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- ABRAHAM ABULAFIA AND
- ECSTATIC KABBALAH
- 1. A Short Biography of Abulafia
- Abraham Abulafia (1240-c. 1292) is the founder of the ecstatic trend of Kabbalah. 1
- Born in Saragossa, in Aragon, he was educated by his father, Shmuel, in Tudela
- until the latter's death in 1258. In 1260 he left Catalonia for the land of Israel in
- search of the mythical river Sambatyon. In the mid-i26os he was in Capua study-
- ing Jewish philosophy, especially the Guide of the Perplexed of Rabbi Moshe ben
- Maimon (Maimonides). At the end of the 1260s he arrived in Barcelona, and in
- 1270 he began to study Kabbalah there, perhaps as the result of a revelation.' From
- 1271 to 1273 he was teaching his Kabbalah and his special, mystical understanding
- of Maimonides' Guide to some Kabbalists in Castile. At the end of 1273 or early
- Abulafia and Ecstatic Kabbalah
- 1274 he left Spain, and for the next five years he attempted to teach his special type
- of mysticism in Greece: in Patros, Thebes, and Evripos. In 1279 he returned to Italy
- and, after a short period of detention in Trani in the same year, again spent some
- months in Capua, where he taught his Kabbalah to four students. In 1280 he made
- an unsuccessful effort to meet Pope Nicholas III while the latter was in retreat in
- the castle of Soriano, near Rome. When Abulafia arrived at the castle, the pope
- suddenly died of apoplexy, and as a result Abulafia was imprisoned for two weeks
- in Rome by the Minorite Franciscans. In 1282 he was in Messina, Sicily, whither he
- presumably traveled immediately after his release from prison.
- Well before his arrival in Sicily, starting in the early 1270s, Abulafia had written
- several books in which he described in some detail his peculiar type of Kabbalah,
- consisting of a variety of techniques aimed at reaching an ecstatic experience. 3 He
- called this experience "prophecy." By the end of the 1270s his literary and propa-
- gandistic activities had dramatically intensified. In 1280 alone he wrote two of his
- most important books: a large commentary on Maimonides' Guide named Sitrei
- Torah, written in Capua, and an important and most influential mystical hand-
- book, Sefer Hay yet ha-'Olam ha-Ba', written in Rome. Between 1279 and 1283 he also
- wrote several "prophetic" works, which unfortunately have been lost. 4 Abulafia's
- own commentary on these works has, however, survived. It is mainly from these
- commentaries that we learn about Abulafia's prophetic claims, as well as of some
- messianic aspirations stemming from his revelation in Barcelona in 1270. These
- aspirations prompted him to seek an audience with the pope in 1280, following
- another major revelation in 1279. It seems that some Jews, apparently fearing the
- negative consequences of such an audacious enterprise, distanced themselves
- from Abulafia and in some cases even persecuted him. 5
- An errant teacher of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, 6 a mystic, a prophet, a
- messiah, a preacher of a new Kabbalah to both Jews and Christians, a prolific
- writer — these epithets describe Abraham Abulafia at the time of his arrival in
- Messina, where he would remain for the rest of his life, producing more than two-
- thirds of his extensive writings, which would contribute substantially to both the
- Jewish and the Christian cultures, 7
- 2. A Mystical Interpretation of the Guide
- Italy hosted the composition of most of Abulafia's oeuvre. There he also dissemi-
- nated Kabbalah, either as a certain mystical interpretation of Maimonides' Guide of
- the Perplexed or as a more advanced form of mysticism, which will be described in
- chapter 5. With regard to his interpretation of the Guide, we learn from a very
- important document, included in a book written in 1286 in Messina:
- ABULAFIAAND ECSTATIC KABBALAH
- And I have taught it [the Guide] in several places: in Capua, to four [students] ,
- accidentally, but they went on erroneous ways, since they were thoughtless
- young men, and I left them. And at Thebes [I had] ten [students], and none
- of them [profited from the teaching] , but they spoiled the two ways, the first
- [the plain] and the second [the kabbalistic]. In Evripos four [students], and
- there also was no one who profited, since the thoughts of men are different
- from one another, a fortiori regarding the depth of wisdom and the Srtret
- Torahandldidnotseeoneofthem who was worthy to receive even the notes
- of the truth as it is. And in Rome [I taught the Guide] to two elders of the city,
- R. Tzidqiah and R. Yeshayah, my allies, blessed be their memory and they
- succeeded in a limited way, and they died, as they were very old And m
- Barcelona two [students] , one of them an old one, R, Qalonimus blessed be
- his memory, a venerable man, and one young man, learned and intelligent
- and very respected, from the aristocracy of the city, whose name was R.
- Yehudah named Salmon, and he succeeded in a very excellent way. And at
- Burgos two [students], a master and [his] student The name of the master
- [was] R. Moses Cinfe ... a great man and an honorable scholar. And die
- nameofthestudentisR. ShemTov.alsoakindandgood young man,buthis
- youth prevented him from learning, and he did not study it [the Guide] but
- only a few external traditions, neither he [R Shem Tov] nor his master
- DL Moses]. And in Medinat Shalom [I had] two [students], one of them 1L
- Shemuel the Prophet, who received from me a few traditions , and the second
- R. Joseph Gikanlla, and he unquestionably succeeded in ^ndrous way
- concerning what he studied under my guidance, and he added much from
- his strength and knowledge, and God was with him. 8
- This passage is unique not only in the kabbalistic literature, but also in the
- eled so much and was continuously involved for so long in spreading the views of
- Maimonides-IassumematAbulafiawasinvolvedinteachingtheGu,^
- seven years, during which he composed three commences on this book in
- wide range of places: Catalonia, Castile, Greece, Italy, and Sicily
- Abulafia's list of the places and stents he taught *"*»%£»?
- example he begins the list with Capua, where he stayed in late 1279 and early
- ^onlyl! mentions the Greek cities; likewise, his visits in Catalomaand
- Casdl took place long before his second stays in Italy and Greece. The l«t also
- Mentions b/name only the students who succeeded, in one way or .no*er, »
- presented in the latter part of the list, with only the failures in the first half. Last
- ABULAFIAAND ECSTATIC KABBALAH
- but not least, the list ends with the name of R. Joseph Gikatilla, who is presented
- as an accomplished disciple. Thus the list is arranged according to a hierarchical
- rather than a geographical principle.
- Abulafia's observations also signal a difference between his students in Greece
- and those in Spain. He labels all his Greek students and most of his Italian ones as
- failures. In contrast, all his Spanish students are described as either very or some-
- what successful. This conspicuous difference between East and West, with Italy
- occupying an intermediate status, presumably reflects cultural differences between
- the relatively free and rich spiritual life ofjews in Spain and Jewish life in Byzantium
- and Italy. In Spain, interest in Kabbalah was growing at the very time Abulafia
- was moving about there, whereas in Italy and Byzantium the medieval forms of
- Jewish mysticism were apparently unknown in the late 1270s. Abulafia's peculiar
- type of mysticism, combining Maimonidean metaphysics and psychology with
- the Ashkenazi mystical practices of combinations of letters, must have seemed
- bizarre, and enjoyed a poorer reception, in less developed areas. In the second half
- of the thirteenth century, the younger Jewish intelligentsia in Spain were already
- seeking a spiritual alternative to Maimonides' rationalism, whereas in Italy the
- more classical form of Maimonideanism continued to be taught as late as the end
- of the thirteenth century. Thus' it is not surprising that Abulafia found fewer but
- better students in the West, more numerous but worse ones in the East.
- As far as I can determine from my own acquaintance with medieval materials,
- the passage above provides a unique example of the itinerary of a wandering
- teacher. It covers an unusually large area and at least sixteen years of activity.
- Moreover, this teacher indicates that he taught a very specific work, the Guide, on a
- scale never equaled either before or afterward. But the passage reveals more than
- the uniqueness of Abulafia as an errant teacher and disseminator of the ideas of
- the Guide. Here we have testimony about the first attempt to propagate a very
- specific, kabbalistic understanding of the Guide. Abulafia mentions "two ways,"
- presumably of study. One, we may assume, involves learning the plain meaning of
- the Guide by a linear reading of the text according to the order of the chapters; the
- second way, according to this passage, involves plumbing the depths of wisdom
- and Sitrei Torah, topics that in Abulafia's commentaries on the Guide refer to
- kabbalistic matters as he conceived them. Abulafia's testimony that some students
- were given the second way of reading the Guide appears to signal the first attempt
- to disseminate an esoteric reading of Kabbalah beyond Spain, the stronghold
- of this lore in the second part of the thirteenth century.
- Abulafia's version of Kabbalah seems to have been the first form of medieval
- mysticism propagated in Italy, Sicily, and Greece. Inevitably, Abulafia's type of
- Kabbalah was influential in the later development of this lore in Italy and in the
- Abulafiaand Ecstatic Kabbalah
- Byzantine Empire. Abulafia's description of his students indicates that at least a
- large proportion of them were young persons. At this stage, there was no minimal
- age requirement for the study of Kabbalah.
- 3. The Kabbalah of the Errant Scholars
- Abulafia spent most of his life wandering between Catalonia, Castile, Italy, Sicily,
- Greece, and the land of Israel. This mobility may reflect in part his own personality
- and inclination; but it was also at least a partial result of environmental pressures.
- Abulafia was both a charismatic and a disturbing figure. He left Spain in the mid-
- 1270s, when interest there in the synthesis between Kabbalah and philosophy was
- declining and being replaced by a critique of philosophy. The growing emphasis
- upon theosophy and theurgy affected even Kabbalists such as Joseph Gikatilla, a
- former student of Abulafia, who changed his interest from linguistic to theosoph-
- ical Kabbalah. Still later, as we have seen, Abulafia was also persecuted by Jews
- who feared repercussions from his messianic claims. These conflicts, potential
- - and actual, account for Abulafia's years of wandering until he disappeared, some-
- time after 1291, in Sicily. This linkage between wandering and an interest in
- ecstatic Kabbalah was not limited to Abulafia; at least two other adherents to
- ecstatic Kabbalah testify to a wandering existence at the end of the thirteenth
- century and the beginning of the fourteenth. One of these was R, Nathan ben
- Sa'adyah Harar, the author of Sefer Sha'arei Tzedeq, who was deeply influenced by the
- kabbalistic theories of Abulafia. A contemporary of R. Nathan and probably also
- his student, R, Isaac of Acre, was also known as wandering from Acre to Catalonia,
- Castile, and possibly also North Africa. It seems safe to infer that in this period the
- highly individualistic experiences of the ecstatic Kabbalists created tensions with
- the Jewish establishment and made an errant existence expedient if not necessary.
- In contrast, the great centers of Jewish learning welcomed and supported the
- more socially oriented theosophical-theurgical Kabbalists.
- 4. Messianic Mission and Kabbalistic Propaganda
- Abulafia's revelations do not deal solely with idiosyncratic spiritual matters. He
- repeatedly describes himself as a messenger to the people of the "Isle of Power" or
- the "Isle of Mirror," which in Abulafia's nomenclature means Sicily, where he
- wrote one of his most important commentaries on his own prophetic books. Here
- I am less interested in the missionary aspects of Abulafia's messianic and apoca-
- lyptic revelations than in the propagandistic aspects of his activity. For him
- messianism and apocalypticism were not a matter of personal fate and individual
- achievement, but much more a message destined to be disseminated in order to
- swalcen the awareness of the Jews. So, for example, he indicates that God has sent
- Abulafiaand Ecstatic Kabbalah
- him to tell "the words of the living God to the Jews, who are circumcised in their
- flesh but uncircumcised in their hearts." 9 Abulafia claims that the poor to whom
- he has been sent, and for whose sake he has revealed his vision, have not paid due
- attention to the "form of his coming" and that they have spoken about him and his
- God words that should not be uttered. 10 Then he adds: "God has commanded him
- [Abulafia] to speak to the gentiles, those of uncircumcised heart and uncircum-
- cised flesh, in His name. And he has done so, and he spoke to them, and they
- believed in the message of the Lord. But they did not return to God, because they
- relied on their sword and bow, and God has hardened their uncircumcised and
- impure hearts." 11
- This is a very precious testimony concerning the propagandistic activities of
- Abulafia. Indeed, the dissemination of an eschatological-kabbalistic message
- to the Jews in general may be understood as part of a turning of ecstatic Kabbalah
- to external affairs, and thus signals a change from the politics of Kabbalists before
- Abulafia. More or less esoteric, this lore was not intended to be disseminated to
- larger audiences even by those among the Geronese Kabbalists, who had adopted
- a more exoteric type of writing. None of the Geronese Kabbalists mentioned
- discussions with Christians in general, let alone matters of Kabbalah. Clearly,
- none of them undertook a propagandistic task of the intensity and amplitude of
- Abulafia's. He conceived of himself as a messenger to a nation 12 rather than
- only to an elite and traveled from country to country in order to propagate his kab-
- balistic views and thus fulfill his messianic mission. Perhaps a more concise
- expression of this propagandistic revelation is to be found already in a book writ-
- ten in 1280: "You should vivify the multitude by means of the name Yah [a divine
- name] and be as a lion who leaps forth in every city and open place." 13
- However, much more exceptional is Abulafia's turn to the gentiles as a result of
- disappointment in the Jews' lack of receptiveness. That move led him, as we shall
- see in the next chapter, even to attempt to meet with the pope.
- 5. Ecstatic Kabbalah: Spanish or Italian?
- One of the important distinctions proposed in Gershom Scholem's Major Trends,
- but subsequently almost totally forgotten in Scholem's school, has to do with
- what Scholem regarded as two major lines in Spanish Kabbalah. Scholem asserted
- that Abulafia's Kabbalah "marks the culminating point in the development of
- two opposing schools of thought in Spanish Kabbalism, schools which I would
- like to call the ecstatic and the theosophical." 14
- Scholem's assumption that Abulafia represents one of the two trends in
- thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalism is a modern reverberation of a view that
- was already expressed by some Jewish and Christian Kabbalists. However, it seems
- Abulafiaand Ecstatic Kabbalah
- that the modern scholar has introduced a qualification that cannot be detected in
- the earlier sources: Scholem regards Abulafia as the culmination or embodiment
- of a certain school of Spanish Kabbalah. Let us briefly consider this qualification.
- Abulafia was born in Aragon and was educated, for significant segments of his
- life, in Catalonia. Especially important for our discussion is the fact that he started
- his kabbalistic studies and career in Spain. In Barcelona, in the early 1270s, he
- commenced his studies of the SeferYetzirah and its twelve commentaries, and it was
- then that he experienced what apparently was his first and most influential revela-
- tion. 15 However, I doubt whether all these facts are sufficient to characterize
- Abulafia as a representative of a Spanish brand of Kabbalah, for several reasons.
- The two main sources of the specific structure of ecstatic Kabbalah are
- Maimonidean philosophy on the one hand and Ashkenazi mystical techniques
- and esotericism on the other. 16 There is some convincing evidence ±at one of the
- aims of these techniques was to attain a prophetic experience. 17 The combination
- between the philosophical description of prophecy in Aristotelian terms and the
- Ashkenazi techniques and mystical aims, which is a very complex and not always
- harmonious task, is the main achievement of Abulafia as a mystical thinker.
- However, his studies of the Guide of the Perplexed took place in Capua, near Rome,
- with the Italian thinker R. Hillel of Verona long before he engaged in studies of
- Kabbalah/ 8 Maimonides' metaphysics and psychology became major spiritual
- factors in Abulafia's thought; Ashkenazi Hasidism contributed to ecstatic
- Kabbalah a vital element that was not accepted by any other theosophical-
- theurgical Spanish Kabbalist: applying techniques of combinations of letters as a
- means of attaining a paranormal experience. 19 Although we may assume that
- Abulafia studied Ashkenazi texts in Spain, 20 those studies were far from typical of
- his contemporaries' concerns there. 21 In proposing a synthesis between the views
- of the most important Jewish philosopher, who lived in Egypt, and some of the
- views of Hasidei Ashkenaz of northern Europe in order to create a form of
- Kabbalah, Abulafia performed an audacious move that had scarcely any organic
- connection to prevailing Spanish visions of Kabbalah. This idiosyncratic synthesis
- is, in my opinion, one of the most important reasons for Abulafia's failure to
- disseminate his Kabbalah in Spain, and perhaps also for his leaving the Iberian
- peninsula shortly after the beginning of his kabbalistic studies.
- In this context is it perhaps significant that one of Abulafia's teachers in matters
- of Kabbalah was named R. Barukh Togarmi, 22 namely someone coming from
- Turkey, a fact that points to the non-Spanish origin of some of Abulafia's main
- sources. Likewise, he highly appreciated another commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, by a
- certain R, Isaac of Bedresh, namely Beziers, apparendy a Provencal master, whose
- combinatory techniques as preserved in Abulafia's writings are particularly close to
- oft.
- Abulafiaand Ecstatic Kabbalah
- those of the Spanish Kabbalist. 23 Not only is the epithet "Spanish" doubtful, based
- as it is on a formal rather than a conceptual basis, but also the idea of ecstatic
- Kabbalah as a culmination of a Spanish school is premature. Scholem was correct
- in portraying the Zohar as such a culmination. However, in the case of Abulafia, it is
- difficult to see him as summarizing and perfecting elements that were characteris-
- tic of Spanish thought. 24 As a Kabbalist Abulafia was present in Spain for only three
- to four years, and so far I know of not one single Spanish Kabbalist who was sub-
- stantially influenced by ecstatic Kabbalah. 25 Moreover, all of Abulafia's important
- writings were composed outside Spain. 26 And finally, Abulafia's Kabbalah was not
- only not accepted by the Spanish mystics; in fact it was openly and fiercely rejected
- by one influential figure in Spain, R, Shlomo ibn Adret, whose ban of Abulafia was
- so effective that it succeeded in wiping out this form of Kabbalah from Spanish soil
- and thus shaped to a certain degree the spiritual physiognomy of Spanish Kabbalah.
- In sum, not only did the components of ecstatic Kabbalah stem from trends of
- thought that emerged outside Spain, but this lore was divorced from the develop-
- ments of Spanish Kabbalah and did not affect it. The vehemence of the assault by
- an eminent Kabbalist, the late fifteenth-century Rabbi Yehudah Hayyat, who was
- expelled from Spain, upon the dissemination of Abulafia's writings in northern
- Italy attests to the hostility of the Spanish Kabbalists, who gravitated around the
- Zoharic literature, toward.ecstatic Kabbalah. 27
- A comparative analysis of the phenomenological structure of ecstatic Kabbalah
- and Spanish theosophical Kabbalah may help us to see the basis for this hostility
- more clearly. The emphasis of Abulafia's Kabbalah upon the centrality of revela-
- tion and anomian mystical techniques, its specific eschato logical attitude, and its
- individualistic approach are drastically different from the spiritual physiognomy
- of Spanish Kabbalism. The sources of these characteristics are not only the
- idiosyncratic personality of the founder of ecstatic Kabbalah but also the esoteric
- material that inspired him. Abulafia referred to his Kabbalah as a prophetic
- Kabbalah, as against the inferior, sefirotic one. 28 In slightly different forms, this
- distinction was echoed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin. 29
- However, instead of speaking about only two types of Spanish Kabbalah, we
- would do better to resort to the scheme of two trends in Jewish mysticism, starting
- before the thirteenth century. Abulafia was not only the founder of the ecstatic type
- of Kabbalism; as mentioned above, he was also the inheritor of mystical and mag-
- ical techniques practiced by another, earlier type of Jewish mysticism, ±e Hasidei
- Ashkenaz, 30 which in turn was shaped by an even earlier type of Jewish ecstatic
- literature, the Heikhalot literature. He was influenced by another Ashkenazi
- figure, R, Nehemiah ben Shlomo, the Prophet of Erfurt, who did not belong to the
- group of Hasidei Ashkenaz, but relied on magical and Heikhalot traditions. On
- •37*
- Abulafiaand Ecstatic Kabbalah
- the other side, the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalists in Spain inherited both the
- theosophical views of Provencal mysticism and much earlier types of theosophical
- and theurgical thought found mainly in rabbinic literature. 31 These are the reasons
- why I would not describe his Kabbalah as a culmination of earlier developments in
- Spain.
- 6. Ecstatic Kabbalah after Abulafia
- The numerous writings of Abraham Abulafia are the cornerstones of ecstatic
- Kabbalah; their influence can be detected in many texts, and they were preserved
- in a great number of manuscripts. However, very few of them have been printed,
- and those editions are replete with mistakes. Several important works written
- under the influence of Abulafian Kabbalah perpetuated and expanded the ideas
- and mystical techniques elaborated in the works of the master.. The most impor-
- tant of these works are R. Nathan ben Sa'adyah Harar's Sha'arei Tzedeq, written in
- Messina by a disciple of Abulafia sometime before 1290; some of the writings of
- R. Isaac of Acre, dating from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries;
- the kabbalistic traditions that R. Isaac collected from his master, R, Nathan ben
- Sa'adyah; the anonymous Sefer ha-Tzeruf and Sefer Ner 'Elohim, written in the late
- thirteenth century; and, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, R, Yehudah
- Albotini's Sefer SuIIam ha-'Alujah. Most of these books were written outside Spain.
- Most of these works were composed either in the land of Israel or by authors
- who had lived there for a time. 32 Some of these writings reflect the penetration of
- Sufic concepts, absent in the writings of Abulafia. For example, the concept of
- equanimity [hishtau?iuut] , espoused in Damascus at the end of the thirteenth
- century by disciples of Ibn 'Arabi, appears in one of R. Isaac of Acre's works; 33 and
- the oral melodies that are part of Abulafia's mystical technique are accompanied
- by instrumental music in Sefer Sha'arei Tzedeq, a fact that apparently reflects the Sufic
- practice of Sama\ or mystical audition, and dikhr, a session of recitation of divine
- names. 34
- After a long period of resistance to Abulafia's Kabbalah, the Spanish Kabbalists
- who arrived in the land of Israel after 1492 moved toward acceptance of its basic
- assumptions and toward combining it with the classical theosophical-theurgical
- Kabbalah regnant in Spain. Safedian Kabbalists such as R, Moshe Cordovero and
- R. Hayyim Vital in the sixteenth century were conspicuously influenced by
- Abulafia's views, which were now cited openly as a very high form of Kabbalah. 35
- The dissemination of Cordovero's kabbalistic theories by his disciples in popular
- printed ethical writings helped some of Abulafia's religious ideals to reach a larger
- public and finally to play a formative role in the crystallization of eighteenth-
- century Polish Hasidism. 36 Clear traces of Abulafian influence are found in the
- Abulafiaand Ecstatic Kabbalah
- writings of one of the main followers of the Gaon of Vilnius, R, Elijah ben Shlomo,
- namely the nineteenth-century R, Menahem Mendel of Shklov. 37 More recently,
- Abulafia's Kabbalah has received widespread scholarly attention 38 and been printed
- and distributed even in the most orthodox Jewish circles. The main person respons-
- ible for the printing of thirteen volumes of Abulafia's and his followers* books,
- Amnon Gross, intends to facilitate the return of prophecy among Jews today. 39
- ABRAHAM ABULAFIA' S
- ACTIVITY IN ITALY
- i. Abulafia in Rome
- Rome played a very important role in the political and spiritual life of the Jews.
- The city symbolized both the evil Roman Empire, which destroyed the Jewish
- Second Temple, and the headquarters of the religion that later persecuted
- Jews more than any other— Christianity. This doubly negative heritage notwith-
- standing, in the medieval period Rome remained one of the main centers of
- power, regulating aspects of life in countries where many Jews were living.
- However, in the thirteenth century Rome was not only a symbol of past destruc-
- tion and of present persecutions but also a center of Jewish spiritual creativity.
- In addition the city remained related, following some apocalyptic traditions in
- Abulafia's Activity in Italy
- Judaism, to eschatological events that were regarded as favorable for Jews and
- unfavorable for Christians. 1
- In a religious dispute that took place in Barcelona in the early 1260s, the famous
- Nahmanides contended, in the context of a certain rabbinic legend concerning the
- messiah:
- For here it is not stated that he had arrived, only that he was born on the day of
- the destruction [of the Temple] ; for was it on the day that Moses was born that
- he immediately went to redeem Israel? He arrived only a number of days later,
- under the command of the Holy One blessed be He, and [then] said to Pharaoh,
- "Let my people go that they may serve Me" [Exodus 7:26]. So, too, when the
- end-time arrives the messiah will go to the pope under the command of God
- and say, "Let my people go that they may serve Me," and until that time we will
- not say regarding him that he arrived, for he is not yet the messiah. 2
- Moses' mission to the Pharaoh became the prototype for the future career of the
- messiah. According to Nahmanides, the messiah will also have to go to the most
- important ruler of his time and demand that he let the Jews leave. By dint of this
- typological reading, another aspect of Moses' encounters with the Pharaoh may be
- relevant to an understanding of the messiah* s mission to Rome: the performance
- of miracles. As scholars have pointed out, Abulafia may have been influenced by
- Nahmanides' passage, and thus the parallel between the messiah and Moses as
- performers of miracles may also have been operative in the consciousness of the
- ecstatic Kabbalist. This messianic mission seems to be the background of
- Abulafia's intense literary activity and of his arrival in the city in 1280.
- In the years 1279 and 1280, the founder of ecstatic Kabbalah composed several
- kabbalistic writings, which constitute, as far as we know, the first kabbalistic
- books composed in Italy. They consist of three major literary genres:
- [a] Prophetic books, namely revelations having eschatological, often mes-
- sianic, overtones, are presented as stemming from the Agent Intellect
- and addressed to Abulafia. The first of these, Sefer ha-Yashar, was written
- in 1279 in Patros, in Greece; but all the others, approximately seven,
- were written in Italy. In 1280 he composed Sejer ha-Hayyim, either in
- Capua or in Rome. In the same year he wrote in Rome Sefer ha-Hajtarah
- and Sefer ha-'Edut. All the other prophetic books were composed in
- Sicily, where Abulafia himself composed a commentary on all these
- books. Although the prophetic books are now lost, their commentaries
- survived, and there we find quotations from the originals, which allow a
- reconstruction of their content.
- Abulafia'S Activity in Italy
- [b] In 1280, before leaving for Rome, Abulafia composed in Capua a
- kabbalistic commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed, intended for his
- students there. This commentary, Sefer Sitret Torah, is the last and most
- important of three commentaries that he wrote on the Guide and is widely
- available in manuscript form. 3 In a commentary on the Guide written six
- years earlier, he wrote:
- I am today in the city of Phonon, 4 and four precious stones joined
- my academy. . . . God bestowed on these four children [his students]
- knowledge and intelligence in order to understand every book and sci-
- ence, and this is the reason I have brought them closer as far as I could,
- and I invented for them the names Daniel, Hananyah, Mishael, and
- 'Azaryah, and I called the last Zekhariyahu, 5 and they are children with no
- deficiency, good-looking and understanding every science and knowing
- knowledge, and having the capacity to stand in the palace of the king . . .
- and those four children . . . when they come to shelter under the wings of
- the Shekhinah, false witnesses . . . attempted to seduce them from the
- table of the Lord, the God of Israel, in order not to be nourished from the
- splendor of the Shekhinah, 6 at the time when other men consume grass 7
- . . . and they came and implored and asked me to interpret the secrets of
- the Guide of the Perplexed, together with some secrets of the Torah that are
- in my hands, dealing with very profound matters, in order to have a proof
- and merit and mouth and recommender in order to extract some wisdom
- to which their souls were ardently striving, to know it and comprehend its
- essence in order to know their creator. And they implored me very much
- to this effect . . . and I, because of my love of them, did not want to refuse
- them, and I fulfilled their desire according to their wish, and I composed
- this commentary for them and for those similar to them. 8
- Thus Abulafia started rather early in his career to teach youngsters,
- yeladim, not only according to the linear method, but also according to
- the more advanced method of reading the Guide, best exemplified by the
- very book he wrote at their request. In fact, many years earlier, around
- 1273, when he himself was no more than thirty-three, he taught
- Gikatilla, a young man aged twenty-five, his advanced method of study-
- ing the Guide. In the same period he also taught the Guide to two other
- young persons in Spain, R, Shem Tov and R, Yehudah Salmon.
- [c] In 1280 Abulafia composed in Rome a kabbalistic handbook, Sefer Hayyei
- ha-'OIam ha-Ba', another classic of Kabbalah if we are to judge from the
- number of extant manuscripts and quotations from it in other works. 9 In
- Abulafia>s Activity in Italy
- Rome Abulafia taught the Guide to two old men, R. Tzidqiah and R, Isaiah,
- whom he calls his "allies" — an indication that he had some troubles
- there — and describes as being successful. 10 R. Isaiah of Trani the second
- was one of the most important halakhic figures in Italy of that generation.
- R. Tzidqiah may have been the son of R, Benjamin, belonging to the
- eminent 'Anav family; a less plausible candidate is the more famous
- R, Tzidqiah ben Abraham, the author of Sefer Shibbolei ha-Leqet. 11 By any
- standards, during the two years or less of his second visit in Italy, Abulafia
- was busy indeed, even more so if we remember that he also taught in
- Capua and spent some time in Rome trying to gain an audience with Pope
- Nicholas III as part of a messianic enterprise. This intensive literary
- activity is also related to the fact that in 1280 Abulafia reached the age of
- forty, which was regarded as the age when a person attained wisdom. 12
- Thus we may safely conclude that Capua and Rome were the first cities in Italy
- where ecstatic Kabbalah was taught and where important kabbalistic books were
- composed.
- 2. Abulafia and Nicholas III
- Abulafia's overt and determined attempt to meet Pope Nicholas III had messianic
- implications. In August 1279, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, he pursued the
- pontiff, a member of the Orsini family, to the family's summer residence in the
- castle of Soriano da Cimini.
- And during the fifth month following Nisan, the eleventh month following
- Tishrei, [namely] the month of 'Au, during the tenth year, he [Abulafia]
- arrived in Rome. He intended to go before the pope on the eve of Rosh
- ha-Shanah. And the pope commanded all the guards of his house, when he
- was in Soriano, a city one day's distance from Rome, that should Raziel 13
- come to speak with him in the name of Judaism, that they take him immedi-
- ately, and that he not see him at all but that he be taken outside the city and
- burned alive, and there is the wood, inside the inner gate of the city. And this
- matter was made known to Raziel, and he paid no attention to the words of
- those who said this, but practiced concentration 14 and saw visions and wrote
- them down, and thus came about this book, which he called Sefer ha-'Edut
- [Book of Testimony], being a testimony on behalf of himself and God, that
- he gave his life for the sake of the love of His commandments, being also a
- testimony on behalf of God, who rescued him from the hand of his foe. For
- on the day that he went before the pope two mouths were born to him, and
- when he entered the outer gate of the city a messenger went out to greet him
- Abulafia»s Activity in Italy
- and informed him that the one who sought to destroy his soul had died the
- previous night; he was suddenly smitten by a plague, and on that night he
- was slain and died. And Raziel was saved. 15
- The Latin sources describing the death of Nicholas III speak unanimously
- about an apoplexy, which killed the pope abrupdy before a confessor could be
- brought. 16 Abulafia was arrested and kept in custody for two weeks. As soon as he
- was liberated he left the peninsula for a decade of febrile literary and messianic
- activities in Sicily. When reporting the circumstances of his attempt to meet with
- the pope, Abulafia does not explain the cause of his sudden death. However, his
- account contains traces of a tension between the pope and a messiah; the pontiff
- warned the messiah that he would be burned, and the death of the pope is por-
- trayed as the reason for the messiah's rescue. What did Abulafia want to achieve by
- this encounter? I assume that the answer is complex, and we shall deal with it in
- chapter 6. Here let me adduce an interesting passage from the same "prophetic
- book" quoted above, the Commentary on Sefer ha-*Edut Abulafia introduces the brief
- statements revealed to him, which constituted parts of the lost original prophetic
- book, followed by his commentary. The supernal power, whose identity is the
- cosmic power known in Maimonides as the Agent Intellect, is the source of the
- revelation to Abulafia, and he refers to himself in the third person:
- He said that he was in Rome at that time, and they told him what was to be
- done and what was to be said in his name, and that he should tell everyone
- that "God is king, and shall stir up the nations," and the retribution of those
- who rule instead of Him. And he [the Agent Intellect] informed him
- [Abulafia] that he [again Abulafia] was king, and he changed [himself] from
- day to day, and his degree was above that of all degrees, for in truth he was
- deserving such. But he returned and again made him take an oath when he
- was staying in Rome on the river Tiber. . . . And the meaning of his saying
- "Rise and lift up the head of my anointed one" refers to the life of the souls.
- "And on the New Year and in the Temple" — it is the power of the souls. And
- he says, "Anoint him as a king" — anoint him like a king with the power of
- all the names. "For I have anointed him as a king over Israel" — over the
- communities of Israel, that is, the commandments. 17
- It is in Rome — as Abulafia was told according to the plain sense of the
- revelation — that the anointment of the king will take place at the New Year, in the
- Temple. As we have learned from the same book, Abulafia attempted to see the pope
- on the eve of the Jewish New Year. The plain meaning of the attempt to become
- messiah and king at the New Year is that when speaking with the pope Abulafia will
- Abulafia>s Activity in Italy
- fulfill a messianic mission and become the messiah. Was the "temple" no other than
- St. Peter's? In any case, Abulafia interprets this plain sense of the revelation allegori-
- cally, to point to the emergence of the intellect, which is the spiritual messiah, just as
- the person speaking with the pope is the material messiah. 18 The allegorical/
- spiritual interpretation of his own revelation is similar to some psychologically
- oriented Aristotelian interpretations of the Bible in thirteenth-century Jewish
- philosophy, although Abulafia seems to be the only Kabbalist to have composed a
- text that would subsequently be interpreted by the author himself. 19 But what is more
- interesting for the present context is the consonance with the general cultural trend
- in Rome, and I assume in Italy in general, where openness to philosophy stemming
- from either Arabic or Scholastic sources was greater than what is known to have
- existed among Spanish contemporaries. This consonance between the intellectual
- aspect of the Abulafian Kabbalah and the philosophically oriented culture in Italy
- and Sicily is surely one of the reasons for the relative success of Abulafia in Italy, and
- much less in Provence, in contrast to his total marginalization in Spain.
- 3. A Retrospective Vision
- Several years later, sometime between 1286 and 1288, in his Sefer ha-'Ot, one of his
- prophetic-messianic writings, recording one of the most interesting apocalypses
- ever written in Hebrew, Abulafia addresses the death of the pope in a manner that
- is unparalleled in his other writings:
- All the rulers of the small Rome,
- Their strength has failed and diminished.
- Its validity is from the day of the revelation
- Of the Torah and further, and there is no
- Ruler over His tribes.
- Demons come to kill,
- But goats were killed. 20
- And there were delivered to slaughter nowadays
- Both their nobles and humble ones
- By the young and the gentle king.
- His enemy died in Rome [merivo met be-Romi]
- In his rebellion [be-miryo], by the power of the Name
- 'El Hay ue-Qayam, because
- The Tetragrammaton fought him
- By Land and Sea. 21
- These enigmatic lines need a lengthier interpretation than is possible here. For
- now, let me start with the most conspicuous element: Abulafia speaks about an
- Abulafia' s Activity in Italy
- enemy who died in Rome, killed by the divine name. Although the pope in fact
- died in Soriano, I see no better alternative to identifying the anonymous enemy
- than the pontiff. Why his death is translated to Rome becomes clearer when we
- analyze the Hebrew: meriuo met be-Romi be-miryo. Meriuo, "his enemy," contains
- the same consonants as be-Romi, "in Rome," and as be-miryo, "in his rebellion";
- the use of the same four consonants in such proximity inevitably reinforces the
- poetic dimension of the description and may account for Abulafia's choice to
- name Rome as the crucial city. As for Abulafia's claim in 1288 that the pope died
- "by the power of the Name, 'El Hai ue-Qayam," the context implies the agency of
- a "gende and young king," namely a human figure, which is probably Abulafia
- himself. The lines immediately following make the connection clear:
- Against YHWH and against His messiah
- This will be a sign and a proof
- And a faithful testimony,
- Because we have been victorious, by the name BYT. 22
- I interpret the mention of the messiah as a reference to Abulafia himself, who is
- also the "gentle king." The death of the enemy is therefore a proof of the power of
- God and His messiah; apparendy both used the divine name(s) in order to kill an
- enemy: the Tetragrammaton and the name 'EHeYeH, present in the last verse by the
- name BYT, which amounts in ^ematria to 21, like 'EHeYeH. Abulafia's prophetic
- Kabbalah gravitates around the divine names and their use in order to reach an
- ecstatic experience. However, divine names were conceived of as powerful linguis-
- tic units, used by prophets who had been sent by God to perform a certain mission,
- as we shall see in the following chapters. Therefore, from the perspective of an
- older Abulafia, the accidental death of the pope, with whom he wanted to discuss
- the meaning of the authentic Judaism, which is the knowledge of the divine names,
- has become the proof of his victory. The death of the pope is construed as a con-
- frontation between the messiah and the pope, and the former used the divine name
- in order to kill the latter. This retrospective account is far from reflecting what in
- fact happened in Soriano, even in Abulafia's first report of the affair, quoted above;
- it may instead reflect Abulafia's increasing confidence in his messianic mission.
- The occurrence of the name 'EHeYeH in connection with the killing of the pope
- is reminiscent of another killing performed by a redemptive figure: Moses' killing
- of the Egyptian. According to the biblical version, Moses killed the Egyptian who
- oppressed the Jews by physical force. However, according to some midrashic
- statements, Moses used the divine name in order to perform this act.
- Let me return once more to the permutations of letters meriuo, be-Romi, be-miryo.
- I find no more permutations of these consonants elsewhere in Abulafia's verse. I
- ABULAFIA'S ACTIVITY IN ITALY
- suggest that here Abulafia hints at two divine names that were very important in
- his writings: BM and RYW are permutations of the same consonants, and they
- stand for namely the name of 42, MB, and the name of 72 units of three letters,
- which amount to 216, namely RYW. Indeed, the knowledge of precisely these two
- names is described as an important mystical tradition to be handed down in order
- to reach a divine revelation. 23
- 4. Abulafia's Activity in Sicily
- While in Rome and its vicinity in 1279 and 1280, Abulafia produced conspicuously
- influential contributions to Kabbalah, much more so than anything he had written
- before. After his release from two weeks' detention in prison at the hands of the
- Minorites, he departed for Sicily, where he spent the remaining eleven or so years
- of his life. There he produced another 2,000 pages of equally influential work,
- some of it still available only in manuscript. This corpus enlarges our understand-
- ing of Abulafia's students in Messina and Palermo, and of the reverberations of
- Abulafia's writings during the Renaissance.
- Abulafia was already in Messina in 1282, as we learn from his commentary on
- Sefer Tsh 'Adam, where he mentions several of his students there: R Natronay,
- R Abraham ben Shalom, R Nathan ben Sa'adyah Harar, R Sa'adyah ben Yitzhaq
- Sigilmasi, and R Jacob ben Abraham. 24 According to Abulafia's account, these
- students — with the sole exception of the mysterious Rabbi Natronay — came to
- him one after another, apparendy attracted by what they had heard from their
- acquaintances; thus we may infer that in 1282 he had already been in Messina for
- a substantial period. Between 1282 and 1284 it seems that two more students from
- Messina joined his study group and then the majority of his students left him.
- According to Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, his longest book, composed in Messina in
- 1285/1286,
- Indeed, in this town that I am within now, called Senim, 25 which [actually is]
- Messina, I have found six persons, and with me I brought the seventh, from
- whom they [the six] have learned in my presence for a very short while. Each
- of them has received something from me, more or less, and all of them have
- left me, except the one, who is the first, and [he is also] the first reason for
- what each and every one of his friends has learned from my mouth. His
- name is Rabbi Sa'adyah ben Rabbi Yitzhaq Sigilmasi, blessed be his mem-
- ory. He was followed by Rabbi Abraham ben Rabbi Shalom, and was
- followed by Rabbi Jacob, his son, and later was followed by Rabbi Yitzhaq
- his friend, and he was followed by the friend of his friend . . . and the name
- of the seventh was Rabbi Natronay Tzarfati, blessed be his memory. 26
- Abulafia'S Activity in Italy
- One more person has been added to the earlier list but during the same time one
- of the important original figures in Abulafia's group has died: Rabbi Natronay
- Tzarfati. However, when Abulafia wrote this passage only one of his seven disci-
- ples remained with the master: Rabbi Sa'adyah Sigilmasi, to whom the book is
- dedicated. Abulafia continues:
- At the beginning of the year 5046 27 God has desired me, and He has brought
- me into His holy palace, at the very time when I have completed this book,
- which I have composed here in Messina, for the dear, honorable, pleasant,
- intelligent, and wise student, who desires to know the essence of the perfect
- Torah, Rabbi Sa'adyah. . . . Him I have seen as adhering to me in love; for
- him [I wrote this book] in order that he will have it in his hands, as a mem-
- ory of what he has studied with me, for oblivion is common. Likewise, while
- it will be in his hands, I know that it will be of benefit also to his friends . . .
- an intellectual benefit to them as well as to others like them, by most of the
- things written in it. 28
- The master's unambiguous praise of Rabbi Sa'adyah is surely related to the fact
- that he alone was not deterred by some events that had caused his friends to leave.
- Abulafia continues:
- I know that without [the occurrence of] those events [related] to the fanta-
- sies that I saw in my first visions, which have, God be praised, already
- passed, those above-mentioned students would not have separated from
- me. But those fantasies, which were the reasons for their departure and their
- distancing from me, are the very divine reasons that have caused me to stand
- as I am and to withstand the ordeals. 29
- Abulafia is clearly sensitive to the desertion of his Sicilian students. He stoically
- accepts their temporary disengagement but assumes that his devoted follower,
- Rabbi Sa'adyah, will impart to them the content of the book that he, Abulafia, has
- written. Nourishing this patient attitude was his understanding that a certain
- event may appear in a different light to a person who experiences it internally than
- it appears to others. I assume that Abulafia was referring to the consequences of
- his revelations: whereas he was encouraged by the revelations, the students were
- apparently frightened. This calm attitude toward the departure of his students
- apparently had a positive result: three years later, in the introduction to his com-
- mentary on the Bible, Abulafia again mentions R, Abraham ben Shalom and
- R, Nathan ben Sa'adyah, together with R. Sa'adyah Sigilmasi, as being among
- those who accept his leadership.* Moreover, he dedicated one of his most import-
- ant books, Sefer 'Or ha-Sekhel, to R. Abraham and to R. Nathan the Wise. 31 In the
- Abulafia'S Activity in Italy
- same year, 1289, Abulafia dedicated another of his books, Sefer ha-Hesheq, to a
- certain R, Jacob ben Abraham. It therefore follows that Abulafia had been able to
- reestablish good relations with at least three of his students. Moreover, in 1287 we
- learn of another student who is not mentioned up to that point, nor at any time
- afterward. I am referring to Rabbi Shlomo ben Moshe ha-Kohen from the Galilee.
- To him Abulafia dedicated his commentary on the priesdy blessing, Sefer Shomer
- Mitzwah. 32 Thus we may conclude that after a certain crisis, apparently provoked by
- strange events connected to his ecstatic experiences, Abulafia was able to attract
- again some of his former students. It seems that all of them were living in Messina,
- and the fact that he dedicated almost all of the books he wrote in Sicily to these
- students indicates that he spent most of the period 1280-1291 in Messina.
- Nonetheless, it seems that he also established some sort of relationship
- with some of the Jewish inhabitants of Palermo. In 1289 he mentions Rabbi
- 'Ahituv ben Yitzhaq and Rabbi David his brother, Rabbi Shlomo ben Rabbi
- David, and Rabbi Shlomo he-Hazan ben Rabbi Yakhin. 33 With the exception of
- R. Shlomo he-Hazan, all the people of Palermo are described as being physicians.
- According to the same testimony, these people, like his students in Messina,
- followed his guidance. The "physicians' 7 of Palermo are mentioned only very late
- during Abulafia's stay in Sicily, probably as late as 1288, and in the same year he
- dedicated one book to two of his Messina students, whereas no book of Abulafia's
- that we know of was ever dedicated to a disciple from Palermo. This situation
- seems rather strange, since all those described as his Palermo students were part
- of the Jewish upper class, while none of his Messina students is described as
- playing any role in the Jewish community. This imbalance in the politics of book-
- dedication reflects, in my opinion, Abulafia's somewhat later acquaintance with
- the Palermo group. But there may also be another reason for this reticence.
- Toward the end of his life, apparently in the last four years, Abulafia was
- involved in a bitter controversy with the greatest authority on Jewish religious law
- of Aragonese Jewry, Rabbi Shlomo ben Abraham ibn Adret of Barcelona. This
- seminal controversy, neglected in the scholarship of Kabbalah, was apparendy
- precipitated by a fierce assault on Abulafia's messianic and prophetic claims,
- mounted by Ibn Adret in an episde he sent to a number of people in Palermo. 34
- Although there are good reasons to assume that Ibn Adret later wrote to Messina
- as well, 35 his decision to open his attack on Abulafia with a letter to Palermo may
- be an indication of Abulafia's weaker influence in that city. In any case, the exis-
- tence of such an influence seems incontrovertible. This may be learned both from
- Abulafia's own testimony and from that of Ibn Adret, who indicates that Abulafia
- had a very dangerous impact on several communities in Sicily. 36 This impact is to
- be sought on two different levels: Abulafia was a propagandist of his peculiar type
- •49*
- Abulafia's Activity in Italy
- of ecstatic Kabbalah, but also of his claim to be a prophet and messiah. It seems
- that it was the latter claim that provoked Ibn Adret's fiery response. If further
- documents should reveal more substantial evidence for Abulafia's influence as a
- messiah, we would have a better framework for the other messianic documents,
- which originated in Sicily.
- Let me emphasize a particular trait of Abulafia's group of disciples in Messina,
- which in fact is characteristic of the Jewish culture in Sicily in general. Abulafia,
- who was an Aragonese Jew, apparently brought with him a French disciple —
- Rabbi Natronay. In Messina his most devoted follower was Rabbi Sa'adyah
- Sigilmasi, a North African Jew. For a while Abulafia also had a student from the
- Galilee, 37 while Rabbi Abraham ben Shalom was originally from Comti, a small
- island not far from Malta. This collection of individuals testifies to the variety of
- Abulafia's group — a veritable international school of Jewish mysticism, and per-
- haps the first one. Abulafia's presence in Sicily transformed the island into more
- than just the outstanding place for studying ecstatic Kabbalah. Abulafia sent at
- least two of his kabbalistic writings from Sicily to Spain: one letter to Ibn Adret's
- colleague in Barcelona, Rabbi Yehudah Salmon, 38 and Sefer ha-'Ot; 39 an epistle to a
- certain Rabbi Abraham, who was apparently living in Malta or in Comti; 40 and one
- of his books, Sefer Shomer Mitzuah, dedicated to Rabbi Shlomo ha-Kohen, who took
- it with him when he left Sicily. 41 Sicily, and more precisely Messina, thus became a
- center for the dissemination of a distinctive type of Kabbalah to other regions of
- the Mediterranean. This dissemination has much to do with the exoteric vision of
- Kabbalah embraced by Abulafia, who asserted explicitly that "despite the fact that
- I know that there are many Kabbalists who are not perfect, thinking as they are
- that their perfection consists in not revealing a secret issue, I shall care neither
- about their thought nor about their blaming me because of the disclosure, since
- my view on this is very different from, and even opposite to, theirs." 42
- Immediately afterward Abulafia "discloses" the view that the Ma'aseh Merkauah,
- the Account of the Chariot, which is one of the most important esoteric topics in
- Jewish mysticism, should be understood neither as a visionary experience, as in
- the first chapter of Ezekiel, nor as an allegory for metaphysics, as in Maimonides,
- but as a matter of a combination of letters of the divine names, namely as a tech-
- nique of interpretation, and perhaps also as a mystical technique. The more
- exoteric propensity, as expressed here in such explicit terms, would remain a
- major characteristic of Kabbalah in Italy.
- As mentioned above, R. Shlomo ibn Adret made great efforts to counteract
- Abulafia's influence in Sicily. In response the latter distanced himself from theo-
- sophical Kabbalah, including its specific formulation in Nahmanides' and thus
- Ibn Adret's school, namely that the ten sefirot constitute the very essence of the
- Abulafia's Activity in Italy
- divine. Abulafia contended that this was a view worse than the Christian trinitarian
- belief, as it assumed the existence of a more complex plurality in the divine realm. 43
- The sharp exchange between the two Kabbalists is emblematic of the more
- general schism between ecstatic Kabbalah, which remained influential in Italy,
- Byzantium, and the land of Israel, and theosophical Kabbalah in Spain. Spanish
- Kabbalists were also much more inclined to an esoteric approach to Kabbalah, an
- approach rejected by Abulafia and his students. The fact that Abulafia dedicated
- most of his books to Sicilian Jews may account for the preservation of many of
- these books — some, like Sefer 'Or ha-Sekhel, in quite a number of manuscripts.
- Whether Abulafia was able to establish a school that continued the study of his
- particular kind of Kabbalah is a question that cannot be answered conclusively.
- What is more important is that some of his writings were available at the end of the
- fifteenth century, and were interesting enough to attract the attention of several
- authors who were instrumental in the emergence of Christian Kabbalah. It seems
- that the role of Sicily in the transmission of Abulafia's Kabbalah may be greater
- than that of a mere repository of kabbalistic manuscripts. The fact that a convert to
- Christianity, Paulus de Heredia, who came from Spain to Sicily, quotes Abulafia
- explicitly cannot be explained by his knowledge of Kabbalah while in Spain. 44
- Because of Abulafia's stay on the island, it became a center of his Kabbalah in his
- lifetime and for two centuries afterward.
- •si*
- ECSTATIC KABBALAH AS AN
- EXPERIENTIAL LORE
- i. On Abulafia>s Mystical Techniques
- The nature of Kabbalah is a matter of dispute among scholars. Focusing their
- attention on theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah, a preeminently Spanish type of
- Kabbalah, some modern scholars have pointed out the "casuistical" nature
- of Kabbalah as a whole. 1 Part of this evaluation has to do with the marginalization
- of Abulafia's Kabbalah in the scholarship after the mid-1950s, despite Gershom
- Scholem's characterization of ecstatic Kabbalah as a major trend. 2 This marginal-
- ization is part of a larger phenomenon that can be described as a more theological
- approach to Kabbalah, which was conceived of more as a speculative system than
- as a full-fledged form of mysticism. This trend especially affected the writings of
- Abulafia, some of which were dedicated to describing mystical techniques. 3
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- In ancient Jewish mysticism, the Heikhalot literature, there were already articu-
- lated forms of mystical techniques, intended to enable the mystical ascent of the
- soul to the supernal Chariot, the Merkavah. They included recitations of divine
- names and hymns, which apparently induced a peculiar state of consciousness.
- Some of these elements were still discernible among the Ashkenazi Hasidic mas-
- ters of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, who were also interested in
- ecstatic experiences. However, elaborated descriptions of mystical paths seem to
- have been an innovation by Abulafia, who included some older elements found in
- the Ashkenazi texts he studied, with some details whose origins are still obscure.
- Abulafia proposed several mystical techniques, which differed from one another in
- several substantial details. In general we may describe his technique as including a
- basic element of reciting letters of the divine names in an isolated room 4 while in a
- state of mental concentration. 5 So, for example, we read in one of his episdes:
- "whoever wants to come into the Temple and enter to its inmost part has to sanctify
- himself by the sanctification of the high priest and to study and teach and keep and
- do, until he is perfect in his ethical and intellectual attributes, and then he should
- seclude himself 6 in order to receive the prophetic influx from the mouth of the
- Power [Gevurah]." 7 Isolation is a necessary preparation for the practice of recitation
- of the divine names. Recitation is to be performed in accordance with certain rules,
- and the mystic is required to intone the permutations of letters according to the
- tonality indicated by the vowels of the permuted consonants. At the same time the
- mystic uses a pattern of breathing reminiscent of that used by Hindu Yoga; some of
- Abulafia' s handbooks explain movements of the head and hands in detail. In one of
- these handbooks we find the following recommendations:
- Direct your face toward the Name, which is mentioned, and sit as though a
- man is standing before you and waiting for you to speak wi± Him, and He
- is ready to answer you concerning whatever you may ask him, and you say,
- "Speak," and he answers. . . . And begin then to pronounce, and recite first
- "the head of the head" [namely the first combination of letters] , drawing out
- the breath and at great ease; and afterward go back as if the one standing
- opposite you is answering you, and you yourself answer, changing your
- voice, so that the answer not be similar to the question. And do not extend
- the answer at all, but say it easily and calmly, and in response recite one
- letter of the Name as it actually is. 8
- The recitation of the divine name is to be done in a melodious manner, as
- we learn already from one of ±e sources of Abulafia's mystical techniques, the
- Ashkenazi Hasidim. R, Eleazar of Worms of writes: "And the prophet was singing
- songs to the Holy One, blessed be He, and out of the joy of the commandment? the
- •m-
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- speech was coming, as it is said: ( I rejoice at thy word* [Psalms 119:162]. " I0 Singing
- songs to God is by no means an extraordinary concept in Judaism. 11 However, the
- song mentioned here deals with producing a kind of joy that induces the emer-
- gence of prophetic speech, perhaps reflecting a stand closer to some midrashic
- images, in which prophets are described as those "who were like an instrument
- full of speech." 12 Elsewhere, when resorting to the same talmudic passage in
- Sabbath, Rabbi Eleazar describes the enhancing of the glory that is revealed to the
- prophets who praise God. 13 These views are similar to Abulafia's. Here is how he
- describes "prophecy," a term that is often used in his writings to characterize an
- ecstatic experience:
- The proof that song indicates the degree of prophecy is that it is the way of
- song to make the heart happy by means of tunes, as it is said: "And when the
- minstrel played, the spirit of the Lord came upon him" [2 Kings 3:15], for
- prophecy does not dwell in him [unless there is] joy. 14 This was already
- hinted at in two words appearing at the end of Ecclesiastes [12:13], where it
- is said: "The end of the matter, all being heard: Fear God, and keep his
- commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." Join yare' [fear] with
- shamar [keep], and you find shir 'amar [say a song]. There is a hint [of this] in
- "and they shall put my name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless
- them" [Numbers 6:27]. I5
- The last part of this passage is based upon the gematria of 751, by which yare*
- shamar = shir 'amar = 'et shemi (my name). Abulafia equates the two verbs, which
- denote awe and obedience, with recitation of the song on the one hand and with
- the divine name on the other. Blessing stands here for the descent of prophecy, in
- a manner that differs from the blessing in theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah. The
- nexus between the song, shirah, and prophecy is the culmination of a much longer
- discussion, which portrays the Song of Songs as Solomon's last and most sublime
- composition, and points to the spiritual attainment of the author and to the mys-
- tical death by a kiss. 16 In general, Abulafia assumes that the biblical songs, such
- as the songs of Moses and Deborah, point to metaphysical topics and to the
- intellectual human faculty. 17 This view seems to be related to a theory found in an
- anonymous commentary on the Jewish liturgy, contemporary with Abulafia, to the
- effect that the secret of the Song of Songs is the secret of the combination of
- letters, a central technique in Abulafia's Kabbalah. 18
- It seems that the psychological processes that are characteristic of Abulafia's
- techniques are different from parallel processes used in other forms of mysticism
- that are similar in some respects to ecstatic Kabbalah. In lieu of attaining tranquil-
- lization of the mind by fixing the mental processes on a static point, Abulafia
- l :
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- proposed contemplation of an object that is changing all the time. In his system,
- the release of the consciousness from alien thoughts that may disturb the unitive
- or revelatory experiences is obtained by an overactivation of the mental faculty, not
- by its fixation. 19
- 2. PEELINGS: PLEASURE AND DEATH
- In Abulafia's writings and those of his followers, there are several descriptions of
- bodily feeling during the mystical experience. So, for example, we learn in one of
- his first books that "I see that unto Him [God], the quintessence of all experience
- arrives as there comes from Him all the wisdom of logic [and] to every intellective
- soul [comes] the pleasure of vision." 20 Pleasure recurs in a much more elaborated
- manner in a book composed in Messina in 1285-86: "And you shall feel in yourself
- an additional spirit arousing you and passing over your entire body and causing
- you pleasure, and it shall seem to you as if balm has been placed upon you, from
- your head to your feet, one or more times, and you shall rejoice and enjoy it very
- much, with gladness and trembling: gladness to your soul and trembling of your
- body, like one who rides rapidly on a horse, who is happy and joyful, while the
- horse trembles beneath him." 21
- Abulafia conceives physical pleasure as an appropriate feeling and does not
- hesitate to express this feeling. He does not suggest anywhere that this image is an
- inappropriate one to its subject; on this point, Abulafia departs radically from
- Maimonides, who, following Aristotle, sees the apprehension of the divine as the
- highest goal of human activity; the joy that accompanies it is only a side effect of
- this activity. 22 Abandoning Maimonides in this respect, Abulafia crystallized an
- approach, apparently based upon personal experience, that there is an additional
- stage to the acquisition of intellectual perfection — namely, that of the pleasure
- deriving from the mystical experience.
- Maimonides avoided mentioning pleasure as a symptom of a sublime experi-
- ence; this reticence may be part of his more transcendental theology, which
- separates intellect from matter. His effort to push God beyond the range, though
- not beyond the scope, of human understanding in order to safeguard His utmost
- purity and spirituality exacted a price in the realms of both epistemology and
- feeling: the human intellect, connected as it is with matter, cannot experience the
- divine nature, though He is purely intellectual. It was only in the moment of
- death that the few elite, Moses and the patriarchs, were able to attain the kiss of
- bliss, that is, an experience of God, as we learn from the Guide of the Perplexed. 23
- Transcendence has its sublime moments, for which the philosopher often pays in
- the form of a very modest noetic attainment of the absolute intellectual realm.
- Thus the divine unitive experiences were not conceived as possible in his system,
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- and it may well be that Maimonides was deliberately resistant to the Neoplatonic
- views on the cleaving of the soul to God and to the Averroistic unitive noetics. 24
- Abulafia, however, assumes that the "death by a kiss" of the patriarchs, an experi-
- ence attested in hoary antiquity, should be seen in a much more exemplary and
- relevant way. He asserts that "whoever's soul is separated from him at the time of
- pronouncing [the divine name] will die by a kiss." 25 The prerogative of the few
- perjecti in the past, according to the view of Maimonides, was turned into
- the immediate achievement of the extreme mystics, available in the present. The
- secrets of the Guide of the Perplexed are described as redemptive matters: "all the
- secrets to which he pays attention to understand them, by a [concentrated] specu-
- lation, and to understand the intention intended by them, and 'he will be redeemed'
- [Leviticus 25:31]. " 26
- Abulafia construes the verse in Hebrew, Ge'ulah rihieh lo, in his own particular
- way: redemption will be attained by means of the thirty-six secrets, hinted at by
- the Hebrew letters lo, meaning "him," which amount in gematria to 36. Here the
- nexus between secrets and redemption is explicit. A similar position can also be
- found in his first commentary on these secrets, Sefer ha-Ge'uIah, where he identifies
- the "life of the soul" with the "life of the nextworld," referring to hasagah, compre-
- hension. 27 This view occurs also in his second commentary on the Guide, titled Sefer
- Hayyei ha-Nefesh, 28 and it should be understood in a noneschatological framework:
- the nextworld is not the realm of existence after death, but the ecstatic experience
- in this world, as we learn from one of his most important books, Hayyei ha-'Olam
- ha-Ba' (The Life of the Next World). We witness here an important instance of the
- spiritualization of traditional eschatological terminology, interpreted in terms of
- imminent individual salvation, a phenomenon well known in the history of mysti-
- cism, as in Sufism for example. In this context, another observation of Abulafia's
- may be relevant: he states that the number of chapters of the Guide is 177, a number
- that is equivalent to the numerical value of Gan 'Eden, namely Paradise. 29
- 3. The Dialogue with the "Angel"
- As we have already seen above in the quotation from Sefer ha-Hesheq, when practic-
- ing the mystical technique the mystic is to expect someone to speak with him.
- Indeed, an angelic revelation in the form of a man is described several times in
- Abulafia's writings. So, for example, we read in his untitled book:
- "I am the angel of the God of the hosts, so and so, and it is the secret of Gan
- 4 Eden that amounts to three names, YHWH 'Adonai 'Elohim, whose vowels are
- the 'prince of Gan 'Eden 1 "... and he will tell him: "I am the tree of life, the
- Garden in Eden from the East." And he will understand that God has sent to
- .56.
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- him His angel in order to help him by instruction, and to accustom him in the
- strong love of the Creator, by announcing to him the truth of the essence of
- the tree of life that is within the Garden, and he is the "prince of Gan *Eden." 3 °
- We may assume that this angel is no other than Gabriel: "The angel who advises
- you of the secret of God is named Gabriel, and he speaks from the first verse of the
- holy name mentioned by you, and he shows you the wonders of prophecy, for that
- is the secret of 'In a vision I will make myself known to him, in a dream I will speak
- to him' [Numbers 12:6], for 'vision,' which is the secret of the verse, equals
- Gabriel, and "dream/ whose secret [namely numerical valence] is 'Edo, is Enoch." 31
- Here one finds the gematria for Gauriel = 246 = pasuq (verse) = mar'eh (vision) =
- medabber (speaks), and these expressions allude to the cosmic Agent Intellect.
- Consequently, in the prophetic vision the mystic sees "the figure of a human" by
- means of the Agent Intellect, a revelation accompanied by speech. We infer the
- connection between this figure, which is the reason for the response, and the
- person speaking from Abulafia's own words, who describes this situation as an
- answer given by man to himself. It follows that we may reasonably assume that the
- human form is no more than a projection of the soul or intellect of the mystic, who
- carries on a dialogue with it at the time of pronunciation.
- Later in his Hayyei ha-'Olam ha-Ba' Abulafia describes a detail of the technique,
- which has an implication for the dialogic situation: "Hold your head evenly, as if it
- were on the balance pans of a scale, in the manner in which you would speak with
- a man who was as tall as yourself, evenly, face to face." 32 The ontic status of this
- figure may be inferred from Abulafia's earlier comments in the same work: "We,
- the community of Israel, the congregation of the Lord, know in truth that God,
- may He be praised, is neither a body nor a power within the body, nor will He ever
- be corporealized. But at the time that the prophet prophesies, his abundance
- creates a corporeal intermediary, which is the angel." 33 What is the psychological
- mechanism that brings about this dialogical vision? According to his book 'Or
- ha-Sekhel, "because man is composed of many powers, it is necessary that he see
- the influx in his intellect, and that vision is called by the name Intellectual
- Apprehension. And the influx will further jump to the imagination, and require
- that the imagination apprehend that which is in its nature to apprehend, and see
- in the image of corporeality imagined as spirituality combined with it; and that
- force will be called Man or Angel or the like." 34
- In a later passage the intellect, namely the "inner speech," is described as
- reflecting itself within the imagination just as the soul sees itself within the lower
- forms, in what seems to be an appropriation of a Neoplatonic stand: "For every
- inner speech is none other than a picture alone, and that is the picture which is
- •57*
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- common to the intellect and the imagination. Therefore, when the soul sees the
- forms which are below it, it immediately sees itself depicted therein." 35
- Some form of duality is implied here; the higher entity, namely the intellect,
- reveals itself within the lower, the imagination, and this seems to be another form
- of explaining the nature of prophecy.
- 4. Devequt: The Mystical Ideal of Ecstatic Kabbalah
- Beginning in the early thirteenth century, Kabbalah concerned itself with the ideal
- of cleaving to the various divine manifestations, the sefirot, as part of the mystical
- performance of the commandments. In the second half of the century, however, the
- Spanish Kabbalists became less and less interested in this ideal, emphasizing instead
- the paramount importance of the theurgical performance of the commandments as a
- mystical way to the divine. With Abulafia, the situation was fundamentally different:
- he considered the commandments as allegories for the spiritual processes of the
- mystic, rather than as techniques to attain an altered state of consciousness. Whereas
- the nomian, halakhic way of life was considered the main mystical avenue open to
- all the Jews, the ecstatic Kabbalah of Abulafia and his followers was grounded in
- anomian mystical techniques, whose ultimate purpose was to attain a state of union
- with the divine, an interpretation of the biblical imperative to cleave to God. 36 This
- imperative was reinterpreted by means of Aristotelian epistemology as pointing to
- the unitive state of the intellect and the intelligibles during the act of intellection.
- Since the intelligible of the mystic is, according to Abulafia, the cosmic active intel-
- lect, or God as an intelligizing entity, intelligizing God is tantamount to becoming
- identical with Him at the time of intellection. This mystical understanding of Aristotle
- influenced the later formulations of the states of unio mustica as elaborated in the
- Safedian and Hasidic Polish masters. So, for example, we learn from one of Abulafia's
- commentaries on his prophetic writings:
- just as his Master 37 who is detached from all matter is called the Knowledge,
- the Knower, and the Known, all at the same time, since all three are one in
- Him, so shall he, the exalted man, the master of the exalted Name, be called
- intellect, while he is actually knowing; then he is also "the known" like his
- Master, and then there is no difference between them, except that his Master
- has His supreme rank by His own right and not derived from other creatures,
- while he is elevated to his rank by the mediation of the creatures. 38
- This is a fine example of an expression that can refer to an experience of unio
- mustica. Let me adduce now another passage on devequt In the 1280s, probably
- under the influence of Abulafian thought, R. Joseph Gikatilla formulated a view
- that is important for the subsequent development of the ideal of devequt in Polish
- •58-
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- Hasidism: "the letters of the Tetragrammaton, blessed be He, are all of them intel-
- lectual, not sensuous letters, and they point to an existence and to a lasting entity,
- and to every entity in the world, and this is the secret meaning of 'and thou who
- cleave to the Lord, your God, shall be alive today' [Deuteronomy 4:4], namely that
- those who cleave to the letters of the Tetragrammaton exist and last forever." 39
- Abulafia also assumes that the human intellect can become one entity with the
- divine mind, an experience that could be designated as mystical union. In my
- opinion this development in Abulafia's thought, in comparison with Maimonides'
- view, can be explained both by acquaintance with Averroistic views concerning the
- possibility of union between the human and the cosmic intellect, which had been
- accepted by his teacher in matters of philosophy, R. Hillel of Verona; and by the
- mystical experiences Abulafia apparently underwent, which he had understood as
- pointing to union with God. So, for example, he argues in one of his commentar-
- ies on the Guide of the Perplexed that the actualization of one's intellect will trans-
- form it into the entity that caused this process , namely the Agent Intellect, and that
- the two will become "one inseparable entity during the time of that act" 40
- 5. Linguistic and Salvific Prophecy
- Unlike all the thirteenth-century Kabbalists in Spain, Abulafia explicitly under-
- stood the ultimate goal of his Kabbalah as an attainment of the experience of
- prophecy conceived as ecstasy, and consequendy built a whole kabbalistic system
- to accomplish this. The occurrence of a technique and an experience of ecstasy
- to be achieved by that technique can be described as an "ecstatic model," which
- involves not only a confession regarding an experience that someone has had, but
- also more detailed instructions about how to achieve a certain ideal. When this
- model stands at the center of a certain literature, and does not occur as just an
- interpretive stand or an isolated discussion, we may speak about ecstatic Kabbalah
- or an ecstatic literature. So, for example, we read that "the purpose that is intended
- by the ways of Kabbalah is the reception of the prophetic, divine, and intellectual
- influx from God, blessed be He, by means of the Agent Intellect, and the causing
- of the descent and the blessing by means of the [divine] name upon the individual
- and upon the community." 41 This hypervaluation of the intellect is coupled, as we
- shall see below, with a simultaneous hypervaluation of speech; language is both a
- domain of contemplation, higher than nature, and a technique for attaining a
- mystical experience, which has noetic features. In other words, the overactivation
- of the intellect and its merging with God are achieved by an overactivation of
- language, utilized as a component in a mystical technique. The two extremes
- meet, and both are characteristic of Abulafia's strong propensity for actualization
- of some of Maimonides' earlier spiritual ideals. This view is expressed at the very
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- beginning of Strrei Torah, where Abulafia characterizes the Guide as "concerned
- with the explanation of homologies and the interpretation of prophetic parables."
- His own commentary is intended to deal with "religious wisdom, namely the
- interpretation of the rationale for the life of the rational soul, and the interpreta-
- tion of the worship of God through love. Even if the subject of each of them [the
- two books] is unique in itself, everything goes to the same place." 42
- In lieu of Maimonides' hermeneutical project, which is focused on natural and
- metaphysical frameworks, Abulafia proposes a spiritual interpretation of the
- Bible, not only pointing to the true meaning of the Bible, and the proper theology,
- but also and more eminently issuing a pressing call for an intense spiritual life.
- The intensification of this spiritual life for Abulafia involves an ecstatic path
- conceived as inducing prophetic experiences of messianic status:
- It is known that the truth of the attainment of reality is the comprehension
- of the divine name, and by its means he will comprehend the command-
- ments, and they point to the Agent Intellect, 43 because the comprehension
- of the Agent Intellect is similar to a candle, which is a "river" 44 that goes out
- of 'Eden. ... be careful with the wisdom that emerges from the combination
- found in the letters [available] to whoever knows how to combine them,
- because this is the goal of the wisdom of the man who understands the
- divine name . . . because the comprehension of the Agent Intellect, found
- within the 22 holy letters, comprises all the positive and negative command-
- ments, and it is the candle that illumines to every man and is "the river that
- goes out of 'Eden to water the Garden" [Genesis 2:10], and it shows that
- within the 22 letters the comprehension of the name is found, and it is, in its
- entirety, [emerging] out of the combinations of letters, and you will find
- truly that out of the combination of letters, the known, the knower, and
- knowledge [are one] . . . and whoever comprehends the Agent Intellect
- gains the life of the world to come and belongs to the secret of the angels of
- the living God. 45
- The river emerging from Eden and watering the Garden is, quite plausibly, the
- intellectual flow that descends from the Agent Intellect, which is separated from
- matter and is collected by the human intellect. This process is tantamount to the
- phenomenon of prophecy, which reflects, following Maimonides, the Aristotelian
- noetic process of representation of the intellectual by means of the imaginative
- capacity, and the addition of another Aristotelian view, which assumes the identity
- between the knower, the known, and knowledge in the moment of intellection.
- Thus, the Garden is envisioned as the human intellect or person, and Eden as
- the separated Intellect. The latter is conceived, following medieval Aristotelian
- •6o-
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- cosmology, as being available always to those who know, who in the system of
- Abulafia are those who use the technique of combining letters, or the divine
- names. This technique is conceived as inducing a transformation that changes the
- human into an angelic being, namely into an intellectual entity. 46 Here we have the
- explication of the function of language and divine names as means of attaining
- union with the Agent Intellect.
- The main concern of Abulafian soteriology is less the need to attenuate the
- pernicious effects of the external exile, as Maimonides' reconstruction aspires to,
- and much more the attempt to obliterate the inner exile. In fact the two approaches
- should be seen not as drastically different but, at least insofar as AbulafiVs views
- are concerned, as building upon the attainment of Maimonides: the philosopher
- has provided the framework, a political Weltbild, a philosophy of nature and a Neo-
- Aristotelian metaphysics punctuated by some Platonic stands, and a psychology,
- which serve as starting points for an intensification of the religious life, which will
- culminate in a mystical experience. As Abulafia explains in his Sheua' Neriuot
- ha-Torah, this intensification is strongly related to the manipulation of language:
- "the true essence of prophecy, its cause, is the 'word' that reaches the prophet
- from God by means of the 'perfect language* that subsumes the seventy
- languages." 47 The "word" plays the role of the overflow in Maimonides' definition
- of prophecy, the perfect language being none other than Maimonides' Agent
- Intellect, and this is the case also insofar as the seventy languages are concerned.
- It is this emphasis upon the importance of language and of linguistic imagery that
- is unique to Abulafia as an interpreter of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. Some
- Greek forms of ontology and psychology, reverberating in the Middle Ages, have
- been translated into linguistic terms. The process of transformation of intellec-
- tion into language, which took place according to Maimonides at the level of the
- intrahuman psychology, when the imagination translates abstract concepts into
- linguistic units, takes place in Abulafia at the very source of the intellectual realm,
- at least insofar as the Agent Intellect is concerned:
- You should know that speech alone is not the intellect, but it is the true
- faculty of the soul. And in the soul there is no natural faculty that is higher
- than the soul, because the separate intellect emanates upon it its intellect,
- just as the sun emanates light upon the eye. Speech is a faculty in the soul
- similar to the eye in relation to the sun, which generates light upon it. And
- the light of the eye is the very light of the sun, and not something different
- from it. Likewise, the intellect of the soul is the very emanation of the Agent
- Intellect, not something different from it. And speech, as conceptualized 48
- in the intellect, and the imaginative faculty and the appetitive faculty and the
- *6i-
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- sensitive, are ruled by it . . . the intellect commands speech, and speech
- commands the appetitive [faculty], and the appetitive the imagination, and
- the imagination the senses, and the senses move in order to fulfill the
- command of the intellect. 49
- Speech is introduced here as a spiritual faculty, not only as a reproduction of
- intellectual matters on a corporeal key. Let me turn now to the salvific aspects of the
- mystical experience. According to Abulafia in Sefer ha-'Ot: "The Holy God awakens
- [heqitz] the hearts of the sleepers and revives the dead by instilling a new spirit in
- them, so that they will be resurrected. And whoever will not awaken from his sleep
- and who will not be awakened by his [higher] soul, he will sleep an eternal sleep
- and will not come to life. " 5 ° Redemption is therefore not only the arrival of the time
- of the end but also, and perhaps even more eminendy, the arousal of the soul of
- man to a spiritual life. This mystical arousal is described here as conditioned by the
- advent of the end of time, but it affects the spirit rather than the body of man. In a
- rather calculated manner, Abulafia uses expressions related to the resurrection of
- the dead, namely the resurrection of the bodies, which is interpreted allegorically as
- pointing to the arousal of the soul. Let me adduce here a statement from an anony-
- mous kabbalistic writing authored either by Abulafia or by one of his disciples,
- which reflects this extreme emphasis on spiritualization: "This points to the know-
- ledge of the end [qetz] and the end [qetz] of knowledge, namely to the telos of
- man, because he is created in the image of God." 51 The end is a matter not of the
- corporeal existence or revival postmortem, but solely of the life of the intellect.
- A similar stand is hinted at in Vtzar 'Eden Ganuz, where Abulafia states that "the
- end of the spirit is spirit," namely that the telos of the spirit of man is the spirit of
- God. 52 The knowledge of the end is understood as the telos of human knowledge,
- or of the spirit of man, which is either an imitation of God, as man was created in
- His image, or stems from God, as is the case of the human spirit. Again, the term
- qetz has been understood allegorically as the telos, which points to the spiritual
- vision of man, conceived of, implicitly, as more important than the knowledge of
- the end, namely apocalyptic knowledge.
- Abulafia's view of prophecy as the outcome of using mystical techniques had
- an influence on early Hasidism. In his eclectic commentary on the Pentateuch,
- *Or ha-Ganuz le-Tzaddiqim, R, Aharon ha-Kohen Perlov of Apta, an important
- Hasidic author, wrote at the end of the eighteenth century:
- The issue of prophecy is [as follows] : it is impossible, by and large, to proph-
- esy suddenly, without a certain preparation and holiness; but if the person
- who wants to prepare himself for [the state of] prophecy sanctifies and puri-
- fies himself and concentrates mentally and utterly separates himself from the
- •62-
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- delights of this world, and serves the sages, [including] his rabbi, the
- prophet— and the disciples who follow the way of prophecy 5 * are called the
- sons of the prophets— and when his rabbi, [who is] the prophet, understands
- that this disciple is already prepared for [the state of] prophecy, then his
- rabbi gives him the topic of the recitations of the holy names, which are keys
- to the supernal gate. 54
- The terminological and conceptual correspondences between Abulafia's
- thought and this text are remarkable; prophecy is an experience that can be
- achieved in the present time, by specific techniques taught by a master, who is
- described as a prophet, to his disciple. The most important element of the tech-
- nique, besides the cathartic preparations, is the pronunciation of divine names.
- The topic of prophecy recurs in 'Or ha-Ganuz le-Tzaddiqim several times, where the
- degree of prophecy is described as the divestment of corporeality. 55 The divine
- spirit too is described as a level that can be reached in the present time, as is
- evident in the same author's Sefer Keter Nehora'. The affinities between the Hasidic
- master and Abulafia's mystical ideals are significant, pointing to the relevance of
- the latter's Kabbalah late in the eighteenth century.
- -63-
- ABRAHAM ABULAFIA' S
- HERMENEUTICS
- i. A Hermeneutical Generation
- One of Abulafia's most original contributions to Jewish mysticism was his innova-
- tive and complex hermeneutical system. In Spain his contemporaries were greatly
- interested in establishing the details of exegetical techniques for decoding the
- Bible, and it was during this time that the fourfold scheme known as Pardes
- emerged. Whereas in the Song of Songs pardes means "orchard," here it was used
- as an acronym to refer to four senses of the Hebrew Bible: Peshat (plain sense),
- Remez (allegorical sense), Derash (homiletic sense), and Sod (secret sense). 1 This
- hermeneutical system, unlike Abulafia's more complex one, became widespread
- in Kabbalah. But different though the Spanish Kabbalists' symbolic techniques
- •64-
- ABULAFIA'S HERMENEUTICS
- were from Abulafia's, their originators have something in common: being much
- less concerned with halakhic matters than Nahmanides and most of his followers
- were, they belong to what I propose calling innovative Kabbalah, with an approach
- that was open to developments rather than concerned with preserving ancient
- traditions. In exploring exegetical techniques, all these kabbalistic authors active
- between 1270 and 1295 concerned themselves with questions related to both the
- infinity of the sacred text and the status of the interpreter.
- Abulafia did not share the religious outlook of the theosophical-theurgical
- Kabbalists and was not concerned with a symbolic approach. He turned to a much
- more linguistically oriented exegesis, deconstructing the biblical text as part of an
- attempt to encounter the divine. He developed and articulated a sevenfold exegeti-
- cal technique that combined the more classical Jewish methods of interpretation,
- philosophical allegory, and a variety of deconstructive devices. Since I have fully
- described this sevenfold scheme elsewhere, I shall briefly survey here only the
- more "advanced" exegetical techniques against their proper background in early
- Jewish mystical literature. 2
- 2. Interpretive Allegory and the "Path of the Names"
- In the writings of Abraham Abulafia and some of his followers, a famous passage
- from Nahmanides* introduction to his Commentary on the Pentateuch, about the
- biblical text as a continuum of divine names, is quoted several times, always in
- positive terms. Nahmanides differentiated between this continuum of names, as a
- more sublime though lost path, and the path of the commandments, namely the
- biblical text as available today. Abulafia, however, attempted to convert this prin-
- ciple into a practical approach to the biblical text. So, for example, he conceived
- the divine name of forty-two letters as derived from the first forty-two letters of
- Genesis, 3 advancing this "fact" as part of the view that "the entire Torah consists
- of divine names of the Holy One, blessed be He, and this is an intelligible proof
- for a Kabbalist." 4 Although Abulafia does not explicidy mention Nahmanides*
- principle here, his formulation is identical with that of the Geronese Kabbalist.
- However, whereas Nahmanides makes no claim that the way in which he describes
- the division of the words of the first verse is indeed the original reading according
- to the "path of the names," but restricts himself to saying that it is no more than a
- guess, Abulafia regards the name of forty-two as already existing in magical and
- mystical texts as a divine name. What Nahmanides conceived of as being lost, at
- least in part, Abulafia claimed to have retrieved.
- Although Nahmanides was acquainted with techniques involving allegorical
- interpretation, he was reticent about applying them; 5 in general his approach was
- different from Maimonides' naturalistic exegesis. Abulafia combined Maimonidean
- ■65-
- ABULAFIA'S Hermeneutics
- allegorical exegesis with the Nahmanidean theory, namely the allegorical path
- with the path of the names. It is clear that he was also acquainted with exegetical
- elements independent of these two thinkers, such as those found in Abraham ibn
- Ezra's Commentary on the Pentateuch, where some allegories are found; the anony-
- mous book of magic Shimmushei Torah, written in the Middle Ages; and Hasidei
- Ashkenaz views, in which divine names played an important role in both thought
- and magical praxis. 6 Nevertheless, it is obvious from Abulafia's specific formula-
- tions that Maimonides and Nahmanides formed the cornerstones of his approach
- to the "secrets of the Torah." 7 In a passage from his Commentary on the Pentateuch he
- conjoins their approaches to produce a hierarchy:
- This knowledge should be taken by the righteous from the Torah according
- to its plain sense, in order to perfect his righteousness; but if he wants to
- become a pious man, he should approach it by means of the path of the
- philosophical-esoteric one. However, if he desires to prophesy, he must
- approach it according to the "path of the names, " which is the esoteric path,
- received from the divine intellect. . . . If you want to be righteous alone, it
- will suffice that you follow the paths of the Torah, on the path of its plain
- form. If you want to be pious alone, it will suffice that you know the secrets
- of the Torah in the manner of the men of inquiry, together with being righ-
- teous. However, if you want to be a prophet, it will suffice that you follow the
- path of the prophets, whose path was to combine the letters of the entire
- Torah and to approach it by the path of the holy names, from its beginning
- to the end, as it reached us in a true Kabbalah regarding it [the path] that
- "the entire Torah consists of the names of the Holy One, blessed be He,"
- together with being perfect in the first two paths. 8
- I take the reading of the Torah on its plain sense as standing for Nahmanides'
- concept of "the path of the commandments," which according to Abulafia fits the
- rank of the tzaddiq. The last path, defined in terms copied from Nahmanides'
- introduction to his commentary on the Torah, is the highest one, and although
- Nahmanides restricted it to Moses alone, for Abulafia it applies not only to all the
- prophets in the past but also to those who strive to become prophets in the pres-
- ent. The second, philosophical path, the esoteric one, is absent in Nahmanides,
- but very congruent with the perception of Maimonides in the Middle Ages as an
- esoteric philosopher. What is important in the very last sentence is the cumulative
- and the integrative nature of the prophetic path: in order to become a prophet,
- someone must be both an accomplished righteous and a pious man, namely a
- philosopher. Philosophical understanding of the Torah, achieved by allegory, is
- not a spiritual stage to be transcended by the aspirants to prophecy, but an
- •66*
- ABULAFIA'S HERMENEUTICS
- approach to be maintained even when traveling the path of the prophets. As
- indicated in this passage, philosophical understanding of the Torah culminates in
- attaining metaphysical knowledge. It represents the Maimonidean moment of the
- purified understanding of God, which in Abulafia is a condition for union with
- Him or for receiving a message from Him. Between the regular religious perfor-
- mance of the righteous and mystical moments of prophecy, namely ecstasy, the
- contemplative ideal, which involves the allegorical understanding of the Bible,
- was given a secure place.
- Abulafia's insertion of interpretive allegory between Nahmanides' conservative
- path of the commandments and the evasive path of the names is far from a merely
- mechanical achievement: as we shall see below, the allegorical approach did not
- always remain a separate technique, but was sometimes combined with the path of
- the names. However, what seems to be more important is that it illuminated
- Abulafia's perception of Nahmanides* paths. So, for example, Abulafia's attitude to
- the meaning of the commandments is significantly different from that of the
- Geronese master, and much closer to a Maimonidean intellectualist understanding
- of the role of Jewish ritual. No less interesting is the fact that philosophical esoteri-
- cism thus influenced ±e other form of Jewish esotericism: the linguistic one.
- As proposed above, for Abulafia allegorical understanding of the Torah pre-
- cedes prophetic "reading" and is necessary for its attainment. How did the ecstatic
- Kabbalist understand the relationship between the two exegetical techniques?
- According to a statement in Abulafia's Commentary on the Pentateuch, "when they
- [the words of a biblical verse] are taken within the philosophical approach, they
- become related to each other in a general manner, though not in all particulars,
- whereas according to the methods of Kabbalah not one letter is left without being
- used." 9 The move from allegorical to kabbalistic techniques of interpretation
- involves, according to Abulafia, a gain in textual understanding; allegory, dealing
- with broad concepts, involves understanding the relationship between the various
- elements in a biblical pericope in a general way, which implies that some elements
- of the text remain beyond the scope of the exegetical allegorical approach.
- According to Abulafia, only kabbalistic exegesis completely exhausts the pleni-
- tude of the text, fully taking into account all textual idiosyncrasies: "not one letter
- is left without being used."
- A hyperliteral 10 approach that inspires Abulafia's kabbalistic exegesis. He
- regards the letters or the names not as authoritative sources for a certain type of
- religious behavior, like Nahmanides' "path of the commandments," nor as a
- magical source, as Nahmanides' understanding of the "path of the names" may
- have been, but rather as a source of experience. Careful examination of the text, its
- dissection into its constitutive letters, and their rearrangement to generate new
- ■6 7 *
- r—
- ABULAFIA'S Hermeneutics
- formulas are, at the same time, an extreme dedication to the text and an opportu-
- nity for great creative freedom. The constraint of taking everything in the text into
- consideration, unlike the allegorical approach, may produce paralyzing moments.
- Indeed, in the approach adopted in ecstatic Kabbalah, all the letters of the inter-
- preted text must be involved in the new interpretation, but the exegete enjoys great
- freedom to manipulate the text, so that it is quite possible to find more than one
- way of construing a "kabbalistic interpretation." In a passage found later in the
- same commentary, Abulafia writes:
- this topic has been expressed in two pericopes, which have been conflated
- according to the [ir] plain sense, and commented upon according to the way
- of wisdom [namely philosophy], with few additions of kabbalistic words; it
- is necessary indeed to return to this [topic] in order to demonstrate all of
- this topic also according to the path of the names. However, should we
- approach this path according to what we have received from it, [as dealing
- with] the forms of the names and the combinations and gematria and
- notariqon [acronym], and those like them from the paths of Kabbalah, we
- would not be able to write all these topics that we have received by this
- kabbalistic path related to the knowledge of the names, even if all the heav-
- ens were parchments, and all the seas ink, and all the reeds pens, and all the
- beams fingers, and every moment of our days as long as the years of
- Methuselah. Ajbrtiori, there are [kabbalistic] paths that we have not received,
- and we do not know anything about them. 11
- This rather hyperbolic passage expresses the nature of Kabbalah according
- to this Kabbalist; it consists of innumerable techniques of interpretation, each
- of them providing a certain comprehensive and detailed interpretation of the
- text; this is the reason why even in a kabbalistic commentary on the Torah the
- kabbalistic exegete is able to offer only some few of the infinite kabbalistic
- interpretations. 12 The Kabbalah based on divine names is therefore not a forgotten
- or a fragmentary lore, a closed corpus, but an open field, which is actually expanded
- by any additional effort of a Kabbalist to understand the details of a text.
- All the kabbalistic exegetical techniques mentioned in this passage are intra-
- textual; they exploit the literal resources of the text without importing conceptual-
- izations that would create a concatenation between the different words of the text,
- as allegorical exegesis does. Eccentric and radical as these forms of exegesis may
- be, they nevertheless rely exclusively on the potential inherent in the linguistic
- fabric of the text. Whereas the contents found in the allegorical approach can be
- exhausted, the kabbalistic ones are conceived of as inexhaustible. From this point
- of view Abulafia's approach is closer to the midrashic one, not only in its recurrent
- Abulafia's Hermeneutics
- use of statements found in rabbinic sources, but also in its emphasis on intratex-
- tuality. Whereas the midrashic, the allegorical, and the kabbalistic-symbolic
- approaches of the other Kabbalists resort to a certain form of textual narrative
- transposed onto another set of meanings, because they preserve, in general, the
- grammatical functions of the words that constitute the biblical narrative, in
- Abulafia's intratextual approach this effect is far from obvious. Instead there is
- more reliance on smaller linguistic units, phonemes, detached from external
- conceptualization, texts, or plots, to reconstruct the text. This innovative recon-
- struction makes it possible to take into account all the original letters, or their
- substitutes, as constituents of the fabric of the newly reconstructed text.
- So, for example, when dealing with the three angels that revealed themselves to
- Abraham, Abulafia mentions that their acts are conspicuous from the scriptures,
- and that the issue of prophecy has been already clarified in Maimonides' "Guide of
- the Perplexed and other books of wisdom [namely philosophy] in a manner suffi-
- cient for those who want to know them, if they will peruse them carefully. And
- the men of speculation [namely the philosophers] would apply [all] the names of
- the forefathers 13 to the human intellect, and the rest of the names would refer
- to the powers beneath it, some closer to it and some further away. They would
- refer everywhere to the Tetragrammaton and other divine names as designations
- of the Agent Intellect, WI4 The allegoristic interpreters would therefore interpret the
- proper names, both those of the forefathers and of God, as pointing to various
- forms of the intellect, both human and cosmic, which is separate from matter.
- This extratextual interpretation is quite reductive, transforming the particulars
- into a general terminology derived from Greek philosophy. From this point of
- view, the allegorist may not be able to give an account of why the intellect, or
- God, is designated by one biblical term or another. Being part of a universalist
- approach — after all, the intellects, the human and the cosmic ones as described in
- philosophical sources, are transliteral and transnational entities — they transcend
- the peculiar designations found in the scriptural texts.
- An even better understanding of the dramas connected to these intellects can
- be found in the Averroistic treatises on the intellect, which served as sources of
- inspiration for some of Abulafia's own psychological allegories. The biblical text
- is understood as drawing its allegorical sense not only from another series of
- texts, the philosophical ones, but also from texts originally written in another
- language, in many cases stemming from another culture, and oriented to a much
- more unified and simplistic axiology. However, what seems to be even more strik-
- ing in the allegorical approach as described above is the absence of God: His
- names were allegorized as standing for the Agent Intellect, and the whole spiritual
- enterprise took the form of an intraintellectual affair, involving the relations
- .69.
- ABULAFIA'S Hermeneutics
- between the human and the separate intellects. In some cases it is quite difficult to
- distinguish between the human and the separate intellects, and sometimes even
- between them and God, given the assumption that the realm of the spiritual is
- continuous. This view, adopted by Abulafia in some discussions, offers a restricted
- domain of intellectual events as recurring in the variety of biblical stories.
- This extreme psychologization is "remedied" by the tremendous emphasis on
- divine names found in the "path of the names." Although the allegorist speaks
- about very important and positive psychological events, he nevertheless deals with
- a "lower God," a fact that is transcended by the imposition of the kabbalistic
- discourse. In other words, ecstatic Kabbalah's adoption of interpretive allegory
- perceived itself not as an alternative to the negative approach of the Jewish
- allegorists, but as a higher form of interpretation that forcefully reintroduced the
- divine into the spiritual enterprise designated by the Kabbalist as prophecy. In
- the same context Abulafia offers an example of allegorical interpretation that
- corroborates his argument:
- the men of speculation have determined that the name "Lot" is an allegory
- for the material intellect and that his two daughters and wife refer to the
- material realm. And we are instructed that the angels are the advisors of the
- intellect. They are the straight paths that advise the intellect to be saved from
- the evil ones, which refer to the limbs [of the body], whose end is to be
- consumed in sulfur and heavenly fire — this is the full extent of the parable.
- This is in accord with what they say, that the Torah would not have deemed
- it important to relate such a matter, even in the event that it actually did
- occur, for what is the point of such a story for the man of speculation? 15
- The gist of the allegorical approach is to construe a parable, which represents
- naturalistic events, in order to retrieve the significance of the biblical story. By
- using an axiology based upon the psychomachia, the inner war, or the great jihad
- according to the Sufi texts, the allegorist exegete is able to "save" the "embarrass-
- ing" canonical text from the semimythological story, and to confer upon it an aura
- of philosophical significance. Allegory saves the text from its archaic, plain sense
- by assuming that another meaning should be imposed, which stems from a type
- of nomenclature alien to the original text. This extratextuality, unlike the midrashic
- intertextuality, decodes the canonical text by substituting for the archaic or anti-
- quated meaning another one that often violates the original meaning. Abulafia
- expresses his uneasiness with the plain sense rather convincingly by presenting
- a typology of the attitude to language among philosophers: "It is conceivable in
- only one of the three ways: either it is construed in its plain sense, or it may be a
- parable, or it occurred to Abraham in a dream in the manner of prophecy." 16
- Abulafia»s Hermeneutics
- The alternatives opened by the philosophical approach are different, but the
- conclusion is the same: either the plain sense is preserved, but then the philoso-
- pher has nothing to learn from such an obsolete story; or it did not happen in the
- historical sense, and the canonical text is to be explored for deeper meanings. This
- is done either by allegorical interpretation, in the manner we have already seen
- above, by transforming the text into a veiled philosophical discourse, which
- should be decoded, or by relegating the story to the realm of prophecy or
- prophetic dreams. In any case, the Bible on its plain sense is philosophically
- insignificant. Let me elaborate more on the last possibility: "And if it is a prophetic
- dream, or a prophecy itself, it is worthy of being written in order to instruct the
- prophets in the methods of prophecy, and what may be derived from them regard-
- ing divine conduct, and in any case the prophet will be able to see in it parables and
- enigmas." 17
- The last approach, paralleling the path of the names, may provide an insight
- into how to reach a prophetic experience, or to know God. Indeed Abulafia asserts
- that "the explanation of the Kabbalist is that they are all names and therefore
- worthy of being recorded." 18 He is not worried by the obsolete meaning, nor does
- he solve the problem by renewing the meaning through substitution. The text is
- "elevated" to the highest status, that of becoming a continuum of divine names.
- The ecstatic Kabbalist makes quite different claims from those of the allegorist.
- Abulafia's approach deals with ±e last three paths out of seven, and all three may
- be characterized as intratextual. As he explains in the Commentary on the Pentateuch,
- Indeed, every Kabbalist will invoke the Name in all places it occurs, as
- instructed by means of any of the Divine Attribute, because this is true and
- right; and this is the reason why it is necessary to inquire into names and to
- know of each and every one of them to what Attribute it points, because the
- attributes change in accordance with each and every topic. And it is known
- that God does not possess at all attributes that will change from one to
- another, but that the attributes change in accordance with the nature 19 of the
- creatures that are necessarily emanated from them. 20
- Whereas the philosophically oriented allegorist will reduce all the plethora of
- divine names or proper names to describe one entity understood in its different
- states, namely the intellect, the ecstatic Kabbalist claims that different names
- correspond to the variety of creatures here below that is emanated from God. On
- high, there are no attributes that change — a critical hit at some forms of theo-
- sophical Kabbalah — but the different modes of action are projected upon the
- divine realm, extrapolating from the differences in the nature of the creatures.
- From this vantage point the variety of names is not a case of redundancy, and
- ABULAFIA'S Hermeneutics
- should not be reduced to the status of synonyms, but respected in their singularity,
- in order to discover a higher complexity on high. In any case, what is crucial in this
- last quotation is the express need to respect the textual multiplicity of names,
- much more than the allegorist was capable of doing it. It is the concern with the
- particulars that inspires, at least in principle, the ethos of the "path of the names."
- The absoluteness of the details of the text, much more than of its meaning, inspires
- the linguistically centered kabbalistic approach, which is to be contrasted even
- to kabbalistic exegesis focused on symbolic interpretations of the morphemes.
- This concern with intratextuality differs therefore not only from allegoristic extra-
- textuality, but also from the midrashic and, very often, the kabbalistic-symbolist
- penchants for intertextuality.
- 3. Allegorical Compositions and Divine Names
- Another important use of allegory is the allegorical composition. Unlike the few
- instances discussed above, and many others found in Jewish philosophy and some
- kabbalistic books, where the interpreted texts were not composed by authors who
- envisioned their writings as fraught with allegorical meanings and the interpretive
- allegory is, in fact, an imposed allegorization, few Jewish treatises were intended
- as allegories from the very beginning.
- In the same years when the Zohar was being composed in Spain as a symbolic
- text, Abraham Abulafia produced in Italy and Sicily a series of what he called
- prophetic writings describing his revelations and interpreting them allegorically.
- In my opinion, the allegorical interpretations are only later and insignificant
- additions to a text that initially had a literary and conceptual structure and repre-
- sent explications of the conceptual elements already coded within the text.
- Unfortunately, fuller analysis of the literary and hermeneutical aspects of
- Abulafia's activity in this realm remains a desideratum, since most of Abulafia's
- "prophetic" books have disappeared, and only his commentaries survive; the
- single original prophetic text extant, a poetically oriented treatise named Sefer
- ha-'Ot, is not accompanied by a commentary. Nevertheless, it is still possible to
- investigate the allegorical composition and the author's interpretation because
- some quotations from the original prophecies precede the discussions in the
- commentaries.
- In an important passage from a lost prophetic writing titled Sefer ha-Melitz, the
- Agent Intellect, the human intellect, and the persona of the historical messiah
- are all described as the messiah: "the term Mashiyah is equivocal, [designating]
- three [different] matters; first and foremost the truly Agent Intellect is called the
- Mashiyah . . . and the man who will forcibly bring us out of the exile from under
- the rule of the nations due to his contact with the Agent Intellect — he will [also] be
- ABULAFIA'S Hermeneutics
- called Mashiyah. And the material human hylic intellect is called Mashiyah, and is
- the redeemer and has influence over the soul and over all elevated spiritual
- powers." 21 While the historical person parallels the path of the righteous and the
- human intellect the path of the philosophers, the Agent Intellect may stand, as it
- does for Maimonides and Abulafia in many cases, for the source of prophecy,
- and thus the path of prophecy. The development of the intellect — or the souls —
- in this passage is understood in soteriological terms, implying a messianic,
- namely redemptive, experience attained by means of the combination of letters
- and recitations of divine names.
- Let me turn to another instance of allegorical interpretation of a fragment of a
- revelation found in a commentary on a prophetic book:
- And his saying "and his name I have called Shadday, like My name," [means]
- whose secret is Shadday like My name, and [you should] understand all the
- intention. Likewise his saying "He is I and I am He," and it cannot be
- revealed more explicitly than this. But the secret of the "corporeal name" is
- the "messiah of God." Also "Moses will rejoice," which he has made known
- to us, and which is the five urges, and I called the corporeal name as well . . .
- now Raziel started to contemplate the essence of the messiah, and he found
- it and recognized it and its power, and designated it David son of David,
- whose secret is Yimelokh -. . . the heart of the prophet. 22
- This nexus between the body of the messiah, his intellect, and the source of
- intellection is accompanied by a string of ^ematria'ot: ha-shem ha-gashmi (the mater-
- ial or corporeal name) = Mashiyah ha-Shem (the anointed of the name) = yismah
- Moshe (Moshe will rejoice) = hamishah yetzarim (five urges) = 703. The first three
- phrases contain the three consonants H, Sh, M, as in either ha-shem or MoSheH. The
- meaning of this occurrence is quite explicit in a passage of Abulafia in his
- Commentary on Sefer ha-'Edut: "MoSheH knew God [ha-Shem] by means of the name
- [shem] , and God [ha-Shem] also knew MoSheH by means of the name [of Moses] ," 23
- In other words, by means of the recitation of the divine name Moshe knew God,
- and God knew him, or, in the terms of the quotation, by means of the name, Moses
- became the anointed of God. The words ha-shem ha-^ashmi stand for the name of
- Moses and the names of the forefathers that have become, by means of a complex
- linguistic transformation, divine names. 24 However, the main gist of the passage
- is that in speaking about Moses and his transformation into the messiah, namely
- his cleaving to God, Abulafia includes also the forefathers' names, and by doing so
- he includes the name of Abraham. If we remember that we have been quoting
- from a prophetic book addressed to Abraham, hinted at by the angelico-theophoric
- name Raziel — both names amount by gematria to 248 — there can be no doubt
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- ABULAFIA'S Hermeneutics
- that the messiah hinted at here is no other than Abraham Abulafia, who claimed to
- be a messiah. This is also implied in another series: David ben David = Yimlokh 25 = leu
- ha-navi' (the heart of the prophet) = ioo means that the entity named David ben
- David will reign. Some few lines earlier in the Commentary on Sefer ha-'Edut, God has
- mentioned the anointment of Abulafia as a king. Abulafia sees himself as David,
- the son of David. I assume that the second David is no other than the Agent
- Intellect, and the term "David, the son of David" stands for the union between the
- human and the separate intellects. This reading may be corroborated by a third
- expression, ve-'Anolthi Hu\ namely "and I am He," which amounts to 99, a figure
- that for the Kabbalists is practically identical with 100.
- Thus, Abulafia's discussion is not just an allegorical composition attempting to
- deal with the way in which someone may become a messiah, by reciting divine
- names; it should also be understood as revealing, on a more esoteric level, not only
- the atemporal "truth" about the spiritual path, understood in soteriological terms,
- but also the very temporal path, and perhaps an issue as important for Abulafia as
- the atemporal issue, namely that he himself is a messiah and a prophet. Allegory
- here is a compositional technique, an interpretive device, but also, and more emi-
- nently, an esoteric way of pointing to one's own extraordinary mystical attainment
- and his redemptive role in history. Abulafia hints at the mystical attainment in the
- phrase dictated to him by God: "He is I and I am He," which should be understood
- as pointing to a mystical union between the human and the divine. 26 Allegory may
- therefore play a more general role as telling the story of all the souls striving for
- spiritual redemption and extreme mystical attainments, as indeed it does in many
- of Abulafia's writings. However, in some of his discussions allegory also stands in
- a more esoteric way for his own soul.
- Spiritual allegory, which is a term that seems to me more appropriate both for
- decoding the biblical text and for composing his narrative, may designate a special
- application of allegorical techniques for self-expression rather than for more
- general exegesis and literary composition dealing with atemporal truths. What is
- important in this instance of spiritual allegory, however, is that the mystical path
- and the mystical attainment are not expressed solely by intellectualist terminology
- drawn from the medieval philosophical patrimony, but also by linguistic devices,
- personal and divine names, that are intertwined with more classical forms of
- allegory.
- 4. Natural/Divine Language
- The eccentric forms of hermeneutics adopted and developed by Abulafia are part
- of a larger process that I propose calling the arcanization of Judaism, which
- received an important impetus in the thirteenth century. Within the framework of
- ■74"
- Abulafia's Hermeneutics
- this arcanization, not only the words of the scriptures were conceived of as sacred
- and powerful but also their constituent elements, the Hebrew letters. Language
- became arcane, and so, too, did all its components. In the sustained contest
- between the view of language as conventional and the view of language as natural,
- the huge majority of Kabbalists, including all the ecstatic Kabbalists, adopted the
- view that language was natural, and even divine, sometimes because it was con-
- ceived of as being revealed. So, for example, R. Nathan Harar, who wrote the book
- Sha'atei Tzedeq toward the end of the thirteenth century in Messina, asserted:
- Anyone who believes in the creation of the world, [if he also] believes that
- languages are conventional, [then] he must also believe that they [the lin-
- guistic conventions] are of two types: the first is divine, that is, an agreement
- between God and Adam; and the second is natural, that is, based on agree-
- ment between Adam, Eve, and their children. The second is derived from the
- first, and the first was known only to Adam and was not passed on to any of
- his offspring except Seth, whom he sired in his image and likeness. And so,
- the [esoteric] tradition [ha-QabbalaK] reached Noah. And the confusion of
- the tongues during the generation of the dispersion [at the tower of Babel]
- occurred only [with regard] to the second type of language, that is, the natu-
- ral language. So eventually the [esoteric] tradition [ha-Qabbalah] reached
- 'Eber and, later, Abraham the Hebrew. Thus we find regarding Sefer Yeteirah,
- whose authorship is attributed to Abraham, that the Almighty revealed
- Himself to him. And from Abraham the [esoteric] tradition was passed on
- to Isaac and then to Jacob and to his sons [the tribal ancestors]. And our
- forefathers were in Egypt, but the Kabbalah was in the possession of the
- elders of the nation, and the thing remained with them until the birth of
- Moses, and he [Moses] was raised in the house of the king, and he learned
- many sorts of alien [namely philosophical and scientific] lores, and despite
- this fact, because of his predisposition to receive, his mind did not rest
- before his father, Amram, gave to him the Kabbalah that was with them
- from the forefathers, blessed be their memory. And when it happened that
- he went out in the field and secluded himself in the desert, the "Lord of All"
- revealed Himself to him in the bush and informed him and taught him and
- related to him the most wondrous things, which remained with him until
- the [revelatory] event at Sinai, when He introduced him to the inmost secrets
- of the science of the letters . . . until he become acquainted with the essence
- of these letters, revealed to us from his cognition, and the essence of their
- distant roots, and Moses, blessed be his memory, had arranged the Torah as
- a continuum of letters, which corresponds to the path of the [divine] names,
- ABULAFIA'S Hermeneutics
- which reflects the structure of the letters on high; and [then] he divided the
- text [of the Torah] in accordance with the reading of the commandments,
- which reflects the essence of the structure of the lower entities. 27
- This passage, which though written by his student reflects Abulafia's own view
- quite accurately, assumes that the essence of Kabbalah is a tradition dealing with
- the nature of language and prophetic revelation at the same time. The knowledge
- connected to this ancient tradition diminished, and in the future, with the arrival
- of the messiah, it will reemerge. 28 The emphasis on both Sefer Yetzirah and the role
- of Abraham may point to an Abulafian source. Both Kabbalists regarded the
- linguistic material as a reality that was superior to the natural domain and as an
- easier way to the ecstatic experience than any other medium. 29 More ±an any of
- the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalists, these two ecstatic Kabbalists contem-
- plated the Hebrew letters of canonical texts and combined them in order to achieve
- new revelations.
- •76.
- ESCHATOLOGICAL THEMES
- AND DIVINE NAMES IN
- ABULAFIA'S KABBALAH
- 1. Redemption and the Divine Name
- Redeemers tend to possess confidence in being already redeemed themselves.
- Redemption of the many is the application of their own redemption, as anticipated
- by the chosen one. This was the case with Abraham Abulafia. The formulator of a
- kabbalistic system focused on manipulations of language and divine names
- believed that redemption consisted in the application of the linguistic techniques
- on a much broader scale. The new age — historical or psychological — was to be
- ushered in, according to Abulafia's view of eschatology, by a change of names,
- both divine and human. The theme of the divine name as pivotal for the changes at
- the end of time is ubiquitous in Abulafia's writings. Let me adduce some examples
- for the importance of this theme.
- •77*
- Eschato logical Themes and Divine Names
- There is no redemption but by means of the name of YHWH
- And His redemption is not for those who do not request it 1
- In accordance with His Name.
- This is why I, Zekhariyahu,
- The destroyer of the building
- And the builder of the destruction,
- Have written this small book
- By the name of* 'Adonay the small 3
- In order to disclose in it the secret of YHWH the great. 4
- Here the composition of Sefer ha-'Ot, probably the most apocalyptic among
- Abulafia's prophetic books, is expressly envisioned as aiming to disclose the secret
- of the great divine name. However, until then the name 'Adonay is conceived of as
- dominant. TheauthorconceiveshimselfastherevealerofthegreatTetragrammaton,
- apparently assumed to have been unknown beforehand. Elsewhere in the same
- book, the plene writing of the Tetragrammaton is sufficient for those who know
- how to attain a spiritual life for themselves, because it is the source of eternal life. 5
- The name that Abulafia chooses to call himself throughout the book, Zekhariyahu,
- is a theophoric one, meaning "the one who recites the [divine] name." However, it
- is not only the new or renewed knowledge of the divine name, and its preponder-
- ance over other names, that is characteristic of the messianic age, but also a change
- of divine attributes that will occur and symbolize this coming age. So, for example,
- we read in a relatively early book of Abulafia's:
- It is known that these two attributes are changed always in accordance with
- the nature of creation, turning into each other. And the secret is that the
- attribute of mercy always prevails, because the numerical value of YHVH is
- 26 and that of the name 'Elohim is 86, namely when someone adds 86 to 26,
- and when someone writes 26 in its plene form, kqfvav, the concealed [name
- of] 86 under the name of 26 will be found. This means that the attribute of
- judgment is concealed while that of mercy is revealed. Both are, however,
- 26, which means that these two attributes are but one attribute. 6
- The Hebrew letters, spelled K[a]F and V[a]V, can be combined in another way
- to constitute KaV, whose numerical value is 26, namely the gematria of the
- Tetragrammaton, and pctu, which is numerically equivalent to 86, the gematria
- of 'Elohim. 7 The passage points to the concealment of the attribute of judgment,
- represented here by the name 'Elohim, which is contained in the plene writing of
- the letters of the Tetragrammaton. Thus, the revelation of the divine name of four
- letters conveys the preponderance of the attribute of mercy over that of judgment.
- ■78-
- ESCHATOLOGICAL THEMES AND DlVINE NAMES
- Indeed, it seems to me that Abulafia conceives of the belief in the Tetragrammaton
- as characteristic of messianic times. In the Commentary on Sefer ha-'Edut he con-
- fesses that he has received three revelations, the first of which he calls "belief in
- 'Elohim"; then a revelation enigmatically described as 'Emunah 'Ahat, "one belief;
- and finally "true belief," namely "belief in the special name," 'Emunah be-shem
- ha-meyuhad, which is conceived of as "a hidden secret" that is counted in the
- "secret of redemption." 8
- The mention of the first belief— in the name 'Elohim — and the last — in the
- Tetragrammaton — is clear evidence that there is a progression between the two.
- The importance that Abulafia attributes to beliefs is remarkably consonant with
- the Christian emphasis on faith in general and, much later, forms of devotion to the
- name ofjesus in particular. 9 Perhaps this consonance offered Abulafia some reason
- to presume that he would find a receptive ear by Pope Nicholas III. This pope was a
- patron of the Franciscan sect known as the Minorites, and was no doubt aware of
- the adoration that St. Francis felt for the name ofjesus, an adoration that in the
- course of time, and already during the lifetime of Abulafia, had become an impor-
- tant theological phenomenon. 10 Did Abulafia know about this new element of
- Italian Franciscan theology? It is difficult to answer this question. Yet this is pre-
- cisely the framework within which it is possible to explain Abulafia's activity among
- the Christians of Sicily during the ninth decade of the thirteenth century.
- This focusing upon the importance of the divine name in an eschatological con-
- text may also shed some light on a further development of kabbalistic messianism,
- as represented by Sabbateanism; Sabbatai Tzevi started his strange deeds with the
- pronunciation of the divine name. 11 Change of the name is, however, not only a
- matter of the reorientation of belief, which is indeed the gist of Abulafia's view, but
- also of a more ontological restructuring. In another book Abulafia asserts:
- The end of the change [hilluf] of the times has arrived, and so has the end of
- the order of the stars, in accordance with the attributes. And the attributes
- and names will change, and the languages will be mixed [yeuulbelu], and the
- nations and the beliefs will be reshaped, and the diadem of the Israelite
- [nation] will return to its former state, and the rank of Jews will be related to
- the name of the essence [of God], not to the name of [His] attribute. [Then]
- the revealed will become concealed, and the concealed will become revealed,
- and the rank of gentiles — men and women — will be lowered, and they will be
- vanquished, and the rank of Jews — men and women — will ascend and rise. 12
- Though expressed in rather apocalyptic terms, the changes announced in this
- passage may be much less external than internal; the main topic is a cultural-
- religious upheaval: the Jews will relate now to the essential divine name rather
- Eschatological Themes and Divine Names
- than to the name that is an attribute. This is quite a crucial issue, as we have already
- seen in the quotation from Sefer ha-'Ot earlier in this chapter, but its significance
- may be even deeper when the quotation just above is compared to the earlier ones.
- Abulafia here uses the verb yevulbelu — translated here as "mixed" — to describe a
- deep change in the languages. In my opinion, it should be understood as pointing
- to the undoing of the diversity of languages launched at the tower of Babel. This
- is an "objective" event, as is the disappearance of other opinions, beliefs, and
- nations. This "conversion" should be seen as a form of retrieval of a simpler, or
- primordial, form of language and religion, when the messianic time arrives. 13 The
- term hilluf, translated here as "change," stands for a change that took place in the
- past and will be obliterated in the messianic time: "the end of change." Thus
- Abulafia assumes that there is a certain correspondence between the divine names,
- the divine attributes, the constellations of the stars, and affairs here below:
- languages, nations, beliefs. A change of the divine names, namely the emergence
- or the reemergence of the Tetragrammaton as dominant in history, means a new
- type of relationship between the divine attributes and, as a result, the different
- structuring of the celestial constellations, as well as the return of the people of
- Israel to their lost grandeur. 14 In Abulafia's rhetoric of his vision of messianism,
- there is an important restorative moment.
- Abulafia tells us in Sefer ha-'Ot that after he failed to disseminate his teachings
- among the Jews he turned to the Christians. 15 After the Christians also rejected his
- teachings, he wrote: "Now you of wise heart seek the Lord in your hearts, day and
- night. Investigate His Truth and cleave to Him and remember His Name. For His
- Name is engraved within the memory, and the Spirit of the Lord speaks, and
- within Her is recognized eternal salvation." 16 These words inform us that the path
- that Abulafia advocated in vain to the Christians was the contemplation of the
- divine name. Last but not least in this context, Abulafia's disciple R. Nathan ben
- Sa'adyah Harar, the author of Sefer Sha'arei Tzedeq, claims that
- during the time of the Exile, the activity of the names was obliterated, 17 and
- prophecy was canceled from Israel, because of hindrance of the attribute of
- judgment. This state will go on until the coming of the person whom God
- has chosen, and his power will be great because of what has been transmit-
- ted to him related to their power, 18 and God will reveal the name to him, and
- transmit to him the supernal keys. Then he will stand against the attribute of
- judgment . . . and the attribute of mercy will guide him. The supernal
- [entity] will become lower, and the lower will become supernal, 19 and the
- Tetragrammaton, which has been concealed, will be revealed, and 'Adotiay,
- which was revealed, 20 will [then] be concealed. Then it will happen to us
- •8o-
- > : :
- I
- |:
- Eschatological Themes and Divine Names
- what has been written: "For they shall all know me from the least of them to
- the greatest of them" [Jeremiah 31:33]. Then the natural, philosophical
- sciences will be canceled and concealed, because their supernal power was
- canceled, but the science of names and letters, which are by now unknown
- to us, will be revealed, because their [supernal] power is gradually increas-
- ing. Then "the Jews will have light and gladness" [Esther 8:16] , and sadness
- and worry will be [the part of] the deniers, and "many of the people of the
- land will become Jews" [Esther 8:17], and "your sons and daughter will
- prophesy" [Joel3:i]. 21
- Changes in the effectiveness of divine names are related to redemptive events.
- However, just as in the case of the earlier discussions, the influence of a certain
- divine name or another is conceived of as concerning mainly the different forms
- of knowledge: either the flourishing of the inferior types of knowledge of alien
- extraction during the period of exile, or the return of prophecy in the case of
- the Tetragrammaton. In other words, although major upheavals are expected with
- the advent of redemption, they are of a more internal, noetic nature, rather than
- involving a disruption of the cosmic order. In fact redemption may be summarized
- as the revelation of ecstatic Kabbalah, a mystical lore based on letters and names.
- Moreover, according to Abulafia, the letters 'aHWY constitute the hidden divine
- name, which will be revealed to -the messiah. 22 Thus, the return of prophecy is
- reported in a statement that also implies the revelation of an unknown divine name. 2 *
- 2. Changes of Names of the Mystics
- In addition to the revelation of the hidden name of God, Abulafia mentions the
- change of the name of the mystic during the mystical experience, an event that also
- conveys messianic overtones. For example, we learn that during such an experi-
- ence "it will appear to him as if his entire body, from head to foot, has been anointed
- with the oil of anointing, and he was 'the anointed of the Lord [Mashiyah YHWHV
- and His emissary, and he will be called 'the angel of the Lord'; his name will be
- similar to that of his Master, which is Shadday, who is called Metatron, the prince
- [namely the angel] of the divine Face. "^ Thus, just as Enoch received divine names
- as part of his apotheosis as Metatron, the human mystic in the present will also
- assume new names, in many cases having a theophoric structure. In a prophetic
- book composed in the same years as the passage above, Abulafia writes:
- And the meaning of his saying "Rise and lift up the head of my anointed one
- [meshiyhi]" refers to the life of the souls. "And on the New Year and in the
- Temple"— it is the power ofthe souls. And he says: "Anointhim as a king"—
- rejoice him like a king with the power of all the names. "For I have anointed
- •81.
- Eschato logical Themes and Divine Names
- him as a king over Israel" 25 — over the communities [of] Israel, that is, the
- commandments. And his saying "and his name I have called Shadday, like
- My Name" 26 — whose secret is Shadday like My Name, and understand all
- the intention. Likewise his saying "He is I and I am He," and it cannot be
- revealed more explicitly than this. But the secret of the "corporeal name" is
- the "Messiah of God." Also "Moses will rejoice," which he has made known
- to us, and which is the five urges, and I called the corporeal name as well. . . .
- now Raziel started to contemplate the essence of the messiah, and he found
- it and recognized it and its power and designated it David, the son of David,
- whose secret is Yimelokh. 27
- This very rich passage cannot be analyzed here in all its complex details; I shall
- focus only on the topics relevant to our discussion. 28 First and foremost, the reve-
- lation is related to Abulafia, apparently during his stay in Rome in 1280, and the
- temple where the messiah will be installed mentioned here may be no other than
- St. Peter's. However, I take these spatial and temporal details to present only one
- facet of Abulafia's messianism. As he himself puts it, after describing the details
- of the revelation, the mythical elements stand for spiritual events. Rosh meshiyhi is
- equal in gematria to u-ue-rosh ha-shanah but also to hayyei ha-nefashot, namely the
- life of the souls. This is a conspicuously spiritualistic interpretation of messian-
- ism. The messianic figure, chosen by God, is taught the secrets of the divine name,
- and, using this knowledge, he is able to start his messianic activity. Redemption is
- a consequence of the messiah's use of the divine names, just as the instauration of
- the messiah is attained by means of the power of the divine names. The revelation
- of the divine names to a messianic figure is quite a rare topic. So far as I know, an
- explicit instance of such a revelation is found only in Abulafia's writings. Thus, for
- example, we read in his epistle Ve-Zot Li-Yhudah: "When I arrived at [the knowledge
- of] the names by my loosening of the bonds of the seals, 2 * 'the Lord of All'*
- appeared to me and revealed to me His secret and informed me about the time
- of the end of the exile and about the time of the beginning of redemption. He
- compelled me to prophesy." 31
- The nexus between the revelation of the divine name and messianism is there-
- fore conspicuous in ecstatic Kabbalah; indeed this issue is the core of the whole
- system. 32 Revealing the divine names is, for Abulafia, tantamount to revealing
- the core of the Kabbalah itself, which is quintessential for knowing the secret of
- the time of the advent of the messianic era. Indeed, in the same epistle Abulafia
- uses the same statement from Sefer Yetzimh to characterize the form of Kabbalah
- that he deems the highest, namely prophetic Kabbalah, which aims at teaching
- how to actualize the Kabbalists' intellects." It is important to dwell upon the
- Eschatological Themes and Divine Names
- sequence of the events related by Abulafia: his spiritual life, described here
- as knowing the names and loosing the bonds, brought him to a subsequent
- revelation of the eschatological secrets. A spiritual life is conceived here to be a
- condition of redemption, not vice versa.
- However, the revelation of the divine name is only one aspect of the relation-
- ship between name and redemption. According to other writings of the ecstatic
- Kabbalist, the redemptive experience of the messiah is related to his becoming
- unified with God or the Agent Intellect, a state understood as a deep spiritual
- transformation, described also as the change of the name of the messiah to a
- theophoric one. God's theophany at the end of time, described in terms of changes
- of both names and attributes, is related to the messiah's apotheosis as part of his
- individual transformation. Given that the process of apotheosis is explicidy
- described as triggered by a technical use of the divine name, we may conceive the
- topic of the divine name as comprising the mode of theophany, the goal of apo-
- theosis and the technique to reach it. Or, to express it in other terms: the revelation
- of the divine names, which is identical with the future reign of the attribute of
- mercy, is an objective event, namely a theophany, which is to be accompanied by
- personal redemptions and apotheoses, which consist in a transformation of indi-
- viduals into spiritual beings, designated by the theophoric names, by means of
- reciting letters of the divine name. This median role of the knowledge of the divine
- name is well expressed in 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, where Abulafia writes: "The know-
- ledge of the names is a supreme degree over all the human degrees, shared with
- the divine degrees, namely that they announce the way that unifies the soul to the
- Agent Intellect, in an eternal union, and there is no other way close to it, that may
- bring the soul to this wondrous degree." 34
- Divine names are conceived of as modes of divine theophanies, techniques
- for reaching apotheotic states, and designations for those who have reached
- them. Earlier in the same book Abulafia writes, in a way that is not quite clear to
- me, about the passage of the name of man from potentia to actu, which causes
- the ascent of the man by two degrees. 35 By such an experience someone is able
- to both transcend and control nature. Elsewhere in the same treatise we learn
- that "the powers 36 of the Special Name 37 are the tools of the Messiah 38 to change
- the natures by their means, because its [the name's] powers are above Man, Lion,
- Ox, and Eagle. And know that 'eHeYeH is the Special Name, and this is why it
- comprises all the living beasts, just as the vowels of the name are tantamount
- to Ratzo ua-Shou, and I shall give you a sign that all the Chariot is beneath the hands
- of Man." 3 *
- The name 'eHeYeH is an important one, and it is worth observing that it is remi-
- niscent of Moses 7 mission to disclose that new name to the people of Israel. This
- •82.
- ESCHATO LOGICAL THEMES AND DIVINE NAMES
- changing of nature is in line with some philosophical views in the Middle Ages,
- according to which the accomplished man, able to purify his soul and cleave to the
- cosmic soul, or the Agent Intellect, is capable of influencing the processes taking
- place in nature. Abulafia claims that at the beginning of the millennium according
- to the Jewish calendar, namely in 1240, when he was born, the messiah will come,
- and he boasts 40 about his knowledge of the divine name. 41 Elsewhere he claims:
- "The messiah confesses that his speech and conversation come from the special
- name that is with him by nature, and it generates the speech, and actualizes it after
- it has been in potentia. And the simpletons do not perceive from where their speech
- comes, and they are like an animal that produces a sound that is similar to speech,
- but does not understand the nature that is inherent in it." 42
- 3. Jews, Judaism, and Divine Names
- Abulafia's eschatological vision should be understood in a very dynamic manner: it
- is not identical with the more popular vision of the final redemption of the
- people of Israel, once and forever; rather, it has a place within an undulatory
- version of political history, one that sees the ascent and decline of the political
- organization of the Jewish nations as part of larger political and military trends. 43
- Thus, although a restoration may include the return of the Jews to their land — a
- feature of the messianic age often emphasized in many writings on the subject but
- totally marginalized by Abulafia — his concern is with the spiritual aspects of this
- restoration. Abulafia embraces in some of his discussions a unique understanding
- of the essence of Judaism: he understands the significance of the name ofYeHWDaH
- as a confession to the power of the divine name. In an untitled ecstatic tract he
- writes that in the eschatological time, "The comprehension of the Jew will be the
- comprehension of the Name, and this is the way [the name] Shadday was inter-
- preted, to the effect that for us the name 'HYH [I shall be] suffices, and likewise
- YeHWDY [Jew], YHWDaY [the name YHW suffices], 'Ehad 'Ah 'Ehad [One the Brother
- One] ; and by the comprehension of YHWH 'Ehad [Tetragrammaton is One] , redemp-
- tion [Ge'ulah] will come to us." 44 The word YeHWDY, "Jew," contains the consonants
- that also constitute the locution YHW DaY, which means that the three consonants
- that constitute the Tetragrammaton are sufficient A comprehension of the essence
- of the Jew is therefore identical with comprehension of the sufficiency of the divine
- name. By means of gematria, the consonants of the word YeHWDY amount to 35, as
- do the consonants of the expression 'Ehad 'Ah 'Ehad, "One [is the] Brother [of]
- One." The two occurrences of 'Ehad amount in gematria to 26, and this addition of
- "One" to "One" is the significance of the word 'Ah, "Brother." But 26 is also the
- gematria of the consonants of the Tetragrammaton. 45 This comprehension is
- salvific, as we may learn not only from the mention of Ge'ulah, "redemption," but
- Eschatological Themes and Divine Names
- also from perusal of the larger context (not quoted here) , where the phrase Mashiy ah
- YHWH [Messiah of the divine name] is mentioned. In other words, for Abulafia the
- eschatological success of the Jews mentioned in the quotation from 'Otzar 'Eden
- Ganuz may— though I cannot say must— be understood not only as related to a
- political and religious ascent of a certain nation but also as the emergence of a
- certain type of comprehension of the centrality of the divine name. Or, to formulate
- it more drastically: it would not be surprising to assume that Abulafia understood
- the term "Jew" as a metonym for the perfect knowledge of the divine name.
- In this context let me introduce a discussion about exile in Egypt and language:
- "They exchanged their language for numerous foreign tongues, to the extent that
- one does not understand the other, [and are] almost like animals that do not
- understand one another and revert to incapacity for verbal communication. "« 6 The
- disappearance of the use of a common language among the Jews, namely the near
- oblivion of Hebrew, renders them similar to animals; multiplicity of languages
- among the Jews, made real in the exile, also entails a reversion to a state of animal-
- ity. The Jews do not possess any special superiority while in the exilic situation,
- and I assume, on the basis of the context of this quotation, that they are ruled by
- the attribute of judgment. We may assume that the reversal of this situation entails
- the return of the attributes of mercy, of one language, and of redemption.
- In another attempt to, define the nature of the Jews, Abulafia writes in his
- - Commentary on Sefer ha-Melte "the meaning of ( a man of Judah' is that in this name
- is exemplified the lesson of Judaism [Yahadut]. We are informed that the aim of
- consolation is not arrived at merely by speculation, but rather they must make
- whole the integrity of Judaism, that is, confession [hoda'ah] of the knowledge
- of the truth and departure from contusion.*" The author himself explains the
- meaning of the term Yahadut here: it implies hoda'ah, namely confession, derived
- from a stipulated etymological relationship between the words Yehudah and
- hoda'ah. The content of the confession is knowledge of the truth. 48 The nature of
- this truth is not explained here, but we may discern its meaning from the passage
- that immediately precedes this sentence:
- Behold, Raziel intends to inform us of His Exalted Name in accordance with
- the hidden path, in order to bring us closer to Him, may His Name be
- blessed. Separate [the elements of] the words, for at times a name may con-
- sist of even only one letter, which is regarded as if it were one whole word.
- This tells us that each letter is a world unto itself, according to the Kabbalah «
- And he was commanded to illustrate this wondrous Divine Power in order to
- instruct us regarding His blessed Name. Invert the [letters of the] word
- Raziel, so that it becomes Ytsrnel. This tells us that Yisrael is Yizrael, just as
- .85.
- ESCHATO LOGICAL THEMES AND DIVINE NAMES
- Avraham is Ya'aqov. This is due to the joining of their two attributes, grace
- and truth, as it is written: "Thou will show Truth to Ya'aqov [and] Grace to
- Avraham" [Micah 7:20]. And in the word Hodu [glorify, confess] is indicated
- the [Divine] Name 'HYH because of the two essence-names composed
- through the name YH, which are YHW and YHWH, signifying HWD, HWDW,
- and YWDW [they will glorify] as well as [the words] ViDWY [confession],
- HWDW [glorify] and HWD [glory] , [and] WHDY YV WDH [I will glorify] , YHY,
- YWDH. Indeed the confession of the Name is the [true] glorification. Thus
- HWDW [glorify] in the Name of 'HYH is the HWDAH VaD'aY [confession of
- certainty], and the hidden form [of the Name is] HWDaH. This is sufficient,
- just as He is sufficient, may His Name be exalted and raised high. 50
- It is clear that according to Abulafia the hoda'ah, confession, which is the
- essence of Judaism, is the hoda'ah in the names of God— YH 'HYH YHWH. We may
- therefore assume that Yahadut does not refer to the "Jewish people" as a whole, but
- rather to a specific religious experience that involves the names of God. This is
- also Abulafia's view in his epistle Matzref la-Kesefi "And the Jew who thinks that
- because he is Jewish and can trace his ancestry to the seed of Judah, he is of the
- seed of royalty, if he does not confess, in truth his similarity with the tribe of Judah
- is only one of name. For Judah is etymologically related to confession [hoda'ah] ." 5I
- Abulafia relies on the etymological allusion to Genesis 49:8: Yehudah as deriving
- from Yodukhah. Yet whereas there the confession is made by Judah's brothers to
- Judah, Abulafia alters the meaning and has it refer to God. This portrayal of
- Judaism is highly reminiscent of his vision of the Kabbalah, namely that its central
- goal was the dissemination of the knowledge of the divine name. Similarly, he was
- the standard-bearer of the view that the messiah would reveal the true divine name
- and the Kabbalah of the Names. Thus, die "Judaism" about which Abulafia
- intended to speak to Pope Nicholas III was a religion centered upon the name of
- God, and not one centered upon the halakhic structure of Judaism. This definition
- of Abulafia's mission would place it outside the realm of the "messianic national-
- ism" of Nahmanides 52 and another contemporary of his, Rabbi Yitzhaq ben
- Yedayah, and is also different from the proselytizing missionary of Judaism as
- proposed by some scholars." Likewise we read in Sefer ha-'Ot, "You, O nation of
- God, Supernal Holy Ones who look to the Name [mabitei Shemo] and to the source
- of your intelligence, have seen the form ofYHVH within the form of your hearts." 54
- It seems to me that the expression "those who look to His Name" is an explanation
- of the name Yisra'el, indicated by the words "nation of God." This interpretation
- divides the word Yisra'el into yishar, etymologically related to the word yashur, "will
- look to," and the word 'el, "God." 55
- $■
- I
- k
- Eschato logical Themes and Divine Names
- Therefore, when describing the messiah as involved in a confrontation with the
- pope and prevailing by means of the divine name, as described in chapter 3, we
- have an application of a mystical concept of the change of nature by means of the
- divine name. However, whereas philosophers under the influence of Avicenna
- would offer a totally naturalistic explanation for those changes, namely the union
- of the human spiritual faculty to the spiritual power that directs events in the lower
- world, Abulafia introduces three additional elements: the messiah, the divine
- name, and the will of God.
- Moreover, he implicitly regards the messianic achievement as uniting the
- three main religious elements in Judaism: the Torah, the Chariot, and the
- divine name. I assume that the Chariot, Merkauah, has something to do with
- the combination of the letters of the divine names. Ma'aseh Merkauah is numerically
- equivalent with Shem ba-shem, 56 while the Torah, as mentioned above, points to
- vocalization of the consonants. According to another text, there is a deep affinity
- between the Torah and Merkauah. In one of his commentaries on the Guide of
- the Perplexed Abulafia advances another interesting gematria: Ma'aseh Merkauah is
- tantamount to Galgal ha-Torah (= 682), namely the sphere or circle of the Torah,
- which is to be understood as the combinatory circles that are related to permuting
- the letters of the Torah. 57 The Divine Chariot, understood as a complex of
- divine names, is the blueprint of the entire Torah, which Kabbalists conceived
- of as containing an esoteric level that emerged from reading it as a continuum of
- divine names. Perhaps control or the rule over the Chariot has to do with control
- over the circles of divine names that are related to the Torah. Thus the knowledge
- of the divine name comprises both Torah and Merkauah and is the essence of
- the Jew.
- Last but not least: the knowledge of the divine names will be used by the mes-
- siah in a more magical manner. In the untitled treatise mentioned above, Abulafia
- wrote: "and then will be the true time of the Torah, when the Messiah of YHWH
- will control all the Chariot, so that he will change the natures by 58 the will of God,
- and to him it was said: "Time, two times and a half" [Daniel 12:7] , 59 The focus of
- the discussion is overtly messianic: not only is the messiah mentioned but also the
- verse from Daniel dealing with the date of redemption. However, redemption is
- conceived to consist not only in a noetic or religious state of mind, but also in the
- capacity to change the natures, le-shannot ha-teua'im.
- Let me attempt to describe the meaning of such a changing of natures. The
- recognition of the divine name and of the divine unity is to be complemented by an
- additional type of knowledge, that of the vowels between the consonants of the
- divine names; the vowels are conceived of as a hidden topic, hinted at by the vocal-
- ization of the consonants of the Torah. By using the letters of the divine name with
- .8-7.
- Eschato logical Themes and Divine Names
- a certain vocalization, namely Holam and Qamatz, which are the vowels of Torah,
- the true Torah is achieved, namely a mystical experience.
- In other words, Abulafia's Kabbalah consists essentially in understanding,
- manipulating, permuting, and experiencing encounters related to the divine
- names. These acts represent an intense, vibrant, and very focused type of mysti-
- cism, which assumes that an experience of plenitude, understood as salvific, is
- inherent in the very essence of the letters of the divine name.
- I
- L
- •89-
- Notes to Pages 29-35
- Abraham Abulafia and Ecstatic Kabbalah
- 1. On this important Jewish Kabbalist see Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 119-155; Idel, The
- Mystical Experience; Wolfson, Abraham Abulajia; Hames, Like Angels on Jacob's Ladder;ldd t
- "Abraham Abulafia/' pp. 11-15; idem, "Maimonides and Kabbalah," pp. 58-62; idem!
- "Abraham Abulafia, un kabbaliste mystique," La vie spirituelie 68 (1988), pp. 381-392;'
- and idem, "Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed," pp. 206-208.
- 2. On this issue see chaps. 3 and 6.
- 3. For a detailed description of these techniques see Idel, The Mystical Experience; and
- chap. 5 of this volume.
- 4- See a bibliographical description of these lost writings in Idel, "Abraham Abulafia,"
- pp. 11-15.
- 5. See Abraham Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, Ms. Oxford, Bodleiana 1580, fol. 164b;
- as well as a fragment from the Commentary on Sefer ha-'Edut, Ms. Munich 43, printed by
- Henrich Graetz, "Abraham Abulafia, der Pseudomessias," Monatschnft jiir Geschichfe
- und Wissenschajt desjudentums 36 (1887), p. 558.
- 6. See Idel, "Maimonides and Kabbalah," pp. 58-62; and later in this chapter.
- 7. For a portrait of this mystic see Moshe Idel, "Abraham Abulafia, un kabbaliste
- mystique, " la vie spirituelie 68 (1988), pp. 381-392; Hames, Like Angels on Jacob's Ladder.
- 8. Ms. Oxford, Bodleiana 1580, fols. i64a-b. For a detailed analysis see Idel, "Maimonides
- and Kabbalah," pp. 60-63; and idem, "Maimonides* Guide of the Perplexed," pp. 206-208.
- Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 76. See also ibid., p. 86.
- Ibid., p. 76.
- Ibid. For another instance of discussing secrets of the Torah with a gentile see
- Abraham Abulafia, Mafieah ha-Holchmot, Ms. Parma 141, fol. 29b.
- 12. See Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, pp. 75, 78.
- 13. The poetic opening to his book Sefer Hayyei ha-'Olam ha-Ba', printed by Jellinek as an
- appendix to Abulafia's Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 87. For the propagandistic activity of Abulafia see
- also his Commentary on Sefer ha-Yashar, Ms. Rome, Casanatense 38, fol. 41a.
- 14. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 122.
- 9
- 10.
- 11.
- ■-■'M_
- ■$»
- •;».
- 15
- "«;'
- 16
- 1
- 17
- ■IB"
- 18.
- ■H-'
- \ x 9-
- '■
- I
- 20,
- 21.
- 22
- M
- 24
- 2 5-
- 26.
- 27-
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
- 31.
- 32.
- 33.
- 34-
- 35-
- Notes to Pages 36-38
- See Jellinek, Beth ha-Midrasch, 3: xlii.
- See Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 22-24.
- Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 98-99.
- Jellinek, Beth ha-Midrasch, 3: xli.
- The very few other significant discussions in Spain of the combinations of letters are
- found in Kabbalists who either were Ashkenazi by extraction or drew their inspiration
- from Hasidei Ashkenaz. See Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 45 n. 38; and idem, "Ashkenazi
- Esotericism and Kabbalah in Barcelona," Hispania Judaica Bulletin 5 (2007), pp. 69-113.
- Jellinek, Beth ha-Midrasch, 3: xlii-xliii.
- In general, Abulafia's attitude to several central topics in Jewish esotericism is drasti-
- cally different from that of theosophical-theurgical Spanish Kabbalah. See Idel,
- "Maimonides and Kabbalah," pp. 31-79; and idem, "The Kabbalistic Interpretations
- of the Secret of Arayyot in Early Kabbalah," Kabbalah 12 (2004), pp. 157-185, 199
- (Hebrew).
- Gershom Scholem, The Qabbalah of Sefer ha-Temunah and oJAbraham Abulajia, ed. J. ben
- Shlomo (Akademon, Jerusalem, 1969), pp. 229-239.
- See Jellinek, Beth ha-Midrasch, 3: xliii.
- In fact we can easily understand the evolution of Spanish Kabbalah either before or
- after Abulafia without resorting to ecstatic Kabbalah. However, this is impossible in
- the cases of Italian, Byzantine, and Middle Eastern Kabbalah.
- Symptomatically, Abulafia has influenced two philosophers living in Spain, R, Abraham
- Shalom and R, Moshe Narboni; see Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 63-71.
- Idel, "Abraham Abulafia," pp. 3-68.
- See Idel, "The Study Program," pp. 330-331.
- See Abulafia's epistle Ve-Zot li-Yhudah, pp. 15, 19.
- Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola, p. 63; Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah, p. 92;
- Gershom Scholem, DieErforschun^ derKabbala uon Reuchlin biszurGe^entuart (Selbstverlag
- der Stadt, Pforzheim, 1969), pp. 11-12. In his thoroughgoing presentation of this
- distinction in Major Trends, p. 124, Scholem proposes this theory concerning the diver-
- gence between ecstatic and theosophical Kabbalah as his own, without mentioning
- Abulafia as a source. For a more detailed examination of Abulafia's own definition of
- Kabbalah as distinct from the theosophical one see Idel, "Defining Kabbalah" and
- "On the Meanings of the Term 'Kabbalah/ " pp. 69-73.
- Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 14-17, 22-23.
- See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 112-136, 156-172, 173-176, 191-194; and idem,
- "On the Doctrine of Divinity at the Beginning of Kabbalah," in Shefa Tal: Studies in
- Jewish Thought and Culture Presented to Bracha Sack, ed. Z. Gries, Ch. Kreisel, and B. Huss
- (Ben Gurion University Press, Beer Sheva, 2004), pp. 131-148 (Hebrew).
- See Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 91-96.
- See ibid., pp. 126-132, 136-140.
- Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 61-64.
- Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 131-134.
- Notes to Pages 38-44
- Notes to Pages 44-48
- 36. ldel t Hosidism, pp. 56-60. See also M. Idel, "On Prophecy and Early Hasidism,*' in
- Studies in Modern Religions: Religious Movements and Babi-Baha'i Faiths, ed. Moshe Sharon ,1
- (Brill, Leiden, 2004), pp. 68-70.
- $]. See Moshe Idel, "R. Menahem Mendel of Shklov and R Avraham Abulafia," in The %
- Vilna Gaon and His Disciples, ed. M. Hallamish, Y. Rivlin, and R. Shuhat (Bar Ilaa j
- University Press, Ramat Gan, 2003), pp. 173-183 (Hebrew).
- 38. See, e.g., Wolfson, Abraham Abulajia; and Hames, Like Angels on Jacob's Ladder..
- 39. Amnon Gross, personal communication to author, 2002.
- Abraham Abulafia's Activity in Italy
- 1. For more on Rome as the locus of eschatological events see Idel, Messianic Mystics,
- pp. 82-84, 33 2 n - 65. See now also Hames, Like Angels on Jacob's ladder, pp. 71-88.
- 2. Nahmanides, 'Otzar ha-Vikkuhim, ed. Y. D. Eisenstein (Reznik, New York, 1928), p. 88*
- 3. Idel, "Abraham Abulafia," pp. 11-12,42-43 n. 43.
- 4. Namely Capua in gematria.
- 5. This is one of the designations that Abulafia took for himself, as it amounts in
- gematria to the numerical value of Abraham, namely 248.
- 6. Ziv ha-shekhinah. This rabbinic term was interpreted in ecstatic Kabbalah as pointing to
- an ecstatic experience. See Idel, Lamjua^e, Torah, and Hermeneutics, pp. 32-33,
- 7. This may be a remark pointing to anthropomorphic understandings of the divinity,
- influential in some circles in contemporary Italy. See Israel M. Ta-Shma, "Nimmuqd J
- Humash le-Rabbi Isaiah mi-Tram," Qiryat Sefer 64 (1992-93), pp. 751-753 (Hebrew). (
- 8. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Sitrei Torah, Ms. Paris, BN 774, fol. 120a.
- 9. See Idel, "Abraham Abulafia," pp. 62-68.
- 10. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, Ms. Oxford, Bodleiana 1580, fol. 165b;
- Jeliinek, Beth ha-Midrasch, 3: xli.
- n. See Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar "Eden Ganuz, fol. 164a. On the somewhat earlier and more
- famous figure see Israel M. Ta-Shma, "R. lesaiah di Trani the Elder and His
- Connections with Byzantium and Palestine," Shalem 4 (1984), p. 411 (Hebrew).
- 12. See Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 197-200; and idem, "On the History of the
- Interdiction against the Study of Kabbalah before the Age of Forty," AJS Review
- 5 (1980), pp. 1-20 (Hebrew Section).
- 13. This is one of the names Abulafia took for himself. Raziei is numerically equivalent to
- Abraham. See Harar, Sha'arei Tzedeq, pp. 47-51.
- 14. Hitboded. On this significance of this text see Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 108-irx
- 15. Abraham Abulafia, Commentary on Sefer ha- 4 Edut, Ms. Munich 43, fols. 2030-2043,
- printed by Heinrich Graetz, "Abraham Abulafia der Pseudo-Messias," Monatschnfrjir
- Geschichte und Wissenschqft des Judentums 36 (1887), p. 558.
- 16. See Augustin Demski, Pabst Nicholas III — Eine Monographic (H. Schoningh, Minister,
- 1903), p. 347 n. 2. Abulafia's testimony regarding the pope's sudden demise, "he was
- suddenly smitten by a plague, and on that night he was slain and died," corresponds
- to an amazing degree with the Christian sources, which emphasize the suddenness of
- the pope's demise. Demski collects these sources, ibid., p. 348 n. 1. 1 offer here two
- examples: "Item iste Nicholaus Papa Postae existens in Castro Firmano (Soriano)
- ioquelam suam perdidit et subito ipse decessit"; "Dominus Johannes Gaitanus Papa
- nominatus Dominus Nicolaus Papa IV [sic] obiit non bono modo sine poenitentia ut
- dicebatur." Another source, also recorded in Demski, ibid., describes the pope's
- death as follows: "Nicolaus Papa III, in castro Suriano existens subito factus apoplect-
- icus, sine loquela moritur." The word subito (suddenly) recurs in two of these texts,
- .whereas the third text emphasizes the strange nature of his death, and apparently
- comes closest to Abulafia's "smitten by a plague." These texts also corroborate
- Abulafia's version of the pope's death in Soriano.
- 17. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Edut, Ms. Rome, Angelica 38, fols. 140-153; Ms. Munich
- 285, fol. 39b; see also Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 126-127, 199. The Hebrew
- original of the passage is printed in the Hebrew edition of this book (Magnes Press,
- Jerusalem, 1988), pp. 110-111, 154. See also Idel, Absorbing Perfections, pp. 336-338.
- 18. For more on this passage see Idel, Messianic Mystics, pp. 82-84. 0n Abulafia and mes-
- sianism see also Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 45-62. This allegorical technique
- is representative of Abulafia's hermeneutics, covered further in chap, 5 of this volume.
- 19. M. Idel, "On Symbolic Self-Interpretations in Thirteenth-Century Jewish Writings,"
- Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 16 (1988), pp. 90-96.
- 20. Seyirim. See Leviticus 17:7, in Asher Weiser, ed., Abraham ibn Ezra's Commentary on the
- Pentateuch, vol. 3 (Mossad ha-Rav Kook, Jerusalem, 1976), p. 53. On the danger of
- goats, plausibly pointing to demonic powers, when met on Friday evening, see already
- in the talmudic discussions and Mahzor Vitry, by R Simhah, a student of Rashi, ed.
- Shim eon ha-Levi Horowitz (reprint; Bolka, Jerusalem, 1963), p. 81 (Hebrew). These
- sources discuss the term salckanat se'yirim, apparently following a biblical theme. See
- also Nahmanides on Leviticus 16:8 for the nexus between Sammael and goats; and
- Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jems, vol. 5 (JPS, Philadelphia, 1968), p. 312.
- 21. Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 67. For more on issues contained in this passage see Moshe
- Idel, " 'The Time of the End': Apocalypticism and Its Spiritualization in Abraham
- Abulafia's Eschatology," in Apocalyptic Time, ed. Albert Baumgarten (Brill, Leiden,
- 2000), pp. 155-186.
- 22. Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 67. BYT in gematria is 21, the gematria of the divine name
- 'eHeYeH.
- 23. See the text translated and analyzed in Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, p. 105.
- 24. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer 'Ish 'Adam, Ms. Rome, Angelica 38, fol. 3a.
- 25. This is a play on the Hebrew consonants of the name of the town Messina.
- 26. Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, fol. 165 b.
- 27. Namely sometime in the fall of 1285.
- 28. Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, fol. 16 6a.
- 29. Ibid. For more on his fantasies and visions see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 144-145.
- 30. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Mqfteah ha-Hokhmot, Ms. Moscow, Guensburg 133, fol. ia,
- reproduced in Idel, "Abraham Abulafia," p. 20.
- Notes to Pages 48-53
- 31. On the possible relationship between the name of this student of Abulafia and
- Lessing's Nathan the Wise, see Harar, Sha'arei Tzedeq, pp. 32, 345-346.
- 32. On this book see Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 91-92.
- 33. Abulafia, Sejer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fol. ia, reproduced in Idel, "Abraham Abulafia/
- p. 20.
- 34. Abulafia, Ve-Zot li-Yhudah, p. 19. On this controversy see Moshe Idel, "R, Shlomo ibn
- Adret and Abraham Abulafia: For the History of a Neglected Polemic," in Atara L'Haim;
- Studies in the Talmud and Medieval Rabbinic Literature in Honor of Professor Haim Zalman
- Dimitrousky, ed. D. Boyarin etal. (Magnes Press, Jerusalem, 2000), pp. 235-251 (Hebrew),
- 35. In his Responsum I, 548, printed now in Teshuvot ha-Rashba, ed. H. Z. Dimitrowsky, vol
- 1 (Mossad ha-Rav Kook, Jerusalem, 1990), p. 101, he mentions his writings and those
- of the holy communities in Sicily. The use of the plural shows that it was not only to
- Palermo that Ibn Adret wrote in this context.
- 36. Ibid.; and Idel, "R. Shlomo ibn Adret and Abraham Abulafia."
- 37. See Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 91-92.
- 38. See Abulafia, Ve-Zot li-Yhudah, pp. 13-28.
- 39. Abulafia, Sejer ha-'Ot, p. 85.
- 40. Abulafia, Sheva' Netiuot ha-Torah, pp. 1-24.
- 41. See Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 91-92.
- 42. Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, fol. 55a.
- 43. Abulafia, Ve-Zot li-Yhudah, p. 19. On this passage see Idel, "On the Meanings of the
- Term 'Kabbalah,'" pp. 40-42^ and Wolfson, Abraham Abulajia, pp. 99-107. For
- Abulafia's own interpretations of the Trinity, see Idel, Ben, pp. 315-318.
- 44. Francois Secret, "L'Ensis Pauli de Paulus de Heredia," Sefarad 26 (1966), pp. 79-102,
- 254-271, especially p. 100.
- Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore
- 1. For a survey of this understanding of Kabbalah see Moshe Idel, "On the Theologization
- ofKabbalah in Modern Scholarship, " in Religious Apologetics — Philosophical Argumentation,
- ed. Y. Schwartz and V. Krech (J. C. B. Mohr, Tubingen, 2004), pp. 165-167. For more
- on this issue see the beginning of chap. 9 in this volume.
- 2. For a survey of changing attitudes toward Abulafia's Kabbalah in recent scholarship see
- Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 119-155; Moshe Idel, "The Contribution of Abraham
- Abulafia's Kabbalah to the Understanding of Jewish Mysticism," in Gershom Scholem's
- Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: Fifty Years Ajter, ed. P. Schaefer and J. Dan (J. C. B. Mohr,
- Tubingen, 1993), pp. 117-143; Ronald Kiener, "From Ba'al ha-Zohar to Prophet to
- Ecstatic: The Vicissitudes of Abulafia in Contemporary Scholarship," ibid., pp. 145-159;
- Wolfson, Abraham Abulajia; and Hames, Like Angels on Jacob's Ladder.
- 3. On techniques in Jewish mysticism see Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 74-m; and
- idem, Enchanted Chains, passim.
- 4. See Paul Fenton, "La 'Hitbodeduf chez les premiers Qabbalistes en Orient et chez les
- Soufis," in Priere, mystique etjudaisme, ed. R. Goetschel (Presses Universitaires dc
- .364-
- 9
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- ■ 13:
- H
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
- Notes to Pages 53-55
- France, Paris, 1987), pp. 133^57; Moshe Idel, "Hitbodedut: On Solitude in Jewish
- Mysticism," in Einsamkeit: Archdoloaie der literarischen Kommunikation, vol. 6, ed. Aleida
- Assmann and Jan Assmann (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 2000), pp. 192-198.
- See Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 103-169; idem, "Hitbodedut as Concentration in
- Jewish Philosophy," in Shlomo Pines Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday,
- ed. Moshe Idel, Zeev W. Harvey, and E. Schweid, vol. 1 (Magnes Press, Jerusalem!
- 1988), pp. 39-60 (Hebrew); Sara Klein-Braslavy, "Prophecy, Clairvoyance, and
- Dreams and the Concept of Hitbodedut' in Gersonides' Thought," Da'at 39 (1997),
- pp. 23-68 (Hebrew).
- Yitboded. This term can also be translated here as "concentrate."
- Abraham Abulafia, Matzref la-Kesef, Ms. Sassoon 56, fols. 330-343. On this passage see
- also Idel, "Hitbodedut: On Solitude in Jewish Mysticism," p. 195.
- Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ha-Hesheq, Ms. New York, JTS 1801, fol. 9 a, corrected in accor-
- dance with the quotation of this passage in Ms. London, British Library 749,
- fols. i2a-b, where Abulafia's passage has been copied in R. Hayyim VitaPs Sha'arei
- Qedushah under the mistaken tide Hayyei ha-'Oiam ha-Ba'. Even so, it is essentially a
- better version of the unique extant manuscript of Sefer ha-Hesheq.
- Simhah shel mitzuah. Cf. BT, Sabbath, fol. 30a.
- Eleazar of Worms, Sefer Sodei Razayya', Ms. Oxford, Bodleiana 1572, fol. 130a.
- Psalms 33:2, 47:7, 66:2, etc.
- . Cf. Mekhileta' on Exodus 18:19; and Boaz Cohen, law and Tradition in Judaism (JTS, New
- York, 1959), p. 24 a 70.
- EleazaroWorms,PerusheiSiddurha^^
- vol. 1 (Makhon ha-rav Herschler, Jerusalem, 1992), p. 145. See also ibid., p. 149.
- See BT, Sabbath, fol. 30b. Cf. the texts of R. Eleazar of Worms quoted earlier.
- Abraham Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, Ms. Oxford, Bodleiana 1580, fol. 62a; Idel,
- The Mystical Experience, pp. 61-62.
- Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, fols. 59 b-6oa. On the kiss of death as a moment of
- ecstasy in other texts of Abulafia see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 180-184.
- Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, fols. 6oa-b.
- See the anonymous Ms. Paris, BN 848, fol. 7 b; and Adam Afterman, The Intention
- of Prayers in Early Ecstatic Kabbalah (Cherub Press, Los Angeles, 2004), pp. 25-26,
- 285-286 (Hebrew). See also below, notes 43 and 45.
- See Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 13-71.
- Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Re'ayon, Ms. Vatican 2gi, fol. 21a.
- Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, fols. 1630-1643.
- Aristode, Metaphysics XH.7.io 7 2b; idem, Ethics Vn.ii 74 a-ii 7 6a. For Maimonides see
- Hilkhot Teshui/ah 8:2; Haqdamah le-Pereq Heleq, Sejer ha-Ma'or (Tel Aviv, 1948), pp. 121-122;
- Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (University of Chicago Press,
- Chicago, 1963), pt. Ill, chap. 51. Maimonides emphasized that the pleasure that
- accompanies apprehension "does not belong to the genus of bodily pleasures."
- Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, pt. Ill, chap. 51.
- Notes to Pages 56-59
- 24. Idei, The Mystical Experience, p. 125.
- 25. Abraham Abuiaiia, Hayyei ha-'Olam ha-Ba\ Ms. Oxford, Bodleiana 1582, fol. 14b. See also
- Idel, "Maimonides and Kabbalah, " pp. 77-78. For more on the death by a kiss in Kabbalah
- in general see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 180-184; and more recendy Michael
- Fishbane, TheKiss of God (University ofWashington Press, Seatde, 1994), pp. 39-41.
- 26. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Sitrei Torah, Ms. Paris, BN 774, foL 117a.
- 27. Idem, Sefer ha-Ge'uIah, Ms. Leipzig 39, fol. 4b.
- 28. Idem, Sefer Hayyei ha-Nefesh, Ms. Munich 408, fol. ib.
- 29. Idem, Sefer Sitrei Torah, fol. 115 b. For more on the figure 177 in Abulafia 's thought see
- Idei, "Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, " pp. 212-216.
- 30. Untitled fragment in the untitled, anonymous Ms. Florence, Laurenziana-Medicea
- Plut. II, 48, fol. 89b. On this manuscript see the identification of Abulafia as author
- and the discussion in M. Idel, "A Unique Manuscript of an Untitled Treatise of
- Abraham Abulafia in Biblioteca Laurenziana-Medicea," Kabbalah 17 (2008), pp/7-28,
- 31. Abulafia, Hayyei ha-'OIam ha-Ba\ fols. 40-53.
- ^2, Ibid., fol. 54a.
- ^. Ibid., fols. 4b~5a. On the allegorical understanding of the "congregation of Israel" in
- Abulafia's thought see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 211-212 n. ^6; and Wolfson,
- Abraham Abulajta, pp. 66, 127, 215.
- 34. Abraham Abulafia, 'Or ha-Sekhel, Ms. Vatican 233, fol. 127b.
- 35. Abulafia, Sefer ha-Hesheq, fol. 35b.
- ^6. See, e.g., Deuteronomy 4:4. On the importance of the unitive expressions in both
- Kabbalah and Hasidism, see Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 36-73; and idem,
- "Universalization and Integration: Two Conceptions of Mystical Union in Jewish
- Mysticism," in Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. M. Idel
- and B. McGinn (Macmillan, New York, 1989), pp. 27-58, 157-161, 195-203.
- 37. Namely the Agent Intellect, envisioned as Metatron. Formoreon this passage see Idel,
- Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, p, 10.
- 38. Abraham Abulafia, Commentary on Sefer ha-Yashar, Ms. Rome, Angelica 38, fols. 310-323;
- Scholem, Major Trends, p. 382; Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 126.
- 39. See Idel, language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, p. 109. Gikatilla's Sha'ar ha-Niqqud was
- printed in a collection of early kabbalistic tracts titled 'Arzei levanon (Venice, 1601),
- fol. 38a. This collection was reprinted in 1748 in Krak6w, and later in Koretz, and
- Hasidic masters quoted it; see Moshe Idel, "The Magical and Theurgic Interpretation
- of Music in Hebrew Texts from the Renaissance to Hasidism," Yuiml 4 (1982), p. 61 n.
- 164 (Hebrew). Compare also some texts of Abulafia and his school, discussed in Idel,
- language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, pp. 18-19; an< 3 R- Joseph Gikatilla's Sha'arei 'Orah, ed.
- J. ben Shlomo, vol. 1 (Mossad Bialik, Jerusalem 1970), pp. 48, 206, and passim. See
- also the view of R, Elijah de Vidas, dealt with in Idel, Hasidism, pp. 171-172, 179, where
- cleaving to God is also related to linguistic elements. Compare also Scholem's remark
- that the formula used by Hasidic masters in order to convey the idea of cleaving to
- God, deuequt ha-Shem, may be related to views of Gikanlla found in (the unfortunately
- •366-
- Notes to Pages 59-63
- unmentioned) manuscripts of this Kabbalist. See Gershom Scholem, "Two First
- Testimonies on the Contrarities of Hasidism and the Besht," Tarbitz 20 (1950), p. 236
- (Hebrew); and the different opinion of Tishby, The Wisdom qftheZohar, 2: 302 n. 151.
- 40. Abulafia, Sefer Sitrei Torah, fol. 140a.
- 41. Abraham Abulafia, Shomer Mitzumh, Ms. Paris, BN 853, fol. 48b. On this view of
- Kabbalah, which assumes both mystical and magical aspects, see my discussion of the
- mystico-magical model in Hasidism, pp. 95-102.
- 42. Abulafia, Sefer Sitrei Torah, fol. 115b.
- 43. ha-Mirzuot (commandments) = 541 = sekhel ha-po*eI (Agent Intellect). On this gematria
- see Moshe Idel, "The Kabbalistic Interpretations of the Secret of 'Arayyot in Early
- Kabbalah," Kabbalah 12 (2004), pp. 157-159 (Hebrew). See also below, note 45; and
- chap. 5 of this volume.
- 44. In Hebrew the consonants of ha-ner, "candle," are the same as those of nahar, "river."
- On a different understanding of this verse, especially the term "river," see M. Hellner-
- Eshed, "A Riuer Issues Forth from Eden": On the language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar
- ('Alma 'Am *Oved, Tel Aviv, 2005) (Hebrew).
- 45. Untitled fragment, Ms. Florence, Laurenziana-Medicea Plut. II, 48, fols. 79a-b. On
- the possible authorship of this treatise, see note 30 above. The affinity between letters
- and the knowledge of the Agent Intellect means that the cosmic intellect is attained by
- means of the combination of letters. Thus also the term "commandments," which
- amounts in gematria to shekhel ha-po'el, means that the letters of the commandments
- can be used in order to attain the Agent Intellect
- 46. Compare other expressions of this view discussed in Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah,
- pp. 13, 15-16.
- 47. Abulafia, Sheua' Netiuot ha-Torah, p. 8; Idel, "Abraham Abulafia," pp. 86-87, 9 2_ 93> °A
- 98-99, 103. On the possible importance of this unique status of language as a form of
- cognition higher than imagination for later developments in the description of man as
- having the "form of speech," as in Dante Alighieri, for example, I hope to elaborate
- elsewhere. See, for the time being, Eco, The Search for the Perfect language, pp. 48-52.
- 48. Metzuyyar ba-sekhel. On the term tziyyur as forming a concept see Harry A. Wolfson,
- "The Terms Tasawwur and Tasdiq in Arabic Philosophy and Their Greek, Latin and
- Hebrew Equivalents," Moslem World, April 1943, pp. 1-15.
- 49. Abulafia, Sefer Hayyei ha-Nefesh, fols. 9ia-b.
- 50. Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 79.
- 51. Ms. Florence, Laurenziana-Medicea Plut. II, 48, fol. 72a.
- 52. Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, fol. 157b.
- 53. On the phrase "the way of prophecy" see Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, p. 144 n. 22.
- 54. R, Aharon ha-Kohen Perlov of Apta, 'Or ha-Ganuz le-Tzaddiqtm (Zolkiew, 1800) , fols . 46a-b.
- On this book see Hayyim Lieberman, 'Ohe! RaHel (privately printed, New York, 1980),
- pp. 8-n (Hebrew). A partial version of this passage is found in R, Aharon of Apta's Sefer
- KeterNehora' (Benei Beraq, 1980), unpaginated introduction, haqdamah sheniuah, para. 7.
- 55. E.g., R, Aharon ha-Kohen, 'Or ha-Ganuz le-Tzaddiqim, fols. 17b, 18a.
- •*67-
- Notes to Pages 64-71
- Abraham Abulafia's Hermeneutics
- 1. See Scholem, On the Kabbalah, pp. 5-32; W. Bacher, "L'exegese biblique dans leMar," RIJ
- 22 (1891), pp. 33-46, especially pp. 37-40. See also idem, "Das Merkwort PRDS in der
- Jiidischen Bibelexegese," Zeitschnftjiir die alttestamentliche Wissenschafi 13 (1893), pp. 294-305;
- Peretz Sandler, "On the Question of Pardes and the Fourfold Method," in Sefer Elioha
- Auerbach, ed. A. Biram (Qiryat Sefer, Jerusalem, 1955), pp. 222-235 (Hebrew). See also A.
- van der Heide, "Pardes: Methodological Reflections on the Theory of Four Senses, "Journal
- of Jewish Studies 34 (1983), pp. 147-159; Idel, Absorbing Perfections, pp. 429-435. Some of the
- following discussions draw upon this last book, where additional bibliography is found.
- 2. See Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, pp. 82-124.
- 3. See already the interpretation of Hagigah in Ba'alei ha-Tosajbt, fol. nb.
- 4. Abraham Abulafia, Hay yet ha-'OIam ha-Ba', Ms. Paris, BN 777, fol. 108a.
- 5. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, pp. 387-388.
- 6. Exegetical techniques were explored in great detail by Ashkenazi Hasidim; see Joseph
- Dan, "The Ashkenazi Hasidic 'Gates of Wisdom/" in Hommage a Georges Vajda, ed*
- G. Nahon and C. Touati (Peeters, Louvain, 1980), pp. 183-189; and Ivan G. Marcus,
- "Exegesis for the Few and for the Many: Judah he-Hasid's Biblical Commentary," w
- The Age of the Zohar, ed. J. Dan (Institute of Jewish Studies, Hebrew University,
- Jerusalem, 1989), pp. 1-24. In Kabbalah they were adopted in Abulafia's hermeneu-
- tics; see Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, pp. 95-119; and idem, "Abulafia's
- Secrets of the Guide: A Linguistic Turn," in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism,
- ed. Alfred Ivri, E. R. Wolfson, and A. Arkush (Harwood Academic Publishers,
- Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 289-329.
- 7. See Idel, "Maimonides and Kabbalah," pp. 73-74.
- 8. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Mafieah ha-Hokhmot, Ms. Moscow, Guensburg 133,
- fols. 7b~8a. See a very similar discussion, ibid., fol. 12b; and Idel, Absorbing Perfections,
- pp. 269-270.
- 9. Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fol. 25a. See Idel, Absorbing Perfections, p. 262.
- 10. See Daniel Matt, "The Old-New Words: The Aura of Secrecy in the Zohar," in Gershom
- Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: Fifty Years After, ed. P. Schaefer and J. Dan
- (J. C. B. Mohr, Tubingen, 1993), pp. 200-202.
- 11. Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fols. 2oa-b; and Idel, Absorbing Perfections,
- pp. 327-328. See also Abulafia, Sheua' Nerivot ha-Torah, pp. 3-4, discussed in Idel,
- language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, pp. 100-101.
- 12. Idel, Absorbing Perfections, pp. 80-110.
- 13. On the interpretations of the forefathers' names in Abulafia see Idel, The Mystical
- Experience, pp. 127-128.
- 14. Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fol. 23b; Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, p. in.
- 15 . Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fol. 19b; Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, p. in.
- 16. Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fol. 20a; Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, p. in.
- 17. Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fol. 20a; Idel, language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, p. iil
- 18. Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fol. 20a; Idel, language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, p. 111,
- ■1
- Notes to Pages 71-78
- 19. In the original ieji mishpat, which regularly means "according to judgment."
- 20. Abulafia, Sefer Majteah ha-Hokhmot, fols. 230-243.
- 21. Abraham Abulafia, Commentary on Sefer ha-'Edut, Ms. Rome, Angelica 3%, fol. 9a;
- Ms. Munich 285, fol. 13a; Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, p. 66; and idem, The Mystical
- Experience, pp. 127, 140. See also the passages translated and analyzed in Idel, Messianic
- Mystics, pp. 71-72, 82-83.
- 22. Abulafia, Commentary on Sejer ha-'Edut, Ms. Rome, Angelica 38, fols. i 4 b-i 5 a; Ms. Munich
- 285, fol. 39b; see also Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 126-127, 199; idem, Messianic
- Mystics, pp. 82-83. For more on the context of this passage see chap. 6 of this volume.
- 23. Abulafia, Commentary on Sefer ha-'Edut, Ms. Munich 285, fol. 39b. For more on the pun
- Mosheh/ha-Shem in the thirteenth century see Idel, Enchanted Chains, pp. 81-82.
- 24. Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 127-128.
- 25. Written in a defective manner, without Vav,
- 26. For other, similar expressions in Abulafia and his followers see Idel, Studies in Ecstatic
- Kabbalah, pp. 11-12; idem, "On Symbolic Self-Interpretations in Thirteenth-Century
- Jewish Writings," Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 16 (1988), pp. 90-96.
- 27. Harar, Sha'arei Tzedeq, p. 484. This passage should also be read in the context of
- another quotation from the same book, discussed in Idel, Lan^ua^e, Torah, and
- Hermeneutics, p. 17. On this passage see Georges Vajda, who translated it into French in
- a supplement to his article "Deux chapitres de l'histoire du conflit entre la Kabbale et
- la philosophic: La polemique anri-intellectualiste de Joseph b. Shalom Ashkenazi,"
- Archives d'histotre doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age 31 (1956), pp. 131-132; and Idel,
- Absorbing Perfections, pp. 332-33^.
- 28. On part of this passage and its possible affinity to a view of Dante's see Eco, The Search
- for the Perfect Lan^ua^e, pp. 48-50. The possibility of a contact between Dante's and
- Abulafia's views on language is strengthened by the fact that Abulafia's former
- teacher, R, Hillel of Verona, spent some years in Forli, where Dante was exiled. On
- Dante as a prophet— a self-consciousness reminiscent of Abulafia's— there are
- several studies, the most recent of which seems to be that of RafFaelo Morghen,
- Dante profeta (Jaca, Milan, 1983), where previous studies are discussed. See also
- Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Dtuine Comedy
- (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1979).
- 29. On the easy way in ecstatic Kabbalah see Idel, "Defining Kabbalah," pp. 121-122.
- Eschatological Themes and Divine Names in
- Abulafia^ Kabbalah
- 1. Namely redemption.
- 2. Or, according to another plausible interpretation, "In the name of."
- 3. See Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 76, where a revelation is described as stemming from
- 'Adonau, while later in the same book he predicts that the Tetragrammaton will awaken
- the heart of the shepherd to act as a redeemer.
- 4. Ibid., p. 79.
- •368-
- Notes to Pages 78-80
- 5. Ibid., p. 74.
- 6. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ha-Melammed, Ms. Paris, BN 680, fol. 308a. The binary vision of
- this text, as well as that of R, Nathan Harar in his Sha'arei Izedeq, is seminal in Abulafia's
- thought, especially in the important topic of the continuous struggle between the facul-
- ties of intellect and imagination. See Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 144-145; idem,
- Absorbing Perfections, pp. 438-460; and idem, "The Battle of the Urges: Psychomachia in
- the Prophetic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia," in Peace and War in Jewish Culture, ecL
- Avriei Bar-Levav (Center Zalman Shazar, Jerusalem, 2006), pp. 99-143 (Hebrew). Thus,
- the historical binary vision reflects the psychological one. Both in history and in psy-
- chology, Abulafia prefers a binary vision rather than a triadic one, as found for example
- in the rabbinic and in Joachim of Fiori's understandings of history as consisting of
- three major stages. Abulafia also expressed little interest in the division of the six thou-
- sand years into three periods of two millennia, widespread in both Jewish and Christian
- eschatoiogy. See Idel, Messianic Mystics, p. 19 and the pertinent footnotes. In my opin-
- ion, the first and main impetus for Abulafia's messianism was the belief, widespread
- among Jews in Europe, that the victories of the Mongols — imagined to be one or more
- of the ten lost Jewish tribes — meant also the beginning of the redemption of Israel, I
- have discussed the evidence in ibid., pp. 8, 81, 134, and the pertinent bibliography.
- 7. See a similar discussion in Joseph Gikatilla's text adduced by Gottlieb, Studies, p. 114
- n. 41.
- 8. Abraham Abulafia, Commentary on Sefer ha-'Edut, Ms. Munich 285, fbl. 37a.
- 9. See P. R. Biassiotto, History of the Development ojDevorion to the Holy Name (St. Bonaventure
- College and Seminary, New York, 1943), pp. 69-71; and Augustin Demski, Pabst
- Nicholas III — Eine Monographic (H. Schoningh, Munster, 1903), p. 17.
- 10. Biassiotto, History, pp. 71-76. In a later period we witness a spiritual phenomenon
- altogether similar to that of Abulafia, in the person and activity of St. Bernardine of
- Siena, who dedicated his life to preaching and sermonizing on the theme of the holy
- name of Jesus. For him, as for Abulafia, the divine name became the essence of
- religion. See L. McAodha, "The Holy Name in the Preaching of St. Bernardine
- of Siena," Franciscan Studies 29 (1969), pp. 42-58.
- 11. See Scholem, Sabbatai Seui, pp. 210-211, 282-284.
- 12. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, Ms. Oxford, Bodleiana 1580, fol. 41a.
- 13. For more on this issue see Idel, language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, pp. 24-27.
- 14. On the nexus between divine names in the Bible and divine attributes in ancient Judaism
- see A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press,
- Oxford, 1927), p. 44; N. A. Dahl and A. F.Segal, "Philo and the Rabbis on the Names of
- God," Journal/or the Study of Judaism 9 (1978), pp. 1-28; Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives,
- pp. 128-136. On the importance of theophorism in Jewish thought see Idel, Ben.
- 15. Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 76.
- 16. Ibid.
- 17 . This view may have some affinity to the midrashic vision of the change of the names of
- the angels by God at the time of the destruction of the Temple, in order to prevent
- 3
- Notes to Pages 80-83
- invocations by Jewish masters, or magicians, who would attempt to oppose the
- destruction of the Temple.
- 18. The passage refers to the powers of the names. On the status of the divine names and
- their powers in Abulafia see Moshe Idel, "Between Magic of Names and Kabbalah of
- Names: The Critique of Abraham Abulafia," Mahanayyim 14 (2003), pp. 79-95 (Hebrew);
- and idem, Enchanted Chains, pp. 76-79 and the bibliography adduced there.
- 19. This view is similar to that expressed by Abulafia in a passage from Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 69.
- 20. See the earlier quotation from Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 79, where the opposition
- between this name and the Tetragrammaton is also obvious.
- 21. Harar, Sha'arei Tzedeq, p. 472. Significant parallels to some aspects of this passage can
- be found in ibid., pp. 471 and 475. See more about the background of this passage in
- Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, pp. 17-18.
- 22. On this "divine name" see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 18, 22, 31; Wolfson, Abraham
- Abulajia, p. 113 n. 54.
- 23. On prophecy and the appearance of the divine name in early- thirteenth-century
- sources see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 100-10 1; and Wolfson, Through a Speculum,
- pp. 181-187. Meanwhile I have good reasons to believe that Sefer ha-Nauon, whose
- author I propose is an early-thirteenth-century Ashkenazi figure, R, Nehemiah
- ben Shlomo the prophet, was known to Abulafia. See Idel, "Some Forlorn Writings."
- See also note 6 above, note 56 below, and chap. 7.
- 24. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Hauuei ha-'OIam ha-Ba\ Ms. Paris, BN jyj, fol. 109. This
- passage was printed by Jellinek as an addendum to Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 84. For an
- analysis of the context of this passage see Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 15-16;
- and idem, "Enoch Is Metatron," Immanuel 24.125 (1990), p. 236; and compare to the
- discussion of a passage from Nathan of Gaza in idem, Messianic Mystics, pp. 199-200.
- 25. Cf. 2 Samuel 5:17.
- 26. Cf. BT, Sanhedrin, fol. 38a.
- 27. Abulafia, Commentary on Sefer ha-'Edut, Ms. Rome, Angelica 38, fols. 140-153;
- Ms. Munich 285, fols. 390-403. See also Idel, The Mistical Experience, pp. 126-127, J 99;
- and above, chap. 5, note 21.
- 28. Compare also Scholem, Major Trends , pp. 140, 382; and Idel, The Mystical Experience,
- pp. 126-127, where some other details of this passage are analyzed.
- 29. On this issue see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 124-125, 134-137.
- 30. This phrase comes from Sefer Yetzirah VI.4, where it designates God as creator in the
- context of His revelation to Abraham. There can be no doubt that Abulafia uses the
- first person here because he conceives of himself as a person of as great importance as
- the forefather.
- 31. Abulafia, Ve-ZotLi-Yhudah, pp. 18-19, corrected according to Ms. New York, JTS 1887.
- 32. Idel, "Defining Kabbalah," pp. 97-122.
- 33. Abulafia, Ve-Zot li-Yhudah, p. 16.
- 34. Abulafia, Sefer 'Otzar 'Eden Ganuz, fol. 149b.
- 35. Ibid., fol. 104b.
- Notes to Pages 83-87
- 36. The single manuscript of this untitled treatise, found in Ms. Florence, Laurenziana-
- Medicea Plut. II, 48, is not so clear here.
- 37. ha-Shem ha-Meyuhad, in gematria 418.
- 38. Kelei Mashiyah = 418.
- 39. Abulafia, untitled fragment, Ms. Florence, Laurenziana-Medicea Plut. n, 48, fol. 90a.
- 40. Abulafia, Ve-Zot Li-Yhudah, p. 18: Yitpa'er. Abulafia uses this verb in the context of his
- own claim to have received a revelation of the date of the end.
- 41. Abraham Abulafia, Majteah ha-Shemot, Ms. New York, JTS 843, fol. 45b.
- 42. Abulafia, Sefer ha-Melammed, Ms. Paris, BN 68o, fol. 297b.
- 43. On the natural rise of a Jewish state see Shlomo Pines, Studies in the History ojjeurish
- Philosophy (Bialik Institute, Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 277-305 (Hebrew).
- 44. Ms. Florence, Laurenziana-Medicea Plut. II, 48, fol. 21b.
- 45. Such a calculation occurs also elsewhere in Abulafia as pointing to the mystical experi-
- ence of the union of man and God by means of comprehension; see the text analyzed
- in Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, pp. 7-8.
- 46. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Hayyei ha-Nefesh, Ms. Munich 408, fol. 46a.
- 47. Abulafia, Commentary on Sefer ha-Melitz, Ms. Rome, Angelica 38, fol. 5a; Ms. Munich
- 285, fols. roa-b.
- 48. See ibid., Ms. Home, Angelica 38, fol. 7b: "For the spirit comprises Hebrew circum-
- cised powers that instruct truth."
- See Idel, Hasidism, p. 155.
- Abulafia, Commentary on Sefer ha-Melitz, Ms. Rome, Angelica 38, fol. 5a.
- Abraham Abulafia, Matzref la-Kesef, Ms. Sassoon 56, fol. 30b. An issue that needs addi-
- tional investigation is the possible affinity between Abulafia's interpretation of the
- term Yehudy as confession, and an observation by the early-thirteenth-century
- Ashkenazi author R. Nehemiah ben Shlomo the prophet. See also Idel, The Mystical
- Experience, pp. 18, 22, 31; Wolfson, Abraham Abulajia, p. 113 n. 54.
- On the difference between the aims of Abulafia and Nahmanides, see Abraham
- Berger, "The Messianic Self-Consciouness of Abraham Abulafia: A Tentative
- Evaluation," in Essays on Jewish Life and Thought Presented in Honor of Salo Witrmayer Baron,
- ed. Joseph Blau et al. (Columbia University Press, New York, 1959), p. 60.
- See Moshe Idel, Chapters in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Akademon, Jerusalem, 1990), pp. 65, 66,
- 69 (Hebrew).
- 54. Abulafia, Sefer ha-'Ot, p. 80.
- 55. On the meaning of the term Yisrael in Abulafia's writing, see Idel, "Abraham Abulafia,"
- p. 90.
- See, e.g., Abulafia, Sheirn' Netiuot ha-Torah, p. n. See also the important discussion in
- Abulafia's commentary on the Guide o/the Perplexed named Hayyei ha-Nefesh, Ms. Munich
- 408, fols. 65a-b, translated and analyzed in Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 21, where
- the combination of four divine names is described as part of Abulafia's mystical
- technique.
- 49.
- 50.
- 5*-
- S^
- 53
- 56
- ■0:i
- .if
- ^
- m
- ' 723?
- m
- I \
- Notes to Pages 87-90
- 57. Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Sitrei Torah, Ms. Paris, BN 774, fol. 162a.
- 58. Or "according to."
- 59. Untitled fragment, Ms. Florence, Laurenziana-Medicea Plut. II, 48, fol. 88b,
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