Forces Shaping Late Medieval Kabbala
🧿 The period following the emergence of the Zohar in Europe was profoundly destabilizing to Jewish life in Sefarad and Ashkenaz alike, shaping how Kabbala would take form in the coming centuries.
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For European Jewry generally, both in Sefarad and Ashkenaz, the centuries between the emergence of the Zohar in Castile in the 1280s-90s and the outburst of Kabbalistic creativity in sixteenth-century Tzfat (Safed), a town in the Galil (Galilee in northern Israel) then under Ottoman rule, were tumultuous. As we’ve seen, the earlier and central Middle Ages also presented Jews with challenging circumstances, through which they managed to flourish despite precarity, persecution, and minority status. What happened in the late Middle Ages, however, occurred in tandem with the consolidation of royal power as well as Christian triumphalism. This meant that deterioration in Jewish status and safety was increasingly regional as opposed to local, affecting thousands of Jews at a time. In this regard, it was its own phenomenon and represents a new axis of Jewish history, one in which Kabbala was intimately intwined. Kabbala served as a powerful form of Jewish expression during the difficult centuries, utilized by many as a tool for finding meaning in Jewish ritual, history, and texts and becoming increasingly popularized.
Conversionary Pressures and Expulsions
The long thirteenth century included a key shift in Christian perceptions of Jews and of the goals of Christian society. (When historians call a century “long,” generally we mean that there are cohesive features of the period that bleed into the previous or following centuries. Of course, a century mark—of whatever kind—is a rather arbitrary, if useful, way of dividing up historical time.) Previously, Jews were tolerated in Christian society as an intentionally debased minority so as to bear eventual witness to the truth of Christianity—a theological position deriving from the work of the late antique Christian thinker Augustine, and known as the “Doctrine of Witness.” However, this gave away to a vision of a uniformly Christian society, in which all of Latin Europe was united under the authority of the papacy. (I wrote briefly about this subject with regards to the Trial of the Talmud in Paris in 1240, and will return to it, I hope, in an upcoming series dedicated to the Expulsions, the Inquisition, and their aftermath.)
Efforts to achieve an all-Christian society were spearheaded by the mendicant friars, orders of monks that began as protest movements but were, wisely, subsumed by the western Church. (The term catholic, which we now use to describe the Latin, western Church, is, in its lower-case form, simply an adjective meaning “universal”—hence Solomon Schechter’s use of the term “catholic Israel.”) Instead of challenging the Church’s authority, the mendicant orders, including the Franciscans and the Dominicans, expended their considerable spiritual energy through the agency of the papacy. (The papacy was repeatedly riven from within by disputes about the election of popes, leading to rival popes (“antipopes”) ruling from elsewhere than Rome; but it dodged the potential trouble of a reform movement from the mendicants, so called because they took a vow of poverty, protesting the ostentatious wealth of the Church.) Friars also staffed the newly-formed office of the inquisition, which was initially deployed in the south of France to deal with Christian heretics, meaning Christians who were practicing in a way contrary to the official doctrines and norms of the Roman papacy.
The growing interest of the mendicants in converting European Jews to Christianity was spurred by Christian discovery of the Talmud and rabbinic literature, especially aggada (the narrative parts of rabbinic literature, as opposed to the legal sections). This interest was nourished by voluntary Jewish converts to Christianity, some of whom became friars and set to work translating the Hebrew texts, in which they were conversant, into Latin. These were subsequently used, more and more systematically, in public disputations, as well as in conversionary sermons, which various mendicant orders pressed local rulers to require Jews to attend.
Also in the thirteenth century, Christian rulers began experimenting more widely with edicts of expulsion, which prohibited Jewish settlement in their realms (or rescinded existing charters of settlement). The first kingdom-wide expulsion of Jews was from England in 1290, following a number of local orders of expulsion within England. The medieval English Jewish community was relatively small, founded as an offshoot of the Jewish community of Normandy, a part of Tzarfat (the French part of Franco-Germany, or Ashkenaz writ large). Nevertheless, the very fact of the expulsion of all Jews from English lands set a powerful and dangerous precedent, attracting the notice of other European monarchs. In the fourteenth century, for markedly different sets of reasons, more kingdoms issued edicts of expulsion for Jews, sometimes permitting them to resettle and expelling them again. The collective experience of the expulsions was a factor in leading Jews to search for explanation and meaning, which Kabbala increasingly provided.
The Iberian Trifecta
Then, in the spring of 1391, something unprecedented happened in northern Spain to bring together the forces of conversionary pressure, expulsion, and inquisition. A series of fervent Christian preaching led to widescale anti-Jewish riots that spread throughout the peninsula and raged on through the next year. When it was over, nearly half of Iberia’s Jews—the largest Jewish population in Europe—were converted, largely forcibly or through social coercion, to Christianity. The friars had something resembling their stated goal: major progress towards an all-Christian society. However, the converted Jews, known derisively as Conversos or Marranos, or more neutrally as Cristianos nuevos (“New Christians”), faced extreme problems from the get-go in integrating into Iberian Christian society. For one, they were a massive population with scant knowledge of Christian traditions. This meant that many combined Jewish practices with Christian ones, a type of “Judaizing” that made the Church, who regarded them as Christians, extremely uncomfortable. Others purposefully retained their Jewish traditions in private.
At the same time, Iberian Christians did not tend to regard their new brethren as sincere converts or worthy of joining their society, leading to the very beginnings of racialized anti-Judaism. Quickly, limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) laws were instituted which barred New Christians from public offices and other positions of authority. Ultimately, the problem posed to Iberian societies by the Conversos was adjudicated by the office of the Spanish Inquisition, a newly-minted (proto-)state-Church alliance, as well as by the general orders of expulsion against remaining Jews rolled out beginning in 1492 and continuing until 1498 in the various Iberian kingdoms, including Portugal.
From the beginning of modern scholarship, scholars have debated the effects of the Iberian expulsions upon the rise of Kabbala as a popular force and a primary means of Jewish spiritual expression. Gershom Scholem (whose enduring influence on the field of academic Kabbalistic study I touched upon here) favored the explanation, offered already by some thinkers earlier in modernity, that the collective trauma of the Iberian expulsions and the events surrounding them was the impetus for the spread of Kabbala and it centrality in early modern and then modern Jewish life. Moshe Idel, the prolific next-generation Kabbalistic scholar, suggested that the effect was indirect: that the expulsions set in motion a set of geographical dislocations that created the conditions for a fructification of Kabbalistic thought.
We see Jews fleeing the Iberian kingdoms by moving south and east: into Italy, the Balkans and Turkey, northern Africa and Egypt, and the Land of Israel, a territory largely united under Ottoman rule. This brought together Jews from different communities in single cities, where for the first time they retained their identities from their places of origin. The interaction between these diverse, but distinct, groups led to crosspollination and creativity, including in the Kabbalistic realm.
Two Colorful Messianic Figures: David Reuveni and Shlomo Molcho
Another effect of the expulsions and their attendant dislocations was an increased sense of messianic expectation—it seemed that the world order was upended and a new one beginning. The messianic strains already prevalent among Kabbalists helped to conflate the messianic longing with esoteric approaches to Judaism. Into this mix entered two colorful figures whose lives intersected. The first was the mysterious figure of David Reuveni, so called because he claimed that his brother, the king Yosef, ruled over the remnants of the lost Biblical tribes of Reuven, Gad, and the half-tribe of Menashe in a place called the desert of Chavor (מדבר חבור). He also, however, claimed to be descended from King David, as befitting a would-be messiah. Details of Reuveni’s story, including many that are patently fantastical, are captured in his unique autobiography, a genre that would become adopted by Kabbalists in the coming centuries.
In the fall of 1523, David Reuveni appeared on the scene in Venice, Italy. Contemporary and later reports describe him as aged about forty (placing his birth c. 1480-85) and being dark-skinned, although the riddle of his possible origins has not been satisfactorily decided. Ethiopia, Yemen, Arabia, north Africa, and India have all been suggested, as well as the possibility that he was Sefardi. This is contravened by reports that he spoke mostly Arabic and some Hebrew and required a translator when he reached Portugal. It is known that he spent time in the Land of Israel, from which he became knowledgeable about its geography, and spent some time in the tutelage of the Kabbalist R. Avraham ben Eliezer ha-Levi in Jerusalem. In any case, the Jews of Venice gave him a mostly cold reception, doubting his claimed genealogy and messianic pretensions.
Several Venice notables, however, gave traction to his claims, and the following year, in 1524, Reuveni rode into Rome on, yes, a white horse. (You can see a depiction of Reuveni on his white horse here, and an image of him, the origins of which I was unable to track down, here.) In Rome, Reuveni managed to secure a reception with the humanist cardinal Egidio da Viterbo (c. 1465–1532), who was known to keep the company of learned Jews. The cardinal was duly impressed and apparently arranged for the Roman Jewish community to attend to Reuveni’s needs. Here again some notables took positive notice of him, and one admirer, Benvenida Abravanel (a member of the Abravanel family by marriage), gifted him with a silk banner embroidered with the Ten Commandments. This and other colorful banners would become part of Reuveni’s regalia. (They would also become an important part of the drama of his follower, one Shlomo Molcho, who we’ll soon meet; you can see an actual Molcho banner in the same link as the Reuveni picture; it also appears in Molcho’s signature.)
Soon thereafter, Reuveni met with the pope himself, Clement VII (1478-1534), offering the pope a treaty with his kingdom against the Muslims. In his autobiography, he claims to have requested letters from the pope demanding material support for his crusading campaign from the Holy Roman emperor Charles V and from King Francis I of France—as well as from the mythical Prester John in Ethiopia (last seen here). Reuveni’s aim, it seems, was actually to secure passage to Portugal, where he indeed was received as ambassador by King João (John) III. He also garnered an enthusiastic reception from the Portuguese Marranos, who, due to historical circumstances, tended to be, even more than other Iberian Converso populations, forcibly converted and to function as crypto-Jews (Jews who lived externally as Christians but retained their Jewish practice). In court, he talked of conquering Jerusalem and taking the Land of Israel from the hands of Muslims.
Reuveni’s star, however, was dimming. The messianic fervor his presence aroused among Marranos was concerning to the court, who thought him trying to subvert these New Christians back to Judaism. And then, another would-be messiah appeared on the scene: the homegrown Diogo Pires (c. 1500-1532), a Marrano from Lisbon. Seeking an audience with Reuveni, Diogo asked to be circumcised, which Reuveni attempted to dissuade. Diogo proceeded to circumcise himself and to assume the overtly messianic Hebrew name Shlomo Molcho (“Solomon the King”). Both Molcho and Reuveni were impelled to flee Portugal—the latter due at least in part to the former—after which Molcho spent some time in Salonika, among other places, not all of them known with certainty.
In Salonika Molcho studied with the acclaimed Kabbalist R. Yosef Taitatzak (known for his Porat Yosef, philosophical commentary on Kohelet that incorporates the ideas of Thomas Aquinas) and rubbed shoulders with the inestimably influential R. Yosef Karo. Clement VII also granted an audience to Molcho, impressed by his seemingly accurate prophetic predictions, but soon came to suspect him, in no small part because he began preaching—attracting Christians as well as Jews—about the coming messianic era. Molcho seems to have increasingly regarded himself as the messiah. For his part, Reuveni seems to have suffered various imprisonments and a shipwreck on his way out of Portugal but also wound up back in Italy trying to make grandiose overtures to various rulers.
The paths of these two curious messianic figures continued to meet in the 1530s, though Reuveni seems to have rebuffed Molcho at least once. The two went on a joint mission to Emperor Charles V, then in Regensburg. In 1532, however, the two were arrested, Molcho being burned at the stake in Mantua, having already escaped this fate once, for refusing to recant his Judaism (as a former Marrano) and return to Christianity. Reuveni was charged with aiding Conversos to return to Judaism and taken back to Iberia, probably dying there in prison in 1538.
This teeming brew of messianism, conversionary fervor, Kabbala, boundary-crossing, and seismic geopolitical events set up the centers and movements that so profoundly shaped the course of Kabbalistic history in the sixteenth century.
Reads and Resources
David Reuveni’s autobiography has been published in a critical edition by A.Z. Aescoly (the expanded second edition includes an introduction by Moshe Idel) and recently in English by Alan Verskin as The Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The Sixteenth-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East, and Europe (Stanford University Press, 2023).
You can read about Max Brod’s 1925 novel based on the life of David Reuveni in Mosaic Magazine, here.
Here is a post on the National Library of Israel blog about Shlomo Molcho.
Fascinating.