The Review of 14 (2011) 158–187 brill.nl/rrj

The of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-Cordoverian Encounter

Sharron Shatil Open University, -Hanna, Israel [email protected]

Keywords kabbalah, Israel Sarug, Moses Cordovero

Sarugian kabbalah is a field of kabbalistic discourse that is based upon the teachings of as presented by R. Israel Sarug during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Very little is known about Sarug before his arrival in Italy in the 1590s, when he began to propagate Lurianic texts. These were mainly Kanfei Yona,1 which was the earliest known redaction of the Lurianic teachings in writing,2 and texts of his own composition. Sarug traveled in Italy, Greece, and central Europe and had several famous students, notably R. Menahem Azaria of Fano, R, Nathan Otolengo, and Abraham Cohen Herrera.3 There is some scholarly debate on whether Sarug was actually a student of Luria and whether this happened in Egypt or in , prior to the meeting between Luria and Vital.4 Yet there is no argument that the tracts that Sarug brought with him to Italy were the first available sources of in Europe and dominated its kabbalistic output through the

1 This work is extant in several manuscripts, and there are at least three known versions of it, probably written by different students of Luria. It is not certain whether Sarug was the first to bring these texts to Italy or whether they arrived there before him; see J. Avivi, Kabbalah Luriana ( Jerusalem, 2008), pp. 194–203. This should not to be confused with Menahem Azaria of Fano’s later edition of the work; see G. Scholem, Kabbalah (New York, 1978), p. 424. 2 See M. Benayahu, “R. Moses Yona, A Student of the Ari and the First to Put His Teachings in Writing” (Heb.), in M. Benayahu, ed., Lurianic Kabbalah ( Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 7–74. 3 Kabbalah Luriana, pp. 236–242. 4 The two sides of the debate are presented in G. Scholem, “Israel Sarug, Student of the Ari,” in Zion (1940), pp. 214–243, and Ronit Meroz, “Israel Sarug, Student of the Ari: A Fresh Examination of the Issue,” in Da’at (1992), pp. 41–50.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157007011X587567 S. Shatil / The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011) 158–187 159 seventeenth century. Some of these tracts were printed at the end of Solomon Joseph Delmedigo’s Ta’alumot Chochma (Basel, 1629). Others were compiled and edited in Delmedigo’s Shever Yoseph, published in the same volume, or incorporated into the main Sarugian texts: Limudei Atzilut, the interpretation of Sifra De-Tzniuta (both in the same volume, Munkacz, 1897) and Drush Ha-Malbush ( Jerusalem, 2001). In fact, Sarugian kabbalah is a distinct phenomenon within the kabbalah of the last four hundred years and is highly influential on the history of kabbalah and Jewish theology during this period, particularly in Europe. The line of Sarugian kabbalists continues up to the present day, with kabbalists who use Sarug’s writings or those of his immediate students as primary sources. More- over, the influence of Sarugian kabbalah can be easily discerned in many of the prominent spiritual movements within rabbinic Judaism in the modern era, including the Sabbatean movement, the school of the GRA, and the Hassidic movement, in particular within ’s unique strand of kabbalistic specu- lation. Some distinctive Sarugian elements even made it into the systems of Sefardic kabbalists, ever since the incorporation of a version of Sarug’s Drush Ha-Malbush into R. Shalom Buzaglo’s Mikdash Melech on the portion of Bereshit (Amsterdam, 1755). Thus, some of the concepts and ideas typical of Sarugian kabbalah are considered by most kabbalists since the nineteenth cen- tury to be an integral part of their kabbalistic universe. Yet the ideas of Sarugian kabbalah have received little scholarly attention. With the exception of Abraham Cohen Herrera, none of the Sarugian kabbal- ists have been systematically studied.5 There are only some brief suggestions of the origin of some basic Sarugian concepts, such as the sha’ashua and the mal- bush, which we will discuss further below. This lack is probably due to Scholem’s summary of Sarug’s kabbalah as “an attempt to provide a quasi- philosophical basis for Luria’s distinctively unphilosophical doctrine by inject- ing a species of Platonism into it.”6 Scholm’s project of finding out the “authentic” or original ideas of Isaac Luria inevitably led to the sidelining of Sarug, which is still prevalent in current research. Scholars constantly attempt to cast doubt on his originality, his authorship, and his contact with Luria. In this vein, Ronit Meroz has claimed that the writings that came to be known as Sarug’s are actually the work of a school of kabbalists that existed alongside Luria’s school in Safed and that later developed in parallel in both

5 A. Altman has devoted a preliminary paper to R. Menahem Azaria of Fano. See his “Com- ments on the Development of the Kabbala of the Rama of Fano,” in Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought (1984), pp. 241–267. 6 G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish (New York, 1946), p. 257.