THE ANCIENT HEIKHALOT MYSTICAL TEXTS IN THE MIDDLE AGES: TRADITION, SOURCE, INSPIRATION

JOSEPH DAN HEBREW UNIVERSITY,

The relationship between a scholar and the subject he studies need not be one of conflict. Investigating the works of Dante or Shakespeare, Augustine or Maimonides, does not turn the scholar into an opponent of these eminent authors. Writers, with few exceptions, write in order to communicate and be understood; anyone trying to understand them conforms to the basic intention of the text which he analyses. The people who really wanted to keep a secret usually did not write. In the immortal words of Rabbi Isaac the Blind's epistle to his disciples in Gerona, 1 whom he reproved for writing and publishing qabbalistic secrets, afi3)fi IDS PIN ib l»N. The very act of writing assumes the existence of a reader, and therefore, in most cases, the text, on several levels, welcomes the reader. This is also the case with medieval Jewish mysticism: on the whole, even the most difficult works that the scholar has to read were intended to reveal rather than to hide; when trying to understand them, the scholar conforms to the demands of the text. In one aspect, however, the scholar studying Jewish medieval mysticism is in constant conflict with his texts: he or she assumes that they are medieval; they claim to be eternal.2 Historical research demands dating; eternity cannot be segmented and confined to centuries and decades. The scholar treats the Qabbalah as a medieval phenomenon, beginning in the last decades of the twelfth century. The Qabbalists, by their very adoption of this appellation, claim to be the guardians of a tradition which was revealed to

1 The letter was first published by in Sefer Bialik (Tel Aviv, 1934), 141-62, and see his analysis in The origins of the , tr. by A. Arkush, ed. R.I. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press and the Jewish Publication Society, 1986), 384. This letter declared Qabbalah esoteric, and as a result the Gerona Qabbalists stopped publishing qabbalistic books and turned, instead, to traditional ethical treatises. See my discussion in Jewish mysticism and Jewish ethics (Seattle and London: Washington University Press, 1987), ch. 2; and my study in the S. Pines Festschrift, vol. 1 (= Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, 7), (Jerusalem, 1988), 239-64. 1 This problem was raised by me in a discussion of the nature of Lurianic Qabbalah: see R. Elior and Y. Liebes (eds), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the History of Jewish Mysticism: Safed and Lurianic Kabbalah (= Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, 10), Gcrusalem, 1992), 1-8. 84 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY

Moses on Mount Sinai, after having been a part of Divine Wisdom in its timeless existence. When a scholar tries to date an idea, a term or even a particular sentence, he puts himself in opposition to the Qabbalists' most important claim, that they represent eternal truth. This is why it is so easy to distinguish between a scholar and a Qabbalist, between a ipm and a bnptt: the Qabbalist will be constantly trying to demonstrate how his statements reflect wisdom found, for instance, in talmudic sayings; the scholar will insist on trying to find the specifically medieval originality in the same spiritual message. Ultimately, this conflict is centered around the question of the individuality of the mystic. While the scholar is trying to show in what way this particular mystic is different from everyone else, what ideas, symbols and modes of expression were originated by him which make him stand out among his predecessors and contemporaries, the mystic himself will claim that he does not possess any kind of individuality, that he is but a vehicle for the transmission of eternal traditions and the revelation of eternal truth, without adding to them or changing them in any way. For the medieval Jewish mystic, personality and individuality are the opposite of the Truth; anything which is new cannot be true, because Truth cannot but be shared with Abraham and Solomon, Rabbi Aqiba and Maimonides. If the scholar succumbs and accepts these claims, and interprets either Rabbi Aqiba or Maimonides as Qabbalists, he forsakes his historical approach (eternity does not have a history). And worse: he denies the existence of individual creativity, and regards every mystic as a meaningless instrument for the transmission of uniform tradition. The impact of the qabbalistic (and Ashkenazi Hasidic) insistence on the antiquity and eternity of their teachings3 is one of the most difficult obstacles facing the scholar when trying to understand every individual medieval mystic as a unique phenomenon. He or she is surrounded by the legends and traditions which these mystics used in order to demonstrate the timelessness of their mystical knowledge. When assessing the countless claims by Rabbi Isaac Ha-Kohen of Castile,4 or the lyyun circle of

3 A brief description of the qabbalistic and Ashkenazi Hasidic legends, and the use of pseudepigraphy to assert the antiquity of esoteric lore, is to be found in J. Dan, 'Das Entstehen der jiidischen Mystik im mittelalterlichen Deutschland', in K.E. Grozinger (ed.), Judentum im deutschen Sprachraum (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 117-72. 4 Rabbi Isaac probably provides the most important and instructive example of this phenomenon in the history of the study of Qabbalah. Scholem published Rabbi Isaac's works early on in the process of his study of the Qabbalah, in Madaei ha-yahadut, vol. 2, 1927, 165-293. At that time the medieval nature of the Qabbalah was not completely clear to him; only a year earlier he had published (Madaei ha-yahadut, vol. 1, 1926, 16-29) the lecture he gave at the opening of the Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem on the date of the authorship of the , in which he denied the possibility that that central work was wholly