Series Introduction: The History of Kabbala in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

🧿 We begin a series today exploring the history of Kabbala from its medieval developments through its institution in the early modern world, up to the period of the Ari and Lurianic Kabbala.

A detailed Kabbalistic tree from 1691, depicting the Sefirot in the center. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich Cod. hebr. 450.

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In this issue:

• A Crisis of Meaning, Addressed in Different Ways

• The History of Nonsense?

• Precursors I: The Heikhalot Literature, Maaseh Merkava, and Maaseh Bereshit

• Precursors II: Sefer Yetzira

• Precursors III: Raza Rabba and Sefer ha-Bahir

• Reads and Resources

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Last week, we wrapped up the early stage of Ashkenaz with the pietistic Chasidei Ashkenaz movement. The deep connections of this movement to varied esoteric undercurrents circulating in medieval Europe renewed my interest in Kabbala and its importance to Jewish life in the medieval to early modern periods, and prompted the realization that I’ve not yet tackled this important area of intellectual history. And so, a new series was born. If you’re more inclined to be a rationalist, hi, me too, but don’t stop reading just yet. As often as they diverged meaningfully from one another, the two movements also found points of contact and even thorough intertwining in the hands of some thinkers. In its theosophical speculation, Kabbala is nourished by the methodology of rationalist philosophy. Kabbala is also, and increasingly in the modern era, central to Jewish thought; one can scarcely make sense of Jewish history without it. With my historical focus here, I hope mystics and philosophers alike will find points of entry and interest.

A Crisis of Meaning, Addressed in Different Ways

During the period of the Rishonim, Jews faced what I’ve termed a crisis of meaning. (I’d argue that post-Enlightenment Jews faced another, distinct crisis of meaning, which we are still solving, in part through Chasidut, a modern Kabbalistic movement.) The Talmud was a closed text to medieval Jews: that era of aggadic and halachic interpretive authority had ended. At the same time, Jews found themselves living in wholly different circumstances, as a small religious minority among disparate Christian and Islamic movements. The exile had become drastically prolonged—it was periodically predicted to end, to no avail—with Jewish life remaining, even in the most stable and prosperous segments of the medieval period, fundamentally precarious. Added to this were external currents of thought flowing through the Islamic world in particular, especially Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism, two great ancient ways of thinking about the world that were gradually translated from Greek, often via Syriac (a form of Aramaic), into Arabic, where it was consumed by educated Arabic-speaking Jews. Though influential and in some aspects consonant with rabbinic theology, these pagan Greek thought traditions were often at odds, logically, exegetically, and spiritually, with traditional Jewish thought.

These changed conditions elicited a great need for finding applicable and expanded meanings in classical Jewish texts, from Tanach to Talmud, as well as prompting the creation of new genres that would address big Jewish questions directly. In the absence of direct, midrashic exposition of scripture, how were Jews to to find continued meaning in the manifold requirements of Jewish ritual practice? Without adding to the dialectical argument of the Gemara (the Talmud’s later, Amoraic layer), how were they to apply new halachic realities to the cases of the rabbis? After Aristotle’s natural philosophy—what we today call science—proved an extraordinarily powerful means of understanding the world, how to deal with its conception of G-d as the Unmoved Mover, wholly separate from His world?

The foundations of a response to these challenges was instituted already in the Geonic period, when Jewish religious leaders developed the characteristic genre of the halachic responsum, a formulated reply to a direct query or case, as well as the earliest code of law, the Halachot Gedolot. In the late Geonic period, R. Saadia Gaon in particular pioneered a number of genres, including Hebrew grammars for better understanding the language of the Torah, a translation and proto-line commentary on the Torah, a renewed push to create and interpret liturgical embellishments in the form of piyut (liturgical poetry), and, finally, the writing of theological treatises, including both rationalist approaches and, in his commentary to Sefer Yetzira (The Book of Creation), also mystical ones.

By the period of the Rishonim, who followed the Geonim, Jews were spread throughout the known world, from Castille to Samarkand, from London to Yemen. They built upon and developed the genres of the Geonim, greatly expanding the genre of commentary in particular, from textual glosses to dialectical commentaries. Halachically, both line commentaries and codes—occasionally merging, as in the Rif’s influential Halachot—came to address new circumstances and distill meaning from the unruly rabbinic bookshelf. Hashkafically (in terms of worldview), two major types of response emerged in the Middle Ages among Jews: a rationalist strain, emphasizing the harmony of human reason with tradition, and a mystical strain, emphasizing extra-rational forms of knowing and esoteric (secret) traditions passed down alongside exoteric (mainstream) ones. The former gave rise to medieval Jewish philosophy in multiple forms, including allegorical scriptural interpretation, systematic theologies, and analytical treatises. Mystical experience and theosophical speculation, which came to be called in the medieval period Kabbala, “tradition” or “reception,” took on even more varied forms, from ecstatic encounters to complex descriptions of Divine processes, from Torah commentaries to the records of the activities of groups of initiates.

The History of Nonsense?

Reputedly, though its provenance is problematic, the great, beleaguered Talmudic scholar Dr. Saul Lieberman once introduced the doyen of academic studies of Kabbala, Dr. Gershom Scholem, by quipping, “Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is very important science.” This probably apocryphal story is oft-repeated not only for its humor and because of the two outsize personalities it involves, but because it captures an essential moment in the understanding of Kabbala. Despite its enormous, if below-the-surface, creative powers in the Middle Ages and its unstoppable burst of popular appeal in early modernity, by the nineteenth century, Kabbala had become the bugaboo of modernizing, secularizing Jewry. Merged with folkloric superstition, including a fertile demonology thought to be affected through magical powers, Kabbala was considered among some a lamentable, embarrassing encrustation of Judaism with non-rational beliefs—in short, nonsense.

Scholem’s scholarship restored the study of Kabbala almost single-handedly to a “very important science,” imbuing it with legitimate scholarly interest and rehabilitating its image among the subset of Jewish intelligentsia who once found it embarrassing. His work has, accordingly, become the site of fervid scholarly revision and the subject of scholarship in its own right. I, being a fan of premodernity, find Scholem studies less interesting than his basic enterprise of definitively answering Lieberman’s purported charge of the nonsensical nature of Kabbala. Kabbala, as we’ll see in this series, has its share of illustrious rabbinic critics, but its centrality and ability to animate even opposing movements from within the tradition make it indispensable to understanding Jewish thought in its historical development.

Precursors I: The Heikhalot Literature, Maaseh Merkava, and Maaseh Bereshit

Mystical experience is attested from the Tannaitic period; tradition locates the origin of Kabbalistic knowledge in Sinai, along with the Written and Oral Torahs. Its esoteric nature makes its identification in rabbinic texts intentionally sparse. One passage included in Tractate Chagiga, among a longer section devoted to esoteric matters, alludes to the dangers of mystical experience through the metaphor of an orchard (pardes), associating mysticism with the famed Tanna Rabbi Akiva and creating a language for esoteric Jewish experience:

תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: אַרְבָּעָה נִכְנְסוּ בַּפַּרְדֵּס, וְאֵלּוּ הֵן: בֶּן עַזַּאי, וּבֶן זוֹמָא, אַחֵר, וְרַבִּי עֲקִיבָא. אֲמַר לָהֶם רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא: כְּשֶׁאַתֶּם מַגִּיעִין אֵצֶל אַבְנֵי שַׁיִשׁ טָהוֹר, אַל תֹּאמְרוּ ״מַיִם מַיִם״, מִשּׁוּם שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״דּוֹבֵר שְׁקָרִים לֹא יִכּוֹן לְנֶגֶד עֵינָי״. בֶּן עַזַּאי הֵצִיץ וָמֵת, עָלָיו הַכָּתוּב אוֹמֵר: ״יָקָר בְּעֵינֵי ה׳ הַמָּוְתָה לַחֲסִידָיו״. בֶּן זוֹמָא הֵצִיץ וְנִפְגַּע, וְעָלָיו הַכָּתוּב אוֹמֵר: ״דְּבַשׁ מָצָאתָ אֱכוֹל דַּיֶּיךָּ פֶּן תִּשְׂבָּעֶנּוּ וַהֲקֵאתוֹ״. אַחֵר קִיצֵּץ בִּנְטִיעוֹת. רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא יָצָא בְּשָׁלוֹם.

The Sages taught: Four entered the orchard [pardes], i.e., dealt with the loftiest secrets of Torah, and they are as follows: Ben Azzai; and ben Zoma; Aḥer, the other, a name for Elisha ben Avuya; and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva, the senior among them, said to them: When, upon your arrival in the upper worlds, you reach pure marble stones, do not say: Water, water, although they appear to be water, because it is stated: “He who speaks falsehood shall not be established before My eyes” (Tehillim 101:7). The Gemara proceeds to relate what happened to each of them: Ben Azzai glimpsed at the Divine Presence and died. And with regard to him the verse states: “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His pious ones” (Tehillim 116:15). Ben Zoma glimpsed at the Divine Presence and was harmed, i.e., he lost his mind. And with regard to him the verse states: “Have you found honey? Eat as much as is sufficient for you, lest you become full from it and vomit it” (Mishlei 25:16). Aḥer [the Other] chopped down the shoots of saplings. In other words, he became a heretic. Rabbi Akiva came out safely.

Chagiga 14b

The figuration of the mystical plane as pardes, the dangers of close contact with the Divine for even the greatest of scholars, and the language of honey, otherness, and “chopping down the shoots” all become the vocabulary used by Kabbalists and rationalists alike to discuss deep, powerful knowledge that must be kept from those unready to be initiated. (It should be noted, this is just one of a not insubstantial number of mentions of mystical matters in rabbinic literature, as well as materials found at Qumran and in the Cairo geniza; there are a number of other rabbinic figures, notably R. Yochanan ben Zakkai and R. Ishmael, who are associated with mystical speculation.)

Some Tannaitic material, including a tradition of magical incantations and angelology/demonology, made its way into somewhat later rabbinic compositions known to contemporary scholars as the Heikhalot (“[Divine] palaces”) literature. This literature, of which Heikhalot Rabbati is the most circulated of many works, includes both accounts of visions of the Divine palaces as well as the vision described in Yechezkel, chapter one, called Maaseh Merkava (“the account of the [Divine] chariot”) in the Mishnah. It constitutes an important group of works which nourished medieval Kabbala. Another locus of mystical activity was Maaseh Bereshit (“the account of creation”), the rabbinic name for the mysteries of the creation sequence at the beginning of the book of Bereshit (Genesis).

Precursors II: Sefer Yetzira

The enigmatic Sefer Yetzira (The Book of Creation, or Formation) is traditionally attributed to the forefather Avraham, and is sometimes connected with Rabbi Akiva. Modern scholarship is inconclusive about its date of composition, generally placing it between the third and sixth centuries. A brief work of six chapters, sometimes lengthened by a sort of appendix, Sefer Yetzira introduces the concept of the ten Sefirot that describe the emanation of Divine energy down to the world of matter. There is much debate about the meaning of the term “Sefirot,” coming from the Hebrew root denoting “number,” “counting,” “scribing,” “book,” “telling,” and also, as has been suggested in different times and places, sapir (sapphire) and even sphere.

The book opens with “the thirty-two wonderous paths of wisdom” (the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet plus the ten Sefirot) and hints at the power of the Hebrew letters and Divine Name, before stating:

וברא את עולמו בשלשה ספרים בספר וספר וספור: עשר ספירות בלי מה ועשרים ושתים אותיות יסוד:

He created His world with three sefarim: with sefar (numeral), sefer (book), and sipur (story).¹ He created Sefirot without substance (bli mah) and twenty-two foundational letters.

Sefer Yetzira, 1

Following R. Saadia’s important commentary on Sefer Yetzira were many other attempts to explain its sparse but rich language, including by Raavad, Ramban, and Ibn Ezra’s lost commentary on the first chapter. An entire grouping of them belongs to the school of Chasidei Ashkenaz, who cherished the work.

Precursors III: Raza Rabba and Sefer ha-Bahir

Sefer Raza Rabba (The Book of the Great Secret) has not come down to us, but is attested in Geonic sources as well as a number of sources from ninth- through eleventh-century Babylonia and the Land of Israel that turned up in the Cairo geniza. It is also mentioned in Karaite polemics. It is a work of Merkava mysticism that includes magical elements, angelology, and demonology. Importantly, parts of Raza Rabba that we do know of seem to be quoted in the mysterious work Sefer ha-Bahir, also known as Midrash R. Nechunia ben ha-Kanah, the Tanna to whom it is attributed. Sefer ha-Bahir surfaced in Europe as early as the twelfth century and as late as the latter part of the thirteenth. Like Sefer Yetzira, it has defied attempts to ascertain its dating and nature of composition. Ha-Bahir presents the Sefirot through a sexual conceptualization, as male and female, with relations between them. It is considered the earliest source of the particularly medieval development of what we have come to call Kabbala.

Reads and Resources

• There is a bilingual edition of Sefer Yetzira by R. Aryeh Kaplan, with his copious and interesting commentary, as well as of Sefer ha-Bahir. (Unfortunately, most of the Heikhalot literature is published in hard-to-get technical editions.)

• Online, find Sefer Yetzira and Sefer ha-Bahir, both on Sefaria,

• For more on Kabbalistic tree diagrams like the one featured above, there’s a great online resource, Ilanot, hosted by the University of Haifa. See here for digitizations that allow you to zoom in on each section of these complex diagrams. J. H. Chajes, who worked on the Ilanot project, wrote an article on Kabbalistic trees in Tablet. (He also wrote an award-winning book on the subject; see a review here.)

1. Based upon R. Saadia’s reading of the unvocalized terms.