Woman as Theurgical Agent: On the Gendered Distribution of Legal Subjectivity in Medieval Kabbalah

• In Event: Competing Voices and Textual Traditions in Thirteenth Century Kabbalah

Abstract

Scholars have long appreciated how the diffusion of early kabbalistic conceptions of Jewish observance depended upon the development of a discourse articulating a new theurgical approach to the commandments. Castilian kabbalists of the thirteenth century, such as Moses de León and Joseph of Hamadan, composed major works dedicated to defining and refining this discourse. With respect to the “normative mysticism” espoused by said authors, scholarship has generally supported the conclusion that their discourse failed to recognize woman as mystical agents. My paper will discuss a heretofore unknown textual fragment preserved in a Paris manuscript—likely composed by a kabbalist writing in northern Iberia in the late 13th century—which demonstrates that the premise of male exclusivity among kabbalists, a premise which has informed scholarship since Scholem, is by no means absolute. The short composition offers kabbalistic rationales for the three positive commandments in which women are traditionally obligated: ḥallah, niddah, and hadlaqat ha-ner. In so doing, the text explicitly endorses the mystical efficacy of the female legal subjects who perform these commandments. After establishing the importance of this text for reframing scholarly discussions of female agency in medieval kabbalah, the paper will turn to familiar passages from the zoharic anthology which, when reread with a hermeneutic attuned to the presumably “outside” voice of this fragment, yield a surprisingly similar perspective. The paper ultimately enjoins students of these texts to move beyond the old question of whether or not women were kabbalists to a new inquiry concerning the situation of women within the gendered distribution of theurgical agency.

Author

• Jeremy Phillip Brown, McGill University