Radical Self-Flagellation in sixteenth-century Safed: Fact or Fiction?

• In Event: Pneumatic and Bodily Experiences in Jewish Mysticism

Abstract

One of the commonly accepted claims in scholarship of Jewish mysticism is that the kabbalists of sixteenth-century Safed adopted radical forms of bodily castigations from the writings of the medieval German Rhineland pietists (Ḥasidei Ashkenaz), using them as a as a tool of penance (teshuvah). Consequently, they portrayed the kabbalists of Safed as heroic ascetics who, on a daily basis, afflicted themselves with a great variety of self-flagellations.
In my presentation, I shall show how the scholarly notion of the Safedian kabbalists’ alleged radical asceticism is almost entirely drawn from hagiography or shevaḥim-literature. The use of these accounts to reconstruct the everyday conduct of these mystics is problematic for various reasons: Due to the little biographical data available on the central figures of Safed, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the historical value and myth-making in these oftentimes fantastical stories that praise the lives and deeds of exceptional religious figures. Further, the two major works that inform us about the religious personalities of sixteenth-century Safed – Shivḥei ha-Ari and Toledot ha-Ari – are both products of the seventeenth century that passed through a long and complex editorial process. Finally, individuals, who never had personal contact to the main protagonists of their stories, authored these accounts.
Against this backdrop, I assume that the notion of radical ascetic conduct of the Safedian mystics should be regarded a hyperbole produced by Eastern European Jews who travelled to Safed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and who, based on second-hand reports, constructed a prototype of the ‘atoning pietist’. Ultimately, they widely disseminated their ideal of repentance via the epistles sent to their communities in Eastern Europe.

author

• Patrick Benjamin Koch, University of Hamburg, Germany