Similar conceptions of tradition are found in Christianity and Islam. The Catholic Church is believed to be the treasury of tradition that gives divine authority to its instructions. Islamic scholars possess, in addition to the Quran, a vast treasure of divine wisdom that was transmitted orally from Muhammad to his disciples and their disciples. In Hebrew, this tradition is called
masoret
(“that which has been transmitted”) or kabbalah (“that which has been received”). The word “kabbalah,” in such contexts, is an abbreviation, indicating divine truth received by Moses from God; the term does not refer to a particular kind of content. It describes origin and the manner of transmission, without emphasizing any discipline or subject. Essentially, this 2
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term conveys the opposite of what usually is recognized as “mysticism,” which is conceived as relating to original, individual visions and experiences. “Kabbalah” in the Hebrew religious vocabulary means nonindividual, nonexperiential religious truth, which is received by tradition.
The Term in the Middle Ages
This was the only religious meaning of the term “kabbalah”
for a full millennium. In the thirteenth century, a variant was added to it. Groups of Jewish esoterics and mystics, mainly in Spain, Provence, and later Italy, claimed to be in possession of a secret tradition concerning the meaning of the scriptures and other ancient texts, expounding them as relating to dynamic processes within the divine realms. Their origins and teachings will be discussed in some detail in the next chapters. They presented themselves as different in some ways from their co-religionists, and described themselves using several terms.
Among these terms we find self-congratulatory ones such as “
maskilim”
(“those in the know”) and “
nakdanim”
(“those who know the secrets of language”), among others. A prevalent one was “
yodeey hen”
—“those who know the secret wisdom,” that is,
hochmah nisteret
(“secret lore”). Yet another of these terms was “
mekubalim
,” meaning “those who possess a secret tradition,” in addition to the usual kabbalah, which is known to everybody. In the following decades, the terms “kabbalah” and “kabbalists” became the dominant names for these groups, though they did not completely replace other appellations. The term “kabbalah” in this context means an additional layer of tradition, one that does not replace anything in the usual, exo-teric tradition but adds to it an esoteric stratum. This secret tradition, so the kabbalists believed and claimed, was received by Moses on Mount Sinai directly from God, and was secretly transmitted from generation to generation up to the present.
Most of this transmission, they claimed, was oral, given from father to son and from teacher to his disciples.
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The word “kabbalah” is, therefore, a claim by Jewish spiritualists from the High Middle Ages to this day that they have a tradition that was held secret for many centuries. This is a self-designation that denies creativity and originality. These people just happened to receive these secrets from the previous generation, or happened to find manuscripts that contain these teachings. In a few extraordinary cases, people claimed to have learned these secrets in a visionary way, by the spirit of proph-ecy or by uplifting their souls to the divine world and participating in the deliberations of the celestial academy or by meeting a supernal messenger, an angel or a divine power or, sometimes, a prophet such as Elijah, who revealed these secrets to them. Even in these cases we do not find the kabbalists saying that what was revealed to them is new or original. Even in the few examples in which the way the kabbalah was transmitted was supernatural, the content and the teachings were regarded as ancient and traditional. It is inconceivable, from the point of view of the kabbalists, that a medieval or modern spiritualist is able to possess knowledge that was not known, in greater depth and detail, by King Solomon, the Prophet Isaiah, and the talmudic sages. Divine truth is eternal, and it is shared by everybody who is worthy of it, and the nearer one is to the source of tradition, that is, the revelation on Mount Sinai, the more complete and profound the knowledge. One can only learn more through the discovery of more ancient books, or studying in greater depth the old sources. The kabbalah, according to the kabbalists, is never new; it can be newly discovered or newly received, but essentially it is millennia-old divine truth.
Scholars, of course, hold the opposite view. From the point of view of historians of ideas and historians of religion, the kabbalah is a new phenomenon, which first appeared in south-ern Europe in the last decades of the twelfth century. It is the result of original thought and the fruit of the individual creativity of each kabbalist (though they usually have ancient sources on which to rely, as will be discussed in detail below).
While the kabbalists insist that the kabbalah is one truth, even 4
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when expressed in different terms and styles, scholars view each kabbalist as an original writer, who expresses his own worldview, which may differ much or little from those of other kabbalists.
For historians, there is no “kabbalah” in the singular. There are the kabbalahs of the Provence school and the Girona school, the kabbalah of Moses de Leon in thirteenth-century Spain, and that of Isaac Luria in sixteenth-century Safed. Modern kabbalists wrote extensive works dedicated to showing that the teachings of Luria are identical to those of the Zohar. Historians tend to emphasize the individuality and uniqueness of kabbalist’s writings. At the same time, it is legitimate to look for some underlying similarities that are found in most (never in all) kabbalistic expressions, which characterize the discipline as a whole. Yet, one should be very careful when drawing such conclusions concerning the common denominators to many kabbalistic systems: sometimes similarities are more apparent than real. The writers come from the same religious culture; read the same books; use the same terminology, which is regarded as authentic and authoritative; read each other’s writings; and often imitate their predecessors’ styles, but their writings actually convey different meanings. Modern writers who emphasize the antiquity of the kabbalah and the unifor-mity of its basic ideas are, in fact, trying to validate and uphold the claims of the kabbalists rather than to study their works in a critical, historical manner.
Expansion of the Meanings of Kabbalah
The Hebrew terms relating to Jewish religious culture usually retained their original meaning when used in other languages and different cultural contexts. Terms such as “halakhah,” “Talmud,” “midrash,” “mitzvot,” “Hasidism,” and many others have been compared to phenomena in other religions, but their Jewish context has never been denied or diminished. The fate of the word “kabbalah” has been entirely different. Looking at the meanings of this term in the last five hundred years, it seems 5
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that many of its uses could not—and still cannot—be accepted as an aspect of Jewish religious culture. There is no “Christian Hasidism” and no “Islamic Talmud,” yet kabbalah has been identified, insistently, with Christian and universal spiritual phenomena. Kabbalah has been described as Gnosticism, Jewish or non-Jewish, even by the best scholars who have studied it, from Heinrich Graetz, who opposed it, to Gershom Scholem, who presented it as the intrinsic spiritual force within Judaism.
Count Giovani Pico dela Mirandola and his followers in Renaissance Italy described it as the ultimate expression of magic; the essence of Greek philosophy, especially that of Pythagoras; and, above all, the most important source for the Christian religion. Needless to say, it has been identified as mysticism, by friend and foe alike. It has been conceived as expressing universal spiritual aspirations that do not distinguish between nations, cultures, or religions. The adjective “kabbalistic” has been applied in every conceivable and unconceivable context. A modern scholar in Finland (Simo Parpola) discovered it in ancient Assyrian religion. It is a meaningful, even central, component of the New Age worldview. Carl Gustav Jung saw in it universal archetypes of the human psyche, and its influences have been identified in the writings of European philosophers, mystics, and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Giordano Bruno to Gottfried Leibnitz. The Yale University literary critic Harold Bloom equated it with literary criticism and found its influence throughout modern literature and philosophy. It has been used as a synonym for mysticism and magic, and for spirituality in general.
Some of these meanings may contain important elements of truth, yet it should be pointed out that no other postbiblical Jewish term or concept has been universalized in a similar manner. Very few non-Jewish thinkers claim that the Talmud has a universal message for all cultures and religions; this is said about the kabbalah alone among the many aspects of Jewish religiosity. It has been so thoroughly accepted within European culture that even the derogatory, negative meanings attached to it 6
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have not diminished its universal appeal. The term has been used to denote secret, dark, and evil intentions (“cabal” in English) and has been identified with superstition and irrational-ity, yet it remains a meaningful component of European culture.
Even when it is evil and harmful, the kabbalah is still regarded as too good to be left to the Jews alone.
The meanings of the term “kabbalah” have also multiplied in Hebrew and Jewish contexts since the sixteenth century. The most important new meaning is the increasing significance of the magical in the concept of the kabbalah. The flourishing of hagiographic literature since the sixteenth century describing the employs of medieval and contemporary scholars and leaders contributed to this. Legends about figures such as Maimonides (who was not a kabbalist) and Nachmanides (who was) described them working miracles by the power of the magical secrets of the kabbalah. Even today, people who seek religious authority in Israel are sometimes described, by themselves or by others, as “kabbalists,” when the term usually denotes not spiritual aspirations or knowledge of celestial processes but rather magical faculties. A blessing given by someone who is reputed to be a “kabbalist” is regarded as especially effective among many orthodox Jews. Sometimes this is the result of the application of the term “kabbalah ma’asit,” meaning magical tradition, to the kabbalah in general. In current Israeli Hebrew, “kabbalist” and “magician” have almost the exact same meaning.
So what is the kabbalah really? There is no answer to this question. Few people will say that it is the essence of Assyrian religion, while many will say that it is the essence of Christianity. Almost everybody will identify it as mysticism, and many will see it as a secret magical tradition. A common denominator, I believe, of answers to the question “What is kabbalah?” is that the kabbalah is something that I have a vague notion of, but somebody, somewhere, knows exactly what it means.
The role of the historian of ideas is not to uncover what something “really” is, but to present the development of a 7
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concept’s meanings in different historical and cultural contexts, seeking to determine as far as possible the many usages and definitions that it has acquired throughout its history. It is not the task of the historian to state that Gershom Scholem was right and Simo Parpola is wrong or vice versa. It is not his task to declare that Johannes Reuchlin was “really” a kabbalist and Carl Jung was not. It is a historical fact that in the last half millennium hundreds of thinkers used the term in different ways, departing from the cultural context in which the kabbalah emerged. The story of this process has to be told in historical terms, avoiding the designation of one meaning as more “true”
than the others.
Until the nineteenth century, there were no Jewish or Muslim “mystics.” The term “mysticism” is completely absent from Jewish and Islamic cultures, and there is no counterpart in Hebrew or Arabic to the term and the concept it represents.
The concept of mysticism as an aspect of religious spirituality grew in Christianity, and there were numerous Christian thinkers who described themselves, or others, as mystics. The meaning of the term is thus derived from what a scholar may see as the central aspect or common denominator of the ideas and experiences that Christians described as mystical. In the same way, terms derived from this central idea of mysticism—such
via mystica,
the mystical way of life, prayer, and devotion that leads to
unio mystica,
the mystical union with God—are understood according to their authentic usage within the development of Christian spirituality. Naturally, definitions and meanings will differ according to the scholar’s identification of what is mystical within the Christian tradition. Using this term to describe Jewish (or Muslim) phenomena is therefore an anal-ogy, based on one’s acquaintance with Christian mysticism. It is actually a statement that this or that Jewish or Muslim reli-8
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gious phenomenon is similar to another one that in a Christian context has been described as mystical.
In present-day scholarship there is a tendency to identify Christian mysticism in terms of the attitude toward language.
Most traditional definitions of mysticism describe it as the aspiration—and, sometimes, the achievement—of a direct, experiential relationship with God, seeking union with the divine. There were, however, two related flaws in this traditional approach: most of the characteristics assigned to mysticism were valid also to religion in general, thus portraying mysticism as “religion, only a little more so.” This traditional approach also presented the relationship between religion and mysticism as a quantitative rather than qualitative one, while most mystics insisted that their experiences were essentially different from those of their co-religionists. A unique characteristic of mysticism that is opposed, in most cases, to ordinary religious experience is the denial of language’s ability to express religious truth.