CHAPTER TWELVE

THE MATTER OF OTHERS: MENSTRUAL BLOOD AND UNCONTROLLED SEMEN IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY KABBALISTS’ POLEMIC AGAINST CHRISTIANS, “BAD” JEWS , AND MUSLIMS

Alexandra Cuffel *

The impurities of Gentiles and errant Jews were regularly equated with seminal impurity and niddah (menstrual impurity or the menstruating woman herself) within certain kabbalistic texts. Elliot Wolfson, Isaiah Tishby, Sharon Koren and others have already demonstrated that “the other nations,” or more generally, evil and divine punishment, were associated with impurity and the Left, feminine , sometimes demonic, side of the divinity within theosophic . 1 For some kabbalists,

* I wish to thank Joel Hecker of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Phila- delphia, for proofreading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article. All errors are my own. 1 Sharon Faye Koren, “Kabbalistic Physiology: , Nahmanides, and Moses de Leon on Menstruation,” AJS Review 28 (2004): 317–339; idem, “ ‘The woman from whom God wanders’: the menstruant in medieval Jewish mysticism” (Ph.D. dis- sertation, Yale University, 1999); , On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in Kabbalah, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, edited and revised by Jonathan Chipman (New York, 1991), 60–87; Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the : An Anthol- ogy of Texts, trans. David Goldstein, 3 vols. (Oxford and New York, 1991 reprint), vol. 2; Elliot Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford and New York, 2006), 30–31, 37–105, 132–154, 165–175; idem, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany, 1995), 79–121; idem, “Re/ membering the Covenant: Memory, Forgetfulness, and the Construction of History in the Zohar,” in Jewish history and Jewish memory: essays in honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. Elisheva Carlbach, John M. Efron, David Myers (Hanover, NH, 1998), 214–246; idem, “Woman—the feminine as other in theosophic Kabbalah: some philosophical observations on the divine androgyne,” in The Other in Jewish thought and history: con- structions of Jewish culture and identity, ed. Lawrence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New York, 1994), 166–204; idem, “Left contained in the right: a study of Zoharic hermeneutics,” AJS Review 11 (1986): 27–52. Scholars of kabbalah distinguish between “theosophic kabbalah” and “ecstatic kabbalah.” The former generally presupposes a system whereby God is made up of sefirot, or aspects, and emphasizes their importance. These in turn were understood as having a gender, though as recent scholarship has shown, the gender of individual sefirot, especially the shechinah, was not always stable. Elliot Wolfson has been the most prominent scholar arguing for the shifting, unstable quality of gender within the divine. See for example Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: 250 alexandra cuffel just as the demonic feminine, like her divine feminine counterpart, could be reunited with the divine male, so too could some Gentiles either be redeemed or were characterized as somehow an integral part of the divine schema. Even in such seemingly conciliatory texts, however, Gentiles remained impure and spiritually inferior to Jews ; their redemp- tion lay in conversion or some other kind of purification by associa- tion with Judaism.2 The human body, subject as it was to a variety of impurities, remained the fundamental source of symbolic imagery to portray impurity /evil within the Godhead itself, in human-divine rela- tions, and in human-human hierarchies. Yet not all impurities held the same connotations, nor were all Gentiles alike. In this essay I explore the nuances of gendered impurity in polemic against Christians, Muslims, and “bad” Jews in a variety of thirteenth-century Iberian kabbalists’ writings that span both the ecstatic and theosophic approaches.3 I will focus on Abraham Abulafia (1240–c. post 1291), the primary exemplar of “ecstatic kabbalah ,” the Zohar, a multi-layered Jewish mystical text of the thirteenth century that became the foundation for future theosophic kabbalistic works, and Joseph Gikatilla (1248–c. 1305), who was strongly

Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York, 2005), 49–121; idem, Through a Speculum that Shines: vision and imagination in medieval Jewish mysticism (Princeton, 1994). Ecstatic kabbalah, by contrast, focused on the individual mystic’s encounter with, rev- elations from, and union with God and placed less emphasis on the sefirotic system. The thirteenth-century mystic Abraham Abulafia is the primary example of this form of kabbalah. On ecstatic kabbalah see , Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany, 1988). 2 Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven and London, 2005), 112–115, 119–122; Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 27, 58–73, 97–101, 158–171, 195–196, 240. 3 While the impurity of the foreskin, failure to circumcise or circumcise correctly, and the proper relationship of the divine and human phallus to the feminine are also relevant to the gendered, polemical use of impurity in kabbalah, these issues have been examined extensively by others, and hence will receive only passing attention here. Instead I concentrate on the uncleanness of seminal emissions, menstruation, and illicit sex. For literature about the symbolism of circumcision and the phallus in kabbalah see: Ronald Kiener, “The Image of Islam in the Zohar,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 8 (1989): 43–65; Wolfson, “Re/membering the Covenant;” idem, Circle and the Square, 92–98; idem, Through a Speculum that Shines, 336–345, 339, 357–368; idem, “Woman-feminine as Other;” idem, “Images of God’s Feet: Some Observations on the Divine Body in Judaism,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an embodied perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany, 1992), 143–181; idem, “Circumcision and the Divine Name: a study in the transmission of esoteric doctrine,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 78 (1987): 77–112; idem, “Circumcision, Vision of God and Textual Interpretation: from midrashic trope to mystical symbol,” History of Religions 27 (1987): 189–215.