As we have just seen, some modern scholars assumed the ubiquity of the symbolic mode of expression in Kabbalah as a whole, even portraying it as completely different from allegorical types of expression, which they regarded as representative of Jewish philosophical literature. Indeed, interpretive allegory, or allegorization, is one of the outstanding spiritual imports into the exegetical arsenal of Jewish hermeneutics. Despite Philo of Alexandria’s great contributions to the emergence and development of allegorical exegesis in early Christianity and, to a lesser extent, to allegory in Western medieval exegesis, his exegetical approach to the Bible was completely rejected in the rabbinic forms of exegesis as represented by the classical midrashim and in talmudic treatises. It was a millennium after Philo’s death before the next significant instance of interpretive allegory in Judaism was discernible, but then it was mediated by the renascence of Greek philosophies in the Arabic Middle Ages, and did not represent a direct and substantial influence of Philonic exegesis. This means that the medieval philosophers faced a situation similar to Philo’s: they had access to some forms of Greek corpora—now in Arabic translations—and they appropriated them in order to ascribe a philosophical allegorical meaning to the sacred scriptures. Thus, medieval Jewish philosophy may be described as basically a Jewish-Greek amalgam, which had an impact on some aspects of Kabbalistic exegesis and metaphysics.
With the emergence in the mid-eleventh century of formative influences of Neoplatonic philosophy in Shlomo ibn Gabirol, known in the scholastic literature as Avicebron, we find explicit vestiges of such allegorical interpretations, which apparently were much more numerous than the scant extant material testifies. Although only few examples of an allegorical approach to the Bible have survived from his writings, and the precise extent of his allegorical exegesis is unclear, there can be no doubt that the new rapprochement between Greek thought and the sacred scriptures took a form that is quite reminiscent, though probably independent, of the earlier ancient encounter as represented by Philo’s allegoresis. However, even in ibn Gabirol’s allegorical interpretations, which were quoted in an influential work, R. Abraham ibn Ezra’s Commentary on Torah, the impact was marginal.
It is only with the wholesale absorption of Aristotelian terminology at the end of the twelfth century and its exposition in what became the classic of Jewish philosophy, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, that allegorization, or the allegorical mode of interpretation, became part of a more accepted approach to the Jewish canonic writings.1 To be sure, the Aristotelian allegories, even when espoused by an accomplished and authoritative Jewish master like Maimonides, did not pass without strong resistance and sometimes sharp polemics from some Jewish elites. An intercorporal exegesis, as I defined this approach in Chapter 9, invited the dominant role for terms and concepts previously unknown in classical Jewish texts and conceptually different from the worldview of rabbinic thinkers. Indeed, fiery debates, which continued for centuries, accompanied the penetration of Aristotelian-oriented exegesis, and such a critical attitude toward it may still be discerned late in the eighteenth century among the opponents of Hasidism. In between, however, a series of appropriations of allegorical interpretations can be found not only among the followers of Maimonides, such as the various authors from the ibn Tibbon family, but also in other circles, including some of the more conservative ones, in the camp of Kabbalists.
The main example is Abraham Abulafia’s allegorical exegesis. He was not, however, an exceptional voice in this camp: some of the treatments of R. Azriel of Gerona, many of R. Isaac ibn Latif’s biblical interpretations, some of the early writings of R. Moshe de Leon and Joseph Gikatilla, the last three of them Abula-fia’s contemporaries, display strong affinities to Maimonidean allegorizations of the biblical texts. This is also true of one of the most influential Kabbalistic commentators, R. Bahya ben Asher, and of the Commentary on the Talmudic ’Aggadot by ben Asher’s master, R. Shlomo ibn Adret (known by the acronym Rashba). The extent of the influence of allegorical exegesis in Kabbalah still awaits close inspection. Such an examination should be quite fascinating, as it will have to take into consideration the manner in which this exegetical device has been integrated within the more complex hermeneutical system of the Kabbalists. While in general the medieval philosophers had to work with a twofold method of exegesis based on the plain sense and the allegorical sense, the latter conceived of as esoteric, for many Kabbalists the philosophical allegory was already a cultural and spiritual fact, and they had to integrate it within much more complex systems that included additional exegetical dimensions.2
As a rule, Kabbalistic exegesis is much more complex than the regular philosophical exegesis. Whereas the latter was almost exclusively indifferent or even critical toward the Kabbalistic methods, the former was often quite inclusive, as we shall see in the next chapter. This inclusive propensity is more evident when we compare it to the much more exclusivistic attitude of rabbinic authors since the Middle Ages, who would reject both the allegorical and the symbolic-Kabbalistic types of exegesis. What was the reason for the indifference and even rejection or sharp criticism of allegory by some Jewish thinkers (including Kabbalists), on the one hand, and its later integration, on the other? Any monolithic answer would be a simplification if not a blatant distortion. In dealing with a millennium and a half of Jewish exegesis, it would be dangerous to reduce the reticence of hundreds of writers to one major motive. Nevertheless, as concerns allegory, one such observation presents itself: if the etymology of allegory suggests the telling of two stories through one medium, with respect to rabbanism allegory would mean the creation of a universe of discourse that parallels and so competes with the sacred scriptures. The plain sense would have to compete with the other narrative, whose conceptual dimensions stem from a universe of discourse imported from outside, emphasizing the importance of the abstract, cerebral, natural, or orderly in lieu of the much more concrete, imaginative, irregular, and voluntaristic approach found in the biblical texts. As I shall attempt to show, even the types of esotericism informing the two modes of writing were different: they were much more linguocentric in the case of Judaism, where the secrets are often related to texts (sitrei torah), whereas in the Greek form of Platonic esotericism, which was the most influential form in the West, the secrets were much more political than scriptural.
Generations of encounters between Jewish thinkers and alien forms of discourse, whose eidetic structures were different from the biblical and midrashic ones, convinced many Jewish thinkers that one truth is, or at least should be, shared by what has been conceived by them as the various authoritative corpora.3 Interpretive allegory was conceived of as the main means of illuminating this allegedly shared conceptual universe, and there is no doubt that this form of allegory, as cultivated in the Jewish philosophical literature, was an important agent for introducing into Judaism a more universalist type of discourse. I use the term universalist because the Greek manner of reasoning was accepted by a much greater intellectual audience as the higher view of discourse, as the pagan, Muslim, and Christian writings show. The allos, or “other,” has been Judaized, just as Jewish elements have been allegorized. Any fundamental spiritual enterprise has its price, however; it enriches but also excites fears and implies dangers. There is much of reductionism in universalism, as the latter is but an expression of a majority or more powerful culture. Allegory can be seen as a powerful agent of acculturation, but just as often it is an agent of cultural assimilation. The particularistic trends, so conspicuous in Jewish literature, have been instrumental in this rejection of the allegorical forms of discourse.
Let me formulate those cultural and religious fears in the Jewish camp in more hermeneutical terms. Interpretive allegories emerged in the Hellenistic period when attempts were made to interpret the Homeric literature in terms of speculative systems that had little in common with the mythology described by Greek poets. The emergence of the allos within Greek society—the independent, individualistic, even elitist thinkers who sometimes confronted the common religious beliefs, sometimes simply followed another form of intellectual logic based on what was called nature—invited moments of reconciliation between the public domains of agreed-upon myths and the elitist attainments. The more linguistic realms of the mythos, with greater national or local specificities expressed in not only the written but also the oral repetitive culture, encountered spiritual systems, namely systems created and sustained by the logos, the mental or cerebral forms of activity. The allegory was indeed the claim that the accepted myths of the Greek societies are but other formulations of the philosophical truths elaborated by the elite. Although this is an “elevation” of the mythos to the degree where it becomes a trader of an inherent logos, allegory is a violent invasion of one form of discourse into another, namely the imposition of the logocentric onto the linguocentric. The inner problematics, tensions, discrepancies, and idiosyncrasies naturally found in the revered texts, traditions, beliefs, or imaginations have been not only enriched by allegorical interpretations but also, at the same time, “solved,” which in fact means simplified. The linguistic incoherence of the imaginative has been trapped in much more logocentric webs of philosophical coherences. It seems that the official representatives of Greek myths and archaic religions, if there were such authoritative exponents in the early Hellenistic period, were weak or indifferent enough not to protest against the elevation of their mythology to the rank of a hidden philosophy of nature, or perhaps were satisfied by such a development.
The move of the sacred book to the center of Jewish religion during the period of the Second Temple brought to the forefront a new class of intellectuals, the soferim, who—together with the later Pharisees, who generated the rabbinic elite—were bibliocentric and to a certain degree linguocentric elites.4 Their intellectual project was much more inclined toward public disclosure than toward discovery. The book under their scrutiny was written in a language partaken of by people, whereas the Hellenistic philosophers employed much more a silent language of nature or a complex philosophical text studied by the very few elite. The project of the rabbinic elites was to transform the Bible into a shared, founding, formative, or inspiring source that would amplify the richness of the divine text either by expanding on its (allegedly implicit) meanings through various forms of commentary or by consciously preserving different and sometimes diverging and conflicting interpretations as equally relevant and worthy of study. It is random expansion rather than deliberate simplification, pluralism rather than coherence, that marked the main effort of the rabbis in the exegesis found in the midrashic and talmudic literatures. It should be stressed that this was a very qualified and restricted expansion, a calculated and controlled pluralism, but nevertheless the main effort was toward collective interpretations that amplified the mythical elements in the Bible rather than reducing them so as to imply the existence of a coherent speculative system.
One of the elements that seem to be crucial for the floruit of the multiplicity of interpretations was to leave outside the discussions the more general ontic, metaphysical, psychological, and naturalistic presuppositions that presumably nourished the rabbis’ interpretive discourses, and to present the results as if they emanated directly from the written source or oral traditions. Rabbinic Judaism did not develop, apparently as a result of a deliberate choice of literary genres, any elaborate theologies, philosophies, astronomies, physics, magic, alchemies, or psychologies. This does not mean that rabbis were not aware of alien forms of thought or that they did not share some of them; they may even have been inspired by them when operating within the linguistic exegetical realm.5 But the religious importance of the allos was explicitly denied or derided or, in other cases, silently integrated, so that its independent status was regarded as irrelevant for the exe-getical project. The absence of significant philosophical and astronomical terminologies in the talmudic-midrashic literature is one of the outstanding pieces of evidence for the marginalization of the structures of thought that were potentially competing with the rabbinic literature.
The case is quite different, however, when considering the vast speculative projects of Philo or the more modest ones of ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, or Leone Ebreo, who in their deep differences (apparently not incidental) from the rabbinic form of discourse were phenomena of the Diaspora, both in the adoption of speculative systems and in the choice of the language in which to compose their allegorical writings. Here I would like to examine one case of the integration of allegoresis within the hermeneutics of a specific Kabbalistic school, the ecstatic one, and point out the problematics created by attempts to offer a synthesis of an allegorical and a Kabbalistic approach. The main topic in this instance consists in linguistic units, the divine names, of utmost importance, or at least of formal status, in Jewish literature. Being ways to designate the deity, the linguistic units that are considered to be divine names represent the more sensitive part of the sacred language, as is evident from the many interdictions related to their performance, in both written and oral forms, in the regulations found in the rabbinic literature. My intention is to examine a few Kabbalistic approaches to the status of the divine names as representing either the most important points of resistance of the scriptural in the face of the allegorical or their allegorization by Kabbalists.
Discussions about various divine names permeate most of the literature of Jewish mysticism. The immense literary corpus, and even the considerable bibliography, have yet to be organized in a manner that would facilitate a comprehensive typology of the use of the divine names. Insofar as the mystical literature since the Middle Ages is concerned, I would suggest a fivefold distinction between the different ways Jewish mystics used the divine names:6
(1) The divine names were taken to be important components of techniques to achieve mystical experiences, as is the case in late-twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century Hasidei Ashkenaz, Abraham Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah and its various repercussions, until Polish Hasidism.7
(2) The divine names were taken to be an indispensable part of theurgical operations, especially those performed during prayer. By theurgical I mean recourse to techniques, most of them nomian, in order to have an impact on the relations between the divine powers, the sefirot. This view is found from the very beginning of Kabbalah and has reverberated in a long series of discussions.8
(3) Jewish magic in general, and Kabbalistic magic in particular, have resorted to the divine names as powerful and paramount linguistic units. Incantations, amulets, and talismans are often replete with words that are taken to be divine names, even when they are much closer to nomina barbara.9
(4) The divine names were understood as pointing to the structure of the universe, as a type of scientific formula.10
(5) The resort to the concept of divine names is evident in a great variety of hermeneutical approaches from the ancient Heikhalot literature up to eighteenth-century Polish Hasidism. The biblical text has been understood as consisting of a texture different from that engaged in the traditional reading of the canonic text.11 An understanding of the new structure of the biblical text as consisting of divine names was thought to reveal an esoteric layer of the scriptures, which retrieves the various paranormal powers inherent in it: the technical-mystical, the theurgical-symbolical, and the magical.
The first four categories of understanding and using the divine names reflect, in my opinion, a deeper differentiation in the spiritual concerns of Kabbalists and Hasidic masters. I have proposed in the introduction to distinguish between three models corresponding to the first three categories: the ecstatic, the theosophical-theurgical, and the magical, respectively. I hope to elaborate on the relevance of this theory of models for understanding the ecstatic Kabbalists’ attitude toward divine names. In the limited framework of this chapter, however, I would like to concentrate on some aspects of the history of the later hermeneutical attitude toward the biblical text as possessing this particular quality, that is, of consisting of a series of divine names. The explication of the hermeneutical principles that were inspired by this view may help us understand some important issues related to the development of Kabbalah as a much more diversified mode of thinking. An additional reason for focusing on this aspect is that this approach has been understood in modern scholarship as quintessentially reflecting the entire Kabbalistic attitude toward language.
The assumption that powerful names emerge from the verses of the Torah is expressed in Malayan ha-Hokhmah by the verb yotze’im, which literally means “go out.” This means, in the above context, that a certain linguistic exegetical technique is able to extract from a regular verse something that is found in it. A similar view appears in a passage of Midrash Konen, where God is described as opening the Torah and taking out three names from it.12 The opening of the Torah and the taking out of names seem to reflect a certain understanding of the emergence of the names from the text, which is now envisioned as a box where the names are deposited and kept secret. This implies another type of imaginary, as opposed to that of Ma’ayan ha-Hokhmah, where the secrets, though also closely related to the text of the Torah, are disclosed by an external agent which teaches Moses where in the Bible to find the verse that generates the name pertinent for curing some malady or remedying a certain problem. In Midrash Konen, however, the Torah is conceived of as preexisting creation and as the source of the creative processes, by means of three divine names found in it. Let me call this approach intratextual, meaning that the additional layer of understanding some parts of the Torah is generated not by the introduction of an elaborate nomenclature whose conceptualization is extraneous to the interpreted text—an approach I shall call extra-textual—but by a rearrangement of the linguistic units that constitute the interpreted text. The above cases are instances where the process of arcanization does not involve importing concepts that are linguistically extraneous to the text, as the allegorical and the symbolic forms of interpretation do, but entails rearranging the linguistic units that constitute the canonical text.
Already among the Jewish Rhenish pietistic masters, the so-called Hasidei Ash-kenaz, there was a tradition and practice related to the belief that the Torah is a continuum of divine names.13 In some instances such a view underlies the concepts of certain halakhic texts.14 In Nahmanides’ hands there were two different traditions regarding the Torah and the divine names included therein: one stemming from Sefer Shimmushei Torah, the other circulating already at the beginning of the thirteenth century in some circles of Jewish writers in Europe but still not attested in a book that would carefully explicate its significance. According to one of Nahmanides’ expressions of the two traditions:
The entire Torah is replete with the names of the Holy One, blessed be He, and in each and every pericope there is the name by which a certain thing has been formed or made or sustained by it. And in this domain there is a book called Shimmushei Torah, and it explicates in connection with the pericopes their [magical] use and the name that emerges from it and how it emerges and how to use it [the pericope]. But15 there is a [secret] tradition to the effect that the names written in that book are much more numerous than those [explicitly] written in it, because the Torah, from bereshit to le-’einei kol yisra’el, is entirely names, for example, berosh yitbara’ ’elohim, and others similar to it … and from it Moses, our master, blessed be his memory, knew whatever a creature can know and understand.16
Nahmanides was therefore aware of the existence of two somewhat different traditions: one, still extant in Sefer Shimmushei Torah, which presents a limited number of magical names, and another, claiming the existence in ancient times of reading of the entire text of the Pentateuch, from the first to the last words, as a series of divine names. While the former tradition is concerned more with angelic names, the tradition mentioned in the context of the continuum was dealing, according to Nahmanides, with divine names, but not angelic ones. It should be emphasized that Nahmanides does not oppose or criticize the magical aspects of the Torah, but he believes that they indeed were known by Moses and, according to the continuation of this passage, were known and practiced by the “pious men of [former] generations.”17
The passage that most influenced numerous Kabbalists in their concept of the Torah as a continuum of divine names is found in Nahmanides’ introduction to his Commentary on the Pentateuch, where he uses some formulations identical to those found in his above-quoted sermon but adds some crucial comments. So, for example, after adducing the dictum that the Torah is a continuum of divine names as a “[secret] tradition of truth,” he writes that “it was possible to read it [the Torah] according to the path of the [divine] names, and it was possible to be read, according to our reading, as concerning the Torah and the commandment, and it has been given according to Moses according to the path of the division [of the text] of the reading of the commandment, and it has been transmitted to him orally according to its reading as [divine] names.”18 By recourse to the term “reading,” qeri’ah, but not to “going out,” as in his sermon, Nahmanides comes a little bit closer to an exegetical approach, although in his case, too, it is not the human effort to understand the text that conveys its ultimate meaning but a revelation that has been imparted to Moses. The two readings are therefore strongly distinguished by Nahmanides: one deals with the regular Masoretic division of the text and consequently reflects the understanding of the Torah as dealing with the commandments; the other, transmitted orally, deals with the divine names. In the case of the former, Nahmanides uses the form “our reading,” therefore implying the common rabbinic approach to biblical texts. Although the oral tradition has been given to Moses, it has apparently been lost since that time and is no longer available, at least not in its entirety. This last conclusion refers to the more comprehensive vision of the entire Torah as a continuum of divine names. Thus, an oral tradition, which is at the same time described as a true one, concerning the manner of transforming the entire text into divine names has been hinted at, but the sole concrete example given for such a reading has been restricted to three verses in Exodus, taken from much earlier Jewish texts.19
The source that passed the oral tradition on the divine names to Moses is quite unclear: Nahmanides uses a passive verb form, which obfuscates the nature of the transmitter: Moses was given, nimsar, but the giver is not identified. By a comparison to Sefer Shimmushei Torah, where the multiplicity of angelic names is attributed to a revelation from an angel, I would not be surprised if additional sources corroborated such an interpretation. The alternative, that God himself revealed both the Torah and the divine names, is certainly still possible but is not warranted by an explicit text. This reluctance to speak about a secret tradition is crucial in this master’s overall conception of Kabbalah: any Kabbalistic traditions already revealed may in principle be lost but not invented. The more playful interpretive approach to the canonical texts, found in many instances in the rabbinic tradition, is marginalized by one of the most important representatives of the rabbinic culture in the Middle Ages. So, for example, we learn in the sermon quoted in an earlier chapter that the resort to gematria is to be very limited.20
Although the loss of a tradition is not invoked in this passage, the attempt to restrict the free inventiveness of mathematical interpretations is obvious. What seems to me interesting in the case of Nahmanides’ approach is to point out the very existence, in hoary antiquity, of a tradition related to divine names, but not to claim that it is extant. Therefore, even if Nahmanides himself explicitly calls this tradition qabbalah shel ‘emmet, a “Kabbalah of truth,” nevertheless this is not the mystical tradition he himself inherited and transmitted, which is presumably much more focused on the theurgical and theosophical aspects of the Bible. Despite the essential difference between the path of names and the path of commandments, as they have been explicated by Nahmanides they have something very substantial in common: both emerge out of the same conglomerate of letters which, having been written primordially as a sequence of discrete letters, could be divided in more than one manner. The criterion for this division could not be another text that preceded the Bible but must be a matter of a revelation. The revelation is intended to instruct the legislator in the secrets of the two readings, which are constituted by the very act of division. In my opinion, an intratextual approach underlies the two readings, since no extra textual conceptual parallel is invoked as involved in the different divisions of the sequence of letters.
To approach the common denominator of these readings from a more modern literary point of view, we may see the sequence of Torah letters as a structure that interacts with the reader: a rabbinically oriented mind will see in the sequence the source of the ritualistic understanding of the Bible, while someone who possesses a secret tradition will see in the very same letters a series of divine names.21 Moreover, in Nahmanides’ mind the double reading of the Bible—for its plain, exoteric sense and its esoteric, “names”-level sense—does not include an implicit depreciation of the former by an elevation of the latter. In my opinion, the main content of the Bible was regarded as the revelation of the commandments, as we may learn from Nahmanides’ designation of Moses as the “prophet of the commandments.”22 Unlike the interpretive allegory of the medieval Jewish philosophers, whose writings were often haunted by the danger of secretly preferring the intellectual, esoteric content over the more historical and ritualistic content, Nahmanides was less bothered by this possible implication of his proposal.
Nahmanides records the existence of a sublime but now only partially available tradition in which the Torah as divine names is considered the exclusive patrimony of Moses and, because it is not extant but very fragmentary, is regarded as irrelevant to a postbiblical interpretive project. In Nahmanides’ vision of Kabbalah, there is no place for reconstruction of a lost tradition, as this would automatically involve a process of reasoning that he had explicitly banished from understanding Kabbalah. We may assume, on the basis of Nahmanides’ introduction to his Commentary on the Pentateuch, that the sublime Kabbalah that conceived of the biblical text as a continuum of divine names was lost forever. However, this somewhat antiquarian and conservative approach was appropriated in a much more creative manner by another school of Kabbalah, the ecstatic one, in the decades immediately following the death of the Geronese Kabbalist. In the writings of Abraham Abulafia and some of his followers, the passage from Nahmanides’ introduction about the divine names is quoted several times, always in positive terms but without implying that the details of this tradition are no longer available. This absence is not incidental: it reflects the feeling among the ecstatic Kabbalists that Nahmanides, whose writings they explicitly cite as their source, has offered them an approach to the Torah that is very relevant, indeed the core of their Kabbalah, which is often called the “path of [divine] names.” The divine name consisting of forty-two letters was thought by Abulafia to be derived from the first forty-two letters of Genesis, which starts with the letter bet and ends with the letter mem, mem-bet being the name of forty-two letters.23 This “fact” is described by Abulafia as part of the view that “the entire Torah is [consists] of divine names of the Holy One, blessed be He, and this is an intelligible proof for a Kabbalist.”24
Although Abulafia does not explicitly maintain that he applies Nahmanides’ principle, his formulation is identical to that of the Geronese Kabbalist. Yet unlike the example offered by Nahmanides, who does not claim that his description of the division of words in the first verse is any more than a guess at the original reading according to the “path of names,” in the case of Abulafia the name of forty-two has been conceived of in some already-existing magical and mystical texts as a divine name. What was regarded as lost (whether in whole or in part) by Nahmanides was retrieved by Abulafia. Nahmanides himself was wary of allegorical interpretations.25 Although he was acquainted with Maimonides’ naturalistic exegesis, the thrust of his approach was quite different. Nahmanides was not a radical interpreter, because he neutralized the possibility of reading the Torah as a continuum of divine names in the present and rejected philosophical allegories. Abulafia, on the other hand, was a radical interpreter for two reasons: he envisioned both possibilities as accessible, and he brought together Maimonidean and Nahmanidean theories, namely the allegorical path and the path of the names. It is quite evident, however, that while these two masters were among the pool of sources that influenced Abulafia’s Kabbalah, Abulafia was acquainted with additional elements similar to Maimonides’ allegory and Nahmanides’ path of names but independent of these two thinkers. He knew, on the one hand, R. Abraham ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Pentateuch, which contains allegories, and medieval Neoaristotelianism in its Arabic, Jewish, and perhaps also Christian variations, and on the other hand was familiar with Sefer Shimmushei Torah and the Hasidei Ashkenaz views, where divine names play an important role in thought and praxis.26 Nevertheless, from the specific formulations used by the ecstatic Kabbalist, it is obvious that he regarded Maimonides and Nahmanides as the cornerstones of his approach to the secrets of the Torah.27
Let me briefly discuss another text of Abulafia’s, already adduced in Chapter 9,28 where these two approaches were conjugated to create a particular type of hierarchy. I take the reading of the Torah in this passage on its plain sense as standing for Nahmanides’ “path of commandments,” which fits the rank of the tzaddiq. The last path, defined in terms copied from Nahmanides, is the highest one, and although Nahmanides restricted it to Moses, for Abulafia it is a matter not only of all the prophets in the past but also of those persons who strive to become prophets in the present by resorting to combinations of letters and divine names. The introduction of the theme of combining letters within the Nahmanidean view seems to be new with Abulafia, and it had some interesting reverberations in subsequent Kabbalistic and Hasidic theories, which will be discussed in some detail in the next chapter.
The second path, however—the esoteric path, which follows the philosophical path—is absent in Nahmanides but very close to the manner in which Maimonides was understood in the Middle Ages: an esoteric philosopher. What is important in the very last sentence is the cumulative and the integrative nature of the prophetic path: in order to become a prophet, one must be a righteous and pious man who combines ritual and mental accomplishment—namely a philosopher. Philosophical understanding of the Torah, an approach that resorts to allegory, is not a stage to be transcended by the aspirant to prophecy but an approach to be maintained even when traveling the path of the prophets. As indicated in this quote, philosophical understanding of the Torah is a process that culminates in perfect knowledge. It represents the moment of the purified understanding of God à la Maim-onides, which is a condition for uniting with Him or receiving a message from Him. The regular religious performance of the righteous, the mystical moments of prophecy (namely ecstasy), and the contemplative ideal, which involves the allegorical understanding of the Bible, were all given a secure place in his system. The insertion of the interpretive allegory between Nahmanides’ path of commandments and the path of names is far from being a mechanical attainment: as we shall see shortly, the allegorical approach did not always remain a separate technique but was sometimes combined with the path of names. What seems more important, however, is that it radiated on Abulafia’s perception of Nahmanides’ paths. So, for example, Abulafia’s attitude toward the meaning of the commandments is significantly different from that of the Geronese master and much closer to a Maimonidean intellectualistic understanding of the role of Jewish ritual. No less interesting, though, is the fact that philosophical esotericism has also affected the other form of Jewish esotericism: the linguistic one.
For both Abulafia and his student R. Nathan ben Sa’adyah, who composed Sha’arei Tzedeq, allegorical understanding of the Torah precedes the prophetic reading and is necessary for its attainment. How, then, did the ecstatic Kabbalist understand the relationship between the two as exegetical techniques? According to a statement in Abulafia that deals with a biblical story discussed earlier in his text, the allegorical approach is more general, whereas the Kabbalistic approach takes into consideration each and every letter of the interpreted text.29
The move from allegorical to Kabbalistic techniques of interpretations involves, according to the Kabbalist, a gain from the point of view of textual understanding. Allegory, or the metaphorical approach, because it deals with broad concepts, means understanding the relationship between the various elements in a biblical pericope in a general manner, which would presuppose that some elements of the text remain beyond the scope of the exegetical allegorical approach. Only Kabbalistic exegesis, according to Abulafia, can exhaust the plenitude of the text without skipping any of its components and thus in principle take fully into account the textual idiosyncrasies. Abulafia expresses this idea in the strongest terms: “Not one letter is left without being used” during the exegetical enterprise.
Let me explore in more detail the implications of that statement. A hyper-literalistic30 approach seems to inspire Kabbalistic exegesis à la Abulafia, who does not regard the letters or names as an authoritative source for religious behavior, as Nahmanides’ path of commandments is, nor as a magical source, as may have been Nahmanides’ understanding of the path of names, but as a source of experience. The minute examination of the text, its dissection into its constitutive letters and subsequently their rearrangement into new formulas, displays an extreme devotion to the text at the same time as it opens the door to exegetical freedom. The constraint of taking all the consonants into consideration may, unlike the looser allegorical approach, produce paralyzing moments; indeed, as understood in ecstatic Kabbalah, all the letters of the interpreted text should be involved, but the exegete enjoys a great freedom to manipulate the text, so that it is quite possible to find more than one way of construing a Kabbalistic interpretation. In a passage particularly relevant to this question, Abulafia writes:
This issue has been said in two pericopes, which have been comprised together according to the plain sense and commented upon according to the [way of] wisdom [namely philosophy], with few additions of Kabbalistic words; it is necessary indeed to return to this in order to demonstrate all these issues also according to the [path of] names. However, should we approach this path, according to what we have received from it, [as dealing with] the forms of the names and the [letter] combinations and gematria and notariqon, and those like them from the paths of Kabbalah, we would not be able to write all these issues that we have received by this Kabbalistic path related to the knowledge of the names, even if all the heavens would be parchments, and all the seas ink, and all the reeds pens, and all the beams—fingers, and every moment of our days as long as the years of Methuselah. A fortiori there are [Kabbalistic] paths that we have not received and we do not know anything about.31
This Rabelaisian passage expresses the nature of Kabbalah according to this Kabbalist. It consists in innumerable techniques of interpretation, each providing a comprehensive and detailed interpretation of the text; this is the reason why even in a Kabbalistic commentary on the Torah the Kabbalistic exegete is able to offer but a few of the infinite Kabbalistic interpretations.32 The concept of Kabbalah as found in the school dealing with the divine names is therefore not that of a forgotten or fragmentary lore, a closed corpus, but an open field that actually expands in accordance with any additional effort by a Kabbalist to understand the details of a text. The common denominator of all the Kabbalistic exegetical techniques mentioned in this passage is that they are intratextual: they exploit the literal resources of the text without importing conceptualizations that would create a certain concatenation of the different words of the text, as allegorical exegesis does. Eccentric and radical as these forms of exegesis may be, they nevertheless rely exclusively on the alleged potential inherent in the linguistic fabric of the text. Although the contents found in the allegorical approach can be exhausted, the Kabbalistic contents are conceived of as inexhaustible. From this point of view Abulafia, as a Kabbalist, is closer to the midrashic approach, not only because he echoes, in an exaggerated manner, the statements found in rabbinic sources, but also because of the emphasis on intratextuality. Unlike midrashic intertextuality, which is much closer to the modern deconstructionist stand, the intratextual approach is not particularly sensible to the morphemic aspects of the text. Whereas the midrashic, allegorical, Kabbalistic-symbolic, and deconstructionist approaches resort to a certain form of textual narrative because in general they preserve the grammatical functions of the words involved in the biblical narrative, in the intratextual approach this is far from obvious. The reliance on the smaller linguistic units, the phonemes, is more apparent in the intratextual approach, which, detached from external conceptualization, texts, or plots, reconstructs the deconstructed text from the constitutive phonemes. This is quite an innovative reconstruction, which is able to take into account all the original letters, or their substitutes, and weave them into the fabric of the new text.
In discussing the three angels who revealed themselves to Abraham, Abulafia mentions that their acts are conspicuous in the scriptures and that the issue of prophecy has been already clarified in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed “and other books of wisdom [namely philosophy] in a manner sufficient for those who wish to know them, if they will peruse them carefully. And the men of speculation [namely the philosophers] would apply the names of the forefathers33 to the human intellect, and the rest of the names would refer to the powers beneath it, some closer to it and some farther away. They would refer everywhere to the Tetragrammaton and other divine names as designations of the agent intellect.”34 The allegoristic interpreters would therefore interpret the proper names, those of the forefathers and those of God, as pointing to various forms of intellect, the human and the separate one. In other words, this extra textual interpretation is quite reductive, transforming the particulars into a general terminology. From this point of view the allegorist may not be able to give an account of why the intellect or God is designated by one biblical term or another. Being part of a universalistic approach—after all, the intellects, human and cosmic, are transliteral and transnational entities—they transcend the peculiar designations found in the scriptural texts. In fact, an even better understanding of the dramas connected with these intellects can be found in the Averroistic treatises on the intellect, which served as sources of inspiration for some of Abulafia’s own psychological allegories. The biblical text is understood as drawing its allegorical sense not only from another series of texts, the philosophical ones, but also from texts originally written in another language, often stemming from another culture and oriented toward a much more unified and simplistic axiology. What seems, however, to be even more striking in the allegorical approach is the absence of God: His names were allegorized as standing for the Agent Intellect, and the whole spiritual enterprise took the form of an intraintellectual affair involving the relations between the human and separate intellects.
It should be mentioned that in some cases it is quite difficult to distinguish between the human and separate intellects, and sometimes even between them and God, provided that the realm of the spiritual is continuous. This view, adopted by Abulafia in some discussions, offers a restricted domain of intellectual events as recurring in a variety of biblical stories. It is this extreme psychologization that is “remedied” by the overemphasis on divine names found in the path of names. Although the allegorist speaks of very important and positive psychological events, he nevertheless deals with a lower God, a fact that is transcended by the imposition of the Kabbalistic discourse. In other words, the ecstatic Kabbalah’s adoption of interpretive allegory presents itself not as an alternative to the negative approach of the Jewish allegorists but as a higher form of interpretation that forcefully reintroduces the divine into the spiritual enterprise Abulafia calls prophecy.
In the same context Abulafia offers an example of allegorical interpretation that corroborates his argument:
The men of speculation have determined that the name Lot is an allegory for the material intellect and that his two daughters and wife refer to the material realm. And we are instructed that the angels are the advisers of the intellect. They are the straight paths that advise the intellect to be saved from the evil ones, which refer to the limbs [of the body], whose end is to be consumed in sulphur and heavenly fire—this is the full extent of the parable. This is in accord with what they say, that the Torah would not have deemed it important to relate such a matter, even in the event that it actually did occur, for what is the point of such a story for the man of speculation?35
The gist of the allegorical approach is to construe a parable, which represents naturalistic events, in order to save the significance of the biblical story. By resorting to an axiology based on the psychomachia, the allegorist exegete is able to save the embarrassing canonic text from the semi mythological story and confer on it an aura of philosophical content. Allegory saves the text from its meaning by assuming that another meaning should be imposed which stems from a type of nomenclature alien to the original text. This extratextuality, unlike midrashic intertextuality, finds the solution to the canonical text by exchanging the archaic or antiquated meaning for another meaning, which often violates the original one. The uneasiness with the plain sense is expressed rather convincingly by Abulafia’s typology of the attitude toward language among philosophers: “It is conceivable in only one of three ways: either it is construed on its plain sense, or it may be a parable, or it occurred to Abraham in a dream in the manner of prophecy.”36
The alternatives opened by the philosophical approach are different, but the conclusion is the same: either the plain sense is preserved, but then the philosopher has nothing to learn from such an obsolete story; or it did not happen in the historical sense, and the canonic text is to be explored for deeper meanings. This is done either by interpreting the text allegorically, in the manner we have just seen, by transforming it into a veiled philosophical discourse that should be decoded, or by relegating the story to the realm of prophecy or prophetic dreams. In any case the Bible on its plain sense is philosophically insignificant.
Let me elaborate more on the last possibility, again by adducing a passage from Abulafia: “And if it is a prophetic dream, or a prophecy itself, it is worthy of being written in order to instruct the prophets in the methods of prophecy, and what may be derived from them regarding Divine conduct, and in any case the prophet will be able to see in it parables and enigmas.”37 Thus, the last approach, paralleling the path of the names, may provide an insight into how to reach a prophetic experience or how to know God. Indeed, Abulafia indicates in the same context that “the explanation of the Kabbalist is that they are all names and therefore worthy of being recorded.”38 He is not worried by the obsolete meaning, nor does he solve the problem by renewing the meaning by substitution. The text is elevated to the highest status, of becoming a continuum of divine names. The ecstatic Kabbalist makes quite different claims from those of the allegorist. Abulafia’s approach deals with the last three of seven paths, and all three may be described as an intratextual or intercorporal approach. According to Abulafia, “every Kabbalist will invoke the name in all places [in the Bible where it occurs] as instructed by means of any of the divine attributes, because this is true and right, and this is the reason why it is necessary to inquire into names and to know, each and every one of them, to which attribute it points, because the attributes change in accordance with each and every issue. And it is known that God does not at all possess attributes that will change from one to another, but the attributes change in accordance with the nature of the creatures that are [necessarily] emanated from them.”39
While the allegoresis of the philosophical interpreter will reduce the plethora of divine names or proper names to describe one entity, the intellect, in its various states, the ecstatic Kabbalist claims that different names correspond to the variety of creatures here below that emanated from God. On high there are no attributes that change, a critical hint at the exegetical practices of some forms of theosophical Kabbalah, but the different manners of action are projected on the divine realm from the differences in the nature of the creatures. From this vantage point the variety of names is not a case of redundancy; they should not be reduced to the status of synonyms but respected in their singularity, in order to discover a higher complexity on high. In any case, what is crucial in this last quote is the express need to respect the textual multiplicity of names, much more than the allegorist was capable of doing. It is the concern with the particulars that inspires, at least in principle, the ethos of the path of names. The absoluteness of the details of the text, much more than of its meaning, inspires the linguocentric Kabbalistic approach, which is to be contrasted even with Kabbalistic exegesis focused on symbolic interpretations of the morphemes. This concern with intratextuality differs, therefore, not only from allegoristic extratextuality but also from the midrashic and, very often, Kabbalistic symbolistic penchants for intertextuality.
Let me compare this approach to allegoresis as a kind of exegesis pointing to a general truth beyond the details of the text to the way the Christian spiritual commentaries on the scriptures were understood in the Middle Ages. According to Beryl Smalley, the spiritual attitude toward the Bible produced “many commentaries containing little exegesis,” because the truth was conceived of as an infinite space to which the spiritual man is able to look through the physical surface of the text.40 This is also true insofar as allegorical medieval interpretations are concerned; those interpreters knew the truth in advance, before the details of the text had been interpreted, a phenomenon I have called semantic radicalism. Yet whereas the Christian spiritualists knew the “truth” to be attained by their exegesis from their theological doctrine, the Jewish allegorists were inspired by the various trends of Greek thought as mediated and transformed by Arabic philosophy. Sometimes Kabbalists would say that the resort to flexible exegesis, like the combinations of letters, should be balanced by checking the results against the views of the “Torah,” namely the Jewish religious accepted wisdom. New and oftentimes flexible exegetical methods invite validating structures to prevent the emergence of overly idiosyncratic results.
Whereas Abulafia was inclined to restrict the allegorical approach to a relative lower role in the general picture of his hermeneutical system, as the fifth of seven modes of interpretation, one of his disciples went a further step in allowing allegorical exegesis a somewhat greater role. Toward the end of the thirteenth century R. Nathan ben Sa’adyah, a Kabbalist belonging to the ecstatic school of Kabbalah who composed the book Sha’arei Tzedeq, wrote:
Anyone who believes in the creation of the world, if he believes that languages are conventional [then] he must also believe that they [the linguistic conventions] are of two types: the first is divine, i.e. an agreement between God and Adam, and the second is natural, i.e. based on agreement between Adam, Eve, and their children. The second is derived from the first, and the first was known only to Adam and was not passed on to any of his offspring except for Seth, whom he bore in his image and likeness. And so, the [esoteric] tradition [ha-Qabbalah] reached Noah. And the confusion of the tongues during the generation of the dispersion [at the tower of Babel] happened only to the second type of language, i.e. to the natural language. So eventually the tradition reached ‘Eber and, later on, Abraham the Hebrew. Thus we find regarding Sefer Yetzirah, whose authorship is attributed to Abraham, that the Almighty revealed Himself to him.41 And from Abraham the tradition was passed on to Isaac and then to Jacob and to his sons [the tribal ancestors]. And our forefathers were in Egypt, but the Kabbalah was in the possession of the elders of the nation, and the thing remained with them until the birth of Moses, who was at home in the house of the king, and he learned many sorts of alien lore [namely philosophical and scientific lore], and despite this fact, because of his predisposition to receive, his mind did not rest before his father, Amram, had given to him the tradition that was with them from the forefathers, blessed be their memory. And what happened is that he went out in the field and secluded himself in the desert, the “Lord of All revealed to him” in the bush and informed him and taught him and related to him the most wondrous things which remained with him until the [revelatory] event at Sinai, when He introduced him to the inmost secrets of the science of the letters … until he became acquainted with the essence of these letters, revealed to us from his cognition, and the essence of their distant [supernal] roots, and Moses, blessed be his memory, had arranged the Torah as a continuum of letters, which is [corresponds to] the path of [divine] names, which reflects the structure of the supernal letters; and [then] he divided it [the text of the Torah] in accordance with the reading of the commandments, which reflects the essence of the arranged lower entities.42
Let me start with the obvious: the Kabbalist, explicitly quoting the aforementioned passage from Nahmanides’ introduction to Commentary of the Pentateuch, also distinguishes between two readings of the Torah, according to the path of names and the path of the commandments. Unlike Nahmanides, however, he offers an ontological distinction between the two forms of reading: the path of names reflects a metaphysical-divine realm, whereas the path of the commandments refers to a physical or human-oriented one. This understanding of the two paths is partially corroborated by a passage from one of Abulafia’s own writings, where he distinguishes between what I assume is the states of the divine names that are “not combined”; that is, the order of the letters remained in its pure form and deals with things that do not perish, belonging to the account of the Chariot, a strong parallel to the “structure of the supernal letters” in the passage from Sha’arei Tzedeq. On the other hand, the “combined” names, the forms of the names that do not preserve the original sequence of the letters in the divine names, stand in that passage from Abulafia for the account of Creation, which consists in transient entities, corresponding in the passage from Sha’arei Tzedeq to the lower things.43 Nahmanides’ path of commandments is understood in Maimonidean terms as pointing to the world of generation and corruption, whereas the path of names stands for the account of the Chariot, namely for some form of Aristotelian metaphysics. According to another passage from the anonymous Kabbalist, the supernal letters correspond or are related to the world of names, whose existence is obscured in the thought of those who behave in accordance with the philosophical lore, which is equated with the attribute of judgment and with nature, while the messianic time will reinstate the reign of the world of names, understood as standing for the attribute of mercy.44
R. Nathan, like Abulafia yet somehow different from him, sometimes uses philosophy and Kabbalah against themselves, sometimes conjugating them with each other, creating a more comprehensive scheme. Nahmanides’ distinction between the two paths may indeed have something to do with the distinction between the account of the Chariot and the account of Creation, as some later Kabbalists would hint at.45 I wonder, though, whether Nahmanides’ own understanding of the two accounts has anything to do with their Maimonidean interpretation, which looms under the hints of the passage from Sha’arei Tzedeq. I have opted for a theosophical interpretation of Nahmanides’ two paths by alluding to a symbolic reading of the two accounts as pointing to the sefirot Hokhmah and Binah,46 while the ecstatic Kabbalist has separated them in accordance with Maimonides’ distinction between metaphysics and physics. In other words, the ecstatic Kabbalist has allegorized Nahmanides’ discussion by imposing a distinction, found in Greek philosophy, between the world of eternal entities and that of generation and corruption on Nahmanides’ view: the commandments have become allegories of issues found in this lower world, while the names were conceived of as allegories for the transcendental world. However, by such a dramatic shift the path of names or, according to another passage, the world of names is no longer conceived of as a lost tradition but is connected to an ever-existing and never-changing reality, which is indeed obscured nowadays but will be recaptured in the messianic time, when the prophecy will return.47
Someone may assume that on this point the differences between Nahmanides’ implicitly lost tradition and the ecstatic Kabbalist’s utopian knowledge are not so great, as both posit an absence in the present. Such a reading, however, is questionable; R. Nathan ben Sa’adyah, like Abulafia before him, has obfuscated Nahmanides’ ambiguity concerning the question of the availability of the divine-names tradition and opted for the possibility of possessing it already in the post-Mosaic era—not only in the messianic time but in the lifetime of this Kabbalist himself. In other words, though offering somewhat different interpretations of Nahmanides’ “sublime” tradition, the two ecstatic Kabbalists believe that they still possess what Nahmanides contends was lost long ago, in hoary antiquity.
The specific point of view of this project, pertinent to the hermeneutical move just analyzed, is the shift from a nonallegorical passage, which may have some symbolic value, namely that of Nahmanides, to an allegorical understanding that introduces clear philosophical concepts conceived to explicate the meaning of their Kabbalistic tradition. But the most conspicuous move of this Kabbalist, in comparison to Nahmanides and even to Abulafia, is the description of the history of Kabbalah. For Nahmanides, the path of names is a revelation given to Moses and presumably since then entirely forgotten. In the above passage, however, the Kabbalah is said to have already been disclosed to Adam and transmitted thereafter until the time of Moses. Thus, it is not a purely Mosaic or Sinaitic lore but an Adamic revelation, which already presupposes, despite its esotericism, a more universalist status.
What fosters this universalism of Kabbalah, however, is the picture of Moses as someone immersed in the study of many sorts of alien lore well before he was initiated in the Kabbalistic secrets. This remark is quite unusual in the Kabbalistic literature and should be understood on more than one plane: historically speaking, Moses is described, at least initially, as the product of Egyptian culture, a fact that could be ignored or marginalized by a Kabbalist but instead is remarked upon. Next, the assumption that Moses’ study of alien lores—in the Jewish Middle Ages a derogatory term for philosophy—did not preclude him from receiving Kabbalah means that for the Kabbalists there is no unbridgeable gap between the two forms of thought. Indeed, as we learn from the succinct autobiography of this Kabbalist, he himself has studied and immersed himself in philosophy before becoming a Kabbalist, and I see the above description of Moses as an apologia pro vita sua. This was by no means an exception in the group of secondary intellectuals who played a major role in the emergence of the creative Kabbalah, as we shall see. Moreover, given that Moses is the model for the accomplished mystic and his life is understood as paradigmatic for mystics, we may infer that for this Kabbalist the study of philosophy before the study of Kabbalah is not a historical accident, either in the case of Moses or in R. Nathan’s own case. Rather, this order of study can be understood as an ideal curriculum. Consequently, just as in the case of the passage from Abulafia’s Majteah ha-Hokhmot, so in Sha’arei Tzedeq philosophy and allegorical understanding of the Torah are not incidents in the cultural history of Judaism but a necessary and positive step toward the attainment of prophecy.
Another important use of philosophical allegory is the allegorical composition. Unlike the few instances discussed above (and many others found in Jewish philosophy and some Kabbalistic books), where the interpreted texts were not composed by authors who envisioned their writings as fraught with allegorical meanings, and where the interpretive allegory is in fact an interpolated allegorization, few Jewish treatises are written as allegories from the very beginning.
In the same years that the Zohar was composed in Spain as a symbolic text, R. Abraham Abulafia produced in Italy and Sicily a series of “prophetic writings,” in which his revelations were committed to paper and interpreted allegorically. In my opinion, the subsequent philosophical interpretations, which are more allegorical, are only rarely a matter of later and insignificant addition to a text that initially had another literary and conceptual structure; rather, these interpretations represent an explication of conceptual elements already coded within the text. Unfortunately, the nature of the extant material and its neglect by modern scholarship means that a more detailed analysis of the literary and hermeneutical aspects of Abulafia’s activity on this point remains a desideratum. This lamentable situation is exacerbated by the fact that most of the so-called prophetic books have disappeared and only their commentaries, made by Abulafia himself, are available; meanwhile, the single original prophetic text extant, a poetically oriented treatise named Sefer ha-’Ot, is not accompanied by a commentary. Nevertheless, it is still possible to investigate the allegorical composition and the author’s interpretation, because sometimes the commentaries quote sentences from the original prophecies before offering the interpretation. Let me analyze one such instance, found in a book relating a revelation that occurred in Rome in 1280:
And the meaning of his saying “Rise and lift up the head of my anointed one” refers to the life of the souls. “And on the New Year,” “and in the Temple”—this is the power of the souls. And he says: “Anoint him as a king”—anoint him as a king with the power of all the names. “For I have anointed him as a king over Israel”—over the communities of Israel, that is the commandments. And his saying “and his name I have called Shadday, like My name,” [means] whose secret is Shadday like My name, and understand all the intention. Likewise his saying “He is I and I am He,” and it cannot be revealed more explicitly than this. But the secret of the “corporeal name” is the “messiah of God.” Also “Moses will rejoice,” which he has made known to us, and which is the five urges, and I called the corporeal name as well … now Razi’el started to contemplate the essence of the messiah and he found it and recognized it and its power, and designated it David son of David, whose secret is Yimelokh … the heart of the prophet.48
The revelation is cast in rather traditional terms: “anointed one,” “New Year,” “Temple,” “king,” Moses, David ben David. They are interpreted, however, in rather spiritual terms: “life of the souls,” “power of the souls,” “the names.” The allegorical approach is quite obvious in the phrase dealing with Razi’el’s (Abraham Abulafia’s) contemplation of the “essence of the messiah,” namely the spiritual change that causes the union between man and God, and the transposition of the divine name to the human being, which is expressed in “designated it David son of David.” It is Abulafia’s choice to select David ben David as the personification of the powers of the soul and of the kingship, meaning spiritual growth and experience of the divine. Another clear hint at the conscious construction of a text that should nevertheless be interpreted esoterically is found in connection with the phrase “Shadday like My name,” presumably an innovation of Abulafia’s, followed by the warning “and understand all the intention.” The allegorical mode is found not so much in the interpretive aspect, though it is also there, but much more in the construction of a narrative concerning the inauguration of the king in the Temple, at the New Year, as pointing to nontemporal and nonspacial events. What is important in this quote is the introduction of the names within the framework of the allegorical decoding. The divine names, when transferred from God to man, designate, not allegorically but quite directly, the union between the human and the divine.
In some instances it is possible to see in the transference of names a sign of a deep transformation. This is already the case in ancient Jewish mysticism, where the paragon of the Jewish mystics, Enoch, became an angelic being named Metatron and in addition received seventy divine names. Whereas the ancient texts refer to a corporeal translation on high, an extension of the body, which in my opinion is part of an attempt to restore the lost stature of Adam, in ecstatic Kabbalah the transformation takes place mainly on the spiritual level, as in the above passage. It is not a classical installation of a king, or of the king-messiah, that is dealt with here but the spiritualization of man, who will master his body and inclinations and become his own savior. Ancient mythology of the king-messiah, whose corporeal status was changed by his installation by means of coronation and anointment, implying a deification of the king in flesh and blood, was interpreted as pointing to the spiritual change in the consciousness of the mystic, who is able to become deified in spirit.
In the above passage Abulafia offers an allegorical reading of the ancient ritual by describing the ancient installation ritual in his own words, which were selected so as to imply, by their very precise structure, their allegorical meaning. So, for example, the four strings of numerically identical terms presuppose that words included in the corporeal description of the king-messiah are equivalent to their allegorical explications. Let me start with the main string: rosh meshihi (head of my anointed one) = hayyei ha-nefashot (life of the souls) = u-ve-rosh ha-shanah (and on the New Year) = u-ve-veit ha-miqdash (and in the Temple) = koah ha-nefashot (power of the souls) = timshehehu ke-melekh (anoint him as a king) = mi-koah kol ha-shemot (from the power of all the names) = 869. The corporeal aspects, the head of the messiah, the time and the place, are translated into spiritual terms related to the soul, on the one hand, and the divine names, on the other. (This latter nexus will recur in another passage of Abulafia, as we shall soon see.) However, the precise numerical equivalence of so many elements in a rather short text demonstrates quite convincingly that the narrative dealing with the corporeal aspects was carefully designed to include the allegorical interpretation as an organic translation of the meaning of the ancient mythological installation of the king. In other words, the prophetic tracts have a twofold structure: they consist in a short, rather apocalyptic and “primitive” narrative that corresponds, on another level, to the spiritual development of the soul; and the allegorical reading of them is compulsory, given the numerical identity of the various parts of the passage.
This twofold strategy of composition seems to be unique to Abulafia’s way of writing, and it stresses the intratextual feature of his approach. Unlike regular philosophical allegory, which is dependent on external terminology from Arabic and Maimonidean sources, in Abulafia the implication is that only within language is it possible to find the solution of the meaning, because one concept is connected to another not only by the narrative syntax but also by the numerical value that sends the reader to the corresponding term in the allegorical interpretation. According to such a composition, allegory is a much less conventional but quite integral type of relationship that is built into the structure of the text.
Let me, for the time being, move on to the second string: yisra’el = qehillot [congregations] = ha-mitzvot [commandments] = 541. The numerical value 541 is a very common gematria in Abulafia’s writings, whose key is found not in this string but in numerous other passages in Abulafia’s writings, including an important discussion in the context of the above-quoted passage from Sefer ha-’Edut.49 The missing clue is the concept of Agent Intellect (or Active Intellect), the last of the ten intellects, which informs all cognitive processes in this world. Its meaning is influenced by Neoaristotelian interpretations (disseminated in Greek, Arabic, and Jewish philosophies) of Aristotle’s rather ambiguous nous poetikos, which has usually been rendered in Hebrew as sekhel ha-po’el, a phrase whose gematria is 541. According to some passages, Yisra’el (Israel) represents not only a particular nation on the mundane plane but also a spiritual essence identical to the Agent Intellect, which is regarded as the sum of all the forms found here below, a concept also referred to by the term qehillot. Thus, we may again interpret this string as dealing ostensibly with corporeal aspects but hinting at spiritual ones. However, just as the theme of the names has been introduced in the first string, I assume (again with support from many other passages) that Yisra’el also stands for another concept, yesh ra’al, a reinterpretation of the consonants YSR’L to which Abulafia and some other Kabbalists in his entourage often resort. Yesh means simply “there is,” and the gematria of the remaining word, ra’al, is 231. This figure represents all possible combinations of two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, as described in some versions of Sefer Yetzirah, the source for many of the combinatory techniques that were to develop in Judaism. This combinatory technique not only was of mathematical import but was also pregnant with mystical and magical valences, for by combining and reciting the 231 combinations, one is able to create a golem or to reach a prophetic experience. Thus, in addition to the allegorical implications of the name Yisra’el, as standing for a metaphysical entity whose conceptualization stems from Greek ontology as understood by Arab and Jewish thinkers, it is quite plausible that the prophetic dimension of Kabbalah is also implied here. Indeed, this assertion is crucial for understanding the whole passage. The anointment of the head of the messiah, discussed in the first part of the quote, implies a descent of the oil as part of the unction, a process that is paralleled by the descent of the ideas, or forms, from the Agent Intellect onto the mind of the prophet.
Moreover, in an important passage in another prophetic writing of Abulafia’s, the Agent Intellect, the human intellect, and the persona of the historical messiah were all described as messiah. While the historical person parallels the path of the righteous and the human intellect the path of the philosophers, the Agent Intellect may stand, as it often does in Maimonides and Abulafia, for the source of prophecy and hence may imply the path of prophecy. Thus, the intellectual development of the intellect—or the souls—in our passage is understood in soteriological terms, implying a messianic experience attained, according to Abulafia, by means of the combination of letters and recitation of divine names.
This nexus between the body of the messiah, his intellect, and the source of intellection is paralleled by the third string of gematrias in the passage under scrutiny here: ha-shem ha-gashmi (the corporeal name) = mashiah ha-shem (the anointed of the name) = yismah mosheh (Moshe will rejoice) = hamishah yetzarim (five urges) = 703. The first three phrases all contain the consonants h, sh, and m, either in ha-shem (God, “the Name”) or in mosheh (Moshe). The meaning of this occurrence is quite explicit in a passage from Abulafia’s Sefer ha-’Edut: “Moshe knew God [ha-’shem] by means of the name [ha-shem], and God [ha-shem] also knew Moshe by means of the name [ha-shem].”50
In other words, by means of the recitation of the divine name Moses knew God and God knew Moses, or, in the terms of the passage under discussion, by means of the name Moses became the anointed of God. The phrase ha-shem ha-gashmi stands for the name of Moses and the names of the forefathers that have become, by means of a complex linguistic transformation, divine names.51 On this point, however, we must pay attention to the gist of the passage: though speaking of Moses and his transformation into the messiah, his cleaving to God, Abulafia also mentions the forefathers’ names, and by doing so he includes the name of Abraham. If we recall an earlier quotation from a prophetic book addressed to Abraham, which is hinted at in this passage by the angelicotheophoric name Razi’el—both names amount in gematria to 248—there can be no doubt that the messiah hinted at here is none other than Abraham Abulafia, who claimed to be a messiah. This is also implied in the fourth string: david ben david52 = yimlokh53 = lev ha-navi’ (heart of the prophet) = 100 means that the entity named David son of David will reign. A few lines earlier in this book, however, God mentioned the anointment of Abulafia as a king. Abulafia sees himself as David son of David. I assume that the second David is none other than the Agent Intellect, and the phrase “David the son of David” stands for the union between the human and the separate intellects.
This reading may be corroborated by a third expression in the above passage, ve-’anokhi hu’ (I and He), which amounts to 99, a figure that for the Kabbalists is practically identical to 100. Thus, the whole discourse is not merely an allegorical composition showing how one may become a messiah by reciting divine names. It should be understood also as telling, on a more esoteric level, not only the atemporal truth about the spiritual path, understood in soteriological terms, but also the very temporal truth—and perhaps an issue as important for Abulafia as the atemporal one—namely, that Abulafia himself is a messiah and a prophet. Allegory here is not only a compositional technique, an interpretive device, but also, and more eminently, an esoteric means to point to one’s own extraordinary mystical attainment and redemptive role in history. The mystical attainment is clearly alluded to by the phrase dictated to Abulafia by God, “He is I and I am He,” which should be understood as pointing to a mystical union between the human and the divine.54
Allegory may, therefore, play a more general role in telling the story of all the souls striving for the spiritual redemption and extreme mystical attainments, as indeed it does in many of Abulafia’s writings. In some of his discussions, however, it stands for his own soul in a more esoteric way. Spiritual allegory, which is the expression that seems to me more appropriate for both decoding the biblical text and composing one’s own narrative, may designate a special application of allegorical techniques for self-expression rather than for a more general exegesis and literary composition dealing with atemporal truths. What is important in this instance of spiritual allegory, however, is that the mystical path and the mystical attainment were not expressed solely by intellectualistic terminology drawn from the medieval philosophical patrimony, but also by resorting to linguistic devices and to personal and divine names that are intertwined with more classical forms of allegory.
The import of a plethora of new terms in order to convey the intellectualistic and experiential understandings of the Bible is part of what I described above as the intercorporal enterprise.55 The massive resort to it was one of the reasons for the tensions created by the emergence of extensive writings, including Jewish philosophical exegesis, and it became more prominent during the debates related to the second Maimonidean controversy. Although Maimonides’ disciples claimed a faithful approach to the Jewish heritage, their opponents described their exegetical enterprise as heretical.56 To what extent the allegorists were sincere in offering their intercorporal interpretations, or to what extent allegorical interpretation was regarded as alien to the Kabbalists, is a very complex issue that transcends our concern here. There can be no doubt, provided the inclusive approach of many Kabbalists, that theosophical Kabbalists like R. Bahya ben Asher, his master the Rashba’, and sporadically other Kabbalists as well, adopted this exegetical path.57 This is even more the case, as we have seen in this chapter, for the ecstatic Kabbalists.
I would like to address now the question of the perception an ecstatic Kabbalist could have while offering interpretations of the Bible. As we have seen, Abulafia resorted to the verb hadesh, which can be translated as “innovate” or “create,” to point out the inventive aspect of exegesis.58 Two additional discussions may illuminate the perception of the interpretive moment. The first stems from Abulafia’s Sefer Gan Na’ul:
It is incumbent to revolve the entire Torah, which is [consists] in the names of the Holy One, blessed be He, and it is incumbent to innovate new wonders on each and every letter and on each and every word, from time to time. And it is incumbent to inquire into one word and connect it to another, and then leave the second and look for a third to connect it with it [the first], and then another, sometimes at their middle, sometimes at their beginning, sometimes at their end, sometimes by their numbers and sometimes by their permutations, until he will exit from all his initial thoughts and will innovate other, better than them, always one after another. And despite the fact that he does this while the holy name is sealed within his blood, he will not feel until it will move from its place and the blood will not run from his face by the attribute of judgment together with that of joy, he did not achieve anything from the prophetic comprehension. But it is known that when the Name, whose secret is in blood and ink,59 began to move within him, and he will feel it, as one who knows the place of a stone which is within him, he will then know that the knowledge of the Name acted in him, and it began to cause him to pass from potentiality to actuality, and since then he will be judged by all the attributes.60 And he should stand forcefully in the war with them, because they are the emissaries of the supernal, testing and examining his power … and he should always implore the Supreme Name to save him from the examination of the attributes, so that he will be considered innocent in the supernal court.61
An interesting chain of interpretive methods is expounded here. First and foremost is the claim that each and every letter should be the subject of an effort of interpretation. This atomizing exegesis does allow, according to some statements by Abulafia, the contention that each separate letter is a world in itself.62 This method does not, however, involve the most cherished of Abulafia’s exegetical techniques: the combination of letters of the canonical text. When presenting this technique he offers a more complex, detailed, and experiential account. First the contemplative exegete moves from one word to another as they appear in the biblical text; then he associates the beginnings of each of these words to one another, or their middles or their ends. This second device is itself an exegetical technique, found earlier in Ashkenazi Hasidism but put in practice by Abulafia under the name seter—which means “secret”—whose consonants stand for the three major constituents of the exegetical method: the end (sof), the middle (tokh), and the beginning (rosh).63 It should be mentioned that Abulafia not only proposed it as an exegetical model to be applied to the Bible but also used it to compose a short esoteric text that may be understood only when resorting to this type of exegesis.64 Moreover, these three elements play a role in Abulafia’s mystical technique.65 This and other exegetical practices are intended to remove old thoughts and invite new ones, a process that is the reason why he resorts to the term “innovation.”
The physiological aspects of the process described above are less transparent. Abulafia’s language is not very clear, and in the following I offer what seems to me to be a plausible understanding of the text. Abulafia assumes the existence of two stages: during the first one the divine name is sealed in the blood, but he does not feel it, and the blood does not run from his face. I assume that during this stage the practicant is still aware of himself, the divine power or name not having taken possession of him. This stage is described as preprophetical. As only the blood is mentioned, I assume that this stage is connected with the plene spelling of the Tetragrammaton.66 On the other hand, during the second stage the practicant is aware that the divine name is activating or moving him, but this time both blood and ink are mentioned, a fact that for Abulafia means the activation of both the imaginary faculty (the blood) and the intellectual one, which is referred to explicitly and connected to the ink.67 Indeed, the advanced stage conducive to a mystical experience is described elsewhere by the ecstatic Kabbalist as follows:
The hairs of your head will begin to stand up and to storm. And your blood—which is the life blood which is in your heart, of which it is said,68 “for the blood is the soul,” and of which it is likewise said,69 “for the blood shall atone for the soul”—will begin to move out because of the living combination which speaks, and all your body will begin to tremble, and your limbs will begin to shake, and you will fear a tremendous fear, and the fear of God shall cover you … And the body will tremble, like the rider who races the horse, who is glad and joyful, while the horse trembles beneath him.70
This physiological process is explained in more spiritual terms immediately beforehand: “And his intellect is greater than his imagination, and it rides upon it like one who rides upon a horse and drives it by hitting it with [a whip] to run before it as it wills, and his whip is in his hand to make it [the imagination] stand where his intellect wills.”71 I assume that these two stages described in Sefer Gan Na’ul are reflected, using more specific terminology in the above-mentioned Sha’arei Tzedeq, where the terms rashut ’enoshit and rashut ’elohit, respectively, point to the human power or authority and the divine one.72
How are these events related to interpretation? Obviously, there is a move from the canonical sequence of letters in the Bible to one that is conceived of as a continuum of the divine names. This move may point to the first stage, where the name is sealed in the blood. The second stage assumes a prophetic experience during which the mystic encounters different powers, described as divine attributes, and has to withstand these encounters. This is what the text says explicitly. However, on the basis of many discussions in Abulafia’s writings my assumption is that these powers are intensifications of the human faculties, like imagination and intellect, regarded as separate entities in Neoaristotelian psychology. Withstanding such an experience is tantamount to an examination or ordeal. These processes of examination are reminiscent of the biblical ordeals of Abraham and the prophets. Indeed, in one of his prophetic books a supernal power is reported to have told Abulafia, “You have been victorious in my war, and you have changed the blood of my forehead, and its nature and color, and you have stood up to all the tests of my thoughts. Ink you have raised, and upon ink you shall be aggrandized; the letter you have sanctified, and by means of the letter and wonder you shall be sanctified.”73
Thus, the changing of the blood into ink is the basic metaphor for the intellect’s overcoming the imaginative power. Whatever the precise affinities between the transformation of the ordinary order of the text into divine names, and the physiological and spiritual transformations undergone by the exegete, it is obvious that a radical transformative exegesis induces strong transformative experiences. By structuring the biblical text into divine names, the mystic is inviting God into his blood, is activated by the divine presence, receives prophetic inspiration, and is ultimately united with the divine.
How is this prophetic inspiration achieved through the exegetical process? Let us have a look in another book of Abulafia’s:
After you find the appropriate preparation for the soul, which is knowledge of the method of comprehension of the contemplation of the letters, and the one who apprehends it will contemplate them as though they speak with him, as a man speaks with his fellow, and as though they are themselves a man who had the power of speech, who brings words out of his mind, and that man knows seventy tongues, and knows a certain specific intention in every letter and every word, and the one who hears it apprehends it in order to understand what he says, and the one hearing recognizes that he does not understand, except for one language or two or three or slightly more, but he [that one] understands that the one speaking does not speak to him in vain, except after he knows all the languages; then every single word within him is understood according to many interpretations.74
The dialogical aspects of Abulafia’s mystical experiences have been analyzed elsewhere, and I would prefer not to dwell on them here. My main concern is status of the letters as revealing. This experience is achieved after some preparations, as is indicated at the beginning of the passage, and I consider them to be pertinent for the concept of interpretation as understood by Abulafia. Of special interest is that the letters of the Bible do not address the recipient of the revelation solely in Hebrew, but their message should be decoded in all the possible languages.
Let me now turn to a third example of the nexus between exegesis and mystical experience. One of the most widespread treatises of ecstatic Kabbalah, the anonymous Sefer ha-Tzeruf, which is extant in many manuscripts in two Hebrew versions and in a Latin translation by Flavius Mithridates, includes a comparison between man, described as microcosmos, and the Torah:
Likewise in the Torah and its letters there are intelligences and intelligi-bles,75 active and recipients of power, like the intellect that moves the sphere [or circle], which is the [hylic] matter that receives the power or the intellect that moves it, and actualizes it to the form, which is in actu that creates its meaning.76 So also are the plain senses of the Torah and the form of the letters like the matter, and by the motion of the intellect the secrets planted within them are created out of them.77 This is the reason why the sage allegorized them,78 telling interpretations and allegorical things.79 And the purpose of the general principle of all of them is that from the attainment of the wisdom you should understand that [you] are the supernal chariot for the Purpose of Purposes, blessed be He and His name. And the plain senses are like the matter of the sphere, and the form and the mover are the intellect and the intelligible found within it. And the motion within the mover is the intellect. Behold, this is the secret of the doer, of the matter, of the form, and of the purpose. The intellect is the doer, the matter is the form of the letters and the plain senses of the words. And the form is the intelligible understood or cognized from them. And the purpose is the Purpose of the Purposes, blessed be He and blessed be His name. And behold that the sphere corresponds to the heart, and it is the words, and it is the intermediary, and it is the praise allotted to it, not as a necessary thing but as a possible one. And by this several secrets will be clarified, elucidated, accumulated, if you are an illuminated one.80
What is the underlying vision here? I assume that the Aristotelian vision, in its medieval Averroistic version, inspired the entire passage: the matter, namely the letters of a word, includes within it all the possibilities, which are actualized by the human intellect, which manipulates the letters so that meanings, the intelligibles, emerge. This explanation is paralleled on the cosmic level by the extraction of forms from the matter by the motion of the sphere, according to medieval Neo-aristotelian theory. The forms emerging from this motion correspond to the meaning, or the allegorical interpretations, extracted from the words or letters. So far we have accounted for three of the four causes that Aristotle surmised are to be found in any action: doer, matter, and intelligible form. The last and most important one is the purpose, which in this case is God, described explicitly as the Purpose of Purposes. How is this purpose described within the interpretive enterprise? As the anonymous Kabbalist put it expressly, the ultimate purpose of all the interpretations is to guide someone to become the chariot of God, to become close to Him, which means, in my opinion, to attain an experience of adherence to God. By doing so, the mystic reaches the experience attained by the forefathers, who were described in a famous midrashic dictum as the chariot of God.81 In fact, the mystical experience is also understood by Abulafia as similar to the Mosaic and prophetic one, which were the source of the canonical texts. So, for example, he wrote in an untitled treatise:
It is already known that from the tree of life prophecy, Torah, and commandments come. Because from where should these three come if not from the [place] of the secrets of the sacred letters, and who will receive them if not the tongue found between the two hands? Behold, I had already announced to you the wonders when disclosing the secret of the three worlds, the supernal, the median [the celestial world], and the mundane … and the tongue between hands [it is said]82 “All the time will your clothes be white and oil on your head should not lack.” Man asks himself, What is the oil on my head? and he himself answers saying, On my head there is the Torah, the median [ha-’emtza’yit].83,84
Thus, all the interpretations should be understood as leading to the same main principle: the attainment of a mystical experience. Such an experiential understanding of the Chariot, the Merkavah, is found in later Kabbalah and in Polish Hasidism.85 However, unlike Abulafia’s more instrumental approach to the role of the Torah as conducive to an experience that strives to cleave to a totally spiritual or intellectual entity, Hasidic texts analyzed at the end of Chapter 6 invite a less instrumental function.
Let me attempt to explicate the way in which Abulafia would understand the relations between the two levels of the Torah: the plain sense, represented in some important cases as the Torah of blood, or imaginative-exoteric sense (see Appendix 2), and the intellectual sense, the Torah of ink, or intellectual-esoteric sense. In some passages in Sitrei Torah Abulafia contends that it is impossible to invalidate either of the two senses:
Today there are five thousand and forty years since the time that the world was both created and eternal. And if it is created alone it is not important to speak about, because everything that teaches at the beginning of thought that the plain sense of the Torah is true without having a parabolic meaning, we shall believe it immediately without any doubt, as it is, and it is sufficient. And if it is eternal from one point of view, and eternal from another point of view, there is no need to speak about it, because the aspect of the creation suffices in order to innovate the plain sense of our Torah. And if it will teach the aspect of eternity according to the esoteric sense we shall lose nothing, namely the secrets of the Torah. Because the whole intention is to prove the truth according to comprehension and to remove the absurd thought from the hearts. Because if the world is eternal and we believe in creation it would be a lie, and so too if it is created and we believe that it is eternal. But since we believe in the development86 of the creation, as it had been testified to by the true Torah … we should not worry about determining which of the two ways is the true one.87
Thus, Abulafia believes that a synthetic approach is better than any of the two more puristic alternatives. In fact, he hints at the fullness involved in the complexity of the assumption that the world is both eternal and created. This is the attitude of the prophets and the prophetic Kabbalists, and it is the reason for the superiority of this form of understanding. Again, in another quote, he indicates:
According to its essence the Torah comprises two sorts of reality, and both are good. They are the plain and esoteric senses, both being true; and this should be understood from the existence of the body together [with the soul]88 which are together, one is created and one is eternal, this is the exoteric and that is the esoteric, as if this is the parable and that is the signified, but both are together. And this wondrous hint should be sufficient for you.89
Earlier in the same book he writes:
The plain sense of the Torah is a definitive truth, and its secrets are an ultimate truth, and both together are one in their essence. You should understand and contemplate this secret and its words one by one. You should know the source of the thing, [and] by which concept it should be conceptualized according to the human intellect, and what is worthy to be believed in accordance with the influx stemming from the divine intellect, related to the three issues I have hinted at: the innovation of the world and its eternity, the parable of the new and primordial Torah, and the plain sense of the Torah and its esoteric sense.90
We see that Abulafia, the spiritualist who attempted to build a mystical system that teaches ways to transcend normal consciousness takes pain to assert that the plain sense is also good and necessary, though certainly not as important as the esoteric one. This line of argumentation is also found in the writings of one of Abulafia’s anonymous followers, the Kabbalist who composed Sefer ha-Tzeruf, which has been mentioned above.91
Before turning to some more general observations, I would like to point out the affinity between Abulafia’s spiritualistic hermeneutics and that found in a series of Jewish commentaries written in Arabic starting in the beginning of the thirteenth century in Egypt and then later in the Middle East by descendants of Maimonides and others. Under the strong impact of Sufi hermeneutics and mystical techniques, the Jewish authors, most eminently R. Abraham Maimuni, offered spiritual allegories that resemble some of Abulafia’s interpretations.92 The extent of the impact of those developments on Kabbalah is still a matter of dispute. Although I consider it to be evident in the case of ecstatic Kabbalah as it has been formulated since the end of the thirteenth century, in the generation of Abulafia’s students outside Spain it is hard to substantiate the influences on the earlier phase of Kabbalah in general. Such a possibility should not, however, be neglected.93
One of the major developments that nourished Jewish mysticism was the growing interest in late antiquity and in medieval literature of the role played by themes related to Enoch, a marginal figure in the Bible. Enochic themes become more and more important, especially when Jewish mystics were looking for a model for human transformation during a mystical experience, following the dictum “Enoch is Metatron.”94 The metamorphoses of Enoch into the angel Metatron and the different functions attributed to that angel in Kabbalistic literature has already attracted the attention of scholars, and much more should be done in this field.95 R. Abraham Abulafia is indubitably one of the Kabbalists fascinated by the angel Metatron. He took upon himself the mystical name Razi’el, related to Metatron, which in gematria is the numerical equivalent of his given name, Abraham,96 but also speculated about the various identifications of Metatron with the supernal Torah as the cosmic Agent Intellect.97 Some of Abulafia’s Metatronic discussions have antecedents in early mystical literature, although he consistently interpreted the mythological figures of Metatron allegorically, as pointing to intellectual matters.98 Such a tradition has to do with the identification of Metatron with the scroll of the Torah, adduced by R. Abraham ibn Ezra in the name of unknown persons: “There are those who say that the angel is the Torah scroll, for the verse states, ‘My name is within him.’”99,100 Although ibn Ezra himself rejected this view, and I am unable to corroborate this tradition. Nevertheless, it is obvious that through ibn Ezra’s commentary this tradition remained part of the Jewish tradition. Abulafia’s writings contain various formulations dealing with the identity between an intel-lectualistic concept of Torah and the Agent Intellect. I have brought up elsewhere numerous discussions of this issue from Abulafia’s writings and his immediate sources, and I would like to add here one more passage, found in an untitled manuscript. When interpreting the verse u-vaharta ba-hayyim101 Abulafia asserts that “there is a great secret pointing to that upon which the life of people depend, whose secret is the tenth angel, and it is the secret of the Torah because the [word] ‘And thou should choose [u-vaharta]’ amounts to ha-torah. And ba-hayyim is a secret, and is the knowledge of the Tetragrammaton, Yod He’Vav He. Behold, the secret of the Torah is life which depends always upon the Torah.”102
There can be no doubt that the tenth angel stands for the tenth cosmic intellect, which is identical to Metatron. Real life is to be understood in the context of Abulafia’s writings as the life of the human intellect, which depends upon the Agent Intellect, namely the supernal Torah. This spiritual dependence of the human upon a supernal angel is reminiscent of Muslim spirituality, which resorts to an angelology, especially as expounded in ibn ’Arabi.103 However, immersed as Abulafia was in numerical exegesis, he founded his passage on the identity between “life,” namely the sublime attainment of the intellect, and the union with the divine name, as be-hayyim and the numerical value of the consonants of the Tetragrammaton plus their plene spelling amount to the same sum, 70 or 71.
Let us move now to another formulation, which deserves a more detailed analysis. In one of his commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed Abulafia wrote:
The soul is a portion of the divinity, and within her there are 231 gates [yesh ra’al], and it is called “the congregation of Israel” that collects and gathers into herself the entire community under her power of intellect, which is called the “supernal congregation of Israel,” the mother of providence, being the cause of providence, the intermediary104 between us and God. This is the Torah, the result of the effluence of the twenty-two letters.105
I chose this passage in order to show how one short discussion is able to encode a variety of conceptual corpora. Let me start by remarking that this is a rather uncharacteristic passage: Abulafia was concerned with the intellect, not with the soul, and the divinity of the soul is quite weird in an Aristotelian or Maimonidean system, which Abulafia shared to a very great extent. I assume that here, as in some other cases, there is a vestige of an earlier tradition that was not sufficiently adapted to Abulafia’s way of thought. In any case, the soul is conceived to be a portion of divinity in a way reminiscent of Neoplatonism and theosophical Kabbalah. This divine soul harbors the 231 gates that point to the primordial Torah (as we shall see in much more detail in the next chapter), and Abulafia mentions Torah explicitly at the end of the passage. Moreover, we may assume that either Abulafia or his source did not intend human souls in general but the souls of the people of Israel, for two reasons: the phrase knesset yisra’el occurs twice in the passage, and the Hebrew consonants that R’L, which denote the 231 gates, are part of the word yisra’el, as Abulafia and the young Gikatilla repeat so many times in their writings. It is quite reasonable to assume that the two terms knesset yisra’el stand for the human intellect and the supernal one, which is identical with the Agent Intellect and the human intellect.106 The feminine terminology used by Abulafia to designate the Agent Intellect is also strange in his mystical axiology, where the source of knowledge is regarded metaphorically as masculine. Perhaps the resort to such a reference has to do with an earlier Kabbalistic source, which stems from another way of thinking. This quote may be understood as pointing to a triunity of God, soul of Israel, and Torah, in the vein of the famous but much later formula qudesha’ berikh hu’, ‘Orayta’ vi-yisra’el had hu’, which has been mentioned several times in earlier discussions.107
Abulafia’s Kabbalistic system, as represented in the two passages, brings together five different forms of speculation derived from diverging corpora: the anomian theory of linguistic combinatory, stemming from Sefer Yetzirah and represented here by the 231 gates and the twenty-two letters, and the resort by Hasidei Ashkenaz to combinations of letters and gematria; the nomian concept of the Torah; the Heikhalot concern with Metatron; and the philosophical interest in the Agent Intellect and the rabbinic term knesset yisra’el. However, the conceptual layers that determined the meaning of the complex of ideas emerging from the last passage—and many others in Abulafia’s writings—are two: that of Sefer Yetzirah and its followers and medieval Neoaristotelianism, which means two types of anomian thinking. I would say that while the philosophical corpus expands and changes the conceptual cargo of the three other layers, Sefer Yetzirah and mathematical methods provided the exegetical means that brought these diverging layers together. Or, to return to one of the recurrent claims of the present work: the broader the expansion of the conceptual cargo of a certain corpus or corpora, the more eccentric the exegetical methods that have to be put to work.
In ecstatic Kabbalah, following Neoaristotelian medieval literature, allegory was conceived therefore not as an alien form of discourse but, on the contrary, as an important method for interpreting Torah, for reinterpreting some forms of Jewish postbiblical esoteric tradition, and even for composing Kabbalistic writings. From this point of view there is no radical difference between Maimonides’ allegoriza-tion of ancient Jewish esotericism and the ecstatic Kabbalist’s allegorization of Jewish canonical writings. In any case, after Maimonides’ powerful introduction of allegoresis in Jewish medieval exegesis it became difficult for many Jewish intellectuals, for good or for bad, to neglect it, and as soon as this approach was accepted, it moved into many realms of exegesis of the sacred scriptures.
The allegorical impulse expanded and entered more and more domains of Kabbalah as this form of mystical literature developed. This is not the place to elaborate on the strengthening of some allegorical impulses in some forms of early-seventeenth-century Kabbalistic interpretations of Lurianic Kabbalah, which escalated the role of allegoresis just a generation after the acceleration of the resort to the variegated mythical aspects of Kabbalah in the thought of the famous Safedian master.108 Thus, although we may refer to a preponderance of symbolism in some important forms of Kabbalah, the theosophical-theurgical ones, and of allegory in a few others which, though less central, were still influential types of Kabbalah, no definitive attribution of this form of exegesis solely to Jewish philosophers, on the one hand, and its absence or rejection in Kabbalistic literature as a whole, on the other, is historically or phenomenologically accurate. Instead of attempting to distinguish sharply between Kabbalah, as a generic term, and philosophy—again a rather reified description insofar as so many of the Jewish medieval sources are concerned—or between allegory and symbolic forms of discourse, I propose to strike a different balance that will conceive the vast domain of Kabbalistic literature, as is the case with Jewish philosophy, as much richer, much more open and variegated, and much more capable of absorbing different forms of exegesis.109 Such a variegated picture of the phenomenology of Kabbalah will facilitate a better answer to the emergence of spiritualistic allegoresis in eighteenth-century Hasidism. Far from a neutralization of elements in Lurianic Kabbalah done by Hasidic masters as an answer to the crisis created by Sabbateanism, some elements in Hasidic exegesis are similar to and perhaps also influenced by ecstatic Kabbalah.110