Rivista Di Storia E Letteratura Religiosa

MOSHE IDEL

ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC, OR KABBALAH AS RENAISSANCE BEFORE THE RENAISSANCE

ESTRATTO

RIVISTA DI STORIA E LETTERATURA RELIGIOSA

DIRETTA DA G. CRACCO - G. DAGRON - C. OSSOLA F. A. PENNACCHIETTI - M. ROSA - B. STOCK

Anno XLIX - N. 2 - 2013

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Direzione Cesare Alzati, Giorgio Cracco, Gilbert Dagron, Francisco Jarauta, Carlo Ossola, Benedetta Papa´sogli, Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, Daniela Rando, Mario Rosa, Maddalena Scopello, Brian Stock

Redazione Linda Bisello, Paolo Cozzo, Valerio Gigliotti, Giacomo Jori, Marco Maggi, Chiara Pilocane, Davide Scotto Tutti gli articoli proposti alla rivista sono soggetti a un esame affidato a membri interni o esterni al Comitato Scientifico, competenti per la tematica specifica, al fine di valutarne la rispondenza ai criteri di carattere scientifico. Articoli Dattiloscritti di Articoli, Note, Recensioni, Cronache, ecc., A. DORDONI, Il «riposo» dell’anima in Dio: Sebastiano Valfre` e la mistica . . . Pag. 293 come pure opere da recensire vanno indirizzati a:

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RASSEGNE E DISCUSSIONI

Vengono qui raccolti alcuni degli interventi proposti al Colle`ge de France il 22 febbraio 2013, nel- l’ambito della Giornata di Studi – diretta da Carlo Ossola – in onore di Moshe Idel: Bruissements. De l’inarticule´ dans la mystique et la musique. Altri interventi, pronunciati in quella giornata, sa- ranno pubblicati nei prossimi fascicoli della Rivista. Non si e` trattato di esplorare cio` che non arriva ad esprimersi, ma cio` che si raccoglie – come ci ha insegnato Moshe Idel – nella memoria di un can- to, di un popolo, o di un palpito.

ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC, OR KABBALAH AS RENAISSANCE BEFORE THE RENAISSANCE

1. The Combination of Anamnesis and Divine Harmony

Two well-known themes, Pythagorean music of the spheres 1 that was known also to Plato,2 and Platonic ‘anamnesis’,3 are found in separate sources in antiquity. In any case according to scholars in the field Plato’s two main formulations of anamnesis represent some form of de-mythologization of earlier Orphic-Pytha- gorean theories.4 According to the interpretation offered by Jean-Pierre Vernant, anamnesis is related to a sort of ecstasy, which has in some cases salvific over- tones.5 To my best knowledge of the rich bibliography on Plato’s anamnesis, despite his interest in music of the sphere, he did not link it to recollection.6 How-

1 See the comprehensive monograph of L. SPITZER, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘‘Stimmung’’, Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1963. To a certain extent, the following study is a small appendix to this book, which did not address the Jewish aspects of the topic of the otherwise very erudite monograph. For the theory of harmony of the spheres in the more recent centuries see J. GODWIN, L’e´sote´risme musical en France 1750-1950, Paris, Albin Michel, 1991. 2 See E. MOUTSOPULOS, La musique dans l’oeuvre de Platon, Paris, PUF, 1959. 3 See Phaidon, 75e, Phaedrus, 249b-250b, and Menon, 81cd. On anamnesis in Plato see A. CAMERON, The Pythagorean Background of the Theory of Recollection, Wisconsin, Menasha, 1938; F.M. CONFORD, Principium Sapientiae, New York, ed. W.K.C. Guthrie (Harper Torch- book, 1965), pp. 45-61. On the reverberations of Platonic anamnesis in Neoplatonism and then in the Middle Ages see G. SHAW, Theurgy and the Soul, The Platonism of Iamblichus (Penn State University Press, University Park, PA., 1995), pp. 24, 164, 175, 194, 201. See also the interesting reflections of Mircea Eliade on Platonic anamnesis and the archaic man in Aspects du mythe (Paris, 1963), pp. 147-155 and below beside note 113. To judge from a perusal of Mary Car- ruther’s books anamnesis was not a widespread vision in the Latin Middle Ages. 4 J.-P. VERNANT, Mythe et pense´e chez les Grecs, Paris, Editions La Decouverts, 1988, pp. 51-78 and M.L. MORGAN, Platonic Piety, Philosophy & Ritual in Fourth-century Athens, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 47-54, 69-70, 175-177. 5 J.P. VERNANT, Mythe et pense´e chez les Grecs, cit., pp. 51-78 and J.E. MENARD, La function soteriologique de la memoire chez les gnostiques, «RSR», LIV, 1980, p. 306.

7 390 MOSHE IDEL ever, as part of the syntheses between Platonism and Pythagoreanism in Neopla- tonism, the two themes are found together and the question is whether this is a new synthesis between two independent themes in Neoplatonism, or preservation or a reconstruction of a pre-Platonic view or a Middle Platonic view, which did not survive in such explicit a manner in earlier sources.7 Let me adduce the most explicit combination between the two themes found in a late Neoplatonic thinker deeply influenced by Pythagoreanism: 8 Iamblichus.

Indeed, before the soul gave itself to the body, it heard the divine harmony plainly. There- fore, after it departs into the body and hears the sort of melodies that especially preserve the trace of the divine harmony, it welcomes these and recollects the divine harmony from them. It is drawn to this, makes itself at home with it, and partakes of it as much as possible. 9

We may distinguish between three main stages of the soul represented in this passage: 1] the soul preexisted its descent in the body and when in the supernal world it heard the divine harmony, which should be understood from the context as musical since it is connected later on with melodies. 2] when the soul is within the body and listens to music she is recollecting the primordial melodies. 3] This recollection brings the soul to a state reminiscent of the initial one, but within this world. Thus, recollection by listening to harmonious music, reminiscent of the divine harmony, is a possible way of regaining the experience of the preexisting soul while alive. Earlier in the same book Iamblichus claims that «by means of such melodies adapted to the Gods, their divinity becomes present... So, whatever happens to possess a likeness to the Gods directly participates in them: a perfect possession immediately takes place and the [experience of] being filled with the essence and the power of a Higher Being». 10 Elsewhere in the same book Iamblichus writes that «the inspiration of the Gods is not separate from divine harmony». 11 Melodies belonging to Gods instantiate therefore the divine presence within the soul while she is in the body. Recollection constitutes therefore the counterpart of the possible ascent of the soul to its source, by drawing the divine inspiration down. Let me point out the conceptually composite nature of Iamblichus’ book as

6 See E. MOUTSOPULOS, La musique dans l’oeuvre de Platon, cit. 7 See F. BUFFIERE, Les mythes d’Home`re et la pense´e greque, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1956, p. 479; C. VAN LIEFFERINGE, Les Sire`nes: du chant mortel a` la musique des sphe`res. Lectures home´- riques et interpretations platoniciennes, «RHR», CCXXIX, 2012, p. 495, M. SHIFFMAN, Erotic Wisdom and the Socratic Vocation in Plutarch’s Platonic Question 1, in «Greek, Roman, and By- zantine Studies», L, 2010, pp. 263, where the view of Ammonius, a Middle Platonist, is referred. 8 On Iamblichus’s Life of Pythagoras, where music plays an important role see the texts referred by F. BUFFIERE, Les mythes d’Home`re et la pense´e greque, cit., pp. 469-470, 475. 9 IAMBLICHUS, De Mysteriis, 120, 7-14. The translation is that of G. SHAW, Theurgy and the Soul, cit., p. 175. 10 Ibid., 118, 6-119, 9; ivi, pp. 174-175. 11 Ibid., 119, 10-11; ivi, p. 175. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 391 well as of earlier Pythagorean traditions, a point to which we shall revert below.12 It should be pointed out that the imperative to remember God’s redemption of Israel from Egypt, is a basic view in Biblical and post-Biblical Judaism.13 Here, however, I am not concerned with the musica mundana in itself, or with anamnesis in Judaism, but in a particular nexus between them, which stems from the Greco- Hellenistic background.

2. Medieval Reverberations

Iamblichus’s book has not been translated into Arabic or in any language before Ficino’s translation in the late eighties of the 15th century. Nevertheless the combination of the two themes recurs in Arabic sources, which transmitted also other Pythagorean themes to the Middle Ages.14 There are three different kind of sources found in Arabic where this combination is found: a Hellenistic doxography translated in Arabic by the famous translator Hunain ibn Ishaq, which has been translated in Hebrew early in the 13th century by Yehudah al-Harizi, a text that had many reverberations in Jewish sources. It is called in Hebrew Mu- serei ha-Filosofim, namely the Maxims of the Philosophers, and it brings together dicta stemming from a variety of ancient thinkers, mentioning Ammonius in the general context. In a long chapter on music, which shows how much the topic found in Greek and Hellenistic texts could find its way to the Middle Ages, were read: «when the soul will concentrate 15 she will play plaintive 16 melodies and will remember her supreme world, and will join the supreme joint and will have a

12 W. BURKET, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973, P. KINGSLEY, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1995. 13 See M. MESLIN, L’experience humaine du divine, Paris, Cerf, 1988, pp. 320-364, and my Memento Dei: Remarks on Remembering in Judaism, in Il senso della Memoria, Roma, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2003, pp. 143-192, ID., Remembering and Forgetting as Redemption and Exile in Early Hasidism, in Arbeit am Gedaechtnis fuer Aleida Assmann, ed. by Michael C. Frank, G. Rippi, Muenchen, Fink, 2007, pp. 111-129. 14 See F. ROSENTHAL, Some Pythagorean Documents Transmitted in Arabic, «Orientalia», n.s. X, 1941, pp. 104-115, 383-395; ibid., The Classical Heritage in Islam, London, Routledge, 1975, p. 40 and D.J. O’MEARA, Pythagoras Revived, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 230- 232. On Nemesius of Emessa, John of Damascus and Shahrastani, who all mentioned Pythagoras, see H.A. WOLFSON, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, ed. by I. Twersky & G.H. Williams, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1973, vol. 1, p. 357 and see also SA‘ID AL-ANDA- LUSI, Tabaqat al-umam, tr. G. Blachere, Paris, 1935, pp. 57-62, B.R. GOLDSTEIN, A Treatise on Number Theory from a Tenth Century Arabic Source, «Centhaurus», X, 1964, pp. 129-160. 15 E. WERNER and I. SONNE, The Philosophy and Theory of Music in Judaeo-Arabic Litera- ture, «HUCA», XVII, 1942-’43, p. 525, translate «Living in Solitude», but I preferred the other possibility. See my Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, Albany, SUNY Press, 1988, pp. 103-169. See also below beside note 69. 16 Ma‘atzivot. See below in our discussion of Yohanan Alemanno’s passage. 392 MOSHE IDEL rhythmic sweet melodies». 17 Here music is presented as counteracting the acts of nature that attempt to draw soul to material realm. Unlike Iamblichus’s approach, the role of the melodies here is to subdue the lower functions in the human per- sonality, while the recollection of the supernal world is not related necessarily to the performance or listening of music. Much more detailed is the discussion found in the Encyclopedia of the Sincere or Pure Brethren, a text translated in Eng- lish by Amnon Shiloah.18 Though a small part of this encyclopedia has been translated in Hebrew, it was not the epistle dealing with music, which nevertheless has been transliterated in Hebrew characters but in its original Arabic and is extant in one single manuscript.19 In a way similar though not identical to the earlier view, writes also Rabbi Shem Tov ben Yosef Falaqera, a Jewish philosopher active in Spain in the last third of the 13th century, who was well-acquainted with Arabic language and Mus- lim thought, and he even translated from Arabic to Hebrew. In his Sefer ha-Me- vaqqesh, he wrote: they assert that the celestial spheres and stars performing their revolutions, produce joyful tones and delightful melodies. They assert also that as soon as the soul hears a melody of balanced composition and rhythmic measure she rejoices and find delight therein and yearns for her Creator, longing to reach Him. Consequently, the soul contemns the miseries and the accidents of the temporal world and meditates upon the upper world. Such is the aim of the music performing sages. 20

This approach, like it earlier sources is cosmic and restorative in nature. I assume that Falaquera was acquainted with a doxography similar to the Maxims of the Phi- losophers.21 These two types of sources, which were available in the Middle Ages, at least in part, in Hebrew, were more theoretical treatments of music. However in Arabic there are also other types of texts, related to Sufism, where music was practiced as an essential part of the mystical techniques, known as dhikr – the recitation of the name of God – and sama‘ though I did not identify a view identical to that of Iam- blichus as discussed above.22 Though the possible impact of such practices on

17 Musrei ha-Filosofim, 1:18, as printed in I. ADLER, Hebrew Writings Concerning Music in Manuscripts and Printed Books, From Geonic Times up to 1800, Repertoire International de Sources Musicales, in RISM BIX2, Munich, G. Henle, 1975, p. 148; see also the emendations of the sequence of this passage in E. WERNER – I. SONNE, The Philosophy, cit., vol. 17, pp. 515- 516 and p. 525 for another English translation, and pp. 558-563 for a discussion of the Greco- Hellenistic sources of this doxography. 18 The Epistle on Music of Ikhwan al-Safa, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University, 1978. 19 Printed in ADLER, HWCM, cit., pp. 50-54. 20 For the Hebrew text see ADLER, HWCM, cit., pp. 164-166, and E. WERNER – I. SONNE, The Philosophy, cit., vol. 17, p. 547, and for the English translation, slightly modified here, see ivi, p. 550. 21 See A. SHILOAH, R. Shem Tov ibn Joseph Falaqera’s Sources’s for the Chapter on Music in his Sefer ha-Mevakesh, in Proceedings of the Fourth World Congress of Jewish Studies, vol. 2, 1963, pp. 373-377. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 393

Jewish texts cannot be totally neglected, insofar as a specific affinity with the texts we shall discuss below on musica mundana and anamnesis cannot be proven.

3. R. Joseph Angelet’s Passage and its Elaborations

Unlike Muslim mysticism, whose interest in music was quite prominent, in Kabbalah there is a much more modest resort to it in practice. With the exception of Abraham Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah, where music played an important role,23 and much later in East European Hasidism, in other branches of Jewish mysticism we find much more theoretical discussions 24 and one of them will con- cern us here. In the second half of the 13th century, the Kabbalah in Spain was enriched by an exposure to a series of texts that were not known earlier by Kabbalists, some of which stem from Hermetic sources. This happened in both Catalunia and Castile, most probably as part of what has been called the Alfonsine Renaissance, contemporary to the renascence of Kabbalah.25 Also Pythagorean themes circulated in Kabbalistic literature.26 Recently, scholars have pointed out the possible influence of ideas found in Iamblichus on late 13thy century Kabbalists in Castile; Yehuda

22 A. SHILOAH, The Role and Nature of music in the practice of sama, in Repport of the twelfth Congress, Berkeley, 1977, pp. 425-428, 433-434; A. GRIBETZ, The Sama‘ Controversy: Sufi vs. Legalist, «Studia Islamica», LXXIV, 1991, pp. 43-62, J. DURING, Musique et extase, L’audition mystique dans la tradition soufie, Paris, Albin Michel, 1988. For the resort to the concept of anamnesis in Sufism see EVA DE MITRAY MEYEROVITCH, Mystique et poe´sie en Islam, Paris, Descle´e de Bouwer, 1972, pp. 72, 83 – where she mentions one of Iamblichus’ texts adduced above – and 102. 23 See M. IDEL, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, tr. Jonathan Chipman, Al- bany, SUNY Press, 1988, pp. 53-71. 24 See my The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations of Music from the Renaissance to Ha- sidism, in Yuval, vol. IV, 1982, pp. 33-63 (Hebrew), ID., Conceptualizations of Music in Jewish Mysticism, in ed. Lawrence Sullivan, Enchanting Powers, Music in the World’s Religions, Cam- bridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 159-188, ID., Music in sixteenth-century Kab- balah in Northern Africa, in Yuval, vol. VII, 2002, pp. 154-170, and now D. SCHWARTZ, Music in Jewish Thought, Ramat Gan, Bar Ilan University, 2013 (Hebrew). 25 See also my Kabbalah and Hermeticism, and On European Cultural Renaissances and Jew- ish Mysticism, in Kabbalah, vol. 13, 2005, pp. 43-78. 26 On the Pythagorean Golden Verses see M. PLESSNER, The Translation in Arabic and He- brew of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, in Eshkoloth, vol. 4, 1962, p. 58 (Hebrew), Y. TZVI LAN- GERMANN, Studies in Medieval Hebrew Pythagoreanism, «Micrologus», IX, 2001, pp. 219-236, M. BAR ILAN, Astrology and Other Sciences among the Jews of Israel in the Roman-Hellenistic and Byzantine Periods, Jerusalem, Bialik Institute, 2011, pp. 146-147, 208, n. 497, 215, M. IDEL, Ben, Sonship and Jewish Mysticism, London, New York, Continuum, 2008, pp. 315-318, Kabbalah in Italy, pp. 15-16, ID., On the Meanings of the term ‘Kabbalah’: Between the Prophetic Kabbalah th and the Kabbalah of Sefirot in the 13 Century, in Pe‘amim, vol. 93, 2002, pp. 50-51 (Hebrew), ID., Sefirot above the Sefirot, in Tarbiz, vol. 51, 1982, p. 261, n. 110 (Hebrew), and my introduction to JOHANNES REUCHLIN, On the Art of the Kabbalah, De Arte Cabalistica, trs. M & S. Goodman, Lin- coln and London, The Nebraska University Press, 1993, pp. XI-XV and Johannes Reuchlin: Kab- 394 MOSHE IDEL

Liebes discussed his possible influence on a passage in the book of the Zohar 27 and Elka Morlok dealt with reverberations of Iamblichus’s views on Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla.28 It is also in this context that the occurrence of the following passage should be understood. Rabbi Joseph Angelet,29 a Kabbalist that flowered in Spain in the first third of the 14th century, who commented on both the Book of Zohar and on one of Gi- katilla’s major Kabbalistic treatises,30 adduces an interesting version of anamnesis as concerning music that has been most plausibly drawn from an unidentified, presumably Arabic source. In his commentary on the book of the Zohar entitled Livenat ha-Sappir, a book to which he was very close in both thought and language,31 he wrote as follows: [a] And when someone wants to arise to the Torah and prayer, in order that the holy spirit will dwell upon her,32 and «he arouse»: «And when the player played and the spirit was on him» 33 [b] because the [higher] soul 34 is derived from above, from the bundle of life,35 and she is accustomed with melodies and with the songs of the servant angels, and the song of the spheres. But now, when she is within the body and she listens to melodies, then she takes pleasure and delight as she was accustomed when she was cleaving to her root, and 36 to the delight of the voice of the spheres. And out of the pleasure and joy

balah, Pythagorean Philosophy and Modern Scholarship, «Studia Judaica», XVI, 2008, pp. 30-55, and E. MORLOK, Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Hermeneutics, Tu¨ bingen, Mohr/Siebeck, 2011, passim, especially pp. 77-83, 308-309. See also J. WEINBERG, Azariah de’ Rossi and Pythagoras, or What has Classical Antiquity to Do with Halakhah?, in Tov Elem, Memory, Community & Gender in Med- ieval & Early Modern Jewish Societies, Essays in Honor of Robert Bonfil, ed. by E. Baumgarten, A. Raz-Krakotzkin, R. Weinstein, Jerusalem, The Bialik Institute, 2011, pp. 183-184. 27 See his Zohar and Jamblichus, in Essays in Honor of Moshe Idel, ed. by S. Frunza, M. Frunza, Cluj-Napoca, Provo Press, 2008, pp. 106-111, and now his The Cult of the Dawn, Jerusalem, Carmel, 2011, pp. 99-105 (Hebrew). A view similar to both Iamblichus and the Zohar as discussed by Liebes is found also in a treatise from Abraham Abulafia’s school, the anonymous Sefer Ner ’Elohim, cfr. IDEL, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, p. 125. For another parallel between this treatise and an early Zoharic view on the nature of the soul, found only in Pythagoreanism, see what I wrote in my The Writings and Doctrine of Abraham Abulafia, Jeru- salem, Ph. D Thesis, Hebrew University, 1976, pp. 73-74 (Hebrew). 28 Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Hermeneutics, see index, p. 350 sub voce Iamblichus. 29 The name under which this Kabbalist was known in scholarship was Angelino, but this has been corrected to Angelet by I. FELIX, Chapters in the Kabbalistic Thought of Rabbi Joseph Angelet, Jerusalem, M.A. Thesis, Hebrew University, 1991 (Hebrew). 30 See his anonymous commentary on Gikatilla’s Sha‘arei ’Orah, found in manuscripts. 31 R. MEROZ, R. Joseph Angelet and his ‘‘Zoharic Writings’’, in New Developments in Zohar Studies, ed. by R. Meroz [=Te‘uda, vol. XXI-XXII], Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University Press, 2007, pp. 303-404 (Hebrew). 32 Namely the soul. 33 II Re 5, 15 but it is the «hand» of God not the spirit, that is mentioned in the biblical verse. 34 Nishemeta’. In the theosophical Kabbalah this is the highest of three souls, which stems from the third sefirah, Binah. 35 See I Samuel 25, 29 in the context of David. This phrase became in Judaism a standard reference to the post mortem blissful situation of the soul. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 395 she merits that the spirit of God will dwell upon her,37 as she behaved in her first root. [c] And it seems to me that David, that had nothing of himself, needed to arouse himself by means of sorts of melodies in order to draw life upon his attribute from the supernal light called life, and this is the reason why the highest of his degrees is that he knows how to sing in order to arouse ‘the voice, the spirit and the speech’,38 in order to draw good-will to the lower world. 39

This compact passage has not parallel discussion in Angelet’s other writings, and in general his interest in music is rather scant. The passages [a] and [b] are found almost verbatim in Ms. London-Montefiore 348, as an oral tradition heard from the mouth of RYA, which is quite plausibly the acronym of R. [Y]Joseph Angelet.40 In my opinion, we have here a hybrid text that draws upon the earlier connections between the music of the spheres and anamnesis, but adding biblical verses and con- jugating it with the Jewish ideal of studying Torah and praying. Implicitly at least, the Torah study and prayer are understood as performed by means of some form of melody. The Kabbalist elaborates upon the nature of the music heard by the soul, adding to the «song of the spheres» or their voices, namely to the planetary music, also Jewish motifs of the song of the servant angels, found in late antiquity sources.41 For Angelet the main feeling that recollection causes is pleasure and delight, an aesthetic feeling that is reminiscent of the pre-existential condition of the soul. According to the Kabbalist, it is the strength of the soul’s pleasure that causes the descent of the supernal spirit on the soul. To be sure: some form of musica mundana that induces pleasure is mentioned already in the Book of the Zohar,42 a book upon which Angelet commented, but there is no trace there of the theme of musical anamnesis. The resort to the descent of the spirit has, in Jewish tradition, some prophetic implications,

36 Perhaps the meaning was that while in the divine world – the root – the soul listened to the music of the spheres. 37 An ancient Rabbinic dictum claimed that the divine presence does not dwell but on someone who is joyful. See BT, Shabbat, fol. 30b. 38 Cfr. Sefer Yetzirah, I:9. 39 The phrase «lower world» may refer not only to the terrestrial world but, according to many instances in Kabbalistic terminology, to the last sefirah. In Livenat ha-Sappir (mistakenly attributed in print to R. David ben Yehudah he-Hasid) ed. Shlomo Mussaioff, Jerusalem, 1913, fol. 12bc. Some part of the text is in Aramaic, since Angelet imitates the Aramaic language of the Zohar. See also the reverberations of this view in R. ISRAEL TOIB OF MODZITZ, Divrei Yis- rael, New York, 2008, p. 246, reprinted in MEIR SH. GESHURI, Le-Hasidim Mizmor, Jerusalem, 1936, p. 78 (Hebrew), or J. SHAPOTSNICK, SHULCHAN ARUCH, LAMUDEY HACHEM, Lon- don, 1932, p. 17. 40 Ms. London-Montefiore 348, fol. 5a. This reference may indicate that Angelet had a follower who preserved an oral tradition of his. 41 K.E. GROEZINGER, Musik und Gesang in der Theologie der fruehen juedischen Literatur, Tuebingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1982. 42 See, e.g., Zohar III, fol. 170ab. See M. IDEL, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pil- lars, Ladders, Lines, Budapest-New York, CEU Press, 2005, pp. 106-107, where I pointed out to the possible Pythagorean background. 396 MOSHE IDEL though I am not sure that this is necessarily the case also here. Let me elaborate on the resort to the term «her root» that translates the He- brew form yesodah. The assumption in a philosophical context would be that all the souls have the same root, the universal soul, though in a theosophical context it seems to be that each soul has a different root on high, which characterize her nature and behavior. Such a Kabbalistic understanding of an earlier philosophical text, assumes a complex world within the divine structure, perhaps not only ten sefirot. The term yesod, widespread in Livenat ha-Sappir, has there another meaning, namely the ninth sefirah, but the more Neoplatonic use does not occur in the context of the root of the soul elsewhere in Angelet’s other writings. In any case it is possible to discern the use of the phrase deveqah bi-ysodah in late 13th century thinkers, including Kabbalists, without however using the theory of anamnesis. In these sources it is a personal eschatology that defines the meaning of the soul’s cleaving to the supernal world, as culminating a life of holiness, not an initial state of the soul before her descent in the body. Moreover, in some cases, the concept of the paradisiacal music to be listened by the souls in the post-mortem situation has nothing to do with our discussions here.43 Passage [c] is basically a comment on [b] which seems to refer to an earlier source, especially since Angelet starts [c] with the phrase «it seems to me». Indeed the last passage constitutes a theosophical-theurgical comment, based on the assumption of a special affinity between the soul and its source and the responsibil- ity of the soul in the lower world for the corresponding divine power to which she was related. The King David was conceived in the main schools of Kabbalah as corresponding to the last sefirah, referred in passage [c] as his attribute,44 and since this sefirah was commonly described in Kabbalah as lacking a nature of itself but having the influxes that come from the nine higher sefirot, the biblical king was portrayed as using music in order to induce power within the supernal attribute connected to him. Whether the Kabbalist is also capitalizing on the Plotinian view as to the continuum between the embodied soul and its source, known in the book of the Zohar,45 in order to explain the manner in which the human influence works, is not so obvious here. It is possible that we have one of the reverberations of the more ancient identification of king David as musician with Orpheus.46 I resort to the term theurgical in order to refer to an act by means of which a

43 See, e.g., the poetical eulogy of R. Moshe ben Nahman, written in the memory of R. Abraham ben Yitzhaq, a Kabbalist and a cantor in Gerona, printed in Kitvei ha-Ramban, ed. Ch. D. Chavel, Jerusalem, Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1963, I, p. 387. 44 See, e.g., M. IDEL, R. Nehemiah ben Shlomo the Prophet on the Star of David and the Name Taftafia: From Jewish Magic to Practical and Theoretical Kabbalah, in Ta Shma, Studies in Judaica in Memory of Israel M. Ta-Shma, ed. by A. Reiner and alia, Alon Shevut, Tevunot Press, 2011, I, pp. 22-26 (Hebrew). 45 I. TISHBY, The Wisdom of the Zohar, tr. D. Goldstein, London, Littman Library, 1991, II, p. 752. 46 See already the mosaic at Dura Europos, and for the secondary literature see e.g., N. ZEE- ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 397 person can intervene in processes within the divine world 47 that is constituted of a multiplicity of divine powers, a structure I refer as theosophy. In the passage [b] the assumption is that the soul is empowered by listening to music by means of the recollection of the supernal realm and the temporary participation in them. This view was referred by some scholars as theurgical, which is just another legitimate use of the term.48 In both cases there is some form of manipulation of the gods or divine powers. However, given the emphasis of many of the Kabbalists on neces- sity to impact on the balances and processes within the divine sphere, I have ap- propriated one of the two meanings found in the late antiquity pagan sources. What seems to me interesting is the fact that the theurgical understanding of music, which is hardly found in earlier Kabbalah recurs in two authors who were contemporaries of R. Joseph Angelet: the anonymous author the later layers of Zo- haric literature, Tiqqunei Zohar and Ra‘ya’ Meheimna’, and in the writings of another Kabbalist R. David ben Yehudah he-Hasid.49 It should be mentioned that both Angelet and R. David, were most probably connected to some aspects of the

GERS-VAN DER VORST, Les versions juives et chre´tiennes du fr. 245-7 d’Orpheé, in L’Antiquite´ Clas- sique, vol. 39, 1970, pp. 475-506, P. FINNEY, Orpheus, David, and the Gaza Synagogue, «Journal of Jewish Art», V, 1975, pp. 6-15, the appendix of J.-M. ROESLI, ‘‘De l’Orpheé ećossais, Bilan et perspectives’’, to John Block Friedman’s book Orpheé au Moyen Ages, tr. J.-M. Roesli et alia, Paris, Le Cerf, 1999, pp. 285-343, as well as the entire literature on the figures in the Dura Euro- pos synagogue, for example, the study of A. OVADIAH, The Symbolic Meaning of the David-Or- pheus image in the Gaza Synagogue Mosaic, in Studium Biblicum Franciscanum: Liber Annuus LIX, 2009, pp. 301-307. 47 See M. IDEL, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 156-157, ID., From Structure to Performance: On the Divine Body and Human Action in the Kabbalah, «Mishqafayim», XXXII, 1998, pp. 3-6 (Hebrew), ID., Absorbing Perfections, Kab- balah and Interpretation, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 3, 13, 31, 60, 67, 73-74 etc., Ascensions on High, pp. 7, 11, 16-18, 68, 114-115, 120-121, etc., ID., On The Performing Body in Theosophical-Theurgical Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Remarks, in The Jewish Body, Cor- poreality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ed. by M. Diemling, G. Veltri, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2009, pp. 251-271, ID., Some Remarks on Ritual and Mysticism in Geronese Kabbalah, in Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. III, 1993, pp. 111-130, or Enchanted Chains: Techniques and Rituals in Jewish Mysticism (Los Angeles, Cherub Press, 2005), pp. 33- 34, 47; as well as CH. MOPSIK, Les Grands textes de la Cabale, Les rites qui font Dieu, Lagrasse, Verdier, 1993, Y. LORBERBAUM, Image of God, Halakhah and Aggada, Tel Aviv, Schocken, 2004 (Hebrew), J. GARB, Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism, Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 2005 (Hebrew), E. WOLFSON, Mystical-Theurgical Dimensions of Prayer in Sefer ha-Rimmon, in Ap- proaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, vol. III, 1988, pp. 41-80, and I. FELIX, Theurgy, Magic, and Mysticism, Ph. D. Thesis, Hebrew University Jerusalem, 2005 (Hebrew). For this specific understanding of theurgy see G. LUCK, following E.R. DODDS, Arcana Mundi, Magic and the Oc- cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Crucible, 1987, p. 21; see also more recently, G. LUCK, Theurgy and Forms of Worship in Neoplatonism, in Religion, Science, and Magic, ed by J. Neus- ner, & alia, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 186 and R. MAJERCIK, The Chaldean Oracles, Leiden, Brill, 1989, p. 22, where she adduced also other similar definitions of theurgy. Again following some of these scholars, I draw a distinction between theurgy and magic; see R. MAJERCIK, ivi, pp. 22-23. 48 See, e.g., G. SHAW, Theurgy and the Soul, cit., p. 175: «musical theurgy». 49 See M. IDEL, The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations, cit., p. 51, n. 118, p. 55, n. 144. 398 MOSHE IDEL

Kabbalistic thought as found in Tiqqunei Zohar.50 In this layer of the Zohar, music plays indeed a greater role than in other forms of contemporary theosophical- theurgical Kabbalah. Let me point out that unlike the discourse of the 12th century Jewish philosophers and their followers later on, the Kabbalists are quoting only rarely their non-Jewish sources, creating the impression that they present a Jewish view, in many cases the ‘real’ esoteric meaning of the Bible. This point con- tributed to the understanding of Kabbalah as a prisca theologia, as we shall see below in section 7. Last but not least: Platonic anamnesis had an impact on some Rabbinic sources, where the assumption in one of the passages is that the soul studies Torah before entering the body, and in that moment an angel causes the forgetting of the Torah by the infant.51 However, nothing related to a musical element is found in these sources. However, in the book of the Zohar, there is a discussion that elaborates on the Rabbinic statement, and it assesses that the Torah someone is learn- ing in this world is that that he forgot before this person’s descent in the body.52 The presence of such a view in Castile in late 13th century may be related to sources that influenced also Angelet and in any case it explains the nexus between the Torah, mentioned at the beginning of the passage, and musical anamnesis. A comparison of the content of Angelet’s passage with the material referred above shows that it is closer to Iamblichus’s text rather than to any of the extant Arabic texts, and I assume that there was a perhaps lost version in Arabic, which mediated between the Neoplatonic author and the Kabbalist. Angelet’s Livenat ha-Sappir was a Kabbalistic book that remained on the mar- gin of the interest of many Kabbalists, and even its author’s name has been forgotten. However, the passage quoted above attracted the interest of a major Kabbalist of the first part of the 16th century, Rabbi Meir ibn Gabbai, an expellee from Spain who wrote his books in the former Greek part of the Ottoman Empire.53 It is a rather verbatim quote that helped the dissemination of the views found in Angelet’s text in much larger audiences, since ibn Gabbai’s text has been printed already in the 16th century.54 In his quite influential book ‘Avodat ha-Qo- desh, which has been printed already in the 16th century, he refers to views of the

50 See my preface to E. GOTTLIEB, The Hebrew Writings of the Author of Tiqqunei Zohar and Ra‘aya Mehemna, Jerusalem, 2003, pp. 25-28 (Hebrew). 51 BT, Niddah, fol. 30b. See also E.E. URBACH, The Sages, Their Concepts and Beliefs, tr. I. Abrams, Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1979, p. 248. 52 Zohar III, fol. 61ab, and I. TISHBY, The Wisdom of the Zohar, cit., p. 751. 53 On this author see R. GOETSCHEL, R. Meir Ibn Gabbai, Le Discours de la Kabbale espag- nole, Leuven, Peeters, 1981. 54 See below the passage in R. Yehudah Moscato, as well as in R. Sabbatai Lipshitz’s Segullot Yisrael (Muncacz, 1905), fol. 118a, R. AVRAHAM OF VILNIUS, Rav Pe‘alim, Warsau, 1894, p. 75, Y. EISENSTEIN, ’Otzar ha-Midrashim, New York, 1915, I, p. 265, and Rabbi Z.W. ASHKENAZI, the commentator on Rabbi H. VITAL’s Sha‘arei Qedushah, Jerusalem, 1926, p. 61. References to ibn Gabbai passage are more numerous in more recent books, which are written by compilators. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 399 ancient philosophers as to the cosmic music as cited and rejected by Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed.55 Though he agrees to the Pythagorean view, he believes that it is not well-founded in the philosophical sources and he refers to Rabbinic discussions as to the voices of astral bodies, which are in his eyes much more reli- able.56 Then he quotes most of the passage of Angelet, referring explicitly to his source, though ignoring passage [c], despite the fact that he was one of the most elaborated Kabbalists dealing with what I called theurgy.57 What is important in ibn Gabbai’s discussion is that he openly rejects Maimo- nides’ critical stand as to the existence of the music of the spheres. The Jewish philosopher, following the path of Aristotle and the Muslim philosophers he admired, Al-Farabi and Avicenna,58 was quite reticent toward the Pythagorean traditions in general, while the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalists adopted an opposite posi- tion, their resort to the anamnesis-music theme being just one example out of many.59 Like in other cases, one of the Kabbalists’ sources was Maimonides’ Guide, where he criticized the view of musica mundana. Angelet’s passage reverberates, rather verbatim, for example in an early 17th century Italian Kabbalist, Rabbi Aharon Berakhiah of Modena: 60 There is a palace on high that is hidden, and it is not opened but by means of the melody 61... and the soul is taking pleasure from the melody because it is accustomed to the melodies, the songs of the servant angels and the song of the spheres. And when she is in the body and listens to melodies, she is taking pleasure as she is was accustomed when she was cleaving to her root, and out of her great joy she merits that the spirit of God will dwell [upon her], according to her behavior and her root.62

55 II, 8. Cfr. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, tr. Sh. Pines, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1963, II, p. 267. On Maimonide’s rejection of Pythagoras see his letter to the translator of the Guide, Rabbi Samuel ibn Tibbon. For another instance of polemic with Maimo- nides in ibn Gabbai see I. TISHBY, The Wisdom of the Zohar, II, cit., pp. 678-679. 56 ‘Avodat ha-Qodesh, part III ch. 10, Jerusalem, 1973, fol. 68c. 57 For music and theurgy according to ibn Gabbai see M. IDEL, The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations, cit., pp. 46-49. On theurgy in general in this Kabbalistic book see CH. MOPSIK, Les grands textes de la cabale, pp. 364-382, GARB, Manifestations of Power, pp. 232-248. 58 See E. WERNER – I. SONNE, The Philosophy and Theory of Music in Judaeo-Arabic Litera- ture, HUCA, vol. 16, 1941, p. 291. 59 Nota Bene: Abulafia’s Kabbalah, where music plays an important role as part of his techniques to achieve prophecy, does not operate with the assumption of the musica mundana, as he was on this point a faithful follower of Maimonides. 60 On this Kabbalist see I. TISHBY, Studies in Kabbalah and Its Branches, Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1982, I, pp. 177-254 (Hebrew), and IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, cit., pp. 332-334. 61 Cfr. Tiqqunei Zohar, Tiqqun XI, ed. R. Margoliot, Jerusalem, 1978, fol. 26b. 62 R. AHARON BERAKHIAH OF MODENA, Ma‘avar Yaboq, Part I, ch. 31, Vilnius, 1896, fol. 77b. R. Aharon brings also the discussion on David as in Livenat ha-Sappir. It seems that this is the source for similar discussions, e.g., R. MOSHE OF ZLASHIN, Siddur Tiqqun Shabbat, Warsau, 1927, fol. 84b, R. AVNER AFGIN, Divrei Shalom, Jerusalem, 2006, p. 141, and see also ELIAQUM 400 MOSHE IDEL

Here in addition to the theme of anamnesis, there is also a theurgical quality of music, which attributes to musical performance the power to open a hidden palace on high. This is part of a much longer discussion about the extraordinary power of music to affect the divine and other supernal realms, which combines mainly the discussions in Tiqqunei Zohar with Angelet, without however, mentioning the latter by name. Rabbi Aharon’s passage, like that of ibn Gabbai’s has been copied by several later writers, as indicated in the previous footnote.

4. Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi Alqabetz

An important Kabbalist that started his career in the Greek part of the Ottoman Empire, and was a younger contemporary of Rabbi Meir ibn Gabbai, was Rabbi Shlo- mo ha-Levi Alqabetz (1505-1584).63 In the early forties of the 16th century he moved from there to Safed and was one of the members of the first group of Kabbalists that in some few decades put the small Galilean town on the map as the major center of Kab- balah in the world. In his commentary on the book of Esther he wrote: I heard from an elderly man...[a] why melody and music 64 are pleasant to the soul? Because she was accustomed to listen to it on high, as it is known to whoever does not deny the meaning of the [biblical] verses and their truth. And the supernal angels open their mouth, bless and aggrandize 65 etc., «by a clear language» 66 etc., «and I heard the voice of their wings» etc.67 [b] And there are persons to whom this will be so pleasant that their senses will be obliterated, and they do not know where they are. [c] And there are others, that a sleep will fall upon them, since they separated [or concentrated] 68 their soul in order to listen to the song, so that their body will lay down like a dead corpse, since she [the soul] is watching over it [the body] and when she will separate herself it will remain as if it is nothing, sleeping and falling asleep like the infants who are suckling, since they will not sleep if they do not listen to the voice of the song, and when they listen to it, they rest on their beds and their sleep is sweet, since the sound of the voice and the pleasure is still found within their soul, because of the little time of their separation from it.69

DEVORKERS, Bi-Shvilei ha-Minhag, Jerusalem, 1998, III, p. 13, the Hasidic journal Qovetz Beit Aharon ve-Yisrael, vol. XII, 1997, p. 142 and notes 92, 93, R. SHMUEL ABRAHAMI, Tzedeq ‘Eido- teikha, Jerusalem, 2009, introduction, and R. DAVID FALK, Be-Torato Yehegeh, II, Jerusalem, 2003, p. 482, where some of the sources adduced here are mentioned together. 63 On this Kabbalist see B. SACK, The Mystical Theology of Solomon Alkabez, Waltham, Ph. D. Thesis, Brandeis University, 1977 (Hebrew), R. KIMELMAN, The Mystical Meaning of Lekhah Dodi Kabbalat Shabbat, Los Angeles, Cherub Press-Jerusalem, the Magnes Press, 2003 (Hebrew). 64 Alqabetz uses the term music in transliteration in Hebrew letters. 65 This is part of the doxology of the Eighteen Benedictions. 66 Zephania 3, 9. 67 Ezekiel 1, 24. 68 See above note 15. 69 Namely of the souls of the children, from the supernal source of their soul. In R. SHLOMO ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 401

The unknown elderly person who informed Alqabetz,70 or he himself, took the discussions found in Kabbalah one step farther: the nexus of cosmic music and anamnesis as mentioned in [a] is not just the view of the Rabbis, as ibn Gabbai would say but in fact that meaning of some biblical verses. From this point of view we have an attempt to interpret different verses as pointing to the existence of a musica mundana, whose existence was, as seen above, a matter of dispute in the Middle Ages. The effect of listening to music may be twofold: one [b] when a person loses his sense while others [c] will fall asleep, namely had a sort of lethargic state, and its senses being obliterated. At the end of the translated passage, the assumption is that infants fall easier asleep when listening to music since the trace of the supernal melodies are fresher in their memory than in the case of the more mature persons. Unlike the somehow more inspirational oriented passage in Angelet, namely the descent of the divine spirit, it is much more an ecstatic experience that is described here.

5. Yohanan Alemanno and Yehudah Moscato

From Spain, the most important center of Kabbalah in the 13th century, Kabbalists and Kabbalistic traditions radiated in other centers of the Jewish world, and encountered other cultural backgrounds, creating new centers of Kabbalah. One of the most fertile of these new centers was Italy. There the tradition adduced by Angelet was known only much later on, since the second part of the 16th century, as seen above. However, it seems that the view as found in the Maxims of the Philosophers, had a certain impact on Rabbi Yohanan ben Yitzhaq Alemanno (c. 1435-c. 1522), was born in Mantua and became one of the most erudite Jewish authors living in Florence in the last two decades of the 15th century, and one of the teachers of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.71 In his Commentary on the Song

HA-LEVI ALQABETZ, Menot ha-Levi, Jerusalem, 1983, fols. 38b-39a, and the discussion of ADLER, HWCM, pp. 49-50, as to parallels to the passage. See also R. MOSHE OF ZLASHIN, Siddur Tiqqun Shabbat, fol. 85a. 70 I am not sure if we can identify the person but it is not implausible to assume that he refers to ibn Gabbai, who was active in the same area, namely in Greece, from where Alqabetz came to Safed. 71 See, e.g., M. IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510, A Survey, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 177-192, 340-348; ID., The Anthropology of Yohanan Alemanno: Sources and influences, in «Topoi», vol. 7, 1988, pp. 201-210; F. LELLI, Yohanan Alemanno, Hay Ha-‘Olamim (L’Immortale), Firenze, Olschki, 1995; ID., L’educazione ebraica nella seconda meta` del ’400, in Poetica e scienze naturale nel ’400, Poetica e scienze naturali nel Hay Ha-‘Olamim di Yohanan Ale- manno, «Rinascimento», XXXVI, 1996, pp. 75-136, A. LESLEY, The ‘Song of Solomon’s Ascents’, Love and Human Perfection according to a Jewish Associate of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ph. D. Thesis, Berkeley, 1976; or B.C. NOVAK, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Jochanan Ale- manno, «Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes», XLV, 1982, pp. 125-147. 402 MOSHE IDEL of Songs entitled Hesheq Shelomo, written with the encouragement of Pico, he elaborated on the views found in the Hellenistic doxography mentioned above or in Shem Tov ibn Falaquera’s passage.72 In an interesting passage dealing first with the animal soul, Alemanno wrote: ...[p]rovided that this desire 73 is spiritual and the special pronunciation 74 operate in a manner similar to the chord of a violin that by his harmonious voice 75 moves the straw or the trash that is found on the corresponding chord of another violin that is placed on a certain distance because of a certain correspondence that is found between them, as it has been examined many times – in order to move her 76 foundation and her palace 77 to whatever it wishes and there is nothing that can withstand it, so it will happen to the intellectual soul that knows how to play melodies because of a special quality she has, which are saddening 78 the powers of nature and its acts, by her separation from the materials [ho- marim], so that they will not recollect [lizeqor] her spiritual world that is illumining in every direction, when she is conceptualizing [be-tzayyrah] the world of the sefirah,79 that pours blessing, knowledge, intellect and influx.80

Music is understood here as capable to placate the attraction of nature and thus liberate the soul. Recollection is not described here as induced by music, but this act is the result of some form of contemplation of the supernal world, and then the two lower ones. However, it is obvious that there is a structural si-

72 It should be pointed out that Falaquera, though a commentator of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, was also quite interested in Neoplatonism – he translated excerpts from ibn Ga- birol’s Fons Vitae, from Arabic to Hebrew, and was acquainted with the Pseudo-Aristotelian Theology of Aristotle – but also quoted from a famous magical book, ibn Wahsyah’s Nabbatean Agriculture. A similar case is also the 14th century Rabbi Moshe Narboni’s writings, which com- bine Neoaristotelianism with magic and with some forms of philosophical spiritualism. He also was one of the favorites of Alemanno’s who taught one of his books to Giovanni Pico. Thus, the diversity of sources and themes and the composite type of discourse, – though not necessarily a simple type of eclecticism – that constitute different schools in the history of Kabbalah, can be discerned also in the literature that is conceived of as Jewish philosophy, especially in the period of the Renaissance. This composite nature was, to be sure, also part of the doxographies of Gre- co-Hellenistic origins. 73 Hesheq. This is a term privileged by Alemanno, as the title of his book shows, as well as many other usages of this term in his other books. See also M. IDEL, The Sources of the Circle Images in Dialoghi d’Amore, in Iyyun, vol. 28, 1978, pp. 156-166 (Hebrew), and my Kabbalah & Eros, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 186-188. 74 Higayon segulli (the translation is tentative). 75 Qolo ha-mityahes. 76 Of the animal or vital soul. 77 Foundation and palace mean the body, here the body of the world, which is operated by the anima mundi. 78 Ma‘atzivot. The same term is used in the passage from Maxims of the Philosophers that was quoted above. 79 This is Alemanno’s idiosyncratic way to refer to the world of sefirot, understood as the instruments of the divine action. 80 See ADLER, HWCM, p. 44, M. IDEL, The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations, cit., pp. 38-39. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 403 milarity between the soul and the supernal world, as the latter is referred as «her world» that she would like to remember would not the powers of nature distract her from doing so. Moreover, the special quality of singing or playing, inherent in the soul point to some substantial affinity between the human music and musica mundana. The basic metaphor is drawn from the well-known experiment of the resonance between the chords of two violins remote from each other, an experiment mentioned many times in Jewish sources since Alemanno’s generation.81 He em- phasizes the importance of the knowledge of the correspondences between levels of beings found in the three worlds, and he considers this knowledge as the highest one, attributing it to Moses and Solomon.82 Music is therefore part of a more complex vision of the universe as building on a series of correspondences, which may be manipulated by someone who knows them. From this point of view, Ale- manno is reminiscent of the attitude of his contemporary Marsilio Ficino.83 As Ste´phane Toussaint has pointed out recently in an important study, Ficino uses also two writings stemming from the Spanish-Jewish culture, which attracted also the attention of Alemanno.84 It should be mentioned that Alemanno was especially fond of Rabbi Shem Tov Falaquera’s writings, from which we quoted above an important passage.85 In the penultimate decade of the 16th century, a lengthy discussion of musica mundana has been printed as a sermon of Rabbi Yehudah Moscato, a famous preacher in Mantua (1532-1590).86 This treatment represents the most complex treatment of this theme in Jewish texts to that date,87 and we shall address only the aspects that are related to the topic under scrutiny here. The famous preacher

81 See the various occurrences of the resonance between two violins in Jewish texts in M. IDEL, The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations, cit. 82 See the text printed ivi, p. 37. 83 On Ficino and music see G. TOMLINSON, Music in Renaissance Magic, Toward a Histor- iography of Others, Chicago, London, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 101-144. 84 S. TOUSSAINT, Ficino’s Orphic Magic or Jewish Astrology and Oriental Philosophy? A Note on spiritus, the Three Books on Life, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Zarza, «Accademia», vol. II, 2000, pp. 19-33. See also now his Kabbalah and Concordia in Two of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Orphic Theses, «Accademia», vol. XII, 2010, pp. 13-26. 85 See M. IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, pp. 342-343, 461, notes 16, 33, 462, note 36. 86 On this figure see the recent collection of studies edited by G. Veltri and G. Miletto, Rabbi Judah Moscato and the Jewish Intellectual World of Mantua in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Leiden, Boston, Brill, 2012. 87 See now G. MILETTO, The Human Body as a Musical Instrument in the Sermons of Judah Moscato, in The Jewish Body, Corporeality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Mod- ern Period, ed. by M. Diemling, G. Veltri, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2009, pp. 377-393, and my Judah Muscato, A Late Renaissance Jewish Preacher, in Preachers of the Italian Ghetto, ed. David B. Ru- derman, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 41-66, where I dealt with some aspects of the first sermon of Nefutzot Yehudah. For an annotated reprint of his sermon on music see also ADLER, HWCM, pp. 221-239. 404 MOSHE IDEL quotes verbatim ibn Gabbai’s rendition of Angelet’s discussion, but what is more interesting is the framework of this citation. Before quoting ibn Gabbai, without mentioning his name, he wrote: we cannot overlook the perfection of the composition of man, in number and in very pro- portionate weight, in his body and in soul that is constituted out of pleasant and propor- tionate melodies, in the likeness of the soul of the sphere that we mentioned as the opinion of Plato and according to the discourse of the ancient philosopher Pythagoras. Indeed, the source of the soul is from the supernal entities where «joy is found in their residence» 88 with pleasant melodies, as we mentioned, since this is the reason why according to some philosophers the person is enjoying very much the science of music, as it is written in the book Livenat ha-Sappir.89

This is a fine Pythagorean-Platonic passage, which however has to resort to the Kabbalistic passage in order to make the point of the anamnesis clearer. The Man- tuan preacher mentions Pythagoras several times beforehand in this sermon, as dealing with music.90 It seems, therefore, that Moscato is the first thinker to bring together Angelet’s passage with the conceptual Greco-Hellenistic background that nourished it. He could do so only because of Marsilio Ficino’s vast and influential project of translation that he initiated from Greek to Latin, and indeed Moscato mentions him elsewhere by name.91 However, in the line of many of his Jewish predecessors, he envisioned the origins of music not with Pythagoras, as he was well aware from Hellenistic sources he refers, but with the biblical Tuval Cain, thus working in the vein of a unilinear theory of prisca theologia, giving therefore priority to a biblical figure over Pythagoras.92

6. Modern Reverberations

Many of the texts discussed above have been collected and brought together in modern times, by a variety of authors, as mentioned in footnotes above. This is part of the canonization of the above themes, given the authoritative status of some of the Kabbalists we have surveyed. However, very little original discussion has been added to the substance of the above quotations, which have been adduced in many books in order to demonstrate the high status that melodious

88 BT, Ketubbot, fol. 8a. 89 Nefutzot Yehudah, Sermon I (Venice, 1589), fol. 2b. See also ADLER, HWCM, pp. 221-239. 90 Ibid., fols. 1a, 1b. 91 See his Qol Yehudah (Warsau, 1880), part IV, section 42, part V, section 72. 92 Nefutzot Yehudah, fol. 1a-1b. On the unilinear vision of prisca theologia in Jewish sources see M. IDEL, Prisca Theologia in Marsilio Ficino and in Some Jewish Treatments, in Marsilio Fi- cino, His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. by M.J.B. Allen, V. Rees, Leiden, Brill, 2001, pp. 137-158. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 405 prayer occupies in Judaism. This absence of originality is evident also in 18th and 19th centuries several Hasidic resorts to these texts, despite the great emphasis this movement put on prayer, voice, and music. An interesting reverberation of the theme of pre-natal listening to music and recollection is found in the famous Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov’s poem entitled The Angel that was written in 1831, in the English translation of Yevgheny Bonver: At midnight an angel was crossing the sky, And quietly he sang; The moon and the stars and the concourse of clouds Paid heed to his heavenly song. He sang of the bliss of the innocent souls In heavenly gardens above; Of almighty God he sang out, and his praise Was pure and sincere. He bore in his arms a young soul To our valley of sorrow and tears; The young soul remembered the heavenly song So vivid and yet without words. And long did it struggle on earth, With wondrous desire imbued; But none of the tedious songs of our earth Could rival celestial song.

For the time being I am not aware of affinities between the Russian poet and Kabbalah and I have not explanation for the emergence of the nexus between the two concepts in the poem and in the Kabbalistic sources. Nevertheless, I assume that some form of nexus between the poem and sources discussed above presumably there were. Another interesting avatar of the nexus between the musica mundana and anamnesis is found in the speech of the famous Israeli writer Shmuel Y. Agnon, with the occasion of his reception of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966.93 Inter alia, he told there the following story: I always regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem. In a dream, in a vision of the night, I saw myself standing with my brother-Levites in the Holy Temple, singing with them the songs of David, King of Israel, melodies such as no ear has heard since the day our city was destroyed and its people went into exile. I suspect that the angels in charge of the Palace of Music,94 fearful lest I sing in wakefulness what I had sung in dream, made me forget by day what I had sung at night; for if my brethren, the sons of my people, were to

93 Thanks to Dr. Avital Davidovich-Eshed for drawing my attention to Agnon’s speech. 94 This is the term taken from Tiqqunei Zohar. See above the text of R. Aharon Berakhiah of Modena.

8 406 MOSHE IDEL hear, they would be unable to bear their grief over the happiness they have lost. To console me for having prevented me from singing with my mouth, they enable me to compose songs in writing.95

This nostalgic ‘confession’ is part of a self-identification that Agnon, actually a na- tive of the town Buczacz in the Galician part of Ukraine, cultivated also in other cases in his writings.96 Being of a Levite family, which means that his ancestors in the biblical times were singing in the temple, Agnon developed the above myth about his nocturnal experiences. As he was well acquainted with Kabbalistic literature, which he perused for decades, and being a close friend of Gershom Scholem – he spent months in his apartment that hosted the best library of Kabbalistic books – there is no problem to assume that he knew at least some of the Hebrew sources mentioned above.97 However, he removed the cosmic aspects of the musical treatments in order to emphasize his innovative understanding of celestial music and anamnesis: there is some form of sublime music that is sung during the night in a dream, but forgotten during the day, in order to prevent the anguish of the Jews in exile. The Paradisiacal state in the earlier sources was changed here for the nocturnal, oneiric experience, while the descent of the soul in the body became here the diurnal experience. What was however allowed was writing poetry,98 an act that may convey only a part of the lost splendor of the ancient Temple musical rituals. Here the individual moment found in the texts above has been dislocated with the national or communal one, changing the musica mundana into the Levite songs, which are considered to be lost. This is part of what I called a prisca theologia gravitating around music.99 The restorative propensity of this approach is obvious. Agnon’s speech in Stockholm was, however, not the last manifestation of the above passage; the above passage has been printed in its Hebrew original on the Israeli banknote of fifty Sheqel, whose diffusion is even greater than the speech he gave or the printing of this speech in one of his popular books.

7. The Possible Historical Significance of the Anamnesis-Music Theme

The examination of a minor theme in Kabbalistic texts shows that an ancient Greek theme found its way, via Arabic and Jewish philosophical sources into Kab-

95 Printed in SH. Y. AGNON, Me-‘Atzmi ’el ‘Atzami, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Schocken, 1976, p. 85 (Hebrew). 96 E. SHILOH, The Kabbalah in the Works of S.Y. Agnon, Ramat Gan, Bar Ilan University Press, 2011, pp. 82-83 (Hebrew). 97 See, e.g., the references to ibn Gabbai in SHILOH, ivi, pp. 116, 169, 174, 189, 205, 237- 238, 355, 366. 98 In Hebrew the term Shir means both song and poem. 99 IDEL, Conceptualizations of Music, pp. 161-169. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 407 balah. This is part of a much greater stream of traditions, a great part of it belonging to what I propose to call the Greco-Hellenistic reservoir, which includes not only the classical forms of Aristotelianism and Platonism, but also other components like Pythagoreanism and Stoicism, as well as Hermeticism, magic and astrology.100 It seems that the distribution between the ‘purer’ forms of classical Greek thought, namely that of Plato and Aristotle, and the different amalgams between them and the other forms of less ‘classical’ ways of thought, like in the case of Iamblichus, and their common impact on the nascent Kabbalah, still necessitate further investi- gations. By paying the due attention to the complexities of these various amalgams and to their impact in the Middle Ages on Jewish authors, some other solutions to the problem of the sources of Kabbalah, than those dominant in the theories ema- nating from Gershom Scholem’s school, gravitating mainly around a synthesis between Gnosticism and Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages, may be articulated. Tracing the itinerary of the theme in Kabbalah shows that there is a clear distribution between the theosophical-theurgical schools that adopted the combined theme of musica mundana and anamnesis, on the one hand, and the ecstatic Kab- balah that rejected it implicitly, on the other. Indubitably, these divergent attitudes reflect the dialectical impact of Maimonides’ attitude, and our discussions above should be added to earlier analyses of the emergence of Kabbalah as part of a polemic with Maimonides’s special Neoaristotelian interpretation of Rabbinic esotericism.101 It seems that many of the Greco-Hellenistic elements that found their ways in Judaism before Maimonides, like Hermeticism, magic, astrology or Pythagoreanism, in a variety of Jewish writings like those of Rabbi Moshe ibn Ezra, Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra and Rabbi Yehudah ha-Levi for example, have been used by Kabbalists in building their more comprehensive alternatives to Mai- monides’s theological views, which opposed those themes.102 This antithetic ten- dency is not always expressed in an explicit manner, neither are the non-Jewish sources that have influenced the Kabbalists mentioned. Moreover, traces of antag- onism toward the Great Eagle’s thought can be traced also in the 15th and 16th centuries among Kabbalists.103 The appropriation of a variety of Pythagorean themes, like metempsychosis, the centrality of number speculations, especially the role of the tetraktis, the importance of symbolism, and finally the acceptance of the existence of the music of the spheres, shows therefore that Pythagoreanism,

100 See my analysis of the impact of astrology in Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism, London, New York, Continuum, 2011. 101 See M. IDEL, Maimonides and Kabbalah, in Studies in Maimonides, ed. by I. Twersky, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, pp. 31-64. 102 See also M. KELLNER, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism, Oxford, Portland, Littmann Library, 2006. 103 M. IDEL, Maimonides and Kabbalah, cit., pp. 52-53, and ID., Astral Dreams in R. Yoha- nan Alemanno’s Writings, in Accademia, vol. I, 1999, pp. 126-128 as well as our discussion of ibn Gabbai’s approach above. 408 MOSHE IDEL obscure and diffuse as its traditions were indeed, was nevertheless one of many sources that gave to Kabbalah its special conceptual configuration, as different from the general mode of Maimonidean thought. The synthesis, and to a certain extent eclectic nature of Kabbalah from the conceptual point of view, was not presented as such in the Kabbalistic sources, which preferred to present their lore as an ancient, exclusively Jewish tradition. Thus, a complex mixture of a variety of approaches like theosophy and theurgy, with speculative sources, like Neoplatonism, Hermeticism,104 magic or Pythagor- eanism,105 is a matter that is visible since the 13th century, and was transmitted in an even more eclectic manner in the late 15th and early 16th centuries works of Yohanan Alemanno.106 The affinities between Kabbalistic schools and those types of non-Jewish views, which attracted the attention of some Renaissance figures like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola or Johannes Reuchlin were, therefore, not always an artificial type of comparison between topics that were historically speaking un- related. Both Kabbalists and the Renaissance figures thought that Kabbalah is an ancient theology, and the antiquity of the founding figures of speculative litera- tures like Pythagoreanism or Hermeticism, triggered speculations about influences that happen already in hoary antiquity. However, the historical explanations they offered were faulty, believing as they were on the theory of prisca theologia, one basic theory unifying diverse speculative corpora.107 Thus, we may envision the various forms of theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah as a conglomerate of theories, which combined different aspects of the Greco-Hel-

104 M. IDEL, Hermeticism and Kabbalah, in Hermeticism from Late Antiquity to Humanism, ed. by P. Lucentini, I. Parri and V.P. Compagni, Thournout, Brepols, 2004, pp. 389-408; ID., Hermeticism and Judaism, in Hermeticism and the Renaissance, ed. by I. Merkel and A. Debus, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1988, pp. 59-76. 105 See above note 26. 106 See the pioneering survey of E. ROSENTHAL, Yohanan Alemanno and Occult Science, in Prismata, Naturwissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien, Festschrift fuer Willy Hartner, ed. by Y. Maeyama und W.G. Saltzer, Wiesbaden, 1977, pp. 349-361. 107 See, e.g., D.P. WALKER, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London, Duckworth, 1972); CH. SCHMIDT, Prisca theologia e philosophia perenis: Due temi del rinascimento italiano e loro fortuna, in Il pensiero Italiano del Rinascimento e il tempo Nostra, Firenze, 1970, pp. 21-236; P.O. KRISTELLER, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, ed. by Michael Mooney, New York, Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 196-210; CH. TRINKAUS, In Our Image and Likeness, Humanity and Dignity in Italian Humanistic Thought, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1995, pp. 726-742, 754-756; J. HANKINS, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Leiden, Brill, 1990, pp. 459-463; B. TAMBRUN, Mar- sile Ficin et le Commentaire de Plethon sur les Oracles Chaldaiques, «Accademia», vol. I, 1999, pp. 9-48, CH. WIRSZUBSKI, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism, Cambridge, Mass.-London, Jerusalem, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 198, note 41, F. LELLI, Jews, Hu- manists, and the Reappraisal of Pagan Wisdom Associated with the Ideal of the Dignitas Hominis, in Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. by A.P. Coudert and J. Shoulson, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. 49-70, as well as IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, pp. 164-176 and the bibliography mentioned in the corresponding footnotes. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 409 lenistic conceptual reservoir, mediated mainly by the contributions of Muslim translators and thinkers. If the Florentine speculative Renaissance is a matter of the renascence of mainly Platonic and Hellenistic literary corpora that reached Florence coming from the East, namely from the cultural center of the former By- zantine empire, we may regard many of the Kabbalistic corpora created in Spain, as a conceptually synthetic Renaissance, in part connected to the translations stemming from the Alfonsine renaissance, two centuries before the Florentine Renais- sance, but emerging much earlier in the West, and brought to Florence, and of which were translated into Latin and disseminated together with Ficino’s translations of the Greco-Hellenistic library. This geographical transition from the Iber- ian Peninsula to the Apennine one was mediated, among others, by members of Yohanan Alemanno’s family, which arrived to Italy from Aragon sometime in the first decades of the 15th century. Yohanan’s father, Yitzhaq ben Eliyahu, was most probably a dealer with Hebrew manuscripts, and Alemanno’s own writings and his autograph booknote display his most important sources that are per- meated with speculative material written in the 13th-15th centuries, stemming from Spain.108 Alemanno’s synthetic and sometimes eclectic approach combined a variety of Kabbalistic views with different magical and philosophical approaches, including some Hermetic views 109 though what he could know from the Hermetic or Pythagorean themes from Spanish Jewish heritage was much poorer than the treatises Ficino translated from Greek, and the proportional role the factors played in Spain is different from the more prominent presence in the Italian Re- naissance. This hybridic approach to Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah changes the manner in which the term Kabbalah should be used in the studies of the Renaissance: not just one homogeneous lore was adopted and adapted but a variety of books, themes, and approaches, some of the latter composite, which interacted with other composite writings translated by Ficino. Though Italy was an especially rich and vibrant center of culture, also in other centers of Jewish culture like the Ottoman Empire, Northern Africa or Germany, the synthetic approach should be adopted. This is the reason why the basic assumption of Dame Frances Amelia Yates as to the novelty of the conjugation of Kabbalah on the one hand, and Hermeticism and other Greco-Hellenistic views on the other hand, by the Renaissance Florentine figures, needs therefore some form of qualification: 110 Such a synthesis took place

108 I hope to elaborate on these issues elsewhere. See meanwhile IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, pp. 177-178. 109 See my Golem, Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions On the Artificial Anthropoid, Al- bany, SUNY Press, 1990, pp. 167-175, and Kabbalah in Italy, pp. 281-284. 110 See her The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London, 1979, p. 1, and IDEL, Kabbalah and Hermeticism in Dame Frances A. Yates’s Renaissance, Esoterisme, Gnoses & Ima- ginaire Symbolique: Melanges offerts a Antoine Faivre, ed. by R. Caron, J. Godwin, W.J. Hane- graaf, J-L. Vieillard-Baron, Louvain, Peeters, 2001, pp. 71-90. 410 MOSHE IDEL already in Spain, and it reverberated in the writings of Alemanno, some of which have been written while he was living in Florence. To be sure: I do not assume that Alemanno’s views necessarily influenced Fi- cino’s interest in astro-magical music or his musical practices in a significant manner, if at all, or that Ficino’s translations or practices did influence his views in a decisive manner. For the time being, the available material cannot point in any of the two directions. I rather assume that both authors gave expression to views found in similar sources, which they read in different languages stemming from different lines of transmission. Nevertheless, the geographical and temporal con- comitance reflect some forms of more general phenomenon of osmosis, of mutual interests and sources, shared by the two authors active in Florence.

8. Nostalgia of Paradise and Judaism

We have concentrated above on the topic of a restorative experience pro- voked by listening to harmonious music. In some cases, music is understood as counteracting what has been designated as ‘Nature’, namely the impact of the material aspects of man, by liberating the soul from the body as a prison, this being the meaning of the plaintive songs. In the vein of the Orphic-Pythagorean-Pla- tonic approach, music is temporarily facilitating the retrieval of the lost perfection of the soul before her embodiment. This is a move from the present to the pre- natal past. Such an approach is reminiscent of Mircea Eliade’s claim as to the importance of the nostalgia for the Paradise as essential for religion and especially mysticism and he indeed claimed that he works within the Platonic conceptual framework.111 He also repeatedly and rather sharply distinguished between this re- ligious approach, which was conceived of as being also archaic and cosmic – and in his opinion more authentic – and what he considered to be the Jewish and Christian general attitudes that were imagined to have been concerned much more with uniqueness of events in history, and with the future, and as much less cosmic.112 However, the examination of the material adduced above about anamnesis, shows that though indeed the Jewish texts were influenced by the Greco-Hellenis- tic material, it seems that it is in the framework of this religion that the most explicit elaborations on the retrieval role of music may be discerned. The theory of a pre-natal existence of the soul, that entered Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity from Platonic sources, prepared the ground for the adoption of additional views

111 See M. ELIADE, Myth and Reality, New York, etc., Harper, 1975, pp. 50-53 and his Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, tr. P. Mairet, New York, 1975, pp. 59-72. See also above note 3. 112 See especially his widely read The Myth of Eternal Return. ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 411 that emerged in early Middle Ages in Pagan and Muslim texts, in some the Middle Ages forms of Judaism. Given the fact that Angelet conceived the theory of musical anamnesis relevant and presumably applicable to the Torah, namely the reading of the Torah probably in some form of chanting,113 and to melodious prayer, we may assume that later on in Jewish history this approach was considered to be part of the Jewish rituals, at least as an ideal. The numerous reverberations of his view in recent books dealing with prayer and Hasidism, as pointed out in the footnotes, are a clear proof of this appropriation in most orthodox audiences in Juda- ism. Such an understanding of two important rituals in Kabbalah that were as- sumed to be performed daily, shows that an approach to Judaism as an anamnetic religion was found in several Jewish texts, at least since the Middle Ages. Therefore, too strong phenomenologies of religion are successful generaliza- tions because they drastically simplify the rich material under scrutiny, but hardly help a more serious engagement with specific texts and their history.114 The existence of important future-oriented aspects of Judaism, which can be described as eschatological or messianic, did not preclude the adoption and the dissemination of the restorative approach to personal experiences stemming from the Greco- Hellenistic sources, understood in some cases as the meaning of important reli- gious ways of behavior in Judaism. Moreover, in the vein of the above portrayal of some forms of Judaism as more hybridic, any attempt of distinguishing Judaism as a whole from the archaic, Greek and cosmic religiosity, is precarious.

MOSHE IDEL

ABSTRACT – The present study traces the vestiges of an ancient connection between the Plato’s theory of anamnesis and the Pythagorean view of cosmic music. The earliest evidence to such a nexus is found in a passage of the Neoplatonian and Neoplatonism thinker, Jamblichus. However, the first substantial treatments of such a nexus are found in Arabic literature, which served as a vehicle that trans-

113 The melodies emerging by the loud reading of the Torah in accordance to the special intonations, based on cantillation signs, is a well-known issue that cannot be elaborated here. See, e.g., SCHWARTZ, Music in Jewish Thought, pp. 210-211, and for Kabbalah, e.g., IDEL, «Con- ceptualizations of Music», pp. 168-170, and E. WOLFSON, Biblical Accentuation in a Mystical Key: Kabbalistic Interpretations of the Te‘amim, «Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy», XI, 1988/89, pp. 1-16, XII, 1989/90, pp. 1-13. For the noise in the context of the Torah see M. IDEL, Die laut gelesen Tora, Stimmengemeinschaft in der juedischen Mystik, in Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbar- ung, Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme, ed. by Th. Macho und S. Weigel, Berlin, Aka- demie Verlag, 2002, pp. 19-53, ID., The Voiced Text of the Torah, «Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fu¨ r Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte», LXVIII [Sonderheft], 1994, pp. 145-166; ID., Enchanted Chains, pp. 221-223. 114 For a critique of Eliade’s understanding of Judaism see M. IDEL, Mircea Eliade, From Magic to Myth (New York, Peter Lang, 2014), ch. 4 (Forthcoming). 412 MOSHE IDEL mitted to Kabbalistic treatises since early 14th century, especially in the influential passage of the Spanish Kabbalist Rabbi Joseph Angelet, found in his Livenat ha- Sappir. Several Kabbalists reverberated his view as to music as triggering the memory of the music heard by the soul before the descent in this world. Some other Kabbalists in the 16th and 17th centuries, include treatments of the same nexus, but independent of Angelet’s book. In modern times, the musical anamnesis is evident in a poem of Lermontov and in the Nobel Prize speech of the Israeli writer Shmuel Y. Agnon. CITTA` DI CASTELLO . PG FINITO DI STAMPARE NEL MESE DI NOVEMBRE 2013

Direttore Responsabile: MARIO ROSA - Autorizzazione del Tribunale di Firenze n. 1705 dell’8 luglio 1965

Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa

diretta da

GIORGIO CRACCO - GILBERT DAGRON - CARLO OSSOLA FABRIZIO A. PENNACCHIETTI - MARIO ROSA - BRIAN STOCK

Periodico quadrimestrale redatto presso l’Universita` degli Studi di Torino

Direzione Cesare Alzati, Giorgio Cracco, Gilbert Dagron, Francisco Jarauta, Carlo Ossola, Benedetta Papa´sogli, Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, Daniela Rando, Mario Rosa, Maddalena Scopello, Brian Stock

Italia: E 93,00 . Foreign E 126,00

Pubblicato nel mese di novembre 2013