'To Reveal or Not to Reveal:' Transmission Models of Kabbalah in Early Modernity

• In Event: Kabbalah and Knowledge Circulation in Early Modern East-Central Europe

Abstract

In this paper I will analyze and expose the literary strategies deployed in the management of kabbalistic knowledge in Jewish mystical anthologies with a focus on works published in the early modern period. In particular, my presentation will discuss two major anthological approaches – the expansive and the reductive models – that kabbalists used to re-present older textual material and ideas. I argue that the expansive model targeted an elite readership, who were already proficient in kabbalistic texts, language, and symbolism while the reductive approach served to render kabbalistic idea and works more accessible and facilitate their comprehension by readers who had little or no knowledge of this lore. I will use Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim to illustrate the expansive strategy, while Yisskahar Baer’s Meqor Hokhmah will serve to expose the modes of the reductive model.
Two basic approaches can be distinguished with regard to an author’s anthological objective: the expansive-syncretistic and the reductionist-simplifying. The first allows a compiler to take excerpted sections as the base text and assemble around it additional primary sources or explanatory material in an effort to synthesize diverse schools of thought and variant homiletic material that readers may have encountered in other mystical or rabbinic works. Menahem Recanati’s Commentary on the Torah is a fine example of this tendency as he engages copious kabbalistic and midrashic sources, each of which presents an alternate mystical or mythic reading of the original text, to create a multifaceted and an elaborately textured exegetical composition.
The second strategy, reductive in focus, was adopted not exclusively but frequently by secondary elites, who saw the Zohar as an already difficult and complex text not only from the linguistic but also from the theosophical point of view, and therefore sought strategies to simplify, digest, and reorganize its content. Yissakhar Baer’s Meqor Hokhmah (1609) fits into this model. His aim is to zoom in and extract a zoharic unit that offers a concise, uncomplicated, often ethically motivated reading of Scripture. Thus the methods that informed each author’s independent style of re-presenting the Zohar were reflective of the readership they wished to target yet still working within the general intellectual framework of legitimating and promoting the study of Kabbalah.

Author

• Andrea Gondos, Freie Universitaet Berlin