How did Judaism’s mystical tradition of kabbalah transcend its medieval provenience and affirm its religious legitimacy in the modern era? How did it transition from being the preserve of a select but significant few to becoming accessible to nonelites? New monographs by Andrea Gondos (Freie Universität Berlin) and Ira Robinson (Concordia University), both associated with the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies in Montreal, pledge to shed light on kabbalah’s stamina.
In Kabbalah in Print, Gondos dilates on the professional middlemen – grammarians, preachers, scribes, and teachers – who mediated between the mystics and the masses and “continued to fill an educational function within society but in contrast to the elites… turned to imparting more the practical and less the theoretical dimensions of knowledge.”
She avers that “secondary elites emerge as important intermediaries and negotiators between elite and popular culture” and terms this mediating tier “a new stratum of cultural agents.” With the emergence of Gutenberg’s mechanical movable-type printing press by the mid-15th century, this cadre of learned initiates “was poised to gain considerable social prestige and economic benefit from the diffusion of printed books and from the accessibility of certain areas of knowledge. For them, books constituted a cultural product that made independent learning suddenly possible and […] broadened the intellectual horizons of the laity.”
Kabbalah’s magnum opus, the Zohar, was first printed in Italy (Cremona, 1558; Mantua, 1558-1560) then in Greece (Salonika, 1597) in discrepant editions. Yet divulgation of esoterica among the vulgus cannot account by itself for the rise of kabbalah, as Gondos rightly notes: “Exposure, however, did not guarantee comprehension. Thus, within a few decades after the Zohar’s appearance in print, demand for abridgements, study aids, and anthologies provoked creative literary responses that aimed to ease both the linguistic and the theological complexities of these texts.”
Through the lens of the salient tradent Yissakhar Baer of Prague (c. 1580–1629), whose four kabbalistic works – Pithei Yah (God’s Portals), Yeish Sakhar (There Is Reward), Mekor Hokhmah (Source of Wisdom), and Yodei Binah (Those of Understanding) – were printed in rapid succession over a two-year period, the authoress argues that kabbalistic study guides such as Baer’s constituted a new literary corpus proffering innovation, not originality, “to create better organizational structures for the processing of information in Kabbalistic works that had already appeared in print. It is not accidental that several study guides are printed within a century following the first major publishing wave of kabbalistic texts as each author vied and competed for presenting a superior product to the interested reader.”
Gondos asserts that the several methods applied for “the management and presentation of esoteric content” served to distinguish study guides, collectively expedited the promulgation and popularity of kabbalah, and affirmed the sanctity of the Zohar.
Still, the recondite conceptualization of the 10 divine emanations (sefirot), fundamental to the Zoharic Weltanschauung, was adjudged excessively cryptic and complicated for laypersons. “One way of coping with the Zohar’s literary and semantic complexities was to underscore the hermeneutically layered style of the narrative and direct the interpretive focus on the plain meaning (peshat) while bypassing the more complex symbolic, and often sefirotic, layers of the work.”
Counterintuitively, understanding is no sine qua non concerning matters mystical; kabbalah study has ever featured a tension between concealing and revealing, and “while incomplete comprehension and reception of a text poses certain limitations on its transmission, by demarcating between the exoteric and more esoteric strata, learning aids represent powerful new instruments in reshaping Jewish knowledge and identity. At the same time, the selective communication of esoteric content […] afforded authors a degree of self-censorship as they engaged in controlled revelation of divine mysteries.”
A central tactic Baer employed to facilitate and legitimate kabbalah study was to present the halakhic portions of the Zohar and his construals thereof using the paradigmatic arrangement of Jacob ben Asher’s medieval halakhic code Arba’ah Turim, whose quadripartite division (Orah Hayyim, Yoreh De’ah, Even HaEzer, Hoshen Mishpat) had meanwhile been iterated by Joseph Karo in both his commentary Beit Yosef and his code Shulhan Arukh. By adopting this codificatory framework, Gondos posits, Baer presented kabbalistic inquiry “as equal in authority and stature to halakhah.”
Near the end of her study, Gondos foregrounds (Yehudah) Yudel Rosenberg (1859–1935) as “an important mediator of Yissakhar Baer in the twentieth century” who shared his predecessor’s vision “to popularize the Zohar with the aim of refocusing Judaism on its spiritual dimensions and away from the tide of secularism, while at the same time hastening the final redemption and the coming of the Messiah.” Rosenberg considered Baer a “great man” and “our teacher”, and his longstanding endeavor to re-present the Zohar to the Jewish laity of his generation was by his own admission, as Gondos states, “greatly indebted to the pioneering works of Yissakhar Baer that anticipated his own by three centuries.”
PART BIOGRAPHY, part oeuvre survey, A Kabbalist in Montreal limns the mystical and practical aspects of a fascinating Hasidic sage physically transplanted from eastern Europe into the New World while spiritually aspiring after supernal planes.
Robinson’s accessible account depicts the formidable Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg as an ambitious but embattled communal leader keen to establish himself as a rabbinical authority and hopeful for opportunities to secure a more stable professional and financial situation.
Despite establishing himself as a “halakhic authority immersed in the problems of the communal rabbinate in North America”, Rosenberg concurrently embarked upon a broader literary career and his popular works won him his greatest fame. His influential book of legends regarding Rabbi Judah Loew ben Betzalel of Prague and his kabbalistically-fashioned automaton, Niflaot Maharal MiPrague Im HaGolem, succeeded partly owing to the pseudepigraphic ruse that it was a print edition of a 16th century manuscript indited by Loew’s son-in-law Yitzhak Kohen and preserved in the fictive Imperial Library of Metz: “It was to his advantage to present this book... as the writing of a major luminary of the Jewish past. This would likely increase sales.” As an imaginative master, Rosenberg granted himself artistic license since he “undoubtedly felt empowered to make changes and additions to existing stories and even to invent stories for the sake of inspiring his readers.”
Per Robinson, Rosenberg determined to offer the public “new-fangled stories purveying the traditional message, thus creating an opposition to modern Yiddish and Hebrew literatures, whose general idea was the diminished relevance of the Jewish tradition in the present day.” While Rosenberg may well have intended to “imitate contemporary works of Yiddish fiction”, Robinson elides the more obvious model of Moses de León and the Zohar for his kabbalistic protagonist, who in the author’s view served as an Orthodox tradent “embodying the Judaic heritage and illuminating the Jewish collective memory from his perspective. His literary work would thus constitute an alternative to modern fiction aimed at a traditional audience.”
But it was Rosenberg’s translation (from Aramaic to Hebrew), recension, and redaction of the Zohar – Seifer Zohar Torah, with its succinct commentary Ziv HaZohar – that proved his masterwork and the centerpiece of his lifework: Robinson asseverates that Rosenberg anticipated “the imminent advent of the messiah and the messianic age” and deemed it a “redemptive and revolutionary task” to create “a version of the Zohar that would be accessible to ordinary Jews”. Indeed, Rosenberg “boldly stated that nothing less than the ultimate salvation of the Jewish people was at stake in the publication of his book.”
As for the propriety of his enterprise, “Rosenberg was greatly encouraged by his discovery of an earlier kabbalist, whom he considered a model. … Yissakhar Baer [who] published a partial Hebrew translation of the Zohar, accompanied by approbations by some of the leading rabbinical authorities of [the early 17th century]. This provided a valuable precedent for Yudel Rosenberg to deal with an Orthodox Jewish society that revered precedent.”
And like Baer, Rosenberg tactically revised the Zohar’s original format, in this case “by rearranging the passages of the Zohar to form a sequential commentary on the Biblical verses.”
In both his scholarly and popular works, Rosenberg oppugned rampant secularism, wielding as his weapon his pen. His kabbalistic compositions provided him a respite from conflictual communal affairs and continual financial stresses, and a means of reaching fellow Jews embedded in modernity yet intuiting that there is more to this world than what science or reason can ever explain.
Much as Gondos portrays Baer as consequential in the preservation and perpetuation of kabbalah in the early modern period, Robinson credits Rosenberg with a substantive share in kabbalah’s “veritable renaissance” in the 21st century.
Readers interested in kabbalah or in the popularization of notions and narratives will welcome these informative and insightful new works.