Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World 9781512824360

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Zimzum

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors Beth Berkowitz Shaul Magid Francesca Trivellato Steven Weitzman A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

ZIMZUM God and the Origin of the World

Christoph Schulte Translated by Corey Twitchell

U n i v e r s i t y o f P e n n s y lva n i a P r e s s Philadelphia

​Originally published as Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung by Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag. © 2014 Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin En­glish translation copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—­Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 https://­w ww​.­pennpress​.­org/ Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2435-3 eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2436-0 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

Preface to the En­glish Edition Introduction

vii 1

Chapter 1. Origins in the Holy Land

19

Chapter 2. From Esoteric to Exoteric: Eu­ro­pean Kabbalists Transmitting Texts and Ideas in the First Half of the Seventeenth ­Century

65

Chapter 3. Christians Unveil the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth and Eigh­teenth Centuries

100

Chapter 4. Shabbateans and Anti-­Shabbateans

143

Chapter 5. The Origins of Chassidism

180

Chapter 6. God’s Contraction in German Idealism and Romanticism

216

Chapter 7. The Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums

252

Chapter 8. Zimzum in the Twentieth C ­ entury

278

Conclusion. The Anthropology of Zimzum

334

Appendix A. Sources on Zimzum: Texts, Art, and ­Music

351

vi Contents

Appendix B. Four Hundred Fifty Years of Zimzum Diffusion

354

Notes

357

Selected Bibliography

393

Index

405

Acknowl­edgments

411

P r e f a c e t o t h e E n ­g l i s h E d i t i o n

Nine years lie between the original German publication of my book Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, which appeared in 2014 ­under the auspices of Suhrkamp’s Jüdischer Verlag (Jewish Press), and Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World. The original edition of the book was widely received and reviewed. In it, I pre­sent the more than four-­hundred-­year, rather paradoxical history of the originally esoteric, orally transmitted kabbalistic doctrine of zimzum, beginning in the sixteenth ­century and culminating in the twenty-­first ­century with a global reach made pos­si­ble by the internet. Zimzum is a concept that pertains both to the creation and creativity that can result from the creator’s or artist’s contraction or withdrawal. In their praise of Zimzum, critics recognized the book as a classic work of Eu­ro­pean intellectual history in the tradition of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism). The book portrays the dissemination and the transformations of zimzum in Judaism and Chris­tian­ity, in Kabbalah, theology, and philosophy, as well as in art, lit­er­a­ture, film, and m ­ usic. Agata Bielik-­Robson and Daniel H. Weiss saw my book as a reason to or­ga­nize a conference in Cambridge University in 2016, where participants discussed zimzum as a theme and foundational princi­ple of modern and con­ temporary thought in philosophy and theology, especially in conversation with Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Scholem, much in the spirit of curiosity that underpins my book. The papers presented at this conference in Cambridge have certainly comprised the most significant responses to my book on zimzum. An edited volume appeared in 2020 as Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology. That volume reflects the ingenuity and insight of the scholars who contributed to it. In making decisions about the framing of the En­glish translation of my book, I have opted not to engage directly with the volume and its contributions, many of which are considerably profound. In the same vein, I have chosen not to discuss more recent scholarly articles and

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Preface to English Edition

monographs that have appeared since 2014, such as Avinoam Fraenkel’s Nefesh HaTzimtzum (2 vols., Jerusalem, 2015) on R. Chaim Volozhin, Noam Zadoff’s 2017 biography Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back, or Elke Morlok’s 2021 study of the maskil and kabbalist Isaac Satanow, except where such works offer fresh ideas on the theme of zimzum. In preparing the En­glish translation of my book, I have tacitly corrected factual errors that appeared in the German edition, which keen and well-­ meaning readers have brought to my attention. Any errors remaining in the En­glish translation are the responsibility of the author, not the translator. Corey Twitchell has done a fantastic and thorough job of translating my book for English-­language readers. He has rendered the diversity and multilingualism of the many varying discourses on zimzum that are discussed in the German original in vari­ous constellations and combinations, in a compact and reader-­friendly En­glish translation. Transcribing Hebrew words into American En­glish presented us numerous challenges, in par­tic­ul­ar the book’s key concept, zimzum. The Hebrew noun ‫ צמצום‬appears with vari­ous spellings, sometimes transcribed as tsimtsum or tzimtzum, or in an academic context often as ẓimẓum. We chose the simplest variation, namely, zimzum, pronounced corresponding to the phoneme /ts/, such as the letter z in the word pizza. The transatlantic cooperation between author and translator over Zoom, during which we spent nearly two years discussing ­every single chapter of the translation, working out kinks and infelicities of all kinds, was always creative, relaxed, and often rather amusing. ZimZoom. Thank you, Corey. The jury of Geisteswissenschaften International of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels e.V. selected my book for a translation prize, which has made this complex translation of a German academic study into En­glish pos­si­ble in the first place. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Geisteswissenchaften International, the Börsenverein, and Suhrkamp publishing ­house, especially Thomas Sparr, for supporting my work. I ­here want to express my gratitude to Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, and Steven Weitzman, who elected to include my book in their series Jewish Culture and Contexts. I would also like to thank Penn Press and its editors for turning this translation into a handsome, stand-­alone book. The original German edition of this book in 2014 was dedicated to my ­children. I dedicate the American translation to the memory of Samuel Forest Ozer (2002–2020) from Philadelphia, who was killed in a bicycle accident. He was my son Jonas’s closest friend and “bro” in Philadelphia, only



Preface to English Edition

ix

son of our beloved neighbors and friends Mindy and Sid. As a young boy, Sam observed me write the initial chapters of my zimzum book in 2009– 2010, when the strange German professor from Berlin (who was also his soccer coach) was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. I last saw him at the end of 2019, when we visited the old synagogues of Prague and drank splendid Czech beer. Though the book he watched me write now appears in En­glish translation in his home city of Philadelphia, he is no longer h ­ ere to read it. We miss him very much.

Introduction

The Hebrew word zimzum can mean “contraction,” “retraction,” “demarcation,” “restraint,” and “concentration.” The term zimzum originates in the Kabbalah and refers to God’s contraction of himself before the creation of the world, and for the purpose of creating the world. To put it another way, the omnipresent God, who exists beyond time and space before creation, withdraws a part of his infinite presence into himself. With this divine gesture, God restricts himself in zimzum, clearing the empty space that is necessary for creation. The emanation and the creation of the world are then able to occur in the center of God following this act of zimzum. In this pro­cess, God limits his omnipotence, so that a finite world can exist within finite contours. Without zimzum, ­there would be no creation. For this reason, zimzum is a key concept in Jewish thought. In Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World, I assem­ble a detailed overview of the history and reception of the doctrine of zimzum. As I ­will explain in the following chapters of this book, this concept is usually attributed to Isaac Luria (1534–1572), who was a Jewish mystic and rabbi in the late sixteenth ­century in the town of Safed, located in the region of Galilee. In the traditional Jewish world, the kabbalist and rabbi Luria is referred to with the honorific title Ha’ARI (“the lion”), an acronym derived from the letters of his name. He was a man devoted principally to the spoken word. As such, we do not have a single line that he personally wrote in relation to the concept of zimzum. Instead, we have only the written testimonials of his students, such as Chayyim Vital and Joseph Ibn Tabūl, who compiled their master’s oral teachings into writing. Through this transmedial pro­cess, they not only transmitted but also si­mul­ta­neously interpreted what their teacher had taught and elaborated. Their interpretations of Luria’s doctrine of zimzum have in turn been passed down by their students, friends and adversaries, kabbalists and anti-­kabbalists, phi­los­o­phers and theologians, scholars and artists, Jews and ­later Christians, generation ­after generation. For more than

2

Introduction

four hundred years, t­ hese interpretations of Luria’s zimzum have been copied down in the form of handwritten manuscripts and then ­later replicated in print, adapted to new religious and intellectual contexts, translated into foreign tongues, and through all ­these interventions, repeatedly transformed and re­imagined. This book on zimzum assem­bles, contextualizes, documents, locates, reconstructs, translates, and interprets ­these sources and makes ­these sequences of interpretation, ­these transformations, and the uses of zimzum over the last four hundred years accessible and legible. This corpus of secondary source material most often refers to Luria as the origin point for the doctrine of zimzum and thus forms a kind of Lurianic tradition, although we have no extant manuscript that Luria himself wrote on the topic. Instead, we have a tradition of interpretation without an original.1 For this reason, we do not know precisely what the master taught his small circle of students about zimzum. Transmission and interpretation are what remain of the relatively brief win­dow of time during which his disciples studied with him face-­ to-­face and ­were privy to his exact words. It is fitting then that for the doctrine of zimzum, which is said to have taken place before creation, we have no original text and no original documents. The path that might lead back to the origin of this concept is barred to us. In lieu of a primary source that Luria himself created to illustrate his doctrine, we can explore the constantly evolving interpretations of zimzum and its intricate history of reception.

Zimzum in Reception and Tradition Researching and writing a coherent, comprehensive narrative detailing Luria’s concept of zimzum and its vestiges throughout Jewish and Christian intellectual history in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the twenty-­first ­century, means to study interpretations without direct access to an original text. To this extent, this book analyzes the many interpretations of zimzum across time and space, which form their own tradition of transmission and often refer to one another and almost always relate back to Isaac Luria, despite that fact that he generated no original text that we know of. This trajectory, however, is not at all foreign to the Kabbalah, as the Hebrew term kabbalah means both “reception” and “tradition.” I investigate the reception and tradition of zimzum interpreta-

Introduction

3

tions, even where they have long since crossed the bound­a ries of Kabbalah and left the Jewish or any religious context altogether. I invite the reader to accompany me in my search for ­these traces. This study follows zimzum historically and chronologically on its path from Jewish to Christian religious history in the early modern period, to Eu­ ro­pean and North American cultural history, to philosophy and theology, early modern science, lit­er­a­ture, the visual arts, and even ­music. Following the course of zimzum interpretations, one must work through not only alterations in content but also shifts in medium that the zimzum motif has under­gone throughout its history. This path leads from Luria’s oral teachings to the transcription of this doctrine via the handwritten manuscripts of his pupils and from the kabbalists who for centuries reproduced handwritten copies of lengthy works to the advent of modern book printing. The invention of the printed word made Hebrew books and translations on zimzum available to a much wider audience, transferring the esoteric, intra-­ kabbalistic, often still instructor-­supervised oral study of texts to the public book market and the individual reader no longer dependent on the group dynamic of teacher and fellow students to study this material. Fi­nally, in the twentieth ­century, we encounter the medial transition from written text to the visualization of zimzum in sculptures, paintings, installations, photo­ graphs, on the internet, and most recently even in the form of an auditory experience. By considering this wide religious and cultural-­historical arc, this study traces the sequence of interpretations, historically contextualizing and comparing them. But in the absence of an authoritative original by Luria and the lack of pos­si­ble comparison with such a text, my intent is not to judge the validity of any par­tic­u­lar interpretation or adaptation of zimzum. I forgo a normative system of classification that might other­wise deter readers from thinking beyond simplistic categories of “right” and “wrong” and instead endeavor to pre­sent and analyze four hundred years of reception with as much clarity and precision as pos­si­ble. As such, the analy­sis of zimzum interpretations and their variations that I develop in the following pages is not a task I take lightly. Fascinated by Luria’s concept, his successors have endeavored to discover and understand the truth about zimzum and the origins of our world. Their interpretations raise a claim to truth, which a scholarly endeavor such as this must pursue in all sincerity, ­because the authors and creators of the wide variety of texts analyzed ­here repeatedly make this claim. It is this claim to the veracity of

4

Introduction

Luria’s teachings on zimzum that has prompted generations of authors to describe, feature, interpret, recall, reinvent, even in instances when the intention is critical or polemical. Their objective has been to make the concept of zimzum productive for their contemporaries and their own historical context. Interpretations of zimzum, especially in their multiplicity and diversity, offer the reader a kaleidoscope of epistemological and hermeneutic opportunities from which we may glean much about the interpreters and the historical moments in which they lived. The multitude of interpretations and interpreters can thus be combined into a vibrant, impressive tapestry of Eu­ ro­pean, and to some extent North American, intellectual and religious history, which includes religious and intellectual interrelationships between Jews and Christians. Since the late seventeenth ­century, Christian kabbalists such as Christian Knorr von Rosenroth have reached for and ­adopted zimzum texts originating in the Lurianic Kabbalah. In the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, Christian and Jewish kabbalists exchanged ideas about zimzum with one another. And in the twentieth ­century, Jewish thinkers like Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem rediscovered zimzum as an intellectual concept in the works of Christian phi­los­o­phers such as Franz Joseph Molitor and F. W. J. Schelling. In addition, beginning in the late eigh­teenth ­century and throughout the nineteenth ­century, zimzum gained considerable momentum in Chassidism. Although the Eu­ro­pean Christian world did not initially take note of this popularization, Chassidic cultural and religious connections have been fundamental to the adaptations of zimzum that we find in works by Jewish artists and literati in North Amer­i­ca in the twentieth ­century. The concept of zimzum remains prevalent and enjoys intermittent popularity in the Chassidic world even ­today. In this proj­ect, I do not simply classify ­these zimzum interpretations and attitudes as if they ­were static objects enshrined in a museum. Instead, I document and analyze them in what is often their im­mense complexity and vitality. They often reveal the power­f ul creativity of the interpreters working with this and related concepts. Even deliberate defamation and polemic or superficial distortions and misrepre­sen­ta­tions of the Kabbalah and zimzum have creative potential. Interpretation and appropriation thus become the creative act. As Harold Bloom maintains, “creative misreading” is a constitutive component of the reception history of zimzum.2 Zimzum has inspired almost all its recipients and interpreters to contemplate, reimagine,

Introduction

5

write, and create their own artistic output. This has provoked, required, and encouraged creativity.

Differentiation in the History of Reception The Hebrew term kabbalah, as I previously mentioned, means both “tradition” and “reception.” The Kabbalah is, if you ­will, a tradition of reception. Kabbalists familiarize themselves with older kabbalistic texts and traditions, apply, pro­cess, and alter them in accordance with their own teachings and writings, and pass them down to subsequent generations. This transmission was originally an esoteric pro­cess bound by strict rules: a teacher passed on ­these secret teachings about the inner life of God, cosmic pro­cesses, and the deepest meanings of the Torah and the names of God to only a select few pious, halakhically observant students. This was also the case with the circle of Isaac Luria’s pupils when he articulated the new esoteric doctrine of zimzum and presented it to them within this oral tradition. The reception history of this doctrine, however, only remained esoteric for a few de­cades. As soon as the first Lurianic manuscripts ­were copied by hand and ­later disseminated in print, the esoteric intimacy of the teacher-­pupil relationship dissolved. The reception and acknowl­edgment of zimzum through reading, even without kabbalistic initiation and oral instruction, became pos­si­ble. The doctrine of zimzum found its way into wider Jewish and subsequently Christian circles, and it became exoteric by means of book printing and translations, even as early as the ­middle of the seventeenth ­century, only two generations a­ fter its emergence. In the Shabbatean movement of the seventeenth ­century and in Chassidism of the eigh­teenth ­century, the Lurianic Kabbalah, along with its doctrines including zimzum, gradually gained popularity. While Luria’s teachings regarding zimzum have maintained a presence in Chassidic circles up to ­today, ­these teachings ceased to play a role in Judaism in central and western Eu­rope and the United States when they fell into desuetude ­after the Haskalah and up ­until the early twentieth ­century. It was Gershom Scholem and his research that once again drew the attention of Jewish and non-­ Jewish intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth ­century back to the kabbalistic doctrine of zimzum; Scholem’s writings are cited by artists and thinkers far beyond the narrow field of Kabbalah research, including Hans

6

Introduction

Jonas, Barnett Newman, Harold Bloom, Jürgen Habermas, Jürgen Moltmann, and Anselm Kiefer. I, too, have been inspired by Scholem to return to the sources, the interpretations, and the receptions, and at the same time to look beyond the narrower context of Kabbalah research and religious history. One of the paradoxes of zimzum’s history of influence and reception in Eu­ro­pean and North American history of religion, philosophy, and culture is the fact that the comprehensive repro­cessing of Luria’s historical influence based on a single teaching leads to a hermeneutical overvalue. With a synoptic view of the vari­ous strands of reception, we may understand, as Hans-­Georg Gadamer articulated with his concept of philosophical hermeneutics,3 the doctrine of zimzum in all its motifs and levels of meaning with a wider field of vision and more clearly than any individual in the seventeenth ­century could have done. Overall, this study provides an overview of an ongoing history of influence and reception lasting more than four hundred years, which we can even represent graphically. Centuries of interpretation and reception history accumulate new levels of meaning and layers of significance. If, however, we look at the details of the respective appropriations and expropriations in this history of reception, they are often so brutal that they ignore, abbreviate, or sever the traditional doctrine of Luria’s zimzum. Much is lost, displaced, or cut off in the pro­cess of appropriation; seldom does it entail objective understanding, faithfulness to the original, or loyal transmission.4 Nevertheless, the ruthless and one-­sided appropriations and usages of the zimzum idea are often the most innovative and imaginative. It is therefore necessary that this study specifies the history of reception and the hermeneutics of zimzum.5 As I have said, the reception history of zimzum does not provide access to an original text. And it is a reception history composed of markedly dif­fer­ent perceptions, worlds of ideas, and appropriations. First, a formal distinction can be made between direct and indirect zimzum reception. An example of direct reception is the oral transmission from teachers to pupils, such as with Luria and Vital, but also the reading of the Hebrew texts compiled by pupils of Luria, as recounted by Isaac Bashevis Singer from his youth, or through the academic reading of Scholem, who never had a Kabbalah teacher and gained his knowledge by reading the original texts. Indirect reception occurs when, for example, Hans Jonas and Harold Bloom recount their knowledge of zimzum not directly from the Hebrew texts of the kabbalists but from academic texts by Scholem on the Lurianic Kabbalah.

Introduction

7

Second, on the material level, we can differentiate which textual ele­ments of the Lurianic Kabbalah are received and discussed. First, entire texts such as ­those by Chayyim Vital are read ­either in handwriting or in print. Frequently, however, only select portions of text or even summarized paraphrases are received and reproduced, for example, when Johann Georg Wachter translates, from Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, fragments of text related to zimzum, but sometimes also only paraphrases them. An even further reduced case of material reception occurs when, instead of entire texts, only individual terms such as zimzum or tikkun are used. The Hebrew term zimzum used in the ­middle of a text in another language about the concept of zimzum serves to authenticate the work and signal expertise. Or in instances when works of art feature the name “zimzum” without explanatory commentary, such as the sculptures of Barnett Newman and Christoph Loos, it serves to create an enigmatic tension, for an artwork whose title bears this kabbalistic concept is meant to be understood without further comment from the artist. The American heavy metal guitarist and songwriter Timothy Michael Linton ­adopted the stage name “Zim Zum” in 1996 when he joined the band Marilyn Manson. In this instance, however, “Zim Zum” functions solely as a name, as Linton does not reference the Lurianic Kabbalah in his ­music or songs. The same applies to a novel titled Zimzum that Gordon Lish published in 1993. The brief, partially pornographic short stories that compose the novel make no substantive reference to zimzum, to the Kabbalah, or to Judaism. In this instance, zimzum is simply a name or sound association. In both Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi (2001) and Ang Lee’s 2012 film adaptation of the same name, Tsimtsum is the name of a sunken Japa­nese (!) sailing vessel. It is within the confined space of a Tsimtsum rescue boat that the protagonist, equally interested in zoology and religion, survives while floating in the endless Pacific Ocean. Martel’s narrator, however, informs the reader at the beginning of the first chapter that the main character Pi has written a master’s thesis on the cosmogony of Isaac Luria from Safed. Martel thus introduces the possibility of interpreting the novel Life of Pi in religious terms, without any further mention of the Kabbalah. However, ­there are instances in which the Hebrew term zimzum is not explic­itly mentioned, but rather the concept of a pre-­worldly self-­contraction of God that zimzum designates is implicitly referenced. This self-­contraction of God in zimzum is termed “limitation” (Einschränkung) by Salomon Maimon, “contraction” (Contraktion) by Schelling, and the “internalization”

8

Introduction

of God (Verinnerung) by Franz Rosenzweig, all without ever using the Hebrew term zimzum in their writings. Though the term is missing, ­these authors clearly engage the concept of God’s self-­contraction. Third, in the ways that knowledge about and around zimzum is mediated, we can observe dif­fer­ent modes: personal mediation is the opposite of impersonal mediation. Correspondingly, the Pietist and theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, as a young man in Frankfurt am Main, personally learned Kabbalah from the kabbalist Koppel Hecht, as he describes in his autobiography; but Schelling, for example, only became acquainted with ­these kabbalistic teachings, including zimzum, impersonally via the works of Oetinger, without ever seeking the personal guidance of a kabbalist. In Chassidism too, such as at the Chassidic court of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritch, the mediation and teaching of the Lurianic Kabbalah through the zaddik was a personal experience. On the other hand, a scholar of Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) who was not well-­disposed ­toward the Kabbalah, such as Heinrich Graetz, could read and appropriate the Lurianic descriptions of zimzum from the works of Luria’s pupils, always through impersonal channels. Graetz worked with writings in their respective original language, as is the prevailing standard for academic research to this day in the Wissenschaft des Judentums and in Jewish Studies. This is a completely dif­fer­ent mode of reception than the absorption and examination of the Kabbalah with the help of translations. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s pioneering achievement in the multivolume Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684) was the comprehensive collection, analy­sis, documentation, and translation of kabbalistic source texts into Latin. Initially, this translation of the Kabbalah into the primary Eu­ ro­pean scholarly language of the time made ­these doctrines, especially zimzum, which Knorr translated as “contractio,” accessible to the Eu­ro­pean scholarly world and made pos­si­ble the broad Christian reception history from Henry More and Anne Conway to Isaac Newton, and from Wachter via Johann Jakob Brucker and Friedrich Jacobi to Clemens Brentano. One of the effects of this Latin corpus has been that Christian reception history from the time of Knorr von Rosenroth ­until the nineteenth ­century, and to a certain degree the Jewish history of reception as well, has not perceived the Kabbalah and zimzum as Jewish mysticism, as they are seen ­today, but as esoteric Jewish philosophy. This phenomenon, however, certainly did not correspond to the self-­understanding of Luria and his immediate pupils in

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9

Safed, who sought to express in words their inner, divinely given inspiration, enlightenment, experience, and oral instruction from their teacher. In addition to the difference in reception between an original text and a translation, which can also mean a “crossing” or “carry­ing over” into another historical and religious context, is the weightier distinction of w ­ hether zimzum is explic­itly perceived as a kabbalistic doctrine and contextualized, as in the art of Anselm Kiefer, or ­whether, as in the sculptures of Barnett Newman, it remains implicit and appears only as an enigmatic name and a catchword in a work of art, which at first glance makes no explicit reference to the Kabbalah. The subsequent unraveling of this name by an aesthetic or art-­historical contextualization remains the task of the observer and interpreters. But this distinction existed even among Schelling and Molitor in their day and age. Molitor pre­sents the contraction of God explic­itly as a kabbalistic figure of thought, while Schelling conceals the Kabbalah as the provenance of the concept of God’s contraction, referring to it only implicitly. In the end, the intention and attitude with which zimzum is received is significant. We must distinguish ­whether the doctrine of zimzum is accepted authoritatively and affirmatively as in Chassidism, where the homage to Ha’ARI and his teachings is ­great and offers rich intellectual and spiritual opportunity for connections, or ­whether Luria and his teachings, as with Heinrich Graetz, are dismissed as irrational early modern fantasies, which could not be allowed to bring the emancipated, bourgeois, highly educated Jews of the imperial age into ideological disrepute. The reception of zimzum by Catholic anti-­Semite Clemens Brentano remains paradoxical: he despised Jews and in 1811 held derisive anti-­Semitic speeches at meetings of the Christlich-­Deutsche Tischgesellschaft (Christian-­German ­Table Society) held in Berlin.6 However, this vitriol did not prevent him from employing zimzum as a mythologem of creation in his lyrical poetry. And Johann Georg Wachter only used zimzum and the Lurianic Kabbalah to denounce the “Atheisterey” (atheism) in Judaism and to deride Spinoza as a Jewish atheist. The ways of appropriating zimzum in its long history of reception are manifold and dizzying, but this complexity makes it even more compelling, as it provides a clear picture of intra-­Jewish conflicts, as well as sheds light on the fluctuating interrelationships between Jews and Christians. Fi­nally, I examine in this study the broad transfer of zimzum among vari­ous media: Isaac Luria gave oral lessons to his small circle of select pupils

10 Introduction

­ ntil his early death in 1572, but his students in Safed, such as Chayyim u Vital and Joseph Ibn Tabūl, recorded his words in writing. Their rec­ords ­were duplicated first through handwritten copies and circulated among kabbalists in other locations. Thus, the intimate, esoteric teacher-­student relationships and practice of oral instruction ­were nullified, supplemented instead by reading and learning according to handwritten, book-­length writings that ultimately replaced the oral tradition. Already by 1612, only forty years ­after Luria’s death, passages on zimzum appeared for the first time in print in Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­witz’s book Shefa Tal. In printed form, texts related to zimzum became definitively exoteric, as they became available as commercial goods for purchase and could also be acquired by critics of the Kabbalah and even by non-­Jews. In Shefa Tal, we observe a second shift in media. For the first time in this text, a graphic illustration of zimzum is also printed, with an expressly explanatory purpose. A printed graphic composed of Hebrew letters represents tehiru, the empty space in Ein-­Sof (“The Infinite;” kabbalistic name of God), which is liberated by God’s self-­limitation. From this point on, one can actually behold zimzum. Up ­until the pre­sent day, pictorial depictions of zimzum have become zimzum status quo, first in books such as the drawings in the handwritten copies of the Sefer haDerushim (1620) and ­later in the prized copper engravings of Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae (1742), but most recently, without any text, in paintings such as Anselm Kiefer’s monumental multimedia work Zim-­Zum (1990) located in Washington, D.C. The vividness and three-­dimensionality of sculpture has entirely altered zimzum, as in the interactive and hands-on (!) steel-­plate sculpture Zim Zum I (1969) by Barnett Newman and the installation ZimZum (2000) by Christoph Loos. As we consider zimzum’s transition into the visual arts, from the writing of letters and books into the visibility of images and the tactility of sculpture, I would be remiss if I did not mention composer and sound artist Steffen Krebber who composed a ­music piece entitled “zimzum,” which debuted in Cologne and Amsterdam in 2010. Krebber’s “zimzum” belongs to the series Nichtsattrappen (Simulations of Nothingness), which a computer-­controlled microtonal organ is programmed to perform. In this instance, zimzum provides the name and occasion of avant-­garde m ­ usic, part of an artistic endeavor to capture moments of nothingness. ­After all, zimzum thus becomes an audible trope. With the assistance of the internet, zimzum’s multimedia presence, with its simultaneous legibility, visibility, and audibility, seems to have come full circle.

Introduction

11

Zimzum: Doctrine, Notion, Idea, Act, Myth, Symbol? The zimzum that Luria spoke of, according to the testimony of his pupils, can only be understood as the very first origin, an initial pro­cess within God before he created the world and established the beginning of time. Part of the enduring fascination with zimzum, this primordial self-­limitation and self-­movement of God, is that it is a pro­cess that we can discuss and describe but cannot witness. The only witness to this event would be God, and of course no testimony exists, ­because it preceded time as we know it. We can only speculate about this pro­cess, God’s first act of motion. At the same time, Luria’s portrayals are apparently a source of the sort known from the realm of myth. This may have induced Gershom Scholem to classify zimzum as “myth.” Scholem, who established the academic study of the Kabbalah in the twentieth ­century, drew attention to the significance of zimzum in the Kabbalah of the modern era in several groundbreaking publications. The language he employs to discuss zimzum, however, varies: In the treatise Kabbala und Mythos (Kabbalah and Myth) he speaks of zimzum as a “symbol.”7 He explains Luria’s visions of the “myth,”8 but admits that the symbol and myth in the works of Luria’s pupils, like Vital, turn into a strug­gle with conceptualization.9 Scholem thus follows in his terminology the spirit of the Eranos meetings that took place in Ascona, Switzerland, in the 1950s, which ­were the occasion for ­these remarks on zimzum. It was at ­these meetings that mystic and esoteric traditions as well as my­thol­ogy ­were interpreted as symbols of an original, preconceptional world knowledge. In another Eranos lecture, entitled “Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes” (Creation from Nothingness and the Self-­Limitation of God), Scholem explains that zimzum is a fundamental “idea” and a “basic concept of Judaism” that complements the theological doctrine of creation out of nothingness and makes it comprehensible.10 Myth, philosophy, and theology, symbolic and conceptual thinking, obviously generate dif­fer­ent conceptions of zimzum. In his principal work Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, in the chapter “Isaac Luria and His School,” Scholem describes zimzum at times as an “idea,” at ­others as a “concept,” sometimes as a “teaching,” and sometimes as an “act.”11 Scholem’s academic terminology for discussing zimzum therefore varies considerably, and Scholem never resolves the uncertainty

12 Introduction

about what he considers zimzum to be: symbol or notion, myth or doctrine, idea, concept, or act? And he does not reflect on the fact that an investigation of the sources of the Lurianic Kabbalah, that is, in the rec­ords of Luria’s immediate pupils, can come to quite dif­fer­ent results from an investigation of the further history of zimzum, where the original esoteric kabbalistic concept of zimzum can also be completely readapted to new, extraneous contexts. Lawrence Fine, in his impor­tant monograph on Isaac Luria, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (2003), speaks of Lurianic “myths” and regards zimzum as one of t­ hese myths.12 Fine, like Scholem and Yeshayahu Tishby,13 does not justify the choice of this classification and only vaguely points to a proximity between Lurianic and Gnostic myths. “Myth” thereby appears as a kind of collective concept for nonscientific religious origin narratives. Fine’s summary classification is legitimate from a religious studies perspective, but also inaccurate and confusing, ­because he does not methodically name the specific differences between his concept and Greek or Gnostic my­thol­ogy. Moreover, it makes us forget that—­unlike Hesiod in Theogony, or Homer, or Plato in Timaeus, who write explic­itly about myths as myths—­Luria’s pupils themselves do not write and pre­sent their texts about zimzum as myths, but rather as a deep knowledge, divinely revealed to Isaac Luria, about a primordial event in Ein-­Sof before the creation of the world. All of Luria’s pupils talk about zimzum consistently as a doctrine of Luria or of Torat Ha’ARI, not as a myth. And ­there are sound scholarly reasons to follow their lead. The zimzum narratives of Luria’s pupils are replete with kabbalistic and philosophical teachings, concepts, prob­lems, and theologoumena from rabbinical traditions and from the Jewish religion of revelation: The transcendence, eternity, infinity, and immutability of God, the tension between the doctrine of emanation and the doctrine of creation from nothingness (Hebrew: yesh me-­ayin). This theosophical-­conceptual recharging, even the overloading of the zimzum narrative, which is the result of the permanent theological debate of the Kabbalah with the reasoning and the teachings of medieval Jewish philosophy of religion, entirely neglects a classification of zimzum as “myth.” Karl E. Grözinger has rightly analyzed the precise, systematic, and at the same time very technical description of zimzum by the immediate Luria pupil and receiver Chayyim Vital as “cosmosophical science.”14 Vital’s power­f ul, rationalistic repre­sen­t a­t ion of zimzum is actually closer to early modern scientific discourses than to any ancient myth.

Introduction

13

But this classification of zimzum as a “myth” does not apply to the history of reception ­either. If zimzum had been recognized only as a myth, and not as knowledge that was comparable to philosophical and scientific knowledge, while at the same time close to biblical revelation and kabbalistic doctrine, it would never have developed the same effect, conviction, and fascination among Jews and Christians. We cannot describe the intricate and expansive reception history of zimzum as a “work on myth” (Arbeit am Mythos), which is to say within the theoretical framework that Hans Blumenberg articulates in his groundbreaking 1979 study,15 ­because Jewish and Christian reception up to the pre­sent has conceived of zimzum not as myth, but as theosophical doctrine of creation and revelation. To this extent, the religious studies classification of zimzum as a “myth” remains foreign and external to the Lurianic texts.16 Prior to the twentieth ­century, this was not the language used to describe or conceptualize this concept. On the one hand, Scholem’s and Fine’s conceptual blurring with re­spect to zimzum points to the fact that we do not have originals from Luria, and on the other, Luria’s immediate pupils already saw and interpreted zimzum very differently. Scholem never comprehensively followed up on ­these internal differences in Luria’s school at the beginning of the seventeenth ­century. It was Ronit Meroz who first analyzed them more precisely,17 and they are described in Gerold Necker’s Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala (Introduction to the Lurianic Kabbalah) from 2008. ­There was even a debate among Luria’s immediate pupils regarding how they should best understand Luria’s descriptions of zimzum—as realistic factual assertions about the formation of the world (cosmogony) or as speculations about the same? This debate as to ­whether zimzum is a real act of God, which can be conceived and transmitted as an esoteric doctrine or as a theological concept, or w ­ hether zimzum is only a symbol, a picture, a mysterious origin, a meta­phor, or a trope for a numinous self-­ limitation of God before creation, which the kabbalist—­without knowing better and faute de mieux—­must express in mere ­human language, occupied zimzum interpretations and interpreters for generations. Is zimzum a primordial but real pro­cess in God? Or are we to understand the description of zimzum only meta­phor­ically, as a trope18 and a symbolic expression of finite beings for an other­wise unidentifiable occurrence in God before all time? Is zimzum a quasi-­ontological, ­actual pro­cess in God, a real world-­originating event? Or with zimzum, do we have an origin story, a myth in which ­people try to grasp an incomprehensible and super­natural event, which fundamentally eludes their knowledge, reducing it to inadequate images—­metaphors, and feeble words?

14 Introduction

Zimzum certainly has the makings of an “absolute meta­phor,” which, according to Hans Blumenberg, is characterized by the fact that an intuition cannot be resolved in conceptualization.19 Chayyim Vital portrayed the pro­cess of zimzum as a retreat of divine light, and this is even represented graphically in ­later prints. At the same time, this vividness of the description or illustration of a primordial event, which relates to an occurrence before the creation of all spatiotemporal objects and images, feigns a clarity and plausibility that obscure the difficulty of expressing the spatial conception of a self-­contraction or self-­limitation of the transcendent God who holds the status of the indeterminate Absolute, Ein-­Sof, which, by definition, precedes and excludes spatiotemporality. I do not intend to be essentialist or particularly decisive in one direction or another regarding this conflict of interpretations in the pre­sent study; absolute meta­phors also escape this resolution. What zimzum ­really is and how it was meant, primordial real­ity or meta­phor of origin, remain Luria’s secret. The texts of zimzum, already with the rec­ords of his immediate pupils, vary; the path to the one and only origin, the only true meaning and the true essence of zimzum is blocked. Every­thing ­else, especially the centuries-­long reception history of zimzum, is interpretation.20 This study ­will therefore pursue and analyze this debate through the entire history of zimzum up to the pre­sent day—­a rare undertaking in this field of research ­until now.21 Some of the most brilliant and creative appropriations and explanations of zimzum are the products of this aporia regarding how zimzum is to be correctly understood. Isaac Luria was undoubtedly aware of the divine inspiration of zimzum. He passed on his visions as esoteric knowledge verbally to his few pupils, who then reproduced and interpreted his descriptions of zimzum very differently. Even among pupils who knew Luria personally, namely, Chayyim Vital and Israel Sarug, a conflict arose as to how Luria’s esoteric doctrine of zimzum was to be understood. Chayyim Vital, whose extremely extensive rec­ords of the doctrine of Luria dominated the reception of the Lurianic Kabbalah for centuries, depicts zimzum as a pre-­worldly, proto-­physical, but quite real pro­cess in God. His writings, which his son and pupils edited, distributed, and disseminated, ­were to be definitive for a realistic view of zimzum, not least of all for impor­t ant Chassidic groups that still reissue his works ­today. In contrast to Vital, Israel Sarug denies from the beginning and already at the end of the sixteenth ­century that zimzum is a ­simple, real pro­cess in

Introduction

15

God. Sarug’s learned pupil Abraham Cohen Herrera, a phi­los­o­pher, speaks in Amsterdam of the “meta­phorical zimzum,” and the physician and naturalist Joseph Delmedigo agrees with his Kabbalah-­critical intention. This dispute was resumed and controversially discussed one hundred years ­later in the early eigh­teenth ­century by two rabbis from Livorno, Joseph Ergas and Immanuel Chai Ricchi. ­There are also differing views on zimzum within Chassidism: While Shneur Zalman of Lyady frankly acknowledges zimzum as an anthropomorphic speech of God, Nachman of Bratslav quotes Vital literally and attributes to zimzum the painful, very real absence of God in the earthly world. The Christian kabbalists take a dif­fer­ent view. Since Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, who in the end of the seventeenth ­century acquainted the Christian scholarly world with the Lurianic Kabbalah, the Christian kabbalists from Wachter to Oetinger and the phi­los­o­phers from Brucker to Jacobi predominated in the realistic understanding of the zimzum of Vital. Zimzum is a fixed philosophical and theological figure of thought. According to Henry More and Joseph Raphson at Cambridge, it is a component of early modern physical discourse about God and space. Sarug’s meta­phorical reading remains unknown and unseen in all of this. First Schelling and Molitor ­after him, without knowing Sarug, interpret zimzum as a piece of speculative metaphysics, a figure of thought of the primeval world, over which physical or ontological knowledge does not and cannot exist. In the twentieth ­century, Hans Jonas explains zimzum as the ele­ment of a metahistorical “myth,” Harold Bloom sees it as a “trope of limitation,” and Anselm Kiefer as “the idea of a retreat from which something emerges.” In view of the advances made in the field of physics, the symbolic-­metaphorical fi­nally triumphs over the realistic understanding of zimzum.

Zimzum and H ­ uman Practice Likewise, in the twentieth ­century a tendency prevails among the appropriations of zimzum, which I characterize in this study as an anthropologization of zimzum. Zimzum, unlike in religious tradition, is understood as a ­human figure of thought and be­hav­ior. It is no longer regarded as a primordial self-­movement of God but as a reflection of ­human theory and practice. ­Here, too, Scholem was a pioneer with his speculative as well as controversial thesis that the zimzum of the kabbalists from Safed represented the idea

16 Introduction

of a God in an inner exile, withdrawn out of the world “from His totality into profound seclusion. Regarded this way, the idea of Tsimtsum is the deepest symbol of Exile.”22 The historical experience of the exile a­ fter the bloody and catastrophic expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, according to Scholem, finds expression in the notion of a theogonic and cosmogonic exile of God in himself: Zimzum is “exile as an ele­ment in God Himself.”23 The origin of the conception of zimzum would therefore not be a stroke of genius or the God-­given inspiration of a kabbalist. Rather, the origin and public success of zimzum would be explained by the historical experience of that exile from the Iberian Peninsula, which Isaac Luria and his ­family, as Ashkenazi Jews, did not personally experience, but which had deeply shaken the Jewish world of the sixteenth c­ entury. The retreat of God into the cosmic exile of zimzum explains—­and excuses—­the historical exile of the Jews. The Jews are in exile ­because God is also in exile. For exiled Jews, zimzum as a ­human figure of thought therefore has the highest plausibility and even affords theodicy. Seen from this perspective, the mystical ideas of Luria and his students of the cosmic exile of God reflect the earthly experiences of Jews in exile. This would also explain the high plausibility and rapid spread of such kabbalistic thought among Jews in times of exile and distress ­after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal. If Scholem’s hypothesis, always formulated in the subjunctive and with careful restrictions, is true, then the cosmic inner exile of God in zimzum would only reflect the image of the earthly exile of Jews, in the sense of Ludwig Feuerbach’s theory of projection. Theology, the discussion of God, would, in Feuerbach’s thinking, be traced back to its historical and anthropological core, zimzum to Jews’ exile on earth. But Scholem, of course, knew only too well that Feuerbach’s theory does not in any way affect the self-­ understanding of the kabbalists and their conception of zimzum. In the texts of Luria and his pupils from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarding zimzum, ­there is no mention of exile.24 We may also assume that they would have considered the idea of God in exile as blasphemous: The exile was a disaster and a punishment sent by God, so what Jew would voluntarily go into exile? And can Ein-­Sof be said to have willingly undertaken this exile through zimzum? At any rate, Scholem’s religious psychological exile thesis cannot be verified philologically. It remains speculative. Perhaps this is why Scholem left it as a “symbol” or “myth” of exile in his discussion of zimzum.25

Introduction

17

Other writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Harold Bloom anthropologize zimzum and the concepts of the Lurianic Kabbalah far more radically than Scholem. From the outset, they do not consider zimzum to be a mystical revelation and do not necessarily proj­ect the idea of Jewish exile onto God’s kabbalistic prehistoric existence. Rather, zimzum is a decidedly in­ter­ est­ing, human-­mythological narrative figure or literary trope, which a handful of kabbalists in the ­little town of Safed introduced into the world, but which reflects general ­human sensibilities and the condition humaine. Even if we approach zimzum as a guiding princi­ple of purely ­human theory and practice (which I analyze at the end of this study), some twentieth-­century authors attach considerable significance to it. If ­humans transfer the idea of self-­restraint into everyday practice, voluntary ­human self-­retraction, self-­ limitation, and concentration, a withdrawal that leaves a ­free space for other ­people and other ­things, it can gain significance for artistic creativity, judicious management, the spiritual renewal and development of religious communities, the success of psychotherapy through therapeutic restraint, po­liti­cal compromises, and ecological sustainability. The Lurianic notion that omnipotence is inherently destructive, and that self-­restraint is essential, has ­great potential for critiquing the power dynamics of con­temporary politics and the omnipotent fantasy of ever-­increasing technical and scientific domination of nature and the h ­ uman exploitation of nature. In all ­these forms of anthropologization in the twentieth ­century, except for Scholem, it is no longer about the genealogy of the zimzum motif in the Lurianic Kabbalah. Rather, it is about the divine zimzum as a model and basic figure of ­human action, the ­human imitation of God. Zimzum as ­human imitatio Dei is first found among the pious, as for example with Dov Ber of Mezritch in Chassidism of the late eigh­teenth ­century: ­there the intra-­ worldly self-­restraint of the pious and their withdrawal from the material world in the asceticism of fasting and prayer make pos­si­ble the ascension and “clinging” (devekut) of the soul to God in zimzum. Shaul Magid identified with Isaac Haver Waldman and Dov Baer Schneurson, the second rebbe of Lubavitch, two Chassidic rabbis in the early nineteenth ­century who interpreted the mystical learning of sacred texts through the Chassid as a path to his sanctification and therefore the ­human comprehension of zimzum through study as a step t­ oward the salvation of the world.26 In individual Chassidic groups, this approach is practiced to this day. This is also true at the Kabbalah Centre founded by Philip Berg, where Kabbalah is mercilessly pop­u­lar­ized and commercialized as a meditative and

18 Introduction

spiritual New Age religion and universal message of salvation for Jews as well as for Christians and other believers and is based on the Lurianic Kabbalah as a key source of inspiration. This is how pop star Madonna arrived at zimzum. But zimzum divorced from any religious context, seen only as a purely ­human mode of voluntary ecological self-­restriction in the twenty-­fi rst ­century, in a world increasingly showing signs of the limits of growth and the consequences of environmental destruction through technical and industrial expansion, gains unexpected ecological rationality and po­liti­cal weight. ­Here, zimzum’s motivational potential as a concept, as a trope, but also as an option for action through ­human self-­limitation, is far from exhausted. I do not wish to ­favor one reading of zimzum over another or to endorse a par­tic­u­lar position with this study, even if my partiality is occasionally evident. An in-­depth examination of the notion of zimzum and its reception history is not the place for personal entreaties. Rather, I hope to provide readers a variety of possibilities for interpreting the religious, spiritual, theological, philosophical, and anthropological concept of zimzum, which can in turn influence their self-­understanding, their comprehension of God and the world, as well as their own actions. I ­will prompt competent readers to ponder the concept of zimzum with its roots in the early modern period and continued relevance ­today, as well as the myriad possibilities of their own relationship to it. In the end, it ­will be up to readers to determine ­whether they belong to the circle of t­ hose who for four centuries have regarded zimzum as an idea that rightly belongs to the wisdom and philosophy of the world. If this book successfully mediates the stimulating power of and the enduring fascination with zimzum and its reception history and in ­doing so broadens readers’ horizons, then I ­w ill have achieved what I set out to accomplish.

Chapter 1

Origins in the Holy Land

Safed Safed is the city on the mountain. Its ­houses and synagogues, built in an Oriental architectural style, rest on a hilltop nestled high in the mountains of Galilee. If you look to the north, you can catch a glimpse of the mountains of Lebanon, Mount Hermon, and the Golan Heights, all in close proximity. If your gaze follows the slope of the mountains downward, you can observe glittering Lake Kinneret, which Christians call the Sea of Galilee. If you turn to take in the entire panoramic view, you can also see Galilee’s fertile hills. If you have ever witnessed tranquility fall upon the city and its surroundings on a spring eve­ning as Shabbat approaches and heard the prayers and songs emerging from the ancient synagogues and the clatter of pots and dishes from the ­houses, then you have beheld the sublime landscape and sensed the atmosphere of mystical piety that made Safed early modern Kabbalah’s most impor­tant site. Safed, written and pronounced Zfat in Hebrew and Safad in Arabic, became the center of Jewish mysticism in the second half of the sixteenth ­century. ­There ­were vari­ous reasons for this besides Galilee’s grandiose and romantic geography. The sixteenth ­century was a turbulent time for the Jewish world.1 In 1492, Jews had been expelled from Spain, and in 1497 from Portugal. However, tens of thousands chose forced baptism rather than face expulsion or murder and remained on the Iberian Peninsula as newly baptized Christians, or “conversos.” The Catholic population and Inquisition regarded ­these “New Christians” with mistrust and suspected them of relapsing back into Judaism, and many of ­these New Christians chose to leave Spain and Portugal ­after one, two, or even three generations. They most often

20

Chapter 1

made their living as merchants and settled with their families in the port cities of the Mediterranean, but also in London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg.2 ­After relocating to t­ hese places, they converted back to Judaism, even ­after living, often for de­cades, as Christians. At most, they had only practiced Judaism in secret. They had been socialized as Christians for generations and had forgotten rabbinical tradition, including their Jewish way of life, holidays, and rituals. Both literally and figuratively, the migration patterns of conversos introduced movement into the Jewish world. Eco­nom­ically, the international trade relations of the conversos increased the esteem and prosperity of the Jewish population, as they traveled and served as intermediaries between the Christian world of the West and the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the eastern part of the Mediterranean region and the Balkans. The conversos ­were intellectually and culturally well acquainted with Christian culture; more than a few had studied at Spanish and Portuguese universities. By the same token, they had to reinvent their practice of Judaism from the ground up. As such, they endeavored to relearn rabbinical tradition, strictly follow its commandments, and re-­familiarize themselves with their religiosity. The result was an interest in halakhah and Kabbalah that led some conversos to Safed, located in the Ottoman Empire. ­There, a relatively pronounced sense of Muslim religious tolerance prevailed in relation to all religious minorities, including Jews, so long as they paid taxes and tributes in a timely fashion. The Ottoman Empire encouraged the development of kabbalistic centers in Safed and Jerusalem, ­because it allowed Jews to live ­there largely undisturbed. In 1567/1568, shortly before the young rabbi and kabbalist Isaac Luria moved to Safed, the small city had a population of approximately five thousand inhabitants, mostly Jews, and was, alongside Thessaloniki (Salonica), one of the most impor­tant and prosperous centers of textile production in the Ottoman Empire.3 Still, the kabbalists from the Mediterranean region and eastern Eu­rope came to the city not ­because of its wealth but ­because it was located in the Holy Land. As the Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 16:4 states, “­there is no Torah like the Torah learned in Israel and no wisdom like the wisdom of Israel.” In addition to the migration of the conversos and the socioeconomic and religious implications resulting from ­these patterns of movement, the second most impor­tant ­factor contributing to the intellectual life of Jews in the sixteenth ­century was the development of Jewish book printing.4 ­After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, northern Italy became the



Origins in the Holy Land

21

center of Jewish publishing. The first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud appeared in 1520–1523, issued by the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg in Venice, but assembled by Jewish typesetters. The first printed edition of the Jerusalem Talmud followed, and in 1524/1525 the Mikra’ot Gedolot, the Hebrew Bible with rabbinical commentaries, appeared in print. In 1550, the Venetian publishing ­house Bragadin released Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah. Following ­these publications, Jewish printing and book trade developed at a phenomenal rate, even though in 1563 the pope decreed and saw to the burning of the Talmud and many other rabbinical writings in Italy. Hebrew books ­were exported to both eastern Eu­rope and the Ottoman Empire. The Zohar, also called the Book of Splendor and considered a principal work of medieval Kabbalah, was printed for the first time in 1559 in Cremona and in 1558–1560 in Mantua. From that point on, the Zohar was quickly reprinted, actively traded, available for sale, and could be read in the privacy of one’s own home. Printing gradually replaced the tedious and costly activity of copying texts by hand, tremendously accelerating the distribution of kabbalistic and halakhic works. Hebrew book printing also canonized par­tic­u ­lar texts, ­because the publishing pro­cess in effect singled out the works that ­were considered significant, as reflected in sales figures. At the same time, the printed word detached the transfer and transmission of knowledge from the oral tradition. Esoteric transmission from a teacher to a select group of students gave way to exoteric transmission through reading. Insofar as exoteric transmission bypassed the pro­cess of oral transmission, the printing, sale, and private reading of halakhic and kabbalistic works unsettled rabbinical authority. Nonetheless, when the first kabbalistic circles began to form in Safed around 1535, print culture increasingly influenced kabbalistic teaching even in small centers of learning. Joseph Karo (1488–1575), the mystic and ­legal scholar, born on the Iberian Peninsula prior to the expulsion, took up residence in Safed in 1536. ­There, he wrote Shulchan Arukh (The Set T ­ able), which remains ­today the most impor­tant, authoritative compendium of the halakhah, whose commandments govern all aspects of the lives of observant Jews. In moments of doubt encountered frequently in daily life, the reader can dive into the four sections of the Shulchan Arukh for information regarding domestic and synagogal life, dietary laws, marriage law, as well as civil and criminal law. Shulchan Arukh first appeared in print in Venice in 1565. Beginning in 1540, the accomplished kabbalist Moses Cordovero (1522– 1570) also resided in Safed. As a young man, Cordovero had made a name for

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himself as the author of the 1548 book Pardes Rimmonim (Orchard of Pomegranates), which portrayed all the impor­tant doctrinal systems of the medieval kabbalistic tradition, that is, the Zohar, with systematic and philosophical clarity. The first printed edition of Pardes Rimmonim appeared in Thessaloniki in 1584, fourteen years ­after Cordovero’s death. But it had nonetheless already become well known in kabbalistic circles during the author’s lifetime, circulating in the form of hand-­copied manuscripts. Kabbalists representing the most diverse schools of thought held the book in high esteem and students of the Kabbalah came from around the entire Jewish world to study with Cordovero in Safed. Among them was Isaac Luria (1534–1572), who moved to Safed in 1569. In the short period of time between Cordovero’s death in 1570 and his own untimely death at the end of 1572, Luria became the leading figure among Safed’s kabbalists. Even Shlomo Halevi Alkabez (ca. 1505–1576), Cordovero’s instructor in the Kabbalah, lived and taught in Safed. Alkabez composed “Lekhah Dodi,” the famous Sabbath hymn. Heinrich Heine’s poem “Princess Sabbath” cites this hymn and celebrates, centuries ­after it was first written, how the pious opened the win­dows and doors of their homes shortly before the beginning of Shabbat, so that they might welcome Princess Sabbath into their homes. Alkabez’s song, which is still sung ­today, reminds us of the Safed kabbalists’ custom of greeting the Sabbath by singing in the fields outside the city and reserving a seat at the seder ­table for the prophet Elijah, whose arrival would herald the coming of the Messiah. Should he appear, the pious are always ready to receive him. Karo, Cordovero, Luria, and Alkabez, like all kabbalists in Safed, often traveled to Meron, a small pilgrimage site in the mountains, just a few kilo­ meters from Safed. Shimon bar Yochai (ca. 135–170), one of the most famous rabbis of the Talmud, whom the kabbalists considered the author of the Zohar, is buried ­there. Visitors to his grave venerate him with pilgrimages, prayers, singing, and by lighting candles. In the sixteenth c­ entury, hundreds of kabbalists traveled to Meron ­every year on Lag Ba’Omer, thirty-­three days ­after Passover, to celebrate exuberantly at the grave of the ­great Tanna (Mishnaic sage) Shimon bar Yochai, who, according to legend, died on that date and is said to have instructed his students to observe the anniversary. ­Today, tens of thousands of religious and nonreligious Israelis continue the practice. ­After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and expelled all the Jews from the city following the Bar-­Kokhba revolt, Galilee became the sanctuary of the Tannaim, the rabbis who created the Mishnah. Shimon bar Yochai, who



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hid from the Romans in a cave, was one of them. The Palestinian Talmud—­ paradoxically called the Jerusalem Talmud, for it owes its emergence to the expulsion from that city—­originated in this landscape. The Galilean towns of Safed, Meron, and Tiberias therefore became, alongside Jerusalem, holy sites of Erez Israel, the Holy Land of Israel. They are still impor­tant sites ­today in the sacred geography of the Holy Land. When the kabbalists settled in Safed in the sixteenth ­century, they did so with the intention of studying, living, and praying in the Holy Land and in the geo­g raph­i­cal vicinity of the place where the Zohar was born. This is the sacred topography, the religious context, and the holy terrain in which the Lurianic Kabbalah emerged.

Isaac Luria: Ha’ARI—­The Lion Isaac Luria, the founder of the school of Lurianic Kabbalah that bears his name, had not written much by the time of his early death in the summer of 1572 in Safed, at the relatively young age of thirty-­eight. He does not seem to have possessed the knack for writing down or organ­izing the surfeit of his kabbalistic inspirations. Luria was a man of oral doctrine, who operated within a small circle of dedicated, hand-­selected pupils. It was his wish that the Kabbalah remain esoteric, according to ancient tradition. This desire to uphold the bound­a ries of the esoteric is why he forbade his students from disseminating to a wider public his new ideas that ­were changing Kabbalah as it was understood at the time. His modesty and humility, as well as his ascetic life, filled with prayer, meditation, and the ecstatic quest for God, that is, a way of life marked by mystical practice, further contributed to legends of his holiness. His esoteric kabbalistic teachings aroused considerable curiosity.5 But ­there are no drawings, illustrations, or any kind of pictorial depictions of Luria, and we only have a handful of historical documents written by or about him, apart from colorfully embroidered, deeply hagiographic anecdotes composed posthumously, such as ­those written by Shlomel Dresnitz, who came to Safed thirty-­five years ­after Luria’s death.6 Nevertheless, kabbalists of all schools of thought revere Luria as one of the ­great holy men in the tradition and history of the Kabbalah. Some of his students even venerated him as the reincarnated soul of Shimon bar Yochai, his generation’s redeemer of sin, the healer of the cosmos and indeed as the Mashiach ben Joseph, the Messiah precursor of the victorious Mashiach ben David, who

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as the king of Israel ­will lead his ­people out of exile back to Zion and rebuild the ­Temple.7 Luria died unexpectedly in 1572. His pupils endeavored to overcome the shock by continuing to discuss and study his teachings, which they considered holy. But they also began to document and transmit his teachings far beyond the borders of Safed. Luria’s grave in Safed quickly became a pilgrimage site and remains so ­today. A small, beautiful sixteenth-­century synagogue, which he is said to have frequented, has borne his name since the seventeenth ­century. Safed was and remains the site of remembrance of the Lurianic Kabbalah, even though it had already ceased to be a center of kabbalistic scholarship by the end of the sixteenth ­century. Nearly all of Luria’s students left Safed ­after the members of his immediate circle began to quarrel just a few years ­after the master’s death. Luria’s carefully guarded, secret, and exclusively orally transmitted teachings attained their full potential only through his students’ writings. ­These writings have ensured that the Lurianic Kabbalah—­against Luria’s own wishes—­have gradually attained popularity throughout the Jewish world. Isaac Luria was born in Jerusalem in 1534.8 ­Because his ­father, Salomon Luria, hailed from Germany or Poland, he is also called Isaac Luria Ashkenazi, according to ancient custom. This designation of origin is one of the explanations for the famous, honorable acronyms formed from his name, ARI, both the Hebrew word for “lion” and an abbreviation of “Ashkenazi Rav Isaac.” The other, even more common explanation of the acronym is “ha-­ Elohi Rav Isaac,” the “divine Isaac,” but it can also mean “ha’ARI,” the lion. ­After the sudden death of his ­father, Luria’s ­mother left Jerusalem and moved with young Isaac to Cairo to live with her ­brother Mordechai Franses, a prosperous tax collector. ­There, Luria was raised in the Sephardic tradition of his ­mother and ­uncle and ­later married his cousin. He was a pupil of David ibn Zimra, a well-­k nown author of halakhic and kabbalistic texts, and subsequently studied with Bezalel Ashkenazi, one of Zimra’s students and successors. Cairo was a well-­established center for Jewish learning with close contacts to the Jewish communities in the Holy Land, and Luria’s teachers ­were all rabbis of note. In other words, Luria grew up and was educated in a circle composed of Egypt’s rabbinical ruling elite. From them, he learned Kabbalah and received instruction in halakhah, that is, religious law, jurisprudence, and ethics. Even as a young married man, Luria took paths dif­fer­ent from ­those of his rabbinical teachers. By occupation, he was a merchant who traded in pep-



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per, wine, wheat, leather, and silk. He successfully practiced his profession, which provided for his ­family, up ­until the time of his death, even ­after he became a famous kabbalist. ­There is evidence in documents found in the Cairo Genizah that he had business contacts as far away as Venice. Rather than becoming a rabbi, he followed a course that led to the quiet reflection of mysticism. The young Luria withdrew to the sparsely populated Jazīrat ar-­Rawdah (Rawdah Island), located in the Nile River, which belonged to his ­uncle, in order to study and pray ­there. Living in solitude, he often only returned home to Cairo to spend the Sabbath with his ­family, as Jewish law requires. A ­ fter 1560 and u ­ ntil his arrival in Safed in 1569, t­ here are no known documents providing details of his life in Cairo. We may reasonably assume that Luria spent the time between this short de­cade before his three-­year period of activity in Safed becoming deeply acquainted with the Zohar, the principal work of medieval Spanish Kabbalah that appeared at the end of the thirteenth ­century, and Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim, the con­ temporary synthesis of the teachings of medieval and early modern Kabbalah. Although the Zohar was by then available in print, both books ­were also widely distributed in manuscript form. But Cordovero lived and taught in Safed, and it seems this was the reason why Luria moved ­there with his ­family in 1569 and joined the group of students who studied with Cordovero. ­After Cordovero’s death in 1570, the charismatic Luria ­rose to prominence as one of the leading teachers of the Kabbalah and gathered a significant number of students who lived in ascetic all-­male communities known as chavurot (from the Hebrew chaver, meaning “friend” or “companion”). In ­these close-­knit groups, Luria’s pupils studied together, fasted, prayed, awaited visions and inspirations, and, although married, lived apart from their wives and ­children for long periods of time. Isaac Luria did not teach to a larger audience in Safed, but rather only to his select group of students, over thirty of whom we know by name. Older and more established halakhic authorities with an interest in Kabbalah, such as Joseph Karo and Moshe Alshekh, lived in Safed at the same time as Luria taught, and although they showed interest in his new teachings, he did not permit them to attend his kabbalistic lessons. But this did not lead to a falling out with ­these older colleagues. His students, on the other hand, or­ga­nized into four chavurot, ­were permitted to listen to Luria’s spontaneous, unsystematic, sometimes hours-­long oral lectures, sermons, inspirations, interpretations, and speeches. He obliged them with all his authority to remain ­silent on the topic of his kabbalistic teachings, which even he seems to have

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understood ­were innovative. Some of Luria’s students, including Chayyim Vital, who occupied a special role and had his teacher’s approval, composed transcripts of ­these apparently rather impressive shiurim (lessons), seemingly despite Luria’s strict prohibition. ­These transcripts ­were the first written artifacts documenting Luria’s inspired teaching. At the time, no one could know that the young, aspiring, fascinating kabbalist Luria, who drew numerous students to Safed, would have only two years to accomplish what he did before his death during an epidemic, on 15 July 1572.9 Even during Luria’s lifetime, ­there ­were differences of opinion among the vari­ous chavurot his students composed, but now the teacher as a mediating and pacifying authority was gone. Directly following the death of Ha’ARI, competing and in some cases markedly opposed schools of thought arose from the vari­ous chavurot. Each represented unique, vari­ous versions of the true, au­then­tic doctrine of the g­ reat ARI, which w ­ ere circulated orally and ­later in written form, despite Luria’s prohibition against this dissemination of his ideas. In this dispute over interpretations and interpreters, Gershom Scholem identifies four distinct schools, each ­under the leadership of one of Luria’s students: t­ hose of Moses Yonah, Israel Sarug, Joseph Ibn Tabūl, and Chayyim Vital.10 Within t­ hese four schools, vari­ous versions and interpretations of Luria’s doctrine of zimzum emerged, which ­were in turn delivered to posterity. Despite the disputes among the vari­ous schools of Lurianic thought, we can sketch out the fundamental features and concerns of Luria’s Kabbalah. The differentiation between the upper world of Ein-­Sof (the infinite “Divine”) and the material, earthly world of humankind forms a crucial aspect of his thought. The Ein-­Sof is the world of God and the ten sefirot (from the Greek “spheres”), divine forces or powers that function within the pro­cess of creation as vessels for divine light. Furthermore, kabbalists believe that pious, as well as profane and sinful actions of Jews in the earthly sphere exert an influence over the divine powers in the heavenly world. ­There is a correlation between ­human sin and cosmic chaos above, meaning that sin and disorder correspond to and influence one another. Meanwhile, the same also applies to tikkun, the deliverance from and cure for sin, evil, and disorder: the individual tikkun carried out by a pious person in the earthly sphere influences the cosmic tikkun of the heavenly domain. The pious believe that by avoiding sin and strictly adhering to all 613 mitzvot—­the commandments and prohibitions that God gave the Jews in the Torah—­they contribute to the redemption of the world from sin, disorder, and evil through ­humble,



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intensive prayer with inner investment and meditation on the holy names of God. Tikkun ­will also ­free the Jews from the yoke of exile and bring them back to the Holy Land. The possibility that the pious contribute to the salvation of the world through immersion in the divine mysteries is the driving force ­behind Isaac Luria’s mysticism. Prac­ti­tion­ers could atone through asceticism for individual sins that they might happen to commit, allowing them to avoid further sinning in the ­f uture. In Luria’s chavurot, the pleasures of wine and meat ­were to be avoided, except on Shabbat. Sexual abstinence, fasting, self-­ flagellation, a meager amount of sleep, the simplest clothing, intensive prayer, and meditation outside of the normal synagogal hours of prayer and in the ­middle of the night ­were the rule for Luria’s students, most of whom ­were married men. Atonement for sin included multiday fasting and other purification rituals such as frequent prayer and bathing.11 An ascetic life led within the par­ameters of God’s halakhic pathways, the eschewal of sin, repentance, prayer, and meditation, as well as the collective, intensive study of holy texts within the chavurot, all exerted a positive influence on the tikkun of the heavenly realm. Luria’s followers thus infused old, synagogal rituals with new, theurgic piety and furthermore also created new rituals for religious ser­vice, hours of prayer, and holiday cele­ brations. In ecstatically enraptured, visionary moments, Luria’s ­adepts experienced yichudim, the unification of their souls with the soul of a perished wise man or holy zaddik. Even the unrestrained meditation on the holy names of God belonged to their rituals of piety. The positive individual ­mental state achieved, as well as the individual healing, that is, individual tikkun of the mystic in his asceticism and piety, ­were seen as a contribution to and an ele­ ment of cosmic tikkun, the salvation of all, of both the lower and upper worlds. The pious man was able to contribute to both cosmic tikkun and the world to come. Zimzum is a pro­cess within Ein-­Sof, which takes place before the emergence, both division and differentiation between the lower and upper realms, well before all cosmic disorder and before creation itself. Other sources of disagreement notwithstanding, all of Luria’s vari­ous students concur that zimzum is the prerequisite for the possibility of the creation and existence of both the upper and lower, earthly worlds. Zimzum exists at the source, the beginning, while tikkun is at the very end. The emergence of the doctrine of zimzum, the self-­contraction of God, is inextricably linked with the name of Luria. The conception of zimzum that he taught his students involved

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a true innovation in comparison with the Zohar, Cordovero’s Kabbalah, and all older rabbinical writings. Although Luria’s students would ­later pass on vastly dif­fer­ent versions of Luria’s doctrine of zimzum, they all nonetheless agree that zimzum is at once an act of the self-­contraction of God before the emanation and creation of the world and a self-­contraction of God away from a place that is in turn stripped and emptied of his presence. In this way, the concept of zimzum that Luria taught represents something entirely new in rabbinic tradition and in Jewish intellectual history. According to pre-­Lurianic tradition, God’s self-­contraction only occurred in or at a place, not from a place. Some midrashim from late antiquity interpret God’s biblical proclamation to Moses in the book of Exodus (25:22), “­There I ­will meet with you, and I ­will impart to you—­from above the cover, from between the two cherubim that are on top of the Ark of the Pact—­a ll that I ­w ill command you concerning the Israelite ­people,” as a movement of self-­contraction to this very place, the Ark of the Covenant. In the commentary on Exodus 25:10 in the Midrash Exodus Rabbah, the rabbis formulate God’s proclamation as, “I ­w ill descend and withdraw my presence [Hebrew: azamzem shekhinati] into that cubit-­sized space [i.e., the Ark of the Covenant crafted by Moses].”12 In the Palestinian Haggadah Pesikta DeRav Kahana, we find an almost verbatim formulation, “And I descend and ­will withdraw my presence down ­there among them.”13 ­Here, in both Midrash and Haggadah, God contracts his shekhinah (literally, his “indwelling,” i.e., his divine presence at an earthly place ­after creation); he descends and concentrates his presence in a par­tic­u­lar place on earth. The noun zimzum is not used ­here at all, but rather the verb form referring to the action of God’s self-­concentration at a place in the world that has already been created. What is impor­tant for Luria is not the transition between the action and the verb and the definition and doctrine of zimzum, but rather the new direction of that zimzum and a new sense of temporality. Luria’s zimzum is no longer the concentration and withdrawal of God into a par­tic­u­lar place, but quite the opposite: God’s withdrawal away from a place within God’s own center. This withdrawal of God away from a place distinguishes Luria’s zimzum from the zimzum that Nachmanides describes in the thirteenth c­ entury in his commentary on the Sefer Yezirah. According to Nachmanides, God concentrates himself in his kavod (glory) before he emanates the sefira Chokhmah. ­Here, the pro­cess of emanation takes place prior to the creation of the earthly world, but the zimzum does not occur away from a place, and



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no empty space is created. Rather, God concentrates himself within an aspect of himself, in his kavod, at the beginning of the pro­cess of emanation.14 But Luria’s understanding is dif­fer­ent. God, who is omnipresent prior to zimzum and is therefore, according to the Kabbalah, named the Infinite, Ein-­Sof, withdraws himself through zimzum away from a place and in so ­doing ­frees up a space within his own center that is literally devoid of God but nonetheless also exists within God. This is the second impor­tant innovation: while zimzum, as the midrashim and the Haggadah explain, took place in a terrestrial realm that had already been created when God descends to the Ark of the Covenant, Luria’s conception explains that zimzum, God’s withdrawal and self-­contraction, takes place before creation. Zimzum, God’s self-­delineation and retreat, is for Luria a prerequisite for creation. All of Luria’s students, in their transmission of his ideas, agree on this point. And this makes zimzum, in all their eyes, one of Luria’s bold new teachings. Nevertheless, the emphasis and repre­sen­ta­tion in ­matters related to zimzum vary greatly in the works of the pupils who studied in Luria’s chavurot. The short book by Rabbi Moses Yonah (the details of whose biography remain unknown) bearing the title Kanfei Yonah (“The Wings of the Dove,” but also a reference to the author’s name, “The Wings of Yonah”) contains only one sentence pertaining to zimzum. This book lacks both a description of the pro­cess of zimzum and a definition of it. The single reference reads: “The name [God] simplifies itself into the limitless, contracted itself [Hebrew: zimzem], and shortened itself [. . .], and ­there remained an empty space that one in truth calls tehiru.”15 God places the mysterious light of malbush, the divine garment made of light (Israel Sarug also writes about this light extensively), into tehiru, the empty space that existed prior to creation. But zimzum plays practically no role in Moses Yonah’s school of Lurianic thought. In contrast, Joseph Ibn Tabūl described zimzum in considerable detail in Drush Chefzi Bah (Explanation of “My Delight in Her” [i.e., the city of Jerusalem; compare with Isaiah 2:24]). His description, however, has had scarcely any reception history, as his drushim (explanations), including ­these detailed passages concerning zimzum, w ­ ere for centuries only available in manuscript form and ­later published ­u nder the name of his close friend Chayyim Vital. Even the first published edition of this work, which appeared in 1921 ­under the title Simchat Cohen, does not mention the name Joseph Ibn Tabūl.16 Chayyim Vital, on the other hand, assumed a place of dominance, with his claim to be Luria’s only true and au­then­tic student and interpreter. Vital

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made this claim in competition with his fellow students immediately following the master’s death and ended up exerting considerable influence on the reception history of the Lurianic Kabbalah with his comprehensive and systematic explanations of Luria’s teachings, among them the doctrine of zimzum, which dominates the reception history through the popularization and dissemination in Vital’s portrayal. Fi­nally, Israel Sarug, who prob­ably knew Luria from Egypt, joined the circle of students surrounding Luria. He did not find himself favorably disposed ­toward ­these other pupils and left Safed shortly ­after his arrival. He presumably developed his own version of zimzum, which differs greatly from Vital’s and Ibn Tabūl’s depictions, first in Italy in the 1590s. In contrast to Vital’s and Ibn Tabūl’s naturalist portrayals of zimzum as a real course of events within God, Sarug believed that zimzum was only to be understood symbolically, namely, as an anthropomorphic approximation of an incomprehensible, numinous pro­cess in God himself, articulated with the means and within the narrow limits of ­human language and comprehension. Sarug wrote more than thirty years ­after Luria’s death, and it is Vital who is likely responsible for the very first written depictions of Luria’s concept of zimzum, if not inscribed during Luria’s lifetime, then immediately ­after his death in 1572.

Chayyim Vital: Zimzum Becomes Written Word Chayyim Vital’s long life, from 1542 to 1620, was characterized by a paradox. He would have gladly become Isaac Luria’s sole spiritual heir and recognized successor, as he esteemed his teacher Luria above all ­else. This status eluded him, ­because other students of Luria did not recognize his claim and ­because Vital lacked his teacher’s charisma. But in striving for this goal, Vital spent de­cades writing down and systematizing Luria’s oral doctrines in meticulous detail and in vari­ous versions on hundreds of pages. Yet he kept ­these writings a secret and did not allow them to leave his possession or to be published during his lifetime. Without Vital as his ambassador, Ha’ARI’s message would prob­ably not have made its way into the world, even if this world ­were merely the small world of Safed’s kabbalistic circles. Vital thus became one of the ­giants among esoteric writers, even though his works ­were stowed away in a drawer. Ultimately, however, his failed attempt to keep his writings a secret made him—in retrospect and against his own wishes—­one of the most impor­tant authors in the entire history of the Kabbalah.



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Vital, who was also named in some documents as Chayyim Vital Calabrese, ­after his ­father Joseph Vital Calabrese’s region of birth in Calabria, Italy, was born in Safed in 1542. He therefore felt at home in the Galilean capital of the early modern Kabbalah. He was personally acquainted with all the famous kabbalists and halakhists who resided ­there, and he studied in his youth in several yeshivot in upper Galilee, including that of Rabbi Moshe Alshekh in Safed. In 1564, Vital began to delve into Cordovero’s printed Kabbalah works (though he never studied with Cordovero). When Isaac Luria—­ who was only eight years his elder—­began to teach in Safed following Cordovero’s death in 1570, Vital immediately recognized Luria’s charisma and became his student. In his enthusiasm, Vital even ascribed Luria messianic qualities. According to his own recollections and ­those of his contemporaries, Vital was able to establish himself quickly as one of the leading minds and one of the master’s favorites, distinguishing himself from the other thirty students in Luria’s circle in Safed.17 When Luria died in the summer of 1572, a mere two years ­after beginning his teaching through the oral transmission of knowledge, Vital asserted the claim that he was the sole authority for interpreting both the oral and written transmission of Luria’s teachings. With a markedly single-­minded sense of purpose, Vital tolerated no contradiction and attempted to discredit his adversaries, force them into silence, and push them out of the circle of students. Vital was not successful, however, ­because Luria’s other students, including Joseph Ibn Tabūl, did not bend to Vital’s ­will and instead interpreted and passed down Luria’s esoteric teachings in their own way. If Vital did not possess Luria’s charisma, unlike his teacher, he did possess the ability to secure the new doctrines of the Lurianic Kabbalah in written form and pre­sent them in a comprehensive, systematic way. No other student of Luria’s in Safed composed nearly as many texts as Chayyim Vital. His body of work is many times greater than that of all the other pupils who studied with Luria during his lifetime combined. Though Chayyim Vital did not create the Lurianic Kabbalah, he nonetheless remains its preeminent author. Through his writings, he initiated and has influenced to a large extent the reception history of the Lurianic Kabbalah. Vital made it pos­si­ble for Luria’s ideas to take on written form. In recording Luria’s teachings systematically, Vital saved them from oblivion. He presumably wrote from a combination of memory and the notes he had written down while Luria was still alive. At the same time, he attempted to continue mediating Luria’s teachings orally with the other members of his

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chavura. He endeavored at all costs to prevent his rec­ords and with them Luria’s esoteric teachings from becoming public. Vital therefore obliged both himself and his fellow chavura members to refrain from sharing anything written with third parties for a period of ten years. They swore not to reveal anything that ­either Luria himself or Vital had taught them. They attempted to stay true to Luria’s own imperative about keeping his teachings a secret.18 Lurianic doctrine was to remain esoteric, and its interpretation, both orally and in written form, was to remain reserved for Vital. Against his own, highly charged expectations, Vital failed in establishing himself as Luria’s successor. He therefore de­cided to leave his home city of Safed and resettle in Jerusalem, where he presided over a yeshiva from 1577 to 1585 and where he continued to work in secret on the pro­cess of setting Luria’s teachings to paper. Vital was most likely the one to title his edition of Luria’s doctrines Ez Chayyim (Tree of Life), a reference to both the Tree of Life that stood in the ­middle of Paradise (Gen. 2:9), as well as his own Hebrew first name and Vital, his Italian ­family name. We may assume that during his years in Jerusalem, he continued to revise and systematize his notes. Despite the curiosity of his contemporaries, he kept them strictly secret, even ­going so far as to conceal a portion of his writings in a genizah at the Jewish cemetery in Jerusalem. A genizah (literally, “hiding place”) is a covered and walled-up depository that securely stores Hebrew texts that are no longer in use. It is halakhically forbidden to destroy damaged or other­ wise illegible Hebrew-­language books and papers such Torah scrolls and other texts that contain the names of God or deal with sacred subjects. Vital’s writings from the Jerusalem genizah ­were accidentally rediscovered and published years l­ater. It was only in 1585, ­after the ten-­year discretionary period, that Vital returned to Safed. In 1586, he became gravely ill and lay unconscious for several days. While he was incapacitated, the rabbi Jehoshua ben Nun bribed Vital’s ­brother Moshe with fifty gold pieces and instructed scribes to copy down a portion of Chayyim Vital’s secret writings. ­These copies then went into circulation, marking the end of the period of secrecy. The intruders did not manage to copy all his works, however, and Vital completed additional notes ­after he recovered and further revised ­those that he had previously written. Still, the circulation of ­these clandestine copies starting in 1586 initiated the massive, albeit largely unsystematic, distribution of Vital’s writings on Luria’s Kabbalah. The date thus marks the beginning of the dissemination of Luria’s doctrine of zimzum by way of the written word.



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Despite losing sole control over the distribution of texts he had personally composed, Chayyim Vital remained the most impor­tant source of Luria’s teachings. Joseph Ibn Tabūl, Moses Yonah, and ­later Israel Sarug attracted students, teaching and publishing their own versions of Luria’s Kabbalah. But Vital’s writings captivated audiences not only ­because of their authenticity but also on account of their quality and quantity. They quickly found many readers in kabbalist circles and ­were frequently copied. Through this unwanted circulation of his texts, Vital garnered among his fellow kabbalists a position of authority as a source, but he increasingly lost his leading position and nimbus as the only legitimate, au­then­tic interpreter of Luria’s no longer secret teachings. His writings ­were subject to new interpretations, and he had lost control now that his rec­ords of Luria’s teachings circulated throughout the entire Jewish world ­under the name of his master as Kabbalat Ha’ARI. In Vital’s writings, the Lurianic Kabbalah triumphed, and as their author, Vital was venerated, then as ­today. But he failed to become Luria’s successor, remaining a ­simple rabbi for several years with a handful of students in Safed. From ­there, he traveled to Damascus in 1604, where he also held a position as rabbi ­until his death in 1620. Vital continued to oppose the distribution of his writings during his time in Damascus, keeping his manuscripts ­under lock and key, but third parties published unauthorized versions of his Lurianic writings prior to his death. ­These third parties edited and copied what they ­were able to access. And although the competing Lurianic schools of thought of Ibn Tabūl, Moses Yonah, and Sarug went their separate ways, they nonetheless valued Vital’s writings, the editing and publication history of which resemble a puzzle.19 First, Benjamin Halevi and Elisha Vestali reor­ga­nized in Jerusalem the fragments that had been copied in 1586 during Vital’s serious illness. From ­these fragments they assembled around 1620 a manuscript that they titled Sefer ha-­Derushim (Book of Commentaries). This manuscript was repeatedly copied and was soon also in circulation in Eu­rope as the rec­ord of Luria’s teachings through Vital. Half a ­century ­later, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689) found Vital’s description of zimzum in a manuscript of Sefer ha-­ Derushim and translated the work into Latin. It was only in 1996 that a carefully reworked critical edition of Sefer ha-­Derushim was published, based on a manuscript completed by Ephraim Fanjiri, a student of Chayyim Vital’s in Damascus.20 Jerusalem was also where Abraham Azulai accidentally discovered in 1618 the manuscripts that Vital had hidden in the genizah at the Jewish cemetery

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on the Mount of Olives. By then, Jerusalem had begun to replace Safed as the most impor­tant center for the study of Kabbalah, and kabbalist and rabbi Jacob Zemach, previously a student of Vital’s son Samuel Vital in Damascus, edited ­these manuscripts into a single work, circulated ­under the title Ozzerot Chayyim (Chayyim’s Trea­sures; or, The Trea­sures of Life). By 1650, Samuel Vital had also begun to publish his ­father’s writings ­u nder the title Shemonah She’arim (Eight Gates); t­ hese w ­ ere texts they had previously kept ­under lock and key in Damascus. Fi­nally, in 1653, Jacob Zemach’s student, the rabbi Meir Poppers from Krakow, composed out of all ­these handwritten sources a three-­part synthesis of all Vital’s known writings. In manuscripts that ­were repeatedly copied, Poppers’s collection of Vital’s writings found a readership in central and eastern Eu­rope. In addition to extremely comprehensive and technically detailed explanations of all ele­ments of the Lurianic Kabbalah, ­these manuscripts contain the single most comprehensive description of zimzum handed down by Vital. The maskil (Jewish enlightener) Isaac Satanow was the first to print the depiction of zimzum as edited by Poppers. He did so in 1782, in Korets, a Chassidic shtetl in Ukraine. The book was titled Sefer Ez Chayyim. Only a relatively brief passage from this extremely comprehensive work applies to my discussion ­here, but the description of zimzum that Vital penned is, in addition to the shorter version in Sefer ha-­Derushim, 21 the locus classicus in the history of the reception of zimzum. This passage was reproduced in the manuscript copies of Vital’s rec­ords and like the other doctrines of the Lurianic Kabbalah reached the Jewish communities of Eu­rope from Amsterdam to Chernobyl, by way of Galilee and through Italy.22 ­Later, the Lurianic Kabbalah unfolded h ­ ere, in eastern Eu­ rope. This development, of course, included the doctrine of zimzum, which would play an impor­tant and gradually popu­lar role as a religious and ideological trailblazer for the seventeenth-­century messianic movement of Shabbateanism,23 and for the Chassidic spiritual movement in the eigh­teenth ­century.24 But long before the 1782 printing in Korets, the manuscripts of Vital’s texts found their way sporadically into Christian hands as well. The Pietist theologian and Christian kabbalist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782) acquired a manuscript of Ez Chayyim in 1730 from a Jewish merchant in Halle. 25 He in turn disseminated the doctrine of zimzum in many of his works. He was the conduit through which German thinkers like Hegel and Schelling encountered Luria’s ideas.26 Unlike Oetinger, most Christian scholars

Figure 1. Description of the pro­cess of zimzum in Vital’s Sefer Ez Chayyim, print edition by Isaac Satanow, 2nd ed. (Korets, 1784).

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of the time could not read Hebrew. As such, we must take the view that Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s first Latin translation of long excerpts from Sefer ha-­Derushim, including a slightly shortened passage concerning zimzum that appeared in the first volume of his widely received 1677 Kabbala Denudata, paved the way for zimzum to attain prominence in Eu­ro­pean intellectual circles.27 In his polemic against Spinoza in Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (1699), Johann Georg Wachter translated into German and shortened the excerpts concerning zimzum that Knorr von Rosenroth had previously rendered into Latin.28 But Chayyim Vital’s comprehensive original text on zimzum did not appear in an annotated German translation based on the Hebrew original ­until 2002. An En­glish translation of this passage in Sefer Ez Chayyim was printed most recently in 1999.29 It is therefore worth our while to reproduce an exact translation, exegesis, and interpretation of this locus classicus. Vital’s Zimzum: Translation

You should know that before the emanations ­were emanated and the creations created, a most supreme, ­simple light filled the ­whole of existence. ­There was no vacant place, no aspect of empty space or void, but every­thing was filled by that ­simple, infinite light. It had no aspect of beginning or end, but was all one, pure, completely uniform light, and this is what is called the light of the Infinite [Hebrew: Or Ein Sof ]. When it arose in his pure ­will to create the worlds and to emanate the emanations, to bring out the perfection of his actions, his names, and his attributes—­for this was the reason that the worlds ­were created, as we explained in the first paragraph of the first inquiry. And then the Infinite contracted itself at its midpoint, in the exact center of its light. [. . .] And ­a fter he contracted that light and withdrew away from that midpoint to the sides surrounding it, it left a vacant space—an empty, hollow void. That contraction [Hebrew: zimzum] was completely uniform around the midpoint, so that the void was uniformly circular on all sides. It was not ­shaped like a square with fixed corners, ­because the Infinite had contracted itself equally from all sides, like a circle. The reason for this is that the light of the Infinite is absolutely the



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same, completely and totally uniform, so that it had to withdraw itself the same distance from all sides and it could not contract itself from one side more than the o­ thers. We know from the science of geometry that ­there is no shape except the circle that is the same all over. This is not so with the shape of a square, which has protruding corners, or with a triangle, or with any other shape. Therefore, ­because the Infinite is uniform in all its mea­sure­ments, as we stated above, it had to contract itself in the form of a circle. [. . .] ­There is yet another reason for this [the form of the circle]. It was ­because of the emanations that ­were destined to be emanated ­later into the midst of that open, void, and empty place that we described above. According to this explanation, the emanations ­were ­shaped like circles so that all of them would be uniformly close and attached to the Infinite that surrounds them uniformly. This way they receive the abundance of light that they need from all sides equally. This would not have been the case if the emanations had been in the form of a square or a triangle or any other shape, ­because then some protruding corners would have been closer to the Infinite than the other sides and they would not have received the light of the Infinite uniformly. The reason that this contraction [Hebrew: zimzum] was necessary and how it happened ­will be explained at the end of this branch [. . .]. ­After the contraction that we described above, the void, vacant, and empty space remained in the exact ­middle of the light of the Infinite, as mentioned above. As a result, a place was already ­there for what would be emanated, created, formed, and made. Then one straight line extended from the light of the Infinite, extending from its circle of light, from above to below, descending and developing into that void [. . .]. The top of this line extends from the Infinite itself and touches it. But the other extremity, at the lower end of this line, does not touch the light of the Infinite. The light of the Infinite extends by way of this line and spreads downward. Within that empty place, He emanated, created, formed, and made all the worlds—­every one of them. This line is like a single, narrow conduit through which the “­waters” of the super­natural light of the Infinite spread and are drawn to the worlds that are in the empty space in that void.

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We w ­ ill now describe some of the results of the kabbalists’ investigation into how t­ here can be a head, a m ­ iddle, and an end within the sefirot that we described above. However, since the head of the line touches the light of the Infinite on the upper side, while its lower end does not extend all the way down to the place where the light circles beneath the worlds, and is not attached to it ­there, we are justified in saying “head” and “end.” For, if the line had received the abundance [Hebrew: shefa] from the light of the Infinite through both of its ends, they would both have aspects of “heads,” equal to each other, and ­there would be no such ­thing as “higher” or “lower.” Similarly, if the Infinite had extended in from all the sides surrounding that empty place, ­there would be no top and bottom, no front and back, no East and West or North and South. But ­because the light of the Infinite extends only by way of a single line and a narrow conduit, we are justified in saying above and below, front and back, East and West, as we have learned, with God’s help [. . .].30 Vital’s Zimzum: Interpretation

The imperative at the beginning of this passage is “know,” as opposed to “believe.” The kabbalist has at his command esoteric knowledge and passes it on in a didactic manner only to a select few, meaning kabbalists considered worthy of this knowledge, and no one ­else. He has at his command knowledge that provides information concerning something that took place before the creation of the world, “before the emanations ­were emanated and [before] the creations [­were] created.” The Torah gives us sufficient and authoritative information regarding what occurred during and ­after the creation of the world. In the book of Genesis (Bereshit), all Jews and all ­people may read a well-­k nown, authoritative, and exoteric creation story, while the Kabbalah, on the other hand, communicates knowledge regarding an event that took place prior: it allows the initiated access to knowledge about what God did “before the creations ­were created.” And this event, as well as Chayyim Vital’s text, style, and tone, have nothing mysterious about them. Rather, Vital describes zimzum in this passage very clearly and in the style of an early modern scientific tractate, as if it ­were a pro­cess from the realm of physics—­a far cry from other passages in his works. Dif­fer­ent from many ­later Jewish and non-­Jewish interpreters, who prefer a meta­phorical or speculative reading of the doctrine of zimzum, Vital considers zimzum to be a



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real pro­cess. The simplicity of this rather technical description, positioned at the very beginning of Ez Chayyim, has most certainly contributed significantly to the ­great success and wide distribution of this text excerpt. For the creation of the world Vital uses the Hebrew verb from Genesis 1:1, bara, as in “Bereshit bara elohim” (In the beginning God created . . .), as it says in the first sentence of the Bible. According to rabbinical midrash, and also the church ­fathers,31 the verb bara stands for creation from nothing. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth from nothing, rather than from some previously existing ­matter. Both rabbis and church ­fathers agree on this point, in contrast to the Aristotelian theory of the preexistence of unformed ­matter. And God did not form heaven and earth out of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are to be found, just like the many names of God, in a preexisting, eternal Torah in heaven, according to the ancient text of Sefer Yezirah, often cited in the Kabbalah.32 From ­here, Vital’s doctrine of zimzum distinguishes itself as unique from the very beginning. He embarks on new paths, fully aware of their novelty. Apart from God, nothing should be eternal. According to Vital, the world is created neither from God nor some other preexisting ­thing, such as ­matter or letters. This is Vital’s authorial intention, which corresponds to the central idea of the doctrine related to the creation from nothing, something upon which both rabbis and church ­fathers agree. God’s act of creation marks the absolute beginning of time, space, and all finite material existence—­that is, of something other than God himself. The created, finite world arises, exists, and remains in ­every re­spect essentially dif­fer­ent from the eternal, infinite God. As an erudite rabbi, Chayyim Vital was of course familiar with the rabbinical interpretation of Genesis 1:1 when he used the verb bara. Even more astonishing for his readers was the fact that the same sentence also contains “before the emanations ­were emanated.” For the doctrine of creation from nothing and Plotinus’s doctrine of emanation (according to which the world as an existing ­thing arises from divine existence through the emanation of light) ­were seen to be competing and irreconcilable. ­Either the world is created out of nothingness, or it is created out of something. Tertium non datur. Both pos­si­ble solutions to this question are irreconcilable, and each is also problematic for the other. For how can something arise from nothing? Ex nihilo nihil fit—­nothing arises out of nothing, or so the Aristotelians repeatedly argued against the doctrine of creation from nothing. In his book Moreh Nevukhim (Guide for the Perplexed) from 1190, Maimonides had portrayed this antinomy between the rabbinical doctrine of creation from

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nothing and Aristotle’s doctrine of the uncreatability and eternity of ­matter over the space of many pages and in consideration of all con­temporary philosophical positions. Vital was certainly familiar with this text by Maimonides. And if, on the other hand, as the emanation doctrine implies, something arises out of God, it remains problematic how something as finite as the world can emerge from the eternal, immutable God. Chayyim Vital was clearly acquainted with this philosophical and religious difficulty. His decision to combine the idea of the creation of the world from nothing with the doctrine of emanation is therefore no accident. Vital’s juxtaposition implicitly contains a vigorous, twofold thesis: his doctrine of nothing not only solves the philosophical prob­lems within both theories, but it also makes the two competing creation theories—­the rabbinically orthodox doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (Hebrew: yesh me-­ein) and the emanation doctrine, favored by the majority of kabbalistic texts and the Neoplatonic Jewish phi­los­o­phers such as Solomon ibn Gabirol—­compatible with one another. Seen in this way, this constellation can also be understood as a proclamation: Vital’s concept of zimzum solves prob­lems pertaining to both doctrines and makes compatible with each other the rabbinically orthodox doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and the emanation doctrine, favored by the majority of kabbalistic texts and the Neoplatonic Jewish phi­los­o­phers such as Solomon ibn Gabirol.33 However, the reader can only recognize the validity of this proclamation by working through the text. But what was ­there before the world was created? This is an ancient question in all creation religions. In response to this question, Vital writes that ­there was only a “supreme, ­simple light [that] filled up the ­whole of existence.” He does not explain what this “­whole of existence” is. The word he uses for it is the Hebrew noun meziut, which in Modern Hebrew means something like “real­ity.” But Vital does not mean empirical real­ity ­here. Meziut comes from the verb maza, which means to find, to be found, to be located. Vital argues that what­ever existed somehow and in­def­initely before the creation of the world, it was full of a supreme, ­simple light. He continues: “­There was no vacant place, no aspect of empty space or void, but every­thing was filled by that ­simple, infinite light.” Before creation and before zimzum, ­there was no space, no ­matter, no borders or limit, no direction, and no empty space or vacuum that existed somewhere. Every­ thing, ­every place was filled with the eternal light of Ein-­Sof. Ein-­Sof had already in medieval Kabbalah been a designation for God. This designation for God in Vital’s writing is entirely in agreement with the negative theol-



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ogy of Maimonides (1135–1204), one of the most impor­tant Jewish phi­los­o­ phers of the M ­ iddle Ages. In his principal work, Moreh Nevukhim, Maimonides had argued that the phi­los­o­phers did not know what God is—by way of positive divine attributes such as omnipotence or omniscience—­but only that he exists.34 While they can be certain of his existence through a philosophical proof, knowledge of God can only be augmented via negativa, that is, by determining what God is not. According to Maimonides, God is not temporal, not corporeal, not material, not accidental, and not finite. ­After his first determination, God is an Ein-­Sof, literally, a “not-­finite” or “infinite.” Vital and Maimonides agree on this point, if not on other points, as the Kabbalah is full of images of God and anthropomorphisms. We cannot know what God is in positive terms, but we might begin to understand him by what he is not. According to Maimonides’s negative theology, God is in any case a nonfinite being—­something totally dif­fer­ent from the finite world. Prior to the creation of the world nothing existed other than this Or Ein-­Sof, the infinite, omnipresent, ­simple, divine light, but every­thing was filled with it. This divine light is not identical with the indefinite and unknown God prior to all creation and revelation, but like God, it is infinite, without limits and omnipresent. And it always shines and is also temporally infinite. For prior to the creation of the world, nothing existed other than this infinite, omnipresent, ­simple, divine light. According to Vital, “It had no aspect of beginning or end, but was all one, pure, completely uniform light, and this is what is called the light of the Infinite.” ­There is a state of “complete indifference” and “indistinguishability” of the absolute and in the absolute before all time and world, as Schelling writes centuries ­later,35 before it comes to the “contraction” and thus to the first subdivision and self-­differentiation of the absolute. But unlike Schelling, Vital does not reflect on a theogony in the context of God’s self-­limitation. According to Vital, this primordial absolute indifference—­and indifference of the Absolute—is merely described as an indiscriminate and directionless omnipresence of the divine light, before God decides to enter into zimzum and the act of creation and emanation. This decision is an act of volition: “When it arose in His pure ­will to create worlds and to emanate emanations, to bring out the perfection of His actions, His names, and His attributes—­for this was the reason that the worlds ­were created.” Vital once again repeats, as if summoning the image, the duplication of creation from nothing and emanation. He also mentions that the purpose of

Figure 2. Description of the zimzum pro­cess in Vital’s Sefer Ez Chayyim with pictorial ele­ments; print edition by Menachem Heilperin (Warsaw, 1890).



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God’s decision to create is to reveal the perfection of his works, names, and attributes. Revelation is the purpose of creation and the purpose of zimzum. Vital then comes to the description of zimzum as making the creation pro­ cess pos­si­ble: “then the Infinite contracted itself at its midpoint, in the exact center of its light. And ­after He contracted that light and withdrew away from that midpoint to the sides surrounding it, it left a vacant space—an empty, hollow void.” Without indicating where the ­middle of the Infinite would then be located, Vital writes that the Infinite gathered himself in his center. Perhaps this statement is unnecessary, ­because the center of the Infinite is ­there where God gathers and concentrates himself. God is, and determines, the center of the Infinite. At any rate, the light of the Infinite existed in this center, just as it did everywhere ­else. Nevertheless, along with himself, the infinite God drew this light away from that center and for the first time, “a vacant space, an empty, hollow void” came into existence where the infinite God and his divine light no longer resided. Through this contraction known as zimzum, which he desired and then brought about, a nondivine space arises. This nondivine space, empty of God, does not exist somewhere outside but rather within this entirely empty and unoccupied ­middle, which God himself has made vacant and which is surrounded at all sides with divine light. Indeed, it is the only space that is ­free from God’s omnipresence. This space was made ­free by God himself, and it is a space of freedom, for freedom exists only where God is absent, where he does not have dominion or wish to have dominion. This ­free space, created by zimzum, God’s withdrawal “from himself into himself,” to quote Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­w itz and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth,36 is a place of the absence of God in the m ­ iddle of his abundance and omnipresence. In the ­middle of his presence, God creates, through the pro­cess of zimzum, a space where he is absent, a nondivine other space, a complete vacuum, emptiness, indeterminacy, and, according to some interpretations, nothingness. The infinite God thus restricts himself within his center using nothingness, which is to say a nondivine, if not anti-­divine, space. This space is without determination, if not also immea­sur­able. It is dark and without light, for the light of the Infinite has retreated from him. The only positive ­thing that Chayyim Vital attributed to this empty, uniformly ­shaped void is its circularity (which is in fact a sphericity if we look at it three-­dimensionally,37 though Vital describes zimzum as two-­ dimensional, using geometrical terms). For the Infinite, Vital argues, retracted itself on all sides equally from its center. He states,

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That contraction [zimzum] was completely uniform around the midpoint, so that the void was uniformly circular on all sides. It was not ­shaped like a square with fixed corners, ­because the Infinite had contracted itself equally on all sides, like a circle. The reason for this is that the light of the Infinite is absolutely the same, completely and totally uniform, so that it had to withdraw itself the same distance from all sides and it could not contract itself from one side more than the o­ thers. We know from the science of geometry that ­there is no shape except the circle that is the same all over. This is not so with the shape of a square, which has protruding corners, or with a triangle, or with any other shape. Therefore, ­because the Infinite is uniform in all its mea­sure­ments, as we stated above, it had to contract itself in the form of a circle. Another reason for the circularity of this empty space in the center is that the worlds w ­ ere created and emanated into this vacuum and the negation of all determination. To begin with, ­there are the ten circular sefirot (heavenly spheres), which, according to kabbalistic tradition, are ascribed qualities such as austerity, benevolence, glory, judgment, and so on. The sefirot are emanations, but they exist in close proximity to the divine light that has been retracted in the form of a circle. This is why they too are round, rather than triangular or square, ­because other­wise they would not all be equidistant from the divine light. Vital explains further: ­There is yet another reason for this [the form of the circle]. It was ­because of the emanations that ­were destined to be emanated ­later into the midst of that open, void, empty place that we described above. According to this explanation, the emanations ­were ­shaped like circles so that all of them would be uniformly close and attached to the Infinite that surrounds them uniformly. This way they receive the abundance of light that they need from all sides equally. This would not have been the case if the emanations had been in the form of a square or a triangle or any other shape, ­because then some protruding corners would have been closer to the Infinite than the other sides and they would not have received the light of the Infinite uniformly.



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­Later, four worlds ­will emanate into the circular, empty void. They include azilut, the world of emanation; beri’ah, the world of creation; yezirah, the world of formation; and asiyyah, the world of realization or actualization,38 which is our complete and actualized terrestrial world. Vital explains how we should imagine this pro­cess: ­ fter the contraction that we described above, the void, vacant, A and empty space remained in the exact ­middle of the light of the Infinite, as mentioned above. As a result, a place was already ­t here for what would be emanated, created, formed, and made. Then one straight line extended from the light of the Infinite, extending from its circle of light, from above to below, descending and developing into that void [. . .]. The top of this line extends from the Infinite itself and touches it. But the other extremity, at the lower end of this line, does not touch the light of the Infinite. The light of the Infinite extends by way of this line and spreads downward. Within that empty space, He emanated, created, formed, and made all the worlds—­every one of them. But first, Adam Kadmon takes shape. Adam Kadmon is the first Adam, the prototype of the second, earthly Adam that we know from the biblical story of Genesis. Adam Kadmon is a figure of light with a ­human shape, a cosmic makros anthropos. Through Adam Kadmon, the light of the Infinite creates all four worlds. Lurianic cosmogony is a priori anthropomorphic: light falls from orifices in Adam Kadmon’s body. This light allows the sefirot to take shape, all of them circular and uniform. In a circular pattern around Adam Kadmon, they attach themselves closely to the edge of the vacant, round space. Fi­nally, the four worlds azilut, beri’ah, yezirah, and asiyyah, the earthly world that possesses volume, time, and space, emanate from the head of Adam Kadmon into the ­middle of the void made pos­si­ble by the vacuum that God has created.39 Using an array of impressive images and the greatest technical detail, Vital describes how zimzum precedes the cosmogonic pro­cesses of Adam Kadmon, the shattering of the vessels, the decay of the shards or shells (Hebrew: kelippot), the formation of the four worlds, the development of the parzufim (“­faces,” meaning configurations of light) and tikkun, all of which take place in the vacant space inside of God, surrounded by Ein-­Sof. Zimzum not

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only takes place prior to ­these pro­cesses, but it is also the inevitable prerequisite for them. God does not create the world out of himself into himself, but rather creates the world in a space that is ­free from God. God and the world thus remain separated, and the danger of pantheism is averted. The world originates in a nothingness that God first made pos­si­ble by contracting into himself. This world is not remote, but close to God. The world is contained and surrounded by God, without being identical to him: he remains dif­fer­ent from it, transmundane and transcendent, without being removed from it. The creator and the created are and ­w ill always remain separated by this empty space that the emanated and created, that is, the finite, ­will never be able to completely fill. Zimzum thus occurs prior to all creation, even before the beginning of time. It is not a pro­cess that occurs in time, but rather a necessary condition for the emergence of anything that might resemble time. Although the nothingness inside of the infinite God originates outside of and “before” all finite time, this empty space must first be cleared so that the infinite God can create something finite, dif­fer­ent or distinctive from him. As Oetinger ­later writes, ­there can be no creation nor revelation without zimzum.40 For God does not reveal himself to himself, but rather only reveals himself to that which is created, whose creation in a god-­free space is made pos­si­ble through zimzum. As I cited above, Vital depicts this wholly in ­simple, straightforward terms: “­After the contraction that we described above, the void, vacant, and empty space remained in the exact ­middle of the light of the Infinite, as mentioned above. As a result, a place was already ­there for what would be emanated, created, formed, and made.” ­Here, Vital reiterates once again all four forms of God’s activity, which are, according to rabbinical tradition, a part of the creation of worlds: God emanated (he’ezil), created (bara), formed (yazar), and made or “actualized” (assa) the worlds.41 In the creation of the worlds, the Infinite thus becomes active in four ways. Vital modifies this slightly: The light of the Infinite emanates, creates, shapes, and actualizes the worlds through that line made of light, into the empty space that originates as a result of the pro­cess of zimzum. The uppermost beginning of that line originates from the Infinite itself and touches it. In contrast, the end at the lower part of the line of light does not touch the light of the Infinite: “This line is like a single narrow conduit through which the ‘­waters’ of the super­natural light of the Infinite spread and are drawn to the worlds that are in the empty space in that void.”



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Only zimzum, according to Vital’s implicit thesis, offers a valid explanatory model for creation from nothing, as well as the emanation, the formation of ­matter, and the establishment of the worlds. The creation of the earthly world is made pos­si­ble by the influx of divine light into the empty and godless space inside of God himself, which is brought about by zimzum. The earthly world is a creation from divine light, poured and emanated into nothingness. The earthly world is placed, so to speak, out of nothing and into nothing; nevertheless, it always remains inside of God, it exists in the center, contained and encased in the innermost part of divine light. With the entrance of the Or Ein-­Sof, the divine light across the line made of light, the vacant space is aligned from top to bottom and can therefore have directionality. Vital explains further: We w ­ ill now describe some of the results of the kabbalists’ investigation into how ­there can be a head, ­middle, and an end within the sefirot that we described above. However, since the head of the line touches the light of the Infinite on the upper side, while its lower end does not extend all the way down to the place where that light circles beneath the worlds, and is not attached to it ­there, we are justified in saying “head” and “end.” For, if the line had received the abundance [shefa] from the light of the Infinite through both of its ends, they would both have aspects of “heads,” equal to each other, and ­there would be no such ­thing as “higher” or “lower.” Similarly, if the Infinite had extended in from all sides surrounding that empty place, ­there would be no top or bottom, no front and back, no East and West or North and South. But ­because the light of the Infinite extends only by way of a single line and a narrow conduit, we are justified in saying above and below, front and back, East and West, as we have learned, with God’s help. Through divine ­will, zimzum and the expansion of divine light into the dark space inside of God make the earthly world pos­si­ble, orienting it according to the cardinal directions. What is more, zimzum makes it pos­si­ble for the world to continue to exist. For if God w ­ ere to alter his decision and cease to contract himself, if he ­were to remain entirely within himself and therefore refrain from withdrawal, the empty space in his center would

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collapse, along with all of creation conceived within it. In this re­spect, zimzum is necessary not only for the possibility of creation but also for the preservation of the earthly world. Zimzum is thus not one single act but must be constantly sustained by the Infinite. Zimzum, God’s withdrawal and self-­contraction, enables the continuous emanation and recreation of the world, the creatio continua. ­Because zimzum is not a ­limited singular act of the Infinite, the flow of divine light into the empty space is also not a singular act or concluded event. The divine light never ceases to flow; it streams ­every day, ­every hour, ­every second. The world is created anew at ­every moment, through zimzum. It is in this nondivine place, which exists in the ­middle of the other­wise omnipresent God, that all ­human freedom, good and evil, truth and falsehood first emerge. They exist precisely ­because God leaves this place for freedom by withdrawing his omnipotence and perfection away from that space. ­There would be no such space without zimzum: the finite within the Infinite would not exist. ­There would be no godless space created by God, no universe of astronomers and celestial bodies, no earthly space of geography and cardinal points. And ­there would also be no earthly time, which is only pos­si­ble where the Infinite and timeless has created a void within itself for a beginning and an end. Vital’s locus classicus is the first comprehensive written description of zimzum. We do not know how Luria himself narrated this pro­cess in his spoken words. In Vital’s written text, we read a carefully composed, systematized work that depicts zimzum in kabbalistic, philosophical, and geometric terms as a proto-­physical, real pro­cess inside of Ein-­Sof. This text argues why the resulting space, ­free from divine light and existence, is perfectly round and hollow. It explains how, through the emanation of a ray of light, this hollow space obtains directionality, that is, upward and downward, forward and backward, and how directions of the cardinal directions become pos­si­ble in the earthly world. This realistic description of zimzum as a proto-­physical pro­cess has nothing in common with a myth or rhetorical figure such as a meta­phor or trope. This certainly does not apply to all Vital’s writings, such as ­those pertaining to Adam Kadmon, the parzufim, and the yichudim. But Vital’s description of zimzum serves as an example of “cosmosophical science,” 42 and in that way resembles scientific and philosophical discourses of the early modern period.



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Shevirat ha-­Kelim and Tikkun

As Vital and his teacher Luria understood it, zimzum represents the beginning of a pro­cess of the differentiation of cosmic diversity that departs from the infinite unity of divine light. Unlike the works composed by other students of Luria, Vital’s descriptions and classifications of Luria’s visions offer his readers not a mythological, but rather a cosmosophical, scientific description of the origins of the world. This description emerges from all-­consuming technical detail that fills dozens of well mapped-­out, or­ga­nized pages.43 Although Vital’s portrayal of this complex cosmogony differs to some extent across his vari­ous writings and editions of his works, the scholarly lit­er­a­ture on Vital reconstructs the sequence of this pro­cess of the emergence of the world from light along similar lines.44 I briefly outline some of ­these anthropomorphic ideas h ­ ere. Adam Kadmon holds a key position in Lurianic cosmogony ­because all worlds originate from the flow of the light of Ein-­Sof out of his bodily orifices. The emanation and profusion of divine light is filtered, decelerated, and reduced through Adam Kadmon, the makros anthropos. In the pro­cess of cosmogony, he limits the surplus and abundance of the overwhelming divine omnipotence and energy as it impacts the worlds. First, the ten sefirot emerge, the vessels (Hebrew: kelim) that are developed and formed from divine light, through the emanation of divine light into the hollow, ­spherical, vacant space created by zimzum, broken and decelerated through the openings in Adam Kadmon’s head. The sefirot, which lay dormant as potential forces, unformed and undeveloped in the undifferentiated uniformity and homogeneity of Ein-­Sof, take shape ­after zimzum by way of emanation into the empty space. Both Luria and the Zohar refer to this space as tehiru. The remnants of light, called reshimu, as well as the intra-­divine powers of din (limitation, austerity, judgment) that stayed ­behind in the dark empty void of tehiru ­after zimzum, also play a role ­here. The ten sefirot ­were molded and formed as vessels of light from ­these sparks of light, in combination with the power of limitation made pos­si­ble by zimzum. ­These vessels contain the inner light (or penimi) and absorb the surrounding light (or makif  ). The ten sefirot form the supreme world of emanation, the olam ha-­azilut, whose purpose is to receive, limit, and subdue the abundance of divine light flowing from Adam Kadmon. Subsequently, ten more sefirot form the olam ha-­beri’ah, the world of creation, then the olam ha-­yezirah, the world of formation. Fi­ nally, ten more sefirot form the olam ha-­asiyyah, the world of realization or actualization, which in this stage of emanation remains purely immaterial.

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The emanating light continually makes new vessels and formations, in which the light is stored, but also spreads perpetually farther and farther. However, an excess of light leads to a shattering of the vessels, the proverbial shevirat ha-­kelim, which explains the emergence of disorder and evil in the world. Shevirat ha-­kelim occurs during the emanation of the sefirot. The three highest sefirot, Keter (crown), Chokhmah (wisdom), and Binah (judgment) are formed first. As vessels, they can accommodate the light of Ein-­ Sof that flows out of the openings in Adam Kadmon’s head without shattering. It is the lower seven sefirot that break ­under the excess of divine light. This shattering occurs anywhere ­there are sefirot, both in olam ha’azilut, and in the lower three of the four worlds: beri’ah, yezirah, and asiyyah. The shattering of the vessels scatters fragments everywhere, which fall down as kelippot (shells or shards). ­These kelippot, shards of broken vessels, represent disorder, impurity, and evil, but also the materiality of ­matter. The earthly world is created by the residual sparks of light that result from the shattering of the vessels and the ­matter of the kelippot, or shards, that have fallen down into the olam ha-­asiyyah. Therefore, the formation of the earthly world presupposes both zimzum and the shattering of the vessels. The shattering of the lower seven sefirot through an excess of light makes it necessary to mend them, which entails reor­ga­ni­za­tion, healing, and redemption of the entire cosmos: God wants to put a stop to evil and perdition. For this healing, called tikkun, the disordered light remnants scattered in space ­after the shattering of the vessels are or­ga­nized and arranged into new configurations. Divine light continues to emanate from Adam Kadmon, but instead of the broken sefirot, parzufim (­faces, shapes, constellations) are now formed on each of the four world levels of azilut, beri’ah, yezirah, and asiyyah. In each of ­these four world levels, five parzufim emerge, respectively: Arikh Anpin (the forbearing one), Abba (­father), Imma (­mother), Ze’eir Anpin (the impatient), and Nukba de-­Ze’eir (wife of Ze’eir). On all planes and world levels, in all constellations and configurations of cosmogony, Vital combines aspects of the masculine and feminine, male and female parzufim, depicting their balancing oppositeness and coalescence in elaborate detail. The spiritual and erotic ­union of masculine and feminine powers and aspects of the deity is the expression of divine love and stabilizes a new order of the four worlds. Tikkun is this pro­cess of u ­ nion and reor­ga­ni­za­tion in love. The consummation of tikkun at the end of the pro­cess is the salvation of the world. Yeshayahu Tishby explains that t­ here are three parallel explanatory models for Luria’s doctrine of the breaking of the vessels. First, ­there is a mech-



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anistic model, which understands the breaking of the vessels as the result of an excess of divine light and divine energy. Second, ­there is a cathartic model that explains that the shattering of the vessels initiates a pro­cess of separation and self-­purification between good and evil within God himself, which remain unseparated in Ein-­Sof; at the same time, this pro­cess explains the existence of evil in the world. Third, ­there is a teleological model that posits that shevirat ha-­kelim allows good and evil to arise, so that ­humans may have a choice between sin and righ­teousness, reward and punishment, thus allowing ­people to contribute literally to tikkun, that is, redemption, by performing God’s mitzvot, commandments of the Torah. This is mending and restitution of the world through sacred works of righ­teousness.45 For the Lurianic Kabbalah, good and evil are not initially an individual moral issue, but rather a cosmological prob­lem. The cosmological prerequisite for the emergence of ­human good and evil following Adam’s original sin is the shattering of the vessels, which takes place before the creation of the earthly world. Tikkun promises the cosmological triumph over evil, the divine salvation of the world, in which only ­human beings can participate. Tikkun is the third prominent doctrine of the Lurianic Kabbalah ­after zimzum and shevirat ha-­kelim. It represents the pro­cesses of restitution and healing of the broken vessels and worlds at the end of the cosmogonic pro­cess. Tikkun is initiated everywhere through divine workings and takes place on all the countless planes, world levels, aspects, and configurations of the Lurianic model of the world. ­Humans can contribute to tikkun while on the terrestrial plane by performing moral and pious acts. Through asceticism and prayer, the fulfillment of commandments in everyday life and theurgical practice such as kavvanot (meditations) and yichudim (meditative ­union of the sefirot and ­human souls), through blessings in connection with prayer and meditation, which, according to Luria, lead to intra-­divine couplings, sivvugim, and thus to the cosmic joining together of all broken ­things,46 humankind can influence the movements of the sefirotic worlds, as well as the ascent and descent of the kelippot and the sparks of sefirotic light. For Vital and his teacher Luria, practice plays a prominent role in this approach to Kabbalah. While his explanations of zimzum, shevirat ha-­kelim, and cosmic tikkun still belong to the theoretical Kabbalah (Kabbalah Iyyunit), the explanations on ­human participation in tikkun through halakhic observance, intensive asceticism, and rituals of piety belong to the practical Kabbalah. In the practical Kabbalah, up to and including Chassidism, the ascetic and theurgical practices for overcoming evil, sin, and ­human deficiencies that

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Vital describes remain of the utmost importance and attract attentive readers. But the phi­los­o­phers who read Vital, Jews and Christians alike, ­were fascinated by zimzum and regarded it as an intellectual showpiece from the ancient theosophical tradition of Kabbalah and, more generally speaking, Jewish intellectual history. In contrast, other ele­ments that Vital explains in his extensive works remained almost unnoticed by ­these readers. In the history of Christian reception of the Lurianic Kabbalah, shevirat ha-­kelim and tikkun play almost no role, ­because the dogma of original sin offers a competing religious model that explains the origin of evil and suffering in the world, and with Christ’s death on the cross, resurrection, and return, ­there are other religious models for salvation. It was not ­until the end of the twentieth ­century that ­these other two ideas, especially shevirat ha-­kelim, would once again gain purchase, this time in Anselm Kiefer’s monumental sculptures and installations.

Joseph Ibn Tabūl: The Roots of Rigor Joseph Ibn Tabūl came from the Maghreb, prob­ably from Morocco, and was born around 1545. As is the case with many other details pertaining to his biography, we do not know when he arrived in Safed.47 In any case, during Luria’s two-­year period of activity in Safed, Ibn Tabūl numbered among his closest students. His fellow students even considered him the most talented of Ha’ARI’s followers, with the pos­si­ble exception of Vital. Ibn Tabūl and Vital ­were lifelong competitors, presumably even during their master’s lifetime, despite that or precisely ­because they both originally belonged to the same chavura and saw each other daily. A ­ fter Luria died, Ibn Tabūl refused to accept Vital’s claim that he was Ha’ARI’s only legitimate and au­then­tic successor. Vital pushed him out of the chavura. As a result, the two kabbalists gathered separate circles of students around them in the microcosm of Safed. While Vital only accepted students who had studied with and been personally acquainted with Ha’ARI (and obliged them, as Luria once did, to keep strict silence regarding Lurianic teachings), Joseph Ibn Tabūl’s circle grew rapidly, ­because he was a charismatic teacher, admitted new ­adepts of the Lurianic teaching, and passed on Luria’s teachings in his writings without hesitation. In the years immediately following Luria’s death, the two competing schools operated in Safed parallel to one another while si­mul­ta­neously isolating themselves from the other. Vital moved to Jerusalem in 1576, and from



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the beginning of the seventeenth ­century, the students of Vital and his son Samuel, including Jacob Zemach and ­later Meir Poppers, dominated the field from that city. With the publication of his writings and the appearance of Sefer ha-­Derushim in 1620, Vital became the preeminent interpreter of Luria, pushing Ibn Tabūl, who was not nearly as prolific as his competitor, to the margins.48 The exact date of Ibn Tabūl’s death remains unknown, but he presumably died in Cairo, where he had moved several years ­after Vital’s relocation to Jerusalem. Ibn Tabūl’s most impor­tant Lurianic work, which his pupils disseminated posthumously, circulated ­under the title Drush Chefzi Bah (Explanation of “My Delight in Her” [i.e., the city of Jerusalem; compare with Isaiah 2:24]) as a manuscript in Italy. However, Ibn Tabūl did not actually select this title. Part of the irony of the competitive relationship between Vital and Ibn Tabūl is that when this work was fi­nally printed in Jerusalem in 1921, Vital was named as the author. Drush Chefzi Bah begins immediately and without introduction with a description of zimzum and its prehistory within God: “Know and understand that before the highest emanation, blessed be his [God’s] name, created the lower world, in which he created Adam, from which humankind originated, ­until he chose the holy nation from among humankind and they received the Torah and its commandments and extolled his splendor and majesty, the universe was chaos [tohu wabohu]. From this, it can be seen that before all this, ­there was not even the world of emanation, even though the purpose of all this was to bring forth humankind, who would preserve the Torah.” 49 Joseph Ibn Tabūl begins big, outlining a cosmic prob­lem. When God, the highest emanation, created the earthly world to bring forth the ­human race and from it the Jewish ­people, who would receive the Torah and its commandments, the universe was an unstructured chaos. The existence of the Torah and the Jewish ­people is the purpose of creation, but initially, when God existed only for himself, every­thing was formless confusion. ­There was neither the world of emanation nor the world of creation, formation, and realization. In the beginning, God had not yet developed and “clothed” (malbushim) the sefirot, nor the four upper worlds. They ­were still embedded and obscured, formless in the primordial tohu wabohu. To bring order and structure to this chaos and transfer the evolution of the still undeveloped, implicit, and hidden worlds from the status of pure potentiality to actuality, it is necessary for God to limit, structure, and shape chaos through the imposition of bound­a ries. This occurs through zimzum.

Figure 3. Joseph Ibn Tabūl, Drush Chefzi Bah (Jerusalem, 1921), folio A. Shown h ­ ere is a description of the pro­cess of zimzum with Gershom Scholem’s handwritten marginalia.



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But before this pro­cess arrives at zimzum—­and Joseph Ibn Ṭabūl’s description differs significantly from Vital’s ­here50 —­the forces of din, or rigor, must be awakened and activated in chaos. Din is the power of limitation, differentiation, and judgment. The powers of din in the primordial state, in the unstructured chaos of the eternal beginning within God, remain undeveloped and exist only as a potential. They are then balanced by the opposite forces of rachamim, that is, mercy, love, forgiveness, and compassion. The powers of rigor and mercy are originally contained in God himself, but they only become effective and ­actual—­first through emanation in the upper worlds, and then fi­nally in the earthly world. In the power of din, God serves as a strict judge of good and evil. In the power of the rachamim, on the other hand, he is the loving God who exemplifies mercy and forgiveness. In the primordial state before emanation and creation, that is, in the unstructured chaos of the very beginning, din and rachamim exist only as potential, and an activation of the potentialities or, as Ibn Tabūl writes, the “roots” of din (shorshei ha-­din) are required to generate structure and order through austerity and limitation. The instrument for this is zimzum. What’s more, zimzum presupposes the powers of din, which spring into action and existence immediately during the zimzum, as Ibn Tabūl explains in the first section of Drush Chefzi Bah. In comparison with Vital, who delineates the prehistory of the development of the powers of din before and during zimzum, and elides zimzum as an act of God’s ­will,51 Ibn Tabūl’s description of the act of zimzum is brief: Let us return to our theme, that the light of Ein-­Sof fills every­thing. And when it arose in his [God’s] ­simple ­will to emanate and create worlds, as he [then] did, he contracted his light together—as it is written: he contracted his presence between the beams of the Ark of the Covenant [Midrash Exodus Rabbah on Exod. 25:10: “For every­thing that is beneath must by necessity have its roots above”]—­ and an empty space remained [. . .] and only a ­little of the residual light remained in this same space, as it is said: it is not the sun itself that shines in the sunlight. But what [the light] caused itself to divide is the power of limitation [koach ha’din]. For every­thing that is below must by necessity have its root above.52 If God’s purpose in creation is to reveal and spread his rachamim, love and mercy, with the Torah in the lower worlds, then this functions initially

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and only through the opposing forces of din, which are active in the zimzum. The forces of din, forces of austerity and limitation, are represented by the residual light from the light of the Ein-­Sof, called reshimu, in the space cleared by zimzum, in which the forces of the rachamim can also flow during the emanation of light. In the world of the sefirot and fi­nally in the lower, earthly world, both forces become effective and real, where before they ­were indistinguishable, neutralized, and virtually pre­sent in Ein-­Sof, ­until fi­nally the roots of din ­were activated and concentrated in the pro­cess of zimzum. In the empty space following zimzum, the ­limited light of the Ein-­Sof can then again emanate the powers of divine mercy, rachamim, and become effective in the formation of the worlds. In contrast to what Vital argues, however, the light of Ein-­Sof does not emanate and flow from the light channel into the hollow space emptied from the light of Ein-­Sof within Ein-­Sof, but from a yod, the first letter of the Tetragrammaton, the four-­letter and unspeakable name of God, Yod-­Heh-­Vav-­Heh. This letter yod reaches down from the Ein-­Sof into the empty space: Creation from nothing by light, emanated and formed by the first letter of the holy name of God. According to Ibn Tabūl, one cannot know this pro­cess, but can only believe. ­Here, the Kabbalah relates the account about something of which philosophy and science know nothing and cannot know anything. For Ibn Tabūl, zimzum is a ­matter of faith.

Israel Sarug: God’s Garment of Light and the Speculative Zimzum Israel Sarug was the exoteric heralder of the Lurianic Kabbalah, who brought it into the Jewish world of Eu­rope during his long journeys and made it famous ­there in the last de­cades of the sixteenth ­century and the first of the seventeenth. He traveled from Safed via Asia Minor and Greece to northern Italy, Dalmatia, Germany, and fi­nally eastern Eu­rope, where he taught the teachings of Luria in his own adaptation, strongly influenced by Cordovero, to large Jewish communities and impor­tant rabbis. Yosef Avivi has reconstructed Sarug’s whereabouts and frequent travels in ­those years, using the references to Sarug in documents written by his students and hosts. Between 1587 and 1603, ­there is mention of him being in Greece, northern Italy, and Dalmatia; afterward also in Frankfurt am Main and Krakow. In 1587, fifteen years ­after Luria’s death, Menachem Asariah from Fano, one of the leading



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rabbis of Italy, editor of the printed edition and most impor­tant commentator of Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim in his time, mentions Israel Sarug for the first time in his Asara Ma’amarot (Ten Treatises).53 Before 1593, the rabbis David Shemarja, Jehuda Hacohen, Shlomo Ohev, and Abraham Herrera mentioned that Sarug was in Thessaloniki and Ragusa (­today: Dubrovnik). And from 1593 to 1600, he spent time in Ferrara and Venice, according to the rabbis Menachem Asariah Fano, Esra Fano, Nathan Ottolenghi, Baruch ben Baruch, Schimon Cohen, Aharon Berachia Modena, and Jehuda Arie Modena. From 1600 to 1603, Sarug was in Gorizia, according to the testimony of R. Issachar Beer Eilenburg and Esra Fano. In 1603—­according to R. Nathan Ottolenghi and R. David Sacharja Mendel—he is seen again in Venice, and between 1603 and 1606, R. Alexander Katz mentions a stay in Frankfurt am Main. According to accounts by R. Pinchas Halevi Hurwitz and R. Jehuda Hacohen, Sarug is said to have still been in Krakow during the late years of his rabbinical itinerant life as the heralder of Luria’s Kabbalah. On ­these journeys, during longer stays in places with impor­tant Jewish communities such as Venice, Ferrara, Gorizia, and Ragusa, Sarug gathered other scholarly kabbalists around him, whom he familiarized with his version and interpretation of Luria’s teachings. Some of the most impor­tant Italian rabbis of the era became acquainted with the Lurianic Kabbalah through Sarug viva voce. Around 1600, Italy was the most impor­tant Eu­ro­ pean hub of the Kabbalah, and Sarug was the decisive ambassador of the Lurianic Kabbalah to this center. Through Sarug, the Lurianic Kabbalah reached Eu­rope rather early. As a teacher of the Kabbalah, Sarug was obviously an equally charismatic and mysterious figure. Even ­today, we only know that he presumably came from Egypt, but the date and place of birth remain unknown. At a young age, Sarug (also Saruk, Seruk, or Saruq, as his name is written in vari­ ous sources) had certainly met the young Isaac Luria in Egypt, before he left for Jerusalem and Safed, that is, before 1569. ­W hether Sarug actually followed Luria to Safed and belonged to his group of pupils ­there is unclear, ­because ­there are no reliable sources. In any case, Sarug’s name is missing from the chavurot lists, which list Luria’s immediate students. In a foundational biographical essay on Sarug,54 Scholem argues that it was not u ­ ntil ­after 1580, that is, years ­after Luria’s death, that Sarug traveled to Jerusalem and Safed, where he contacted students such as Chayyim Vital, Moses Yonah, and Joseph Ibn Tabūl who had studied directly with Ha’ARI. Similar to them, although largely in­de­pen­dent from them, he then developed his own

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kabbalistic system.55 Ronit Meroz conversely asserts that Sarug was in Safed with Luria, adapted some of his teachings, but left the small city for an unknown destination before the master’s death in 1572. Had that not been the case, his authority as a pupil of Luria would never have been accepted by Italian kabbalists like Menachem Asariah Fano, who maintained close contacts and had correspondents in Safed.56 What­ever the truth may be, the impact of Sarug’s emergence and success was determined by the fact that he traveled and taught as a student of Luria, the famous mystic from Safed who died young and who could ­after his death only speak through his pupils. We cannot dispute that Sarug’s adaptation and interpretation of Luria’s teachings differed markedly from ­those of Chayyim Vital and Joseph Ibn Tabūl, especially his teachings on zimzum. It is also indisputable and obvious that Sarug, unlike Luria’s immediate pupils in Safed, did not feel bound by Luria’s esoteric mandate of silence when he brought his teachings into the public sphere. ­After he had left Safed, where he certainly had a difficult time among Luria’s other students with their competing interpretations of the teachings of Ha’ARI, Sarug appeared in the far-­flung regions of the Jewish public realm, where he propagated his version of Luria’s teachings. It is hard to ignore the analogy with the missionary journeys of the apostle Paul, ­after he had quarreled with the immediate disciples of Jesus who remained in Jerusalem at the so-­called Apostolic Council. Presumably traveling a route not unlike the one that Paul had undertaken, Sarug reached Italy by ship along the edge of the Mediterranean via Asia Minor and likely Thessaloniki. In his anti-­kabbalist work Ari Nochem (A Roaring Lion), the famous Venetian rabbi Leone da Modena testifies to Sarug’s teaching and long private conversations with him in Venice in 1592.57 Between 1590 and 1595, Sarug must have also taught in Ragusa for quite some time, ­because his philosophical pupil Abraham Cohen Herrera, who was then a resident ­there, confirmed that Sarug introduced him to the Lurianic Kabbalah ­there. Between 1593 and 1603, Sarug taught in Ferrara, Venice, Gorizia, and Thessaloniki, among other places, and between 1603 and 1606 in Frankfurt am Main and then possibly in Krakow. The trail of this missionary of the Lurianic Kabbalah got lost somewhere in eastern Eu­rope. We do not know where he is buried. Sarug had perhaps already written down parts of his idiosyncratic Kabbalah system titled Limmudei Azilut (Doctrines of Emanation) in Palestine and brought it with him to Italy.58 At any rate, parts of this work circulated among his disciples and are mentioned again and again by them. The Lim-



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mudei Azilut did not appear in print in a complete edition ­u ntil 1897  in Munkacz; arguably, parts of the book appeared in some manuscripts that incorrectly named the author as Chayyim Vital. It is not uncommon for it to be quoted as one of Vital’s works, even though Vital takes a decidedly dif­ fer­ent view, particularly of the zimzum, in his own writings. Israel Sarug and Chayyim Vital may have known one another in Safed or Jerusalem, but we do not know for certain ­whether they ever grappled about zimzum in oral debate. We can only speculate on this point. It is in any event quite pos­si­ble that Sarug developed and wrote down his own kabbalistic system in northern Italy and Dalmatia when he traveled in the guise of Luria’s pupil and had to pre­sent and defend his version of the Lurianic Kabbalah to a small circle of learned listeners who w ­ ere trained in the Kabbalah of Cordovero. Ultimately, some of ­those receiving his ideas ­were among the best-­k nown kabbalists and rabbis in Italy. Sarug’s Kabbalah is a system of ­great originality, beauty, and speculative power. In the program that Sarug lays out in Limmudei Azilut, zimzum has a completely dif­fer­ent role, a dif­fer­ent significance, and dif­fer­ent consequences than in Vital’s Ez Chayyim. Vital had already written down certain passages of his book and both his manuscripts and oral teachings circulated among his followers. Sarug must have been acquainted with ­these manuscripts and knew very well that his own teaching on zimzum contradicted Vital’s, for he expresses this contradiction very clearly, without mentioning Vital specifically by name: “And know that the part of Ein-­Sof that zimzum contracted was only a preparation for making the pro­cesses [in Ein-­Sof] a ­little more substantiated; but all of that has once again returned to its original state, and all of that was not even a single moment, and neither time nor limit exist in that part of Ein-­Sof. This was, God forbid, not the real zimzum, which left an empty space in Ein-­Sof. Instead, it was the preparation for a space in which any realization could be achieved, which is part of the all-­encompassing Ein-­Sof. As it is written in Song of Songs 7:6, ‘A king is held captive in the tresses.’ ”59 Sarug’s animosity ­toward Vital is, I argue, discernable ­here. He disputes that a real zimzum (zimzum mamash) took place in Ein-­Sof, which created a space permanently empty of Ein-­Sof, that is, a space that is actually empty and thus ontologically dif­fer­ent from Ein-­Sof, a space that is delimited from Ein-­Sof by a border (gvul) and in which, unlike in the infinite eternity of Ein-­Sof, finite time (seman) exists. While Vital pre­sents zimzum as a real act and pro­cess that substantially changes Ein-­Sof by excluding its substance from an empty place, thus limiting its infinity and creating something other

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than Ein-­Sof, Sarug insists that zimzum is only a brief initial movement within the pure potentiality of Ein-­Sof. As Sarug sees it, this movement prepares the emanation of the worlds in the theogonic self-­development of Ein-­Sof but is not permanent. Zimzum is necessarily, but fleetingly, at the transition from the pure potentiality of Ein-­Sof into the real­ity of the emanation pro­cess. For Sarug, zimzum serves only to prepare for the possibility of world creation alongside other preparations in the theogonic self-­ development of Ein-­Sof, but zimzum actualizes nothing other than Ein-­ Sof; it creates neither an empty space, nor a boundary, nor time. In Sarug’s understanding of zimzum, Ein-­Sof remains within itself. It is neither emptied nor constricted but is marked by zimzum as a step in the pro­cess of preparation for emanation. Ein-­Sof only changes within itself, in its potentiality, not in its real­ity. Unlike in Vital’s version, zimzum is for Sarug a purely inner, fleeting movement of Ein-­Sof within itself. Ein-­Sof emerges as “emanator” and creator of a new real­ity ad extra only with the emanation of the sefirot as that which is “emanated.” Sarug richly and subtly describes Ein-­Sof ’s self-­development from primal indeterminacy in the theogonic pro­cess to the emanation of the worlds, in which zimzum is only a stage of preparation. His portrayal exerted considerable influence on many of his students and was widely received as early as the beginning of the seventeenth ­century. Sarug’s version is completely dif­fer­ent from what we find in the works of Vital, Moses Yonah, Joseph Ibn Tabūl, and other students of Luria. In his depiction, zimzum also has a special role to play. Sarug asserts that zimzum is also first an act of God’s ­will. This act of God’s ­will, however, is not unconditional. Unlike Vital, Sarug explains how this act of ­will first came about in Ein-­Sof ’s self-­development, which is already the result of Ein-­Sof ’s self-­development triggered by something other than w ­ ill. The self-­development of Ein-­Sof begins in Sarug’s account60 through the inner delight of Ein-­Sof in itself, called sha’ashua.61 Like the laughter of man, this delight releases a very slight shaking or reverberation, called nianua. Ein-­ Sof begins to move ­because of this shaking: “When Ein-­Sof shakes itself slightly in itself and shines and flashes by itself in itself, this shaking is called delight.”62 This inner plea­sure of the parts of Ein-­Sof in and with itself releases the slight vibration, the power of din, the power of austerity and limitation that originally existed in undivided and unmoved harmony with the opposite power of the loving, overflowing compassion, rachamim. Din is within Ein-­Sof the power of limitation, distinction, and mea­sure. ­Here, Sa-



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rug’s remarks on din resemble ­those of Joseph Ibn Tabūl. Just as the inner delight of Ein-­Sof activated the powers of din, it also gave birth to the power of restrained inscription (koach shiur ha-­chakikah). The power of inscription, chakikah,63 is only a condition for the possibility of the Torah, torah bekoach. For Sarug, the possibility of the Torah is already registered in the theogonic self-­development of Ein-­Sof before all world creation. Thus, the Torah as a potentiality is part of the divine primordial world. The inner self-­pleasure of Ein-­Sof, which invokes the forces of din, which in turn invokes the forces of restrained inscription, is the basis for the fact that even before the emanation of the worlds, the Torah, preexistent, not yet ­actual, but only potential, can already be inscribed in Ein-­Sof itself. Already in the first stages of its self-­development, Ein-­Sof carries the possibility of the Torah, and thus the possibility of its revelation, that is, it becomes real ­after the creation of the world, into itself—­out of pure self-­delight. ­Here, Sarug merges the ancient Sefer Yezirah,64 following the kabbalistic tradition of the preexistence of the Torah in heaven, which was already with God before the creation of the world and whose letters ­shaped the world, with the Lurianic theogony in Ein-­Sof. The primordial, preexistent Torah acts as the threshold between the unity of Ein-­Sof and the multiplicity of the sefirot and the worlds that are emanated from Ein-­Sof.65 The Torah was ­there in Ein-­ Sof before the emanation of the sefirot. With the power of inscription, Sarug continues, a primordial space, tehiru, is then engraved into Ein-­Sof in the form of a round sphere (kaddur). The sphere marks the place that is intended for the creation of worlds in Ein-­Sof. The light that forms this marking is the light of both the Torah and the commandments within the all-­embracing light of Ein-­Sof.66 The light of the Torah, not yet created and revealed, already shines in its mere state of possibility on the marking of that place l­ater intended for the creation of the world. Sarug thus not only combines Torah with theogony, using rich, meta­phorical language, but he also asserts that the Torah in its state of potentiality is also already delivered to creation in such a way that the revelation and thus the realization of the Torah is a direct consequence of creation. Above all, before the beginning, the revelation of the Torah belongs to the purpose (in the text, he uses the term takhlit) and thus to the teleology of the pro­cess of the world’s creation. Sarug literally inscribes the Torah and its 613 commandments (mitzvot) into the theogony of Ein-­Sof as potencies that exist prior to all creation but are also the purpose of creation. The assertion that the Torah arises from the inner self-­delight of the divinity

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makes clear to what degree the pious kabbalist Sarug sees himself committed to the rabbinical tradition of observance and joy in the Torah. In the subsequent course of the theogonic pro­cess, the garment of God forms from the fusion of light and limitation in their communality. We find the theme of God’s garment of light in Psalm 104 of the Hebrew Bible, which extols the glory and omnipotence of God in the creation of the world: “You are clothed in glory and majesty, wrapped in a robe of light” (Ps. 104:2). From ­there, the motif of the divine robe of light has found its way into Jewish and Christian mysticism of all eras. For Sarug, however, Ein-­Sof is clothed in a garment of light even before the creation of the world, and the robe of light becomes part of the theogony. And what makes Sarug’s description of creation unique is his assertion that the Torah is woven into God’s robe of light. The pro­cess begins in Ein-­Sof with the weaving of a garment out of light and mea­sure. Sarug refers to this garment as malbush. The malbush is woven out of the twenty-­t wo letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are continuously combined with each other in all pos­si­ble variations: ‫אה‬, ‫אד‬, ‫אג‬, ‫אב‬, and so on. This garment obtains its form and structure, its fabric, the texture of its weave, through the combinatorics of the Hebrew letters across its surface (Sarug also quotes from the Sefer Yezirah ­here). This fabric surface of letters not only clothes Ein-­Sof but also fuses with its essence. As God’s garment, malbush,67 consists of the combination and the fabric of all letters of the Hebrew alphabet, that alphabet of course is already pre­sent in undeveloped form in the preexistent Torah in Ein-­Sof, as well as in the potentialities of all names of God. The letters of God’s garment already contain, in the state of possibility, the entire Torah and holy names of God, which ­will only come into real­ity with creation and revelation at the end of theogony. But in Ein-­Sof, just as in the deity itself, they have not yet developed and become a real­ity. Initially, however, the malbush contains and clothes the infinite potential of God even before the sefirot are emanated. Sarug and his pupils consider malbush to be a special feature of their understanding of Kabbalah. But what does this exuberant description of malbush, described over the course of several pages of Limmudei Azilut, have to do with the zimzum? Sarug answers this question theologically: God wanted to create the world out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo, or in rabbinical terms: yesh me-­ein. Sarug argues: When he wishes to create all his creations, they are being out of nothing [yesh me-­ein]. And he substantiates the same being ­until it



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becomes manifested. He made a root of the ­things that exist in mea­ sure and limitation, which in turn is the root of the materialization of all worlds. The materialization is brought into existence by the contraction [zimzum] of a part of the surrounding Ein-­Sof. The light becomes real in stages, ­until the malbush is formed out of it and the world of points [olam ha-­nekudot] flows out of the garment of God, which is called the world of Ein-­Sof. And from ­there, out of the world of emanation [azilut] flows the world of creation [beri’ah]. The world of formation [yezirah] then flows out of the world of creation, and out of the world of formation flows the world of actualization [asiyyah].68 Zimzum assumes significance on account of its role in the materialization of worlds in the creation out of nothingness. But this nothingness is not the empty space as Vital understands it, the nonpresence of Ein-­Sof in that space. According to Sarug’s line of thinking, zimzum explains how the divine light withdraws from the primordial space of tehiru through limitation. ­There, the malbush, the light-­like letter garment of God, substantiates itself, from which the world of light points originates. Out of this garment of light, the world of the emanations flows, thus materializing the divine light in the emanations. Zimzum is not permanent. It only makes tehiru pos­ si­ble, which is filled first by God’s robe of light, the malbush, and thereby enables the emanation of the lower worlds. Sarug does not describe this pro­cess in detail. Instead, he offers his readers the conclusion he draws: zimzum is merely a contraction of divine light, not a substantive or even ontological change in Ein-­Sof itself. Only emanation is a manifestation and realization of Ein-­Sof outside of itself. The indeterminacy of Sarug’s remarks tells us that he does not wish to agree with Chayyim Vital’s radical interpretation of zimzum. According to Vital, zimzum made it pos­si­ble for the light of Ein-­Sof to be completely vacated from the empty dark void in the ­middle of Ein-­Sof. Ein-­Sof had thus created a true vacuum through this self-­clearing and self-­limitation, a place ­free from Ein-­Sof in its own center, the nothingness of itself. Sarug eschews this radical conclusion and emphatically refutes it: “It was this, God forbid, not an a­ ctual zimzum at all, which left a space ­free of Ein-­Sof inside of Ein-­ Sof.”69 Sarug’s hesitation in embracing the radicality of an ­actual zimzum is apparent in his meta­phor of light. According to his thinking, zimzum is not real, as he describes only a movement in the distribution of light within the

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fullness of Ein-­Sof rather than a change within Ein-­Sof itself. Sarug’s zimzum leaves ­behind in the primordial space of tehiru the points of light from which the light of the worlds can emanate. As Sarug understands it, neither vacuum nor darkness radically changes the theogony of Ein-­Sof. Creation from nothingness remains, as in all doctrines of emanation, emergence of the lower worlds from the overflowing of light. Sarug thus also denies the full impact and real­ity of the zimzum. Vital’s radicalism is broken off at the tip. God’s radical self-­change through zimzum is not the ontological precondition of creation. Rather, Sarug’s zimzum remains a preparatory stage of emanation within the pleromatic theogony in Ein-­Sof, a speculative theogony before all realization, whose real­ity Sarug explic­itly denies. Zimzum is no more than a stage in the game of possibilities within God. By denying the real­ity and actuality of zimzum, Sarug becomes a forerunner of a very distinct interpretation of zimzum among the followers of the Lurianic Kabbalah. He establishes the interpretation of zimzum as a symbol and meta­phor.

Chapter 2

From Esoteric to Exoteric

Eu­ro­pean Kabbalists Transmitting Texts and Ideas in the First Half of the Seventeenth ­Century

Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­witz: Zimzum in Print To this day, we do not know exactly how the doctrine of zimzum made its way to Prague. In the last de­cade of the sixteenth c­ entury, Israel Sarug first brought this idea central to Luria’s doctrine to northern Italy, even all the way to Dalmatia. ­There, he publicly disseminated Luria’s teachings. Luria and zimzum thus became a known quantity in Italy, Eu­rope’s most impor­ tant kabbalistic center. Luria’s ideas circulated both through oral teachings and in the manuscripts and rec­ords that his pupils wrote. But ­after 1606, Sarug’s trail goes cold. So how did zimzum get to Prague? All we know for certain is that in 1612 the Prague physician and kabbalist Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­witz (1566–1619) completed a work titled Shefa Tal (Abundance of Dew) and printed it in Hanau, in the German state of Hesse. The first edition of Shefa Tal was illustrated and set with splendid typeface. The zimzum of Ein-­Sof before and during the emanation of the worlds assumes a prominent role in Shefa Tal and is even supplemented with an image, for the very first time in print. The manner of depiction and the vocabulary used are reminiscent of the zimzum narratives of Sarug and Ibn Tabūl, and texts copied in what we know to be Sarug’s handwriting circulated throughout Italy. But we know as ­little about Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­ witz’s travels to Italy and the details of his biography as we do about how Lurianic manuscripts w ­ ere brought to Prague.

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Nonetheless, the first printing of Shefa Tal in 1612 signaled that zimzum had under­gone a transmedial breakthrough, shifting from a doctrine that was portrayed only in handwritten or hand-­copied texts to an idea that now circulated on the printed page. This leap into print was just as impor­tant for the shift from esotericism to exotericism as the transition from Luria’s purely oral teaching, which took place only within the small circle of his pupils, to ­those pupils putting quill to paper, writing down his doctrines in many dif­fer­ent manuscripts. Prior to the advent of the printing press, t­ hese manuscripts ­were circulated in the form of handwritten copies and reached a wide readership among fellow kabbalists. In print, however, even opponents of the Kabbalah now had access to the doctrine of zimzum in the form of the printed word. It was now available to a larger public, and its influence began to extend well beyond kabbalistic circles. A reader could purchase the book and literally carry zimzum home in black and white. However, Horo­witz, on the ornate title page of Shefa Tal, professes to be an adherent of the Kabbalah of Moses Cordovero, who, as I discussed in the first chapter, had been Luria’s teacher in Safed. At the time, Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim (Orchard of Pomegranates) was the most comprehensive, authoritative, and systematic repre­sen­ta­tion of the Kabbalah. Pardes Rimmonim had been available in print since 1584 and serves as Horo­w itz’s point of departure in Shefa Tal. Horo­w itz splices Luria’s doctrine of zimzum into his paraphrasing, commentary, and interpretation of Cordovero’s teachings on emanation, without ever mentioning the name Luria or any of his disciples. In 1612, Luria, unlike Cordovero, was not yet an authority in Prague. As Bracha Sack has demonstrated, Moses Cordovero had already written on the idea of zimzum.1 Luria certainly would have been acquainted with the idea ­because of his teacher Cordovero. He had studied Cordovero’s works and the Zohar for a considerable amount of time. But Luria also altered Cordovero’s ideas in decisive ways. Cordovero had, of course, been familiar with the idea of a zimzum of God in his shekhinah (presence, actuality, indwelling), as the midrashim portray it, when God allows his shekhinah to dwell in the Ark of the Covenant and thus maintain an earthly presence among his ­people, the ­people of Israel. Furthermore, according to Cordovero’s thinking, zimzum acts as a restriction of the flow of energy and light during emanation. Zimzum dampens and slows down the abundance and excess of the emanation pro­cess and outflow of light on the emanations from top to bottom, in the formation of the sefirot and the four lower worlds of azilut, beri’ah,



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yezirah, and asiyyah.2 ­Here, however, God or Ein-­Sof does not contract collectively before emanation, as Luria ­later argues, but within and during emanation out of Ein-­Sof. Third, Cordovero also explains the idea of zimzum as a concentration in one place inside of Ein-­Sof. But unlike Luria, Cordovero does not consider zimzum to be a prerequisite and point of origin of the emanation pro­cess, but rather merely an ancillary effect. What made Cordovero’s conception of zimzum dif­fer­ent from Luria’s was the fact that in Cordovero’s writings ­there is no description of the pro­cess of zimzum as the emptying of a space in Ein-­Sof itself. The concept of the formation of a place in the ­middle of Ein-­Sof that was ­free from God, made pos­si­ble by God’s withdrawal from this place, does not appear in Cordovero’s writings.3 But this lacuna in Cordovero’s emanation doctrine is precisely what Horo­witz seeks to fill. With the help of the Lurianic descriptions of zimzum, understood as the origination of an empty space for that which emanates from Ein-­Sof, Horo­witz amends Cordovero’s emanation doctrine. In Shefa Tal, Horo­witz describes how it is first through the pro­cess of zimzum that an empty void develops in Ein-­Sof. Like Sarug, Horo­witz refers to this vacant space as tehiru, where the infinite light that emanates from Ein-­Sof is dimmed to reshimu. Next, the supreme sefira, Keter (crown), can be emanated into the tehiru first, followed successively by the remaining sefirot and fi­nally the lower worlds. They are emanations outside of Ein-­Sof and not part of its substance: He contracted his presence [shekhinah] together like between the sides of the Ark of the Covenant, but before the creation of the world he contracted himself together in his substance, which is to say, from himself to himself and in himself, and he created something of a vacant space in his substance, into which he could emanate his ­future emanations that are forces and fluxes from him, and he would create beri’ah, yezirah, and asiyyah, which would exist beneath him. ­These are not of his substance, but rather his kings, princes, and servants. This space, which he made ­free in his substance, is called tehiru, and the central point inside this tehiru is called the first plenum [avir kadmon].4 God’s shekhinah, his holiness, and the Or Ein-­Sof never completely dis­ appear from tehiru, this space cleared in the ­middle of the substance of Ein-­ Sof, through zimzum, ­because a residual part of it, which is called reshimu,

Figure 4. The first description and graphic repre­sen­ta­tion of zimzum in letterpress (print): Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­witz, Shefa Tal (Hanau, 1612), fol. 29.

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is left ­behind in tehiru. To clarify this pro­cess, the first printed edition of the book in 1612 complements this description by appending the very first graphic or pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of zimzum in print, which appears on folio 29 (Figure 4). ­There, you can see a large circular black line with the abbreviation alef ”samekh for Ein-­Sof repeated around the outer edge. Ein-­Sof surrounds the space of tehiru cleared in the ­middle of its substance with the light remnants of reshimu. Tehiru and reshimu alternate around the inner edge of the black circumference. Fi­nally, in the ­middle of the graphic, we can see a thick black spot, around which the lettering avir kadmon is inscribed several times. Horo­witz’s description of zimzum, which creates a space between Emanator and emanations, is compatible with Cordovero’s emanation doctrine.5 Horo­witz does not correct but only supplements the teacher Cordovero and his emanation doctrine by incorporating the zimzum doctrine of Cordovero’s pupil Luria. Horo­witz’s description of zimzum strongly evokes Israel Sarug, in that Horo­witz does not mention the figure of Adam Kadmon, who is so impor­tant for Chayyim Vital’s thinking. For Horo­witz, zimzum brings forth the space of tehiru, which is ­free from divine light but still contains the residual light of reshimu. The only ­thing missing in Horo­witz’s account in comparison with Sarug is the bold and imaginative narrative of the refraction and shaping of light by the divine light robe of the malbush and its combinatorics of Hebrew letters made of light. Instead, like Cordovero’s depiction, Horo­witz describes how the light emanating from the divine Emanator is concentrated by zimzum, and the highest sefira, Keter, is formed in tehiru and at the highest point of the sefira Keter is the highest (world) soul, Neshamah.6 Horo­witz conceives of tehiru as the m ­ iddle “between the level of the Emanator [ma’azil] and the level of the emanated [ne’ezal].”7 Tehiru is neither part of the Emanator nor part of the emanated, but rather substantially separate from both. Tehiru was created through zimzum as a place “outside” (although in the ­middle) of Ein-­Sof and cannot become a part of Ein-­Sof again. For Horo­witz, the pro­cess of zimzum is irreversible. What’s more, the light in tehiru is no longer the Or Ein-­Sof, ­because it has already emanated from Ein-­Sof, meaning that it has separated and removed itself from it. The light in tehiru is called reshimu. Reshimu, which Sarug conceives of as sparks of light, still contains divine light, holiness, and presence, though in markedly reduced and refracted form. According to Horo­witz’s approach, the emanation pro­cess of light and its removal from the undiminished, over-



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whelming power of Or Ein-­Sof are also irreversible. The highest sefira, Keter, the first emanation emanates from the reshimu (without the malbush) in the centrally situated space of the avir kadmon.8 The space of tehiru created by zimzum marks the boundary between created and creation, between divine substance and earthly ­things, between omnipotence and finiteness; it is the space of finitization made pos­si­ble by the emptying of the divine. It remains unclear ­whether Horo­witz considers zimzum to be an a­ ctual pro­cess or a numinous narrative, ­whether physical fact or speculative fiction. In describing zimzum, he repeatedly uses rhetorical turns of phrases such as “so to speak” and “in a sense,” which could suggest that he is ultimately uncertain about the actuality and real­ity of zimzum. But unlike Sarug, Horo­ witz does not explic­itly deny the actuality of zimzum at any point in his description. If anything, zimzum, which is intended to make Cordovero’s theory of emanation plausible, comes across to the reader of Shefa Tal as an intermediate step, conceptually difficult to grasp, but physically necessary, in the pro­cess of emanation that he likewise understands in physical terms. For Horo­witz, zimzum thus has a double function. First, it clears space for the emanations outside the Emanator. Second, it breaks down the abundance (the shefa in the title Shefa Tal) of the light emanating from top to bottom to a degree that, starting from the first emanation, the sefira Keter, the other sefirot, and then the lower worlds can arise. Tehiru, the empty primordial space created by zimzum, equally separates and acts as intermediary between Emanator and the emanated in the emanation pro­cess. Functionally, zimzum must explain how the overwhelming and ultimately destructive energy-­rich Or Ein-­Sof can be reduced and refracted during the emanation pro­cess to such an extent that finite emanations can emerge from it. It must explain how the break between creator and created is overcome in the pro­ cess of emanation.

Menachem Asariah Fano: Zimzum in H ­ uman Language Rabbi Menachem Asariah, born in the Adriatic coastal town of Fano near Pesaro, was one of Italy’s most respected rabbis, when the comparatively unknown Israel Sarug visited him and introduced him to Isaac Luria’s innovative teachings. Their meeting must have taken place before 1587, when Asariah

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Fano published Asarah Ma’amarot (Ten Treatises), ­because he mentions the kabbalist Sarug by name in his book. Rav Menachem (1548–1620) was already known equally as a knowledgeable and groundbreaking Talmudist and halakhist. A collection of 130 of his responsa was printed in Venice in 1600. For de­cades, serving as a rabbi in Ferrara, Venice, Reggio, and Mantua, he attracted numerous students to his circle and was considered a staunch supporter of the Kabbalah of Moses Cordovero. He was responsible for the first print edition of Cordovero’s major work Pardes Rimmonim, completed in Thessaloniki in 1584 (­after Cordovero’s death) and maintained a lively correspondence with other kabbalists in Palestine, who kept him informed of the activities at vari­ous kabbalistic schools in Safed, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Cairo.9 ­Under the influence of Sarug, who was only a ­little older, Menachem Asariah Fano turned his attention to the Lurianic Kabbalah, but he never abandoned his affinity for Cordovero’s scholarly systematic repre­sen­ta­tion of the entire Kabbalah in ­favor of Luria. Through Sarug, he may even have heard of zimzum, adopting his view that zimzum is not a real pro­cess that takes place in Ein-­Sof. In his comprehensive, albeit concise, treatise Jonat Elem (Dove of Silence), comprising only thirty-­seven pages (posthumously printed in Amsterdam in 1648 but available long before in manuscript form), he explains that the kabbalists speak of Ein-­Sof and the ­will of God in Ein-­ Sof and of the powers and potencies of sefirot as if they ­were real, physical beings. But that view, Rav Menachem Asariah contends, is completely out of the question. As Ein-­Sof and the sefirot are not physical beings like ­humans, they are not empirical and therefore not of this world. If the ­great Maimonides, Menachem Asariah argues, had always insisted that the Torah speaks the language of men to be comprehensible to them, but the rabbinical and philosophical scholars could only interpret the Torah and its anthropomorphic, corporeal speech of God allegorically,10 the same applies to the Kabbalah: it also speaks the language of man. Therefore, we must understand the discourse of God’s self-­contraction not as a description of a real, physical, bodily pro­cess, so to speak, but as speech and expression in ­human language, which can describe what is a numinous pro­cess only by way of physical, corporeal images and terms. Rav Menachem Asariah Fano writes in Jonat Elem: “God is the Lord, he and his ­will are one, and with regard to his self-­contraction from the beginnings of the world [. . .] we speak using the language of men to talk about the zimzum of that same first light [of the infinite].”11



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­Human language has no way of discussing zimzum other than using physical terms, but ­these terms are by necessity a stopgap mea­sure. They cannot depict the real­ity of zimzum, which took place before the creation of the world and is therefore beyond ­human knowledge, language, and comprehension. Therefore, we must understand any ­human discourse regarding zimzum as allegorical on account of the limits of ­human language and knowledge. It is figurative language that, by definition, relies on an image and can therefore provide no information about the real­ity of or ­actual access to a divine pro­cess such as zimzum. A reader thumbing through Jonat Elem would only search in vain for a description of the pro­cess of zimzum like the one we have seen in the works of Chayyim Vital. But other Jewish thinkers educated in Italy, such as Joseph Delmedigo and Joseph Ergas, readily cite Menachem Asariah’s argument that we inevitably use ­human language to speak of zimzum as a criticism of a literal, proto-­physical understanding of zimzum. Even Abraham Cohen Herrera eloquently argues for the meta­phorical character of zimzum, but in reference to Sarug, not Rav Menachem. The Italian kabbalists, educated in the spirit of the Neoplatonism of the Italian Re­nais­sance, insisted on an allegorical or meta­phorical understanding of zimzum.

Joseph Salomo Delmedigo: A Philosophical Critique of Language Joseph Salomo Delmedigo was one of the most multifaceted Jewish scholars of the seventeenth ­century. Something of a re­nais­sance man, he was a rabbi, doctor, mathematician, astronomer, kabbalist, and phi­los­o­pher all in one. At the same time, he was a restless man of the world during the baroque age, a natu­ral scientist, seeker of meaning, and widely traveled adventurer, who sought contact not only with Christian and Muslim scholars, but also with the Karaites. During his long, peripatetic life, he spent several months or sometimes years in some of the most impor­tant Jewish communities in the world at that time.12 A copper engraving of himself (Figure 5), which Delmedigo appended to his principal, nearly encyclopedic work, Sefer Elim (Book of Elim), which Menasseh ben Israel published in his printing ­house in Amsterdam in 1629, shows him proudly and self-­confidently dressed in the garb of a wealthy Sephardic Dutch Jew, complete with fur trim and white ruff collar. Like the

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Figure 5. Portrait of Joseph Delmedigo (1591–1655), from Joseph Delmedigo, Sefer Elim (Amsterdam, 1629).

widely traveled merchants of Amsterdam, he wears a tall hat with a wide brim. The Latin inscription on the edge of the oval surrounding the portrait lets the reader know that this decidedly handsome, famous doctor and phi­los­o­pher from Crete was at the prime of his life when this image was created. Delmedigo was born in 1591 in Candia on the island of Crete, the son of a rabbi. He was only fifteen when he enrolled at the University of Padua as a student of medicine. The University of Padua was already admitting Jewish medical students in the sixteenth ­century, meaning that a considerable number of Jewish medical students in the early modern period received their education ­there—­a unique phenomenon in Eu­rope at the time.13 In addition to studying medicine, Delmedigo attended Galileo Galilei’s lectures in Padua and studied mathe­matics and astronomy with him. Around the same time in nearby Venice, Delmedigo became familiar with Leone da Modena, the famous rabbi and critic of the Kabbalah, and frequently conversed with him. A ­ fter completing his medical studies in 1613, he returned briefly to Candia, where he practiced as a doctor. But soon ­after, he moved on and settled for a few years in Cairo, the most impor­tant Jewish community in North Africa. T ­ here, he publicly debated ­spherical trigonometry with Muslim mathematicians and at the same time sought the acquaintance of the leader of



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the Egyptian Karaites, a medical doctor named Joseph of Alexandria. A ­ fter that, Delmedigo lived in Constantinople for a time and subsequently spent a brief period in Romania. In 1620, he became a doctor in Vilnius, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” where he served as personal physician to Prince Radziwiłł and other Polish-­Lithuanian nobles. Only a few years ­later, he moved from Vilnius via Hamburg to the newly established and aspiring Sephardic community in Amsterdam, where he composed Sefer Elim. Abraham Cohen Herrera was also a member of the council of rabbis who had the task of approving this work for print. Herrera socialized with Delmedigo during his Amsterdam years and wrote his book Puerta del Cielo during this time. Sefer Elim treats religious, scientific, and metaphysical questions. As David Ruderman points out, Delmedigo demonstrates in Sefer Elim, as well as in Novelot Chokhmah (Fallen Fruit of Wisdom; published in Basel in 1631), that he is a baroque universal scholar, a polymath who, in this epoch of scientific upheaval, attempts to unite Jewish mysticism with rationalist thought from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican world view and from medieval Aristotelianism to early modern Neoplatonism.14 As a physician and natu­ral scientist, Delmedigo defends scientific empiricism, but as a rabbi, kabbalist, and Jewish phi­los­o­pher, he endeavors to unify esoteric kabbalistic and Neoplatonic speculations concerning the origin of the world with both magic and the rabbinical and patristic doctrine of creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo). Delmedigo is not alone in this era of scientific upheaval, as the scholarly research since Frances Yates,15 regarding the connection between the emergence of modern natu­ral science and the hermetic tradition, demonstrates. Between Giordano Bruno and Isaac Newton, several early modern naturalists ­were intensively engaged with both Neoplatonic and kabbalistic traditions. Among them, Delmedigo, with his Jewish background and education, likely had the most thorough knowledge of the Kabbalah by far. Throughout his life, Delmedigo was suspected of heresy by the strict rabbis due to his advocacy of undogmatic, religiously uncensored, and ­free scientific research, and ­because of his well-­k nown contacts with the Karaites in Cairo, Constantinople, and Lithuania. The Karaites ­were often considered heretical, ­because they only recognized the Hebrew Bible, but not the Talmud and rabbinical lit­er­a­ture, as a religiously and morally authoritative source. Modern science, as the rabbis w ­ ere well aware, was a product of the world of goyim (non-­Jews); it did not agree with the Ptolemaic worldview of the Talmud and Maimonides. Nevertheless, Delmedigo lived as an

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observant Jew in some of the most impor­tant Jewish communities of the period and could never be convicted of heresy. ­After his stay in Amsterdam, he resided and practiced medicine for several years in Frankfurt am Main and then in Prague, where he died in 1655. He was buried in the old Jewish cemetery ­there. Delmedigo’s 1631 Sefer Novelot Chokhmah features the blend of Kabbalah and Neoplatonism that is typical of his eclectic and often paradoxical worldview. With this work, Delmedigo endeavors to reconcile new scientific knowledge and natural-­philosophical thought with orthodox teachings such as the doctrine of creation from nothingness.16 Delmedigo is interested in the new scientific ideas that arose, for example, in the Neoplatonism of Giordano Bruno, who was suspected of pantheism and branded a heretic. Among other topics, Bruno discusses the emergence of the universe and world diversity from the unity of God. To this end, Delmedigo brings the Lurianic Kabbalah and the concept of zimzum into play. Zimzum allows us to imagine the emergence of a nothingness, that is, a place emptied of God, into which the diversity of worlds is emanated. Delmedigo describes this version of zimzum: When the Lord, may his Torah shine, desired to create the world, and the entire earth was full of his honor, meaning that nowhere was it empty, he withdrew himself together [zimzem azmo] and turned the presence [shekhinah] of his might from the ­middle to the surrounding, and he removed himself and ­rose up to the highest parts of heaven, so that he might prepare a space for the worlds yet to be created—­that is to say, like a person who rises in ecstasy [ekstasis] and excitement so that he might cool the tips of his fin­gers and toes, to the place where ­there was none of the warmth of the heart and spirit that was streaming over them. And we call this vacated space, which is abandoned by his honor, nothing, for in that space ­there no longer exists anything of that which had perfection and honor. For the Lord took it away. And that is the primordial that in truth is so ­imagined without every­thing, without a variety of forms. This is why it [that space] is thought of as null and total absence. For it is fr ­ ee from all the characteristics of real­ity.17 Philosophically speaking, however, Delmedigo is far too cautious to pre­sent zimzum as he portrays it ­here, as a real, ­actual pro­cess. He therefore em-



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ploys the image of a person in a state of ecstatic frenzy who stands up and cools the tips of his fin­gers and toes to make the idea of a withdrawal of divine perfection and energy from a space plausible. But just a few lines ­later, Delmedigo adds a philosophical critique of language that takes the anthropomorphism of his previous description to task: I already said this and repeated myself and then said it a third time, that I, to make myself understood, use the words “place,” “emptiness,” “absence,” “ascent,” “zimzum,” and the like. I have also said that all ­these words originate from physical terms, but in truth they do not refer to conditions in time and space. ­Those characterizations with physical lowliness that exist [linguistically] between us [­humans] served the purpose of spirituality, the ascent, and the elevation, but they are [actually] ­free from all corporeality. But our words exist only on the path ­toward image, allegory, and implementation. And remember that I do not repeat the same [word], each time, when I speak.18 Delmedigo argues that, as a pro­cess, zimzum can only be described with the help of ­human language, which must always rely on physical images and examples. But the Jewish phi­los­o­pher, well versed in the works of Maimonides, knows that God is incorporeal. The same phi­los­o­pher also knows that h ­ uman language, which is by necessity physical, can never adequately describe God and his actions. The numinous event that we call zimzum, which takes place within God, can only ever be symbolic, paradigmatic, and meta­phorical, ­because it is expressed materially through physical words such as place, emptiness, absence, and ascent. This use of language, Delmedigo argues, is carried out with the best intentions, for the purpose of edifying us as ­humans, but it is not adequate for describing the ­actual event of zimzum in God. Yet even the phi­los­o­pher, despite being fully aware of this, must necessarily utilize the natu­ral language of ­humans to make himself understood, but he does not explain that ­these words are to be understood meta­phor­ically each time he uses of them. This point bears repeating: if we are to describe zimzum, we must understand this description and its physical concepts such as place, emptiness, absence, and so on, meta­phor­ically, even if the phi­los­o­pher does not always make it clear that the language being used is meta­phorical. However, ­there is no alternative to ­these terms, just as we ­humans possess no ­viable alternative to h ­ uman language.

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Figure 6. Zimzum and critique of language in Joseph Delmedigo, Sefer Novelot Chokhmah (Basel, 1631), fol. 2.

According to Delmedigo, we must therefore understand Luria’s doctrine of zimzum and its central concepts as meta­phors, even if the phi­los­o­pher discussing this concept does not say this ­every time. In this re­spect, zimzum and its characterization, which Delmedigo describes in anthropomorphic terms, are only an auxiliary means for making this difficult orthodox doctrine of creatio ex nihilo slightly more comprehensible. According to Delmedigo, zimzum, even if we understand it meta­phor­ically rather than empirically, makes it pos­si­ble for us to conceptualize how nothingness, referred to in the



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text as ein, can arise within God at all. With this purely meta­phorical understanding of zimzum, Delmedigo approaches the ideas of Israel Sarug, Menachem Asariah Fano (whom Delmedigo praises in the preface of Novelot Chokhmah), and Abraham Cohen Herrera, whom he personally knew very well. Despite the similarity, Delmedigo makes no reference to their meta­ phorical understanding of zimzum.

Naphtali ben Jacob Elchanan Bacharach: The King’s Valley Naphtali ben Jacob Elchanan Bacharach’s book Emek ha-­Melekh (The King’s Valley), printed in Amsterdam in 1648, was the most comprehensive compendium of the Lurianic Kabbalah written by a Jewish author in the seventeenth ­century. Emek ha-­Melekh became and remained a reference work on the Lurianic Kabbalah throughout Eu­rope from Italy to Vilnius, quoted by the Vilna Gaon, as well as his most determined opponents, the Chassidim and their respective schools. It even became a constant feature in Christian Kabbalah, on account of a partial translation of the work that appears in Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata. This work was also a compendium in the sense that Naphtali Bacharach did not take sides in the dispute between the schools of Vital and Sarug. Instead, he generously paraphrases, incorporating large swaths of Sarug’s Limmudei Azilut into his own work, without naming Sarug as author. In addition, he assiduously borrows from Vital’s writings, as well as Horo­witz’s Shefa Tal and Delmedigo’s Novelot Chokhmah. Naphtali Bacharach’s achievement was original in that he merges ­these very dif­fer­ent books and traditions in such a way that the result was a large-­format, well-­structured, and clearly written folio volume of several hundred pages with vari­ous illustrations. It is a volume that, in complete contradiction to the philosophical ambitions of Delmedigo and the theosophical considerations of Horo­witz, bears witness to the pious, speculative-­mystical, magical, and even messianic inspirations of its author. Gershom Scholem attests to Naphtali Bacharach’s literary talent.19 We do not know when Naphtali Bacharach was born nor when he died. We do know that he came from Frankfurt and lived intermittently in Poland. Bacharach likely penned Emek ha-­Melekh in Frankfurt. We know for certain that he wrote the book ­after Novelot Chokhmah appeared

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in 1631, ­because he quotes Delmedigo. We also see Naphtali Bacharach’s skill in synthesizing the vari­ous Lurianic schools and traditions in his succinct description of zimzum. The very first page of Emek ha-­Melekh begins with a prominent portrayal of zimzum, creatively blending ele­ments from both Sarug’s and Vital’s writings: Blessed be his ­great name! Prior to all ­things and occurrences, it arose within his ­simple ­w ill to create the worlds, for ­there is no king 20 without a ­people [. . .] and no nature to improve the good, if ­there was no world for which something is improved. At the same time, ­there also existed no vacant space. Ein-­Sof turned t­oward the worlds and the seven lands beneath them, from ­there and downward, in order to animate them, for [at first] every­thing was filled with the brilliance of his substance, may it be praised! Ein-­ Sof delimited itself into its interior, omitting something in a certain way. Afterward, the Lord of ­will [ba’al ha-­razon, i.e., God] brought about that in his inner being, may it be praised, a circle of space widened and came into being, the location of the aforementioned worlds, and he contracted [zimzem] his light, which existed inside of this circle, and gathered it in a certain way [. . .]. And he raised that same light upward and a space remained, emptied of this first light, but not entirely of all light that had been ­there. A reflection of this first light remains in its place and does not move from it. Secretly, as our rabbis of blessed memory say, the divine presence [shekhinah] [also] did not move itself [from ­there] [. . .] ­until this reflection had been made. This is why the rabbis of blessed memory say that the first holiness is holiness for the second and holiness for the world to come. ­Because in place of this entire holy light, although it leaves this place, a remnant [reshimu] remains. And this is the first contraction [zimzum] from the light of its light substance [of Ein-­Sof]. ­After this, all worlds are located ­there and exist inside this circle that comes into being in the light of the light substance, may it be praised. This is the secret of the writings. Behold, it is a space of the beginning and the end, and the corpus of rabbinical writing explains that this place is the place in which the worlds exist and that ­there are no other worlds in their stead.21



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Initially, Bacharach describes the retreat of divine light from a circular space inside Ein-­Sof using Chayyim Vital’s imagery. The worlds are emanated into a vacated space, and only into this space. Naphtali Bacharach follows in Sarug’s footsteps in their entirety in this description. Sarug seems to have fascinated Bacharach. For example, Vital’s Adam Kadmon plays no role in Bacharach’s book at all. But before Bacharach paraphrases dozens of folio pages’ worth of Sarug’s cosmogony of light, he follows up his brief explanation of zimzum in the same initial section with a digression about evil and sin in the world. He argues that zimzum and the clearing of that space within Ein-­Sof is the condition that makes evil pos­si­ble. ­Because the worlds exist from beginning to end inside of this vacated space, and nowhere ­else, evil also only becomes pos­si­ble in this void, first as a potential, and then as ­actual evil, in the form of the sin of the first Adam. Sin exists in the earthly world from the time of Adam ­until the arrival of the Messiah. The Messiah ben David ­will then overcome all evil in the world. In this cleared space and in the earthly, that is, the lowest world, the ­people of Israel ­will also exist among the other nations, Moses ­will reveal the Torah, and the Messiah ­will ­free the ­people of Israel at the end of time. The space cleared by zimzum is the place of the upper worlds, but also of all world events that occur between the time of biblical Adam and the coming of the Messiah. “For when it says ‘Bereshit bara Elohim’ [In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth], then the explanation for this is: in this beginning [reshit], which is the space of the circle and which is ‘reshit’ (created [by God]), for it existed before the rest of creation and before the worlds.”22 Following ­these explanations about zimzum and evil, which seem to signify for Bacharach a messianic context or even acute messianic expectations, the text offers countless sections regarding the emanation of the worlds, which closely resemble Sarug’s explanations. Naphtali Bacharach is clearly fascinated with the concept of the malbush, God’s garment of light. In the space of numerous folio pages, he describes the emanation of the combinations of letters of light, the origin of the parzufim and the sefirot of the Torah Kedumah, the primordial Torah that existed before the creation of the world. And like Sarug, Bacharach refers to the entire ­thing as sha’ashu’ei ha-­Melekh, the joyful trembling of the king and creator during the moment of creation. Bacharach does not dwell on the concerns regarding the actuality of zimzum that I previously pointed out in the works of Sarug and Delmedigo. The pure fascination with the colorful combinatorics and the power­f ul images

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Figure 7. Circle of the ten sefirot in the primordial space of tehiru, from Naphtali ben Jacob Elchanan Bacharach, Emek ha-­Melekh (Amsterdam, 1648), fol. 14.

for the cosmogony of the primordial and prehistoric worlds dominates Bacharach’s descriptions. He also offers readers a pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of his innovation, called the “wheel of tehiru” (kadur ha-­tehiru). In this image, the ten sefirot are shown all si­mul­ta­neously projecting outward from the vacant, original space of tehiru, like a rotating wheel, while remaining attached to the circular shape, the radius of the wheel and the primordial space. Bacharach’s portrayal does not feature Adam Kadmon, the figure so impor­tant for Vital’s thinking. Naphtali Bacharach indulges in overflowing descriptions and imagery. Olam ha-­tohu, the world of chaos emerges, as well as olam ha-­tikkun, the world of redemption. Every­thing in Bacharach’s book, depicted in hundreds of sections, amounts to a gigantic kabbalistic cosmogony, containing a constant chain of references to the Bible and rabbinical lit­er­a­ture. Naphtali Bacharach’s Emek ha-­Melekh dedicates exactly one col-



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umn to zimzum, but with its hundreds of pages and columns, it constitutes a literary kabbalistic cosmos.

Abraham Cohen de Herrera: Zimzum as Meta­phor Abraham Cohen de Herrera prob­ably composed a handwritten manuscript of Puerta del Cielo (Gate of Heaven) in Amsterdam between 1620 and 1635. This work represents the first real attempt to reconcile and consolidate Neoplatonic Re­nais­sance philosophy and Lurianic Kabbalah systematically. As the subtitle of Puerta del Cielo makes clear, the Spanish-­language work is intended to serve as “light for entering into the full content and understanding of the Kabbalah, whose mysteries and contemplation are connected to the ­human mind.”23 The title also reveals which Kabbalah is meant ­here: Herrera explains that he learned Kabbalah from his master (maestro) Israel Sarug, the disciple of Rav Isaac Luria. At the end, Herrera’s Neoplatonic repre­sen­ta­tion of the Lurianic Kabbalah arrives at the conclusion that Kabbalah, reflected through philosophy, reveals ­those truths of reason that belong to the timeless philosophia perennis (everlasting philosophy)24 spanning all epochs, ­peoples, and religions. At the same time, however, philosophy and Kabbalah are not identical. Rather, both are autonomous, self-­sufficient forms of knowledge. Philosophy as a form of knowledge is exoteric, while Kabbalah is esoteric. The language they employ distinguishes them from one another most of all. Kabbalah speaks mysteriously in images and meta­phors, which Herrera translates into a general philosophical conceptual language. We must decipher Kabbalah discursively using this language. ­Because of this Neoplatonic, philosophical transformation, Herrera pre­sents the Lurianic Kabbalah, and with it the doctrine of zimzum, exoterically. And this exoteric explanation takes place for the first time in a language other than Hebrew, namely, Spanish. Herrera’s intention ­here is to follow the example of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), the Christian Neoplatonist and Re­nais­sance humanist, whom he repeatedly quotes. Pico della Mirandola was the ­father of the Christian Kabbalah. He had already revealed the Kabbalah and its teachings exoterically more than one hundred years prior, in 1486, when he composed his Conclusiones sive t­heses DCCCC in Latin. In ­these Latin ­theses, he pre­ sents the Kabbalah as an inclusive component of the everlasting philosophy and world wisdom.25 Pico had relied solely on the medieval Kabbalah and its

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teachings for the purpose of proving the truth of Chris­tian­ity. Herrera, on the other hand, refers almost exclusively to the modern Lurianic Kabbalah and Cordovero, clearly a conscious decision on his part to maintain a Jewish perspective. Herrera was not necessarily destined from birth to become a Jewish thinker and writer. ­There are almost no documents that provide details about his childhood and youth.26 But his ­father, David Cohen de Herrera was a converso who originally came from Cordoba. When he fled from Spain or Portugal around the ­middle of the sixteenth ­century to escape the Inquisition, he settled in Florence as a merchant ­under the protection of the ­Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo de Medici. At least externally, he presented himself as a Catholic from a ­family that had been forcibly baptized. It is unclear ­whether he then openly returned to Judaism in Florence, or w ­ hether he initially remained a crypto-­Jew who privately identified as Jewish while publicly living as a Catholic, lest he jeopardize his residency status. Only when David Cohen de Herrera moved to Venice at the end of the sixteenth ­century did he lead a public life as a Jew. Additionally, his son Abraham, who was born in 1564,27 first had a Spanish Catholic name, Alonso Nuñez de Herrera. He l­ater took the Jewish name Abraham Cohen de Herrera. Abraham was educated in Florence before he studied Kabbalah with Israel Sarug in Ragusa (present-­day Dubrovnik) between 1590 and 1595. Florence must have been the city where he acquired his enormously broad knowledge of Neoplatonism as well as ancient and medieval philosophy. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Florence was the metropolis of Re­ nais­sance humanism, which had rediscovered Plato and Neoplatonism. In addition to Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), whose works and translations Herrera studied alongside ­those of Pico, is particularly worth mentioning ­here. It is quite astonishing, however, that in Florence Abraham not only studied the ancient philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Porphyrios, but was also, seemingly without any hesitation or anxiety about crossing bound­a ries, familiar with Thomas Aquinas, Peter Lombard, Durandus of Saint-­Pourçain, and Francisco Suarez, in addition to Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes. He quotes all of them in Puerta del Cielo: Jews, Muslims, Christians, pagans, phi­los­o­phers, and theologians, without any par­tic­u­lar hierarchy or differentiation.28 ­Under Sarug’s tutelage in Ragusa, Herrera combined the extensive Re­ nais­sance education that he had acquired in Florence with the study of kabbalistic texts and authors, namely the Zohar, Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim,



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and perhaps some writings by Vital and Sarug. It is unclear when and where he encountered Vital’s writings, which in ­those years mostly circulated as pirated copies, ­because Vital’s pupils, as far as we know, did not travel to and throughout Eu­rope. Since a pious kabbalist like Israel Sarug would hardly have accepted a young man like Herrera as a pupil had he not led the life of an observant Jew, we can reasonably assume that Abraham Cohen de Herrera had already openly reconverted to Judaism with his f­ amily in Florence. In 1595, Herrera left Italy to work for his ­uncle Juan de Marchena, who held the position of commercial agent ­under Mulay Ahmad al-­Mansur, the sharif of Morocco. On his ­uncle’s behalf, he traveled to Cadiz in southern Spain to conduct business, but he fell into captivity when an En­glish fleet led by Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, attacked and conquered the city. Herrera then spent four or five years in captivity in ­England. The En­glish released him only when Queen Elizabeth’s sheriff could provide evidence that Herrera was neither Spanish nor a citizen of Cadiz, but rather, like his ­father and ­uncle, a subject of the ­Grand Duke of Tuscany and a Moroccan commercial agent. A ransom also exchanged hands. ­After his release in 1602 from captivity in Ware, north of London, the ­Grand Duke of Tuscany appointed Herrera his commercial agent in Rouen. During that time, Herrera married and settled down, first in Hamburg and ­later in Amsterdam. At the beginning of the seventeenth ­century, a group of “Portuguese” merchants arrived in Amsterdam. Some of t­ hese w ­ ere conversos, Jews from Spain and Portugal who had been converted to Chris­tian­ ity by force. In Amsterdam, they ­were able to return to Judaism and quickly developed a Jewish quarter and the first synagogues in the district of Vlooienburg on the River Amstel (Figure 8). In Amsterdam, Herrera became a highly respected intellectual member of the newly emerging Jewish community and a successful merchant. He was on excellent terms with the much younger rabbis Saul Morteira (1596–1660), who ­later became Spinoza’s rabbinical teacher, Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657), and Isaac Aboab de Fonseca (1605–1693). Aboab became Herrera’s pupil and was the translator of his works from Spanish into Hebrew. Herrera died on 4 February 1635 in Amsterdam and was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk. His gravestone can still be found ­there t­ oday. At the center of Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo and his attempt to mediate philosophy and Kabbalah, we find the Lurianic ideas of Ein-­Sof, zimzum, Adam Kadmon, and the emanation of the worlds. ­These concepts convey the philosophical prob­lem regarding the emergence of the many worlds of

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Figure 8. The Jewish quarter of Vlooienburg in Amsterdam. City view by Balthasar Florisz van Berckenrode, 1625, partial view.

the existing from the divine One and its abundance, which is why they are so appropriate as thought experiments for Neoplatonic reasoning. The phi­ los­o­pher Herrera pays scant attention to other ele­ments of the Lurianic Kabbalah, such as the shevirat ha-­kelim, the shattering of the vessels that signifies and explains the origin of evil in the world, and tikkun, the apocalyptic salvation of the world. Like all Neoplatonists, he was preoccupied with the transitions between eternity and finite time during the pro­cess of emanation and creation. In contrast, the concept of the end of days and salvation, even messianism, play no role in his reflection on and philosophical adaptation of the Lurianic Kabbalah.29 For Luria and Vital, the events between pre-­worldly creation, the onset of catastrophe and apocalyptic salvation, between zimzum and tikkun, ­were a grandiose cosmological drama that had a positive outcome. Notably, Shabbateanism was able to connect Lurianic eschatology with redemption doctrine in messianic terms. Herrera, on the other hand, in his Neoplatonic focus on emanation and the origin of the world, removes the eschatological sting from the Lurianic Kabbalah, preparing it for its reception during the baroque period. On the baroque world stage, the world



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is a well-­constructed building made pos­si­ble by God: for Leibniz, it is the best of all pos­si­ble worlds. ­There exists no alternative, no end times, neither a new heaven, nor a new earth for this world, where ­humans must prove themselves. And Herrera concentrates on describing in philosophical terms how the Kabbalah explains the establishment of the worlds. However, to reconcile the Lurianic ideas of Ein-­Sof, zimzum, and Adam Kadmon with the Neoplatonic language of concepts, Herrera must employ a hermeneutic trick and explain ­these ideas and the associated narratives as meta­phorical modes of expression, turning them into images that in truth represent philosophical ideas. According to Herrera, the kabbalists only made use of meta­phors for the sake of a better, more popu­lar understanding: Ein-­Sof is thus God, the infinite One of Neoplatonism, Adam Kadmon represents the perfect and intangible intellect, and zimzum stands in meta­ phor­ically for restriction, privation, and limitation in dialectical tension with emanation. Israel Sarug, Herrera’s instructor in the Kabbalah, in stark contrast to Chayyim Vital, disputed the actuality of zimzum. In d­ oing so, he relegated it to the sphere of preparation and possibility of creation, thus si­mul­ta­neously asserting that zimzum did not alter the ontology of Ein-­Sof. Herrera the pupil goes a step further and explic­itly speaks of zimzum as a meta­phor. He even founded an entire school of interpretation of zimzum as a meta­phor, based on his book Gate of Heaven. Philosophically, he comes to the same conclusion as his teacher Sarug in the images and meta­phors that he employs. According to his line of thought, the substance of God is not changed by zimzum and remains the motionless mover and causa efficiens of all that exists, just as all theologians and religious phi­los­o­phers of the M ­ iddle Ages and Cordovero believed. In the opening lines of Puerta del Cielo, Herrera clearly explains why he discusses the Kabbalah at all. He argues that he sees the Kabbalah and its ­great texts as part of the Oral Torah, the indispensable oral teaching tradition of Judaism that has existed since the time of Moses. For this reason, the Kabbalah forms a vital component of the rabbinical tradition.30 Following this initial explanation, Herrera immediately addresses the topic of Ein-­Sof and argues that we must think of God as a most perfect, first, uncaused cause of all, as “incauzado cauzador de todo.”31 He transfers the unmoved mover of medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Aristotelianism, spanning religious thought from Averroes and Maimonides to Thomas Aquinas, to the Ein-­Sof of the Kabbalah. Herrera asserts that infinity and perfection

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characterize this first unmoved cause, which he understands to be Ein-­Sof. The infinity of the first cause, literally expressed in the Hebrew name Ein-­ Sof, has three philosophical dimensions: it is (1) infinity of essence or perfection and power; (2) infinity of duration or eternity; and (3) infinity of space and presence or omnipresence.32 Like his view that Ein-­Sof is the one, perfect, and infinite cause of all ­things (which itself has no cause or beginning), also known as the One, or the first hypostasis of Plotinus, Herrera interprets Adam Kadmon as the Neoplatonic intellect. A single, perfect, caused, and therefore finite, effect emerges from the One, the perfect, infinite, first cause: the intellect. In kabbalistic terms, Adam Kadmon emanates from Ein-­Sof. Adam Kadmon, the first intellect, is perfect, intangible, pure reason, but unlike the One, the intellect is finite, an assertion that Herrera supports by quoting intellectual ­giants such as Plato, Moses, and Orpheus (!), as well as Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Speusippus, Porphyrius, Avicenna, and many more, also including ­later thinkers like Leone Ebreo, Pico della Mirandola, and Marsilio Ficino.33 And this first intellect (“el primero entendimiento”) contains within itself all other intelligences, ideas, and archetypes. It is the mundus intelligibilis and the place where all forms exist. Herrera also identifies it with the olam ha-­azilut (world of emanation). From Adam Kadmon, the mundus intelligibilis or olam ha-­azilut, the world soul or anima mundi emerges as the third hypostasis, which, Herrera argues, represents the three lower kabbalistic worlds of beri’ah, yezirah, and asiyyah, the throne of glory, the world of angels, and the physical world, as well as the sefirot.34 As Alexander Altmann has demonstrated,35 Herrera finds it extremely difficult at this juncture in Puerta del Cielo to bring the animated imagery of the Lurianic Kabbalah into harmony with Neoplatonic terminology. ­These difficulties, however, do not obscure his explanation of zimzum. The most impor­tant aspect of Herrera’s explanation for my discussion ­here is an impor­tant shift that he makes in adapting the ideas of his teacher and master (maestro) Sarug. While Sarug argues that the malbush, God’s garment of light, is the medial entity between Ein-­Sof and created worlds, Herrera only develops the concept of the malbush within and as an effect of Adam Kadmon. For Herrera, the malbush emerges from Adam Kadmon, and the primordial Torah with the Hebrew letters emerges from the malbush.36 Ultimately, the Torah and lower worlds emerge from the perfect intellect. In Herrera’s thinking, Neoplatonic reason becomes a creative force. This reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the significance of the malbush in relation to Adam Kadmon has systemic consequences for Herrera’s understanding of zimzum.



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Systemically, zimzum plays a crucial role in the emergence of the intellect, that is, Adam Kadmon, from the infinite One, or Ein-­Sof. The philosophical explanation and interpretation of zimzum must answer the question how a finite being, the intellect, can emerge from the infinite One, how the finite can emerge from the infinite. Herrera first mentions zimzum in Puerta del Cielo using a ­simple, straightforward description, which appears in the second chapter of the second book. Herrera uses the Spanish term encogimiento for zimzum, which is the first time the Hebrew word zimzum is translated into another language. At first glance, Herrera’s description seems remarkably untheoretical. Only the title heading of the second chapter announces that we are to understand zimzum and its description in purely meta­phorical terms: Ein-­Sof as the unlimited first cause produces finite and ­limited effects at finite places and times by way of the meta­phorical zimzum (“por el metafórico zimzum o encogimiento”).37 Although the emanation from the infinite and perfect primordial light of Ein-­Sof in no way affects and alters the three aforementioned dimensions of the infinity of Ein-­Sof, namely, the infinity of essence, the infinity of duration and existence, as well as the infinity of potential and omnipresence of Ein-­Sof, we can only imagine the emanation of infinite light and its distribution and participation in finite and therefore ­limited effects as the limitation and restriction of light. Meta­phor­ically speaking and adapted to the abilities of our finite reason,38 we might describe this pro­cess in the following way: the infinite light, which originally filled all conceivable and pos­si­ble places, demarcates itself in its center, withdrawing itself from that point in the shape of a circle, thereby creating an empty place, so to speak, that can reabsorb and incorporate the ­f uture pos­si­ble finite effects of emanation. Herrera then follows this up with a description that is strongly reminiscent of Vital’s rather than Sarug’s depiction of zimzum: something like a fine channel extends into this empty, meta­phorical circle, from which a first and perfect effect called Adam Kadmon emanates. It penetrates that empty space called avir kadmon, which resulted from the limitation of the infinite first cause.39 Herrera cautiously and repeatedly reassures his readers that this kabbalistic description of zimzum is only an inauthentic and meta­phorical one. He describes an abstract pro­cess of emanation of the first finite effect from the infinite first cause, a pro­cess that ­human language cannot describe. In Puerta del Cielo book II, chapter 2, Herrera reduces zimzum to a meta­phor that requires a philosophical interpretation.

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With the same reservation about employing a meta­phorical manner of speaking (metafóricamente hablando), Herrera then describes in Puerta del Cielo II 3 how the name of God is expressed, in Adam Kadmon, the first effect of the uninduced first cause, in the form of a tetragram. The tetragram, in turn, with its letters is the cause and mea­sure of all ­things and contains within itself all the sefirot and the numbers, all the parzufim, or configurations, as well as all the light that animates and makes the divine and earthly worlds come to life. In his portrayal of the pro­cess of emanation of the sefirot, parzufim, and divine and earthly worlds from the letters of the tetragram, Herrera largely follows the example set by his teacher Sarug. Like Sarug, Herrera also describes zimzum as a self-­limitation of the infinite divine light, the Or Ein-­Sof. This self-­restriction takes place due to a prior decision of ­free ­will that Ein-­Sof initiates. Just like in medieval philosophy, such as in the works of thinkers like Averroes, Maimonides, and Thomas, God’s ­free ­will makes the decision for emanation and creation, and thus also for zimzum: “Quando quiso la causa primera communicarse y produzir el universo, se recogio de si en si.” 40 This creation of the world is not an act of necessity, but one of divine freedom. This act by no means exhausts all of God’s possibilities. The w ­ ill to enact zimzum is an act of freedom of the divine w ­ ill. But how does this volition, this decision made with the ­will, come about within the intrinsically will-­less, homogeneous Ein-­Sof? To answer this question, Herrera returns to another of Sarug’s teachings, that of divine self-­ pleasure, or sha’ashua. It is the divine self-­pleasure that brings movement into the powers of the One, the Ein-­Sof, so to speak, and seduces the infinite into the transition into the finite.41 Nevertheless, as Alexander Altmann has stressed,42 it is particularly difficult to reconcile zimzum with Neoplatonic emanation teachings that conceive of the emanation pro­cess as a straightforward, unchecked outflow of light from the unmoving One. Why is zimzum at all necessary for emanation? To formulate an answer to this question, Herrera offers vari­ous considerations and justifications, all of which shift zimzum from the side of the infinite, motionless, and immovable One to the side of its finite effects. Herrera agrees with both Vital and Sarug that zimzum is a contraction of the outflowing divine light. But Herrera argues that zimzum is a restriction, limitation, deprivation, and thus finitization that takes place on the object side, which exists among the finite effects, rather than a movement of the infinite One itself. ­Here, Herrera follows Sarug’s line of thinking, but not that of



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Vital, who had claimed that Ein-­Sof is effectively changed by the pro­cess of zimzum. In Herrera’s Neoplatonic view and philosophical differentiation of Sarug’s conception, zimzum signifies a contraction of the emanated, not of the Emanator. It is a contraction of the finite effects rather than a contraction of their immovable cause. As Herrera viewed it, the One ­causes zimzum voluntarily, but zimzum takes place in the emanations and effects of the One, not in the infinite One itself, which remains the motionless mover of ancient metaphysics. Consequently, zimzum does not affect the infinite One, but it limits and finalizes the effects of the one infinite cause. In the epilogue of the seventh book of Puerta del Cielo (VII 13), Herrera once again summarizes in ten contemplations and declarations how zimzum, envisaged meta­phor­ically, is to be understood philosophically. He argues:43 1. Zimzum is a concentration and proportioning of the initially infinite activity and efficiency of Ein-­Sof to a productive potency (“produzible potencia”), i.e., an object-­oriented force. 2. The ­will of Ein-­Sof determines and limits itself by way of zimzum for the purpose of finite effects. 3. The emanation of a finite consists, to an extent, of a deprivation, i.e., the lack of the infinite in the object. Zimzum refers to the lack or absence of the infinite in the finite object. 4. Zimzum stands for the inferiority (“degeneración”) of the emanated effect compared to its infinite, perfect cause. 5. The one, first cause is infinitely superior to all its finite effects. 6. Zimzum creates, so to speak, empty spaces and intangible vessels (“casi receptáculos y vazíos”) for the multiplicity of ­things, without which the one and undivided substance in its one being would not be able to emanate and reproduce into the multiplicity of its effects. 7. In the pro­cess of emanation, the being of the first cause is neither entirely similar nor entirely dissimilar to being of the effects. Without zimzum, the finite being of the effects would be indistinguishable from the being of the cause. 8. The finite effects requisitely consist of unity and multiplicity: unity, insofar as they participate in the first cause; multiplicity, insofar as zimzum makes them dissimilar from the One when they descend from unity into multiplicity.

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9. Through zimzum/limitation (“encogimiento”), t­ here arises the possibility of a privative infinity in Ein-­Sof, an infinity that is defined by the absence of bound­a ries and yet si­mul­ta­neously longs for bound­a ries. From an indeterminate, unformed, but malleable force of the first cause, a formed, distinct, and perfect being arises through limitation, in which zimzum creates ­limited space that allows existence to flow in. 10. The consummately perfect cause infinitely exceeds all its effects. Nevertheless, we must not imagine the relation of the One to its effects as completely detached and incompatible, but rather as a relation of the infinite to the finite, permanently produced and maintained by zimzum, just as the light of the infinite is continually emanated and pre­sent in all finite ­things, but within limits and as finite light. The tenth and final point once again underscores that Herrera does not think of zimzum as a one-­time pro­cess, but as a permanent pro­cess of mediation and transition from the infinite to the finite. Permanent zimzum in the emanation pro­cess enables what theologians call the creatio continua, the creation and preservation of the worlds in perpetuity. The continued emanation of the many from the One is only philosophically conceivable if we maintain that zimzum establishes difference through limitation and multiplicity through difference. The many do not arise beyond the One identical to itself or outside it, for this One, omnipresent, has no outside. Therefore, multiplicity arises only within the One, in that zimzum creates differentiation/limitation in the One, it does not change the One, the cause, but rather its effects and consequences. The emanations are completed and multiplied through zimzum, limitations in the flow of divine light. Herrera anticipates the obvious philosophical objection that the One in the Kabbalah, through zimzum, initially produces only one effect, Adam Kadmon, or the intellect, by speaking of a second zimzum, or, perhaps more accurately, of continued acts of zimzum in the plural, which take place in Adam Kadmon. Herrera therefore speaks of the self-­limitations of Adam Kadmon in the plural through which ­these produce the worlds, “los zimzumim o incogimientos de Adam Kadmon.” 44 The zimzumim of Adam Kadmon, the plural form of the Hebrew singular noun zimzum, are subject to the same dialectic of differentiation. The



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first, still perfect but finite effect of the infinite divine produces through an ever-­expanding, permanent setting of limits on the object side the worlds, starting with the immaterial world of emanation, olam ha-­azilut, subsequently followed by the three material worlds, beri’ah (creation), yezirah (formation), and asiyyah (actualization). Like the first zimzum, the additional zimzumim are constantly generating new multiplicities and effects. For Herrera, zimzum means that finite objects emerge through limits, difference comes into being through limits, which in turn produce multiplicity and diversity. Zimzum in the plural is thus the constant driving force b­ ehind plurality. With zimzum, the Kabbalah answers the old Platonic and Neoplatonic question of how it is pos­si­ble for the many to arise from the comprehensive One: through a restriction of the effects of the limitless One that move inward.

Isaac Aboab de Fonseca: A Rabbinical Inquisitor When Abraham Herrera died in Amsterdam on 4 February 1635, highly respected and at a ripe old age, his Puerta del Cielo presumably only circulated throughout Amsterdam and the Netherlands in manuscript form. Gate of Heaven first made its way into the wider Jewish world only in the Hebrew translation that his pupil the rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca completed. Aboab released the text ­under the Hebrew title Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim (the Hebrew has the same meaning as the original Spanish title, Puerta del Cielo). The translation was printed in Amsterdam in 1655, twenty years ­after Herrera’s death.45 Isaac Aboab was a generation younger than Herrera. He was a young man when he became acquainted with Herrera in Amsterdam. Aboab was born into a ­family of conversos in 1605 and received Catholic baptism before his ­family settled in Amsterdam and publicly returned to Judaism. His life and deeds are a textbook example of the rapid demographic and religious development of the “Portuguese” community in Amsterdam, which had brought together the Spanish and Portuguese conversos ever since the Portuguese converso Manuel Rodriguez Vega was first granted Amsterdam citizenship in 1597. In the old district of Vlooienburg, which was like an island nestled within the southeastern city fortification on the Amstel, converso families made homes ­there in quick succession, returned to a strictly halakhic lifestyle, founded synagogues, and in 1616 the library and school Ez Chayyim. Aboab became a rabbi in this quickly growing Portuguese community, which

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Figure 9. Isaac Aboab de Fonseca (1605–1693). Engraving ­a fter a drawing by Aerendt Nachtegael, 1686.

prospered rapidly due to overseas trade. He witnessed the colonial expansion of the Netherlands to Indonesia, Japan, Ceylon, and Siam, where the Dutch United East India Com­pany seized the trade mono­poly.46 In 1624, the Netherlands conquered the former Portuguese colony of Brazil, where the first Jewish communities in the Amer­i­cas soon formed, inspired by the intensive maritime trade of Dutch Jewish merchants of Portuguese origin and language. In 1641, Aboab traveled to northern Brazil, where he served as the first rabbi of the newly founded congregation of Recife from 1642 to 1654. When the Portuguese reconquered Brazil, however, he returned to Amsterdam in 1654, and in 1655 he oversaw the printing of Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim. In 1656, just one year ­later, Rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca was one of the leading participants in the cherem (ban) that excommunicated Spinoza, who was only twenty-­four years old at the time. The rabbinical council that issued the cherem also consisted of Rabbi Saul Morteira, in whose yeshiva Spinoza had once studied (from 1646 to 1649). Isaac Aboab was thus actively involved in the most famous and momentous excommunication of the Jewish modern era, when the young Spinoza, who had not yet emerged as the famous phi­los­o­pher and author that he would ­later become, was expelled from the Jewish community ­because of his irreverent, that is, nonhalakhic, way of life, and on account of several statements that he had made in public, criticizing religion. His name was literally deleted from the community register books. Due to the banishment that followed his excommunication, all



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members of his community, even his siblings, ­were forbidden any written or oral contact with Spinoza. They w ­ ere not allowed to come into contact, eat, or live with him. As a result, he faced economic ruin and was forced to transfer his share of the ­family business to his ­brother. He even left the city of Amsterdam in 1660, ­after Saul Morteira’s repeated interventions with the magistrate against Spinoza.47 ­Until his death in 1677, Spinoza was only able to return to Amsterdam in secret when he wished to visit his Christian friends and publishers. He  had long since become an internationally famous—­a nd notorious—­ philosopher ­because of his criticism of both Judaism and Chris­tian­ity.48 However, Spinoza was not only personally acquainted with Isaac Aboab (who outlived him by many years, ­dying at an advanced age in 1693), but he also almost certainly read Aboab’s Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim. Although he does not mention or quote the book anywhere in his letters and works and does not appear to have owned a copy of it, this most impor­tant Jewish philosophical treatise, printed in Amsterdam around the ­middle of the seventeenth ­century, surely could not have escaped his notice. Scholars who study Spinoza debate ­whether we can identify an influence, a reaction, or merely an analogy between Herrera’s Neoplatonic Kabbalah interpretation and Spinoza’s philosophy, especially in the first book of his Ethics (1677), which contains Spinoza’s doctrine of God, titled De Deo.49 While significant differences exist between the two, ­there is also a certain amount of overlap, which scholars attempt to explain. Herrera argues for the infinite, all-­encompassing Ein-­Sof, or the One, and Spinoza maintains that the all-­encompassing, single substance of God differentiates itself intrinsically. But for Herrera, this intrinsic differentiation of the One is a theistic, divinely intended, teleological emanation pro­cess of the progressive immanent endlessness and materialization of divine light. Spinoza argues, however, that it is a nonteleological, nondeliberate, material, and causal-­ mechanical natu­ral pro­cess within the one substance. As Spinoza maintains in Ethics (Pars I, De Deo, Prop. 29, Scholium), nature, as finite and temporal natura naturata and material res extensa, is released and developed from the all-­encompassing and eternal, divine natura naturans. Despite the stark difference between Herrera’s Neoplatonic interpretation of Kabbalah and Spinoza’s immanentist natu­ral philosophy, scholars have repeatedly asserted a connection between Spinoza and Kabbalah ever since the publication of Wachter’s Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (1699). The idea has thus become a trope in philosophical history and lit­er­a­ture.50

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This is a surprising turn of events in the realm of intellectual history that the pious and strict Isaac Aboab certainly never would have anticipated ­because of his translation of Puerta del Cielo. He likely completed the translation in Amsterdam between the time of the death of Herrera (whom he held in very high esteem) in 1635 and his sea voyage to Recife in 1641. Aboab would not have been able to garner access to the kabbalistic and philosophical reference works in Hebrew necessary for finishing the translation while he was a establishing a Jewish community in northern Brazil. He would have required access to the libraries in Amsterdam to complete the proj­ect. His translation of Puerta del Cielo differs significantly from the handwritten manuscript copies of Herrera’s text. Aboab entirely omitted the first two of ten chapters of Herrera’s original Puerta in his translation. Other­wise, Aboab rendered a faithful translation of the text. What is significant about Aboab’s translation of Herrera’s text is that Aboab comes very close to the original kabbalistic terminology in Hebrew. This proximity allowed readers to make a direct connection between Hebrew texts of the Kabbalah and Herrera’s Neoplatonic interpretation, without the detours and refractions that appear in Spanish in the original Puerta. In a purely linguistic sense, Aboab’s Hebrew translation brings Herrera home, removing his ideas from the Latin-­ influenced terminology of Neoplatonic Re­nais­sance philosophy and returning them to the orbit of the Hebrew Kabbalah. This transition begins with the way Aboab names the author in the book’s title. In Hebrew transliteration, the Spanish Herrera becomes the Hebrew kabbalist “Errera,” beginning with the letter ayin. Knorr von Rosenroth, who worked with Aboab’s translation, even transliterated the Hebrew letter ayin into the Latin letter i and always referred to Herrera as “Irira.” In Aboab’s Hebrew translation, Herrera’s text easily finds its way into the entire Jewish world, even among the kabbalists and Chassidim of eastern Eu­rope, where no one would have understood the Spanish Sephardic original. The massive reception of Herrera’s text in the frum Jewish world of Ashkenas was made pos­si­ble in part by the fact that Isaac Aboab’s Hebrew translation tacitly leaves out all of Herrera’s references to non-­Jewish philosophical and theological sources that could deter traditional Jewish readers. Any trace of Herrera’s classical, Neoplatonic, scholastic, and Re­nais­sance philosophical background dis­appears from the translation, and only the Jewish sources remain. Isaac Aboab’s Hebrew translation is thus kosher. It mirrors the rabbi’s fervent attempts to de-­Christianize Amsterdam’s Sephardic



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communities intellectually and socially, as well as his personal journey back to the Jewish sources. Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim was reprinted in Dubno in 1804, and again in Warsaw in 1864. The entire Spanish original has never been published; a partial edition of the text appeared in print for the first time in 1987, a full edition only in 2010. At least ­until the late twentieth ­century, readers understood Herrera/Irira to be the author of this text only ­because they had access to the Hebrew printed edition of Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim. Herrera’s other work, Casa de la Divinidad (Hebrew: Beit Elohim), which Isaac Aboab also translated into Hebrew, has received far less attention. Through Aboab’s translation, Herrera became known again in the rabbinical world of Ashkenaz and in the Christian scholarly world as well. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, the most impor­tant Christian kabbalist of the seventeenth ­century, may have acquired a copy of Aboab’s 1655 printing of Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim while traveling to ­Great Britain and the Netherlands between 1663 and 1666. He certainly never laid eyes on the Spanish manuscript, but he based his Latin translation on Aboab’s Hebrew 1655 edition, shortening it with significant abbreviations and summaries. Using the Latin title Porta Coelorum and listing the author as R. Abraham Cohen Irira, Lusitano, Knorr included his abridged Latin translation of the work in the third part of his main work, Kabbala Denudata (Kabbalah Unveiled) printed in Sulzbach in 1678. Herrera’s text in Latin translation appears on pages 1–192 of Knorr’s 1678 edition. Kabbala Denudata provided all Christian scholars access to Herrera’s work in Latin, the universal Eu­ro­pean scholarly language of that era. Through this channel, Christian scholars became acquainted with zimzum as a kabbalistic concept. Knorr von Rosenroth also quotes several other kabbalistic texts on the topic, but Herrera’s passages on zimzum enjoy a very prominent position in Kabbala Denudata. Nevertheless, we can see a significant difference between Aboab’s Hebrew and Knorr’s Latin version of Puerta del Cielo, especially regarding zimzum. Knorr does not disclose the fact that Herrera advocates a meta­phorical understanding of zimzum, an omission that would have a strong influence on the Christian scholarly reception of zimzum. In this re­spect, Aboab’s translation of Herrera’s text is entirely dif­fer­ ent. He omits the entire explicit discussion of “meta­phorical zimzum” that can be found in Puerta II 2, ­because he did not translate the first and second

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book of Puerta del Cielo and began only with the third. But Aboab translates Herrera’s discussion of zimzum in Puerta VII with precision, nearly verbatim. Aboab refers to Puerta VII as the fifth treatise (­ma’amar chamishi), faithfully rendering the key chapters Puerta VII 8 and VII 12. T ­ hese chapters emphasize Herrera’s view of a figurative (i.e., not real), meta­phorical understanding of zimzum. In Puerta VII 8, in which Herrera thematizes Sarug’s description of zimzum, he states: “como el Rab metafóricamente dize.”51 Aboab translates this turn of phrase with even greater intensity into Hebrew: “kara’o harav zimzum, besod haremes hane’elam.”52 In En­glish, the phrase reads: “­there Rav [Sarug] called it zimzum, in the mystery of the hidden meta­ phor.” With its specific choice of words, Aboab’s translation explic­itly refers both to Remes, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, and to Sod, the esoteric interpretation of Scripture, in rabbinical hermeneutics, two parts of the four-­letter acronym PaRDeS (peshat, remes, derash, and sod), a mnemonic for the four types of biblical exegesis. Aboab translates Herrera’s discussion of the meta­phorical zimzum in such a way that he characterizes zimzum as both an esoteric and a meta­phorical doctrine. Aboab proceeds in similar fashion with the translation of the long key chapter on zimzum in Puerta VII 12, which features extensive explanations of zimzum teeming with restrictive rhetorical formulations such as “in the manner of,” “in the style of,” “in a sense,” “equally,” all of which underscore the meta­phorical language of zimzum.53 Aboab emphasizes that we must understand zimzum purely as meta­phor. Subsequent readers of Sha’ar ha-­ Shamayyim, such as Rabbi Joseph Ergas of Livorno in the eigh­teenth ­century, also confirm this interpretation. When they argue for a meta­phorical understanding of zimzum, they always agree with ­these passages from Aboab’s Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim and quote Herrera to support a meta­phorical interpretation of zimzum. Knorr von Rosenroth’s interpretation is markedly dif­fer­ent. In his Latin translation, Porta Coelorum, passage V 8 reads: “quod dictus Doctor [Sarug] appellat Zimzum seu restrictionem: quasi nempe contraxerit Lucem suam infinitam, & intra se reliquerit spatium quoddam vacuum.”54 Knorr’s opus contains nary a word that might indicate an esoteric or allegorical reading of zimzum such as the kind we find in Sarug’s writings. He only roughly summarizes the long versions of V 12 in the space of a single page and fails to translate them in their entirety. He makes no mention of a meta­phorical zimzum. Instead, Knorr, contrary to Herrera’s original intent, writes of “Aen-­ Soph ita contractus, dicitur infu[n]disse lucem suam & potentiam suam.”55



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He continues, describing the ­actual self-­movement of Ein-­Sof in zimzum, through which Ein-­Sof limits its power: “quod Aen-­Soph restrinxerit, & determinaverit, atque limitaverit potentiam suam operandi.”56 In Knorr von Rosenroth’s translation and interpretation, Herrera’s cautious discourse on the meta­phorical zimzum, which Aboab faithfully transmitted, dis­appears through his omission and abbreviation. Instead, Vital’s conception of the actuality of zimzum as an ­actual self-­movement and self-­change of Ein-­Sof dominates the discourse in Kabbalah Denudata. This naturalistic repre­sen­ ta­tion of a real pro­cess called zimzum captured the imagination of the Christian scholarly world. But eighteenth-­century Jewish scholars, ­whether in Italy or in eastern Eu­ro­pean Chassidism, in debating the issue of an ­actual versus a meta­phorical zimzum, always cite Herrera/Errera/Irira, along with Menachem Asariah Fano and Joseph Salomo Delmedigo, as their primary sources when they wish to support an argument for a meta­phorical understanding of the concept.

Chapter 3

Christians Unveil the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth and Eigh­teenth Centuries

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth: Kabbala Denudata (The Kabbalah Unveiled) What is the Kabbalah? What is zimzum? When Christian scholars of the baroque period sought answers to ­these questions, they looked to Baron Christian Knorr von Rosenroth as the Christian expert in ­these ­matters. They could seek wisdom in one of the massive volumes comprising his Latin work Kabbala Denudata, translated into En­glish as The Kabbalah Unveiled. Readers during the baroque and ­later during the Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment who might have been unsure about a par­tic­u­lar kabbalistic term, name, or title would have certainly found reference to any one of them in one of the volumes of Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata.1 For seventeenth-­ century readers, Knorr was a trusted authority, not unlike Gershom Scholem, whose incomparable scholarship commands our confidence ­today. Scholem not only revolutionized scholarship on Judaism with his rediscovery and exploration of the Kabbalah but was also responsible for one of the greatest scholarly achievements in cultural studies in the twentieth ­century. In the same way that Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism has been the standard reference work on the Kabbalah for much of the twentieth ­century and now at the beginning of the twenty-­first ­century, Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata served as the standard reference source on the Kabbalah during the baroque period.2 A par­tic­u­lar strategy lies at the heart of The Kabbalah Unveiled, in that Knorr reveals the esoteric teachings, concepts, views, and texts of the Kabbalah that originally circulated only within the



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Jewish realm, for the benefit of the entire Christian scholarly world. And he wrote this work using the Eu­ro­pe­an Christian scholarly language of Latin. With the publication of Kabbala Denudata, the Kabbalah thus becomes exoteric and readily available to Christian scholars. In this re­spect, Knorr was scarcely the first to undertake this kind of innovation. ­There had been Christian kabbalists since the late fifteenth ­century who had written about the Kabbalah in Latin, thus making it accessible to Christian readers.3 During the Italian Re­nais­sance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was the first Christian to publish kabbalistic teachings in Latin in his 1486 Conclusiones. The purpose of the Conclusiones was to demonstrate to the pope and the College of Cardinals in Rome the cohesion among all impor­tant basic religious and philosophical teachings in Chris­tian­ity, Judaism, Islam, and ancient wisdom.4 For Pico, kabbalistic teachings belonged expressly to this canon of spiritual world wisdom that spanned all times and religions, cosmogonies, and cosmologies, a tradition known as philosophia perennis (perennial philosophy).5 In two monographs, De verbo mirifico (1494) and De arte cabalistica (1517), the German jurist, humanist, and Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) reinterpreted kabbalistic teachings in terms of Christian theology and defended Judaism and the Talmud in the German-­speaking sphere against the anti-­Jewish attacks of the convert Johannes Pfefferkorn and the Dominicans of Cologne during the “Reuchlin Affair.” Reuchlin was not only Germany’s first Christian kabbalist but also a humanist who advocated religious tolerance ­toward Jews.6 At the beginning of the seventeenth ­century, however, Reuchlin, as well as the French polymath and kabbalist Guillaume Postel (1510–1581), and even the En­glish doctor and theosophist Robert Fludd (1574–1637),7 ­were acquainted only with the texts and teachings of the medieval Kabbalah. They had access to the Zohar, to the Sefer Yezirah (Postel had published an annotated Latin translation of Sefer Yezirah in Paris in 1552),8 as well as to Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’arei Orah (Gates of Light). Sha’arei Orah pre­sents the contents of the Zohar in a systematized format. In 1516, the converted Christian kabbalist Paulo Riccio (ca. 1480–1542) published a Latin translation of Gikatilla’s work u ­ nder the title Portae lucis. The early modern Lurianic Kabbalah that originated in Safed, with its doctrines of zimzum, shevirat ha-­kelim, and tikkun, was completely unknown in the world of Christian Kabbalah and Eu­ro­pean scholars prior to the appearance of Knorr von Rosenroth’s The Kabbalah Unveiled. Knorr offers an overview of both traditions over the course of many hundreds of pages. First,

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he introduces medieval Kabbalah and its central text, the Zohar. Second, he pre­sents the Lurianic Kabbalah, which had just originated in Safed and spread across Italy and to Amsterdam. This twofold, overwhelmingly comprehensive and detailed knowledge of the Kabbalah in its entirety, which no other Christian and relatively few Jewish contemporaries had previously acquired, made Knorr the most impor­tant Christian kabbalist of the seventeenth ­century. Even more than 150 years ­later in 1843, at the very beginning of modern Kabbalah research in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Adolphe Franck wrote in La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux about Knorr: “­There is no more complete, accurate and, ­because of the many efforts and sacrifices whose fruit it is, more respectful work than that of the Baron von Rosenroth on the subject that occupies us: The Kabbalah Unveiled.”9 Knorr von Rosenroth was the pious son of a Protestant pastor and the author of well-­known hymns. His “Morgenglanz der Ewigkeit” (Come, Thou Bright and Morning Star) still appears in hymnals ­today. He was also a ­lawyer, diplomat, and high-­ranking civil servant. As such, his motivation for unveiling the Kabbalah by publishing its doctrines and translating its texts was not rooted solely in Enlightenment princi­ples. Rather, Kabbala Denudata was intended to instruct his contemporaries in Kabbalah and underscore its significance for Chris­tian­ity. We may infer this intention from the copper engraving frontispiece affixed to the first part of the Kabbala Denudata (1677), which allegorically depicts the unveiled Kabbalah as a young ­woman with her upper body unclothed (Figure 10). If we decode the baroque allegory of the frontispiece, which Knorr commissioned the famous Nuremberg engraver Johann Christoph Sartorius to complete, we as readers and viewers can see from the first page the ­great importance that the Christian kabbalist Knorr attaches to the Kabbalah for Chris­tian­ity.10 In the center of the copperplate engraving, which is juxtaposed with the title page of the first printed volume, we see a young ­woman wearing a creased, ankle-­length skirt with her back and bosom uncovered. She ­faces away from the viewer, approaching the open entrance of a building. The inscription “Kabbala Denudata” on a banderole unfurled above her head clearly identifies the young ­woman as a title allegory. The building to which her body is turned is labeled with the inscription “Palatium Arcanorum”—it is a palace of arcane wisdom. The keys to the open door of the palace dangle from her outstretched left arm, meaning that The Kabbalah Unveiled has access to the palace of secret teachings and esotericism. With her right arm, the Kabbalah swings a burning torch that illuminates the palace and the se-



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Figure 10. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata (Sulzbach, 1677), copper engraving frontispiece.

cret teachings: “lucet” (Latin for “shines”) appears written on the torch’s ­handle. At her feet, we recognize the ele­ments, forces of nature, the forces of earth, ­water and the sea; she fixes her gaze on the sky above her. ­There, the sun with its rays of light emerges from among dark clouds. The sun symbolizes the Or Ein-­Sof, the infinite divine light. Inside the splendor of this sun, we see the ten sefirot, arranged in three circles, equal in size. In the uppermost circle, we see the three highest sefirot, Keter, Chokhmah and Binah. In the m ­ iddle, t­ here are the six symmetrically arranged intermediate sefirot, and alone in the lowest circle is the lowest sefira, Malkhut. Through this arrangement of sefirot, which can also be interpreted as the parzufim, ­faces or aspects of the deity, visibly formed and arranged together throughout, the divine light falls on the earthly scenery below. However, the most impor­tant theological statement that both the book and its author evince appears in the scroll that the allegorical Kabbalah wields

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in her left hand. On one side of the scroll, we see the abbreviation N.T. for “Novum Testamentum” (New Testament). Below this abbreviation, ­there appears in Greek capital letters the famous beginning to the prologue of the Gospel of John (John 1:1), “En archè èn ho log­os” (In the beginning was the Word). This is the same passage that Re­nais­sance polymath Doctor Faustus strug­gles to translate in Goethe’s Faust. On the back of the scroll, we see the abbreviation V.T. for “Vetus Testamentum” (Old Testament), with the opening line of the Hebrew Bible (Gen. 1:1), “Bereshit bara elohim” (In the beginning God created the heavens and earth), reproduced in Hebrew letters beneath it. At the rolled end of the scroll, one word clearly emerges: explicat, Latin for explaining and interpreting. In this allegorical interpretation, we may decipher three impor­tant theological statements that the Christian kabbalist Knorr von Rosenroth endeavors to make. First, the New and Old Testaments are inseparable, two sides of the same Holy Scripture and the same divine revelation. Judaism and Chris­tian­ity as recipients of divine revelation belong together. Second, the Old Testament explains (explicat) the New Testament and the New Testament explains the Old. Third, however, and this is the most impor­tant aspect of the Christian Kabbalah, the Kabbalah, and thus the volumes of Kabbalah Unveiled, explicates both the Old and the New Testaments, thereby gaining cardinal theological significance for the Christian reader. Kabbalah not only helps Jews, as Jewish kabbalists claim, to better understand the Hebrew Bible, but it is also indispensable for Christians who wish to decipher fully the message contained in both the Old and the New Testaments. According to the allegory, the Kabbalah also accounts for the Holy Scriptures of both religions. On the one hand, this represents an imposition for the anti-­Jewish sentiment of many Christian theologians, ­because they find the idea that they would need the Kabbalah for the exegesis of the New Testament a provocation. On the other hand, even observant Jews and kabbalists must have felt expropriated, seeing that a Christian like Knorr von Rosenroth, no ­matter how good his intentions may have been, makes Kabbalah a servant to the Christian interpretation of Scripture and the world. Despite his deep re­spect for Judaism and Kabbalah, the pious Protestant Knorr concludes the first part of Kabbala Denudata with a clear statement of Christian faith: “Soli deo Gloria per Christum” (Glory to God alone through Christ). This allegorical image contains more information still. On the one hand, the figure of “Kabbalah Unveiled” creates a hermeneutic link between Old Testament and New Testament, between Judaism and Chris­tian­ity. But on



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the other hand, she conveys this connection using the arcane modern natu­ ral sciences that seek answers to nature’s secrets. This female figure stands meta­phor­ically between the sefirotic heavenly world and the arcane, elementary natu­ral world. Kabbalah is also at the ready with the keys to theology and natu­ral history: the light of her torch falls on both. On the threshold between theology and natu­ral history, she literally occupies a key position. With this copper engraving frontispiece, Knorr signals that he is firmly convinced that knowledge of the Kabbalah benefits both theologians and natu­ral scientists. Esoteric knowledge of the Kabbalah must be made exoteric. The Kabbalah must also be revealed to Christian readers, so that it may entice them, just like the young, attractive, semi-­clothed ­woman in the allegory does. Knorr von Rosenroth dedicated more than two de­cades of his life to the study of Kabbalah. He was born in Silesia in 1636. Beginning in 1655, he studied theology, law, history, philosophy, and ancient languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic. From 1663 to 1666, he traveled to the Netherlands, France, and ­England. He began studying Kabbalah while in the Netherlands. He acquired a number of kabbalistic manuscripts, including texts related to the Lurianic Kabbalah, which was at the time the prevailing and most relevant school of Kabbalah. With his friend Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont as intermediary, Knorr von Rosenroth became court adviser in 1668 and ­later chancellor to Duke Christian August von Pfalz-­Sulzbach. Knorr took up residence in Sulzbach, located in Germany’s Upper Palatinate region, and lived ­there ­until his death in 1689. He dedicated much of his ­free time to his kabbalistic studies and translations. Theologically speaking, he was an ecumenist and irenicist who advocated peace between Protestants and Catholics and ensured that both denominations could share the large Gothic municipal church in Sulzbach. Knorr’s interest in and commitment to Judaism and Kabbalah also had a specific po­liti­cal ele­ment, as Knorr saw to it that Jews ­were tolerated and allowed to ­settle in Sulzbach. Sulzbach thus became an impor­tant site for Jewish book printing ­under Knorr’s aegis. In 1684, at Knorr’s insistence and with permission from Duke Christian August, the Jewish book printer Moses Bloch created a highly regarded and lavish edition of the Zohar in Sulzbach. The Christian printer Abraham Lichtenthaler, who had to procure Hebrew type especially for the purpose, was tasked with typesetting the first parts of Kabbala Denudata in Sulzbach. In 1684, Knorr asked a Christian book printer in Frankfurt am Main to produce the preface (Praefatio ad Lectorem,

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§§ 20–48) to the second part of Kabbala Denudata, ­because the Sulzbach printers ­were too busy completing the Zohar publication at the time. The preface contains a passionate po­liti­cal and religious plea for the toleration of Jews in Christian states and cities. Using the New Testament as his proof, Knorr substantiates the idea that Jesus and the apostles also acted on the assumption that the coexistence between Jews and Christians was necessary. Though many Christian sovereigns at this time made baptism a prerequisite for Jews to ­settle in their lands, Knorr declares ­here that the need for Jews to be baptized is superfluous, since God had made a covenant with Abraham and all his descendants and Jews could therefore also attain eternal salvation without baptism (Praefatio § 43). In the small city of Sulzbach in the Upper Palatinate, the Christian kabbalist, scholar, diplomat, and chancellor Christian Knorr von Rosenroth communicated the message that Kabbalah had the potential to mediate, deepen, enlighten, and promote po­liti­cal and religious coexistence between Jews and Christians, Judaism and Chris­tian­ity, according to the ­will of God. Knorr’s message attracted attention from across Eu­rope. He corresponded with Henry More, head of the Cambridge Neoplatonists, as well as van Helmont. The young Leibniz visited him in Sulzbach in January and February 1688 to discuss chemical pro­cesses, petrology, and Kabbalah. Even Isaac Newton in faraway Cambridge worked his way through Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata.11 In fact, the entire scholarly world of the Eu­ro­pean baroque and early Enlightenment read Knorr von Rosenroth and quoted him. The Kabbalah Unveiled appeared to make the ancient, mysterious wisdom and teaching of the Jews available to Eu­ro­pean scholars, as the work’s subtitle states: Doctrina Hebraeorum Transcendentalis et Metaphysica atque Theologica. The esoteric Jewish tradition handed down in Hebrew and Aramaic was made accessible in one fell swoop by way of this massive handbook comprising nearly 2,400 pages, composed in the scholarly language of Latin. In fact, this tradition, certainly despite the intentions of the kabbalists, was received not as mysticism, but, as the title suggests, as Jewish philosophy, as transcendental, metaphysical, and theological teaching of the Hebrews. While Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo was intended as a Neoplatonic repre­sen­ta­tion of the Lurianic Kabbalah written specifically for a Jewish readership, Knorr offered readers the entire Kabbalah as Jewish philosophy and theology. In Knorr’s work, which represents an impor­tant watershed in the history of Christian reception, zimzum is not an esoteric



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mystical doctrine, but rather appears in the context of Judaism’s exoteric metaphysical and theological doctrines. Within a few years following its publication, Kabbala Denudata became the best and most widely read source regarding the Kabbalah for all Eu­ro­ pean Hebrew scholars. The work ostensibly required no knowledge of Hebrew to access it, though in most cases Knorr’s readers had at least some grasp of the language. This compendium has been responsible for ensuring that the Kabbalah, from Wachter and Brucker, to Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Universal-­Lexicon (which also quotes Knorr) and Jacobi, is understood as “a divine metaphysics”12 and exoteric Jewish philosophy, and not specifically as Jewish mysticism. The Kabbalah Unveiled, however, is not structured and discursively ordered like a metaphysical or theological work, but rather more like a Latin manual on all va­ri­e­ties of the Kabbalah, particularly the Zohar. For many years, Knorr pursued the proj­ect of preparing and financing the expensive, difficult, and ambitious reprint of the Zohar in its original language through the book printer Moses Bloch in Sulzbach in 1684, ­because he understood the Zohar to be Kabbalah’s most impor­tant and central work. By contrast, he conceived the Kabbala Denudata as a vast commentary on and appendix to the Zohar. The task of Kabbala Denudata was to provide access to, explain, comment on, and accompany this notoriously difficult text. This task would be accomplished by way of numerous commentaries, indexes, excerpts from, and synopses of the Zohar, but also through the translation of more recent kabbalistic texts, such as the early modern writings of Cordovero, Luria, and Herrera, which are also made accessible to Christian readers in the vari­ous parts of the Kabbala Denudata. Knorr designed the first part of Kabbala Denudata, published in several volumes in Sulzbach in 1677 and 1678, as Apparatus in librum Sohar, which contains texts on the Zohar. The second part of the Kabbala Denudata, printed in 1684 in Frankfurt am Main (the same year the Sulzbach Zohar reprint appeared), bears the subtitle Liber Sohar Restitutus and, in addition to a Latin synopsis of the Zohar, contains (partial) translations of central texts of the Zohar such as Siphra Dezeniuta, Idra Rabba, and Idra Sutra. The individual parts and subvolumes of The Kabbalah Unveiled therefore contain very dif­fer­ent types of texts. First, it contains an encyclopedia of basic kabbalistic terms, the Loci communes kabbalistici, which alone comprises more than seven hundred pages. The Kabbalah Unveiled also contains translations of entire kabbalistic texts, including a Latin translation of the

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Lurianic Sefer ha-­Derushim and a translation of Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo according to the Hebrew version Sha’ar ha-­Shamayim (1655) by Isaac Aboab. It also provides excerpts from kabbalistic writings in the Hebrew original or in translation, including Emek ha-­Melekh by Naphtali Bacharach, as well as additional synopses, commentary, and letters that Knorr penned about the Kabbalah and some of its teachings, letters written by other scholars, such as Henry More, with ­theses on the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah Unveiled is a compendium of baroque erudition and its vari­ous stylistic flourishes. Knorr likely worked continuously, even obsessively, on this text, which entails a total of almost 2,400 printed pages, during his years in Sulzbach (1668–1689), alongside his numerous official duties. During Knorr’s lifetime, the Lurianic Kabbalah was new and current, nearly con­temporary. Knorr appreciated it on account of its perceived relevance, not ­because of its age or ­because it was well established at the time. The Zohar, on the other hand, ostensibly dated back to antiquity and drew its authority from this venerable age. The Lurianic Kabbalah did not possess the authority accumulated with time and age, not even by its own standards. Knorr therefore read, translated, and commented on it not ­because of its authority, but presumably on account of its originality. What other reason could Knorr have for allowing its teachings to inform his work so extensively and in such detail, including the doctrine of zimzum? Knorr’s real innovative achievement is that he introduced the new Lurianic Kabbalah to the Eu­ro­pean Christian scholarly world. This also applies to zimzum, which could be found neither in the Zohar nor in medieval Kabbalah. Through Knorr, the hitherto purely intra-­Jewish discourse about zimzum, Adam Kadmon, and the malbush expands to include the Eu­ro­pean discussion of ­these kabbalistic themes. The result was an example of first-­rate cultural transfer. We find passages related to zimzum in vari­ous parts and in the form of vari­ous text types throughout Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata. The easiest point of access is via the encyclopedia, the Loci communes kabbalistici, which, almost three hundred years before the Encyclopaedia Judaica, represents the first encyclopedic attempt to convey all basic kabbalistic concepts and doctrines. Within the space of more than seven hundred printed pages, Knorr provides the first complete scholarly description of the Kabbalah in the form of an encyclopedia, a text type that first emerged during the early modern era concomitant with the development of science and scientific discourses.13 ­After Knorr, it was Scholem who first attempted this comprehensive form again with his numerous entries on Kabbalah, its teachings and authors in



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Figure 11. The lemma “Zimzum,” Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 1 (Sulzbach, 1677).

the Encyclopaedia Judaica, which also appeared as a monograph in the anthology Kabbalah (1988). In the Loci communes, it is immediately apparent that the reader of the Kabbala Denudata is expected to have at least some knowledge of Hebrew. Knorr could reasonably assume that Protestant theologians and many humanist scholars of his time would have this as part of their linguistic skill set. The less knowledgeable reader had access to an “Index Latinus Materiarum.” The lexicon’s lemmata are arranged according to the Hebrew alphabet and are also printed in Hebrew (or Aramaic) when appropriate. We therefore find our keyword zimzum listed ­u nder the Hebrew letter tsade: “zimzem Contrahere: zimzum Contractio. Cum Deus infinitus vellet emittere, quae emanare debebant, contraxit seipsum in medio lucis suae centrali;

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ita, ut intensissima illa lux ad circumferentiam quandam atque ad latera in se recederet. Etz Chajim Tract. Ozeroth Chajim Section. Adam Kadmon. Et haec est contractio prima. ibid. Vid. Chalal.”14 This is the complete entry for zimzum in the Loci communes kabbalistici. Knorr von Rosenroth begins with a clear nominal definition: the noun zimzum means “contractio,” that is, “contraction.” It derives from the Hebrew verb zimzem, in Latin contrahere, to pull together. This is the first time the noun zimzum is translated into Latin: contractio. Zimzum is a contraction of God, as the entry further explains. For the concept of zimzum in the Kabbalah means that the “Deus infinitus,” in Hebrew Ein-­Sof, the infinite and undefined God who fills the universe and thus all space, wishes to emanate something out of himself and therefore withdraws from a place in the m ­ iddle of himself, thus contracting away from a place located in the ­middle of himself. In its center, the infinite divine light withdraws in an even circular form from this space back to its edges, which then form a circle of light around a place that is cleared of divine light and is therefore dark. This is precisely how Chayyim Vital describes this primordial pro­cess in his book Ez Chayyim, but Knorr does not explic­itly name Vital in his encyclopedia entry in the tractate titled “Ozeroth Chajim” in the section on Adam Kadmon.15 “Et haec est contractio prima.” This is not only the first contraction, but actually the first ever act of the infinite God, long before the creation of the world. Through this contraction of himself, away from a place in his center, he creates an empty, lightless space, in Hebrew chalal, in Latin vacuum. It is in the center of this perfectly round vacuum that the world can first be created. Regarding this point, Knorr explains in the lemma “Chalal”: “Chalal Vacuum. Deus emissurus, quae emanatura erant, contractione prima intra Lucem suam institutâ, produxit Vacuum quoddam, locumq; inanem exactè circularem, in quo locarentur mundi emittendi. Ez Chajim Part. Ozaroth Chajim Tr. Adam Kadmon.”16 In Knorr’s first definition of the term, we learn that zimzum is an initial act of the infinite God prior to the creation of the world and for the purpose of creating the world. That is to say, God contracts himself, so that first of all ­there is room for the world in that vacuum, which is no longer occupied by the infinite God and the divine light. To be something other than God, namely, the world and nature, God withdraws “from himself into himself ” in the act of zimzum, leaving ­behind a circular, nondivine, empty space, as Knorr states in another passage of Kabbala Denudata: “cum autem voluerit manifestari, & producere naturas, restrinxerit, & quasi contraxerit coarc-



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taveritque; se a se ipso in se ipsum, & sic reliquerit locum quendam inter infinita illa spatia quae ante penitus explebat.”17 Using the lemmata, Knorr concisely formulated and made the Lurianic concept of zimzum, the notion of God’s self-­contraction before and for the purpose of creating the world, comprehensible for the Christian scholarly world for the first time. Though Knorr could not anticipate the subsequent role that zimzum would play in Eu­ro­pean scholarly history, it remains a part of the history of reception of The Kabbalah Unveiled. Knorr objectively describes zimzum as one of many other doctrines of the Lurianic Kabbalah and the Kabbalah as a ­whole. He himself shows no par­tic­u­lar propensity ­toward this par­tic­u­lar concept of Luria’s. It was his readers, who, each in a dif­fer­ent context, be it cosmogony or theogony, speculative metaphysics or transcendental idealism, pounced on the idea of God’s very first contraction before and for the purpose of the creation of the world. Knorr only unintentionally created the conditions that made this dynamic reception pos­si­ble. In his erudite restraint, he pre­sents, at least according to his own claim, only the sources and refrains from philosophizing. He merely translated and summarized the Lurianic Kabbalah in general, and among many other ­things, certain passages on zimzum. Knorr not only pre­sents his readers the brief entry on zimzum that we find in the Loci communes kabbalistici, but also a long quotation from the Sefer ha-­Derushim in Latin translation. The Sefer ha-­Derushim is a systematic compilation of texts secretly cribbed from Chayyim Vital, which Benjamin Halevi and Elisha Vestali assembled in Jerusalem in 1620 and circulated as a manuscript. In a pseudepigraphic gesture, Knorr (incorrectly) ascribes this section of the Sefer ha-­Derushim to Isaac Luria, prob­ably ­because it largely corresponded to the detailed zimzum passages that appear at the beginning of Vital’s Ez Chayyim. Knorr likely had access to manuscript copies of Ez Chayyim in addition to the Sefer ha-­Derushim. This section describes the pro­ cess of zimzum, in ­great detail and with almost scientific meticulousness, as a physical pro­cess of the withdrawal of the omnipresent light of Ein-­Sof from the forming ­spherical lightless space, into which Adam Kadmon is emanated. In the facsimile reproduced in Figure 12, we can see the beginning of this well-­k nown naturalistic description of zimzum penned by Chayyim Vital for the first time in Latin. Vital begins: “Scito . . .”—­“Know that before that which would emanate emanated and all that was created came into being, the highest light expanded to fill the outermost reaches.”18 But Knorr von Rosenroth had another source that described the kabbalistic concept of zimzum. One of the longest segments of The Kabbalah

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Figure 12. Latin translation from the Sefer ha-­ Derushim, in Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 2 (Sulzbach, 1677), “Tractatus I. Libri Druschim, seu Introductio Metaphysica ad Cabbalam Autore R. Jizchak Loriense.”

Unveiled is the comprehensive translation and paraphrase of Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Gate of Heaven. Knorr employed Isaac Aboab de Fonseca’s Hebrew translation of Herrera’s book Sha’ar ha-­Shamayim (which in Hebrew also means “Gate of Heaven”). This Hebrew translation was printed in Amsterdam in 1655, and Knorr presumably purchased a copy of it ­there. And we cannot rule out the possibility that Knorr personally met the aged rabbi and kabbalist Isaac Aboab de Fonseca during his extended stay in Amsterdam in the 1660s. While the original Spanish text written by the converso Herrera existed only as a handwritten manuscript and was not printed ­until the late twentieth ­century by Kenneth Krabbenhoft in Madrid,19 Aboab’s Hebrew translation of Herrera’s work became an intellectual sensation in Amsterdam. This book could be found ­housed on the shelves of many Jewish read-



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ers. Spinoza possibly even owned a copy, and we know that the Sulzbach baron also owned one. In Knorr’s Latin translation, which takes many liberties and in part only briefly paraphrases the sections, Herrera’s book is called Porta Coelorum and its author, Irira. It is ­under the name “Irira” that Herrera and his doctrine of zimzum are then quoted by Johann Georg Wachter and in Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae of 1742.20 In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie), Hegel, whose view is not clouded by personal acquaintance with the source texts, arrives at a particularly negative judgment of the Kabbalah by way of Brucker and mentions the teaching of an “Irira” from the “fifteenth (!) ­century.”21 The history of philosophy thus owes its knowledge of Herrera’s existence and work prior to the twentieth ­century to Knorr’s pioneering translation. Friedrich Häußermann produced the only German translation to date of Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo, using neither the Spanish original nor Aboab’s Hebrew translation, but rather Knorr von Rosenroth’s Latin translation. Gershom Scholem wrote an impor­tant introduction to this edition.22 Herrera was, as he himself repeatedly states, a student of Israel Sarug. He made zimzum, which he knew from Sarug’s teachings, part of a Neoplatonic philosophy inspired by the Kabbalah that deals with the origins of the many from the one single God. In Herrera’s work, even before the idea of God’s self-­contraction had left the specifically intra-­Jewish context, the description of zimzum, as we see in the writings penned by Vital and Sarug, had become a philosophical concept. Following their lead, Knorr von Rosenroth also understood zimzum as a philosophical, “metaphysical” concept. ­Doing so, Knorr, however, combines Vital’s and Sarug’s very dif­fer­ent views of zimzum while favoring Vital’s naturalistic version. Sarug’s view of the concept of zimzum as a meta­phor, which Herrera and Aboab shared and also clearly expressed, clearly did not resonate with Knorr. He ­doesn’t even mention the possibility of a meta­phorical interpretation at all in the encyclopedia entry in the Loci communes kabbalistici; he simply allows it to fall by the wayside in his translations and paraphrases of Herrera’s text. It is difficult to determine ­today ­whether Knorr does this intentionally or simply overlooks the subtleties of Herrera’s distinctions. In the end, Knorr’s reformulations of the Herrera text, such as: “Aen-­Soph ita contractus, dicitur infu[n]disse lucem suam & potentiam suam,”23 do not leave the reader any other alternative interpretation. Knorr makes it look as if Herrera/Irira literally describes the self-­movement of Ein-­Sof in self-­contraction and is in full agreement with Vital on this point.

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Figure 13. Depiction of tehiru following the pro­cess of zimzum, Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 3 (Sulzbach, 1678), 227.

We find a visualization of zimzum and the empty space of tehiru in the illustration section of Kabbala Denudata, published in Sulzbach in 1678. They are realistically rendered as a geometrical constellation of figures made of intersecting, nested circles and squares. Knorr then describes and comments on this illustration in ­great detail on two full pages specifically in terms of a geometric, intra-­divine spatial shape.24 ­There can be no doubt: h ­ ere, zimzum is not a meta­phor but an a­ ctual event. We can even draw it. The conception of zimzum as a material act, an ­actual self-­movement within God, as Knorr understands it from the kabbalistic sources, became decisive for the entire history of Christian reception of zimzum. In contrast, the history of Jewish reception has always acknowledged the conflict between Vital’s naturalistic understanding of zimzum and Sarug’s meta­phorical understanding, and Jewish scholars have discussed and conveyed both variants. The naturalistic understanding of zimzum as self-­movement performed by God was formative for Christian reception history. Both Oetinger and Schelling, who knew that the assumption of a self-­movement of God in zimzum, like any assumption of a change of God, represented a break with the Aristotelian conception of God as an eternal, unchanging, and absolute unmoved mover. They explic­itly welcomed this break and understood it as a



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path ­toward a theology and philosophy of the living God. Other readers of The Kabbalah Unveiled, in par­tic­u­lar Henry More (1614–1687), the Cambridge Neoplatonist who corresponded with Knorr, ­were aware of this break between the naturalistic concept of zimzum as God’s self-­movement and the Aristotelian concept of God, and for this very reason rejected the idea of zimzum as metaphysically untenable.

Henry More, Anne Conway, Joseph Raphson, Isaac Newton: Zimzum in Cambridge In an eminently erudite scholarly article, whose content and scope could provide the means for an entire monograph on this underresearched subject of inquiry, Brian P. Copenhaver demonstrates that Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata and the Lurianic doctrine of zimzum had a surprising impact on seventeenth-­century Neoplatonism in Cambridge.25 Henry More, his student Anne Conway, Isaac Newton, and his Cambridge colleague Joseph Raphson read The Kabbalah Unveiled and discussed the doctrine of zimzum as a scholarly subject. This discussion prompted a new cosmology and connected it to new, pathbreaking scientific conceptions of space that differed distinctly from old metaphysical and theological spatial notions. In rabbinical Judaism, makom, the Hebrew term for “location,” “place,” or “space,” had been an attribute and a name of God. Beginning with the words that God utters in the Hebrew Bible’s book of Exodus (33:21)—­“ hine makom iti” (See, ­there is a place near me)—­Midrash, Kabbalah, and Jewish philosophy up to Spinoza ­were constantly renegotiating the relationship between God and space. Makom was considered both an attribute of God and one of the names of God. Lurianic Kabbalah developed the idea that prior to zimzum, Ein-­Sof was an omnipresent substance that filled all space, in which only the act of zimzum made room for something other than God. This cosmology and conception of space attracted the interest of Henry More, fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, phi­los­o­pher, founder of Cambridge Neoplatonism, and a Christian kabbalist. More had shown an interest in Kabbalah even before becoming acquainted with Knorr, but the baron in Sulzbach introduced him to the Lurianic Kabbalah. In debate with and arguing against Descartes, More had developed his own idea of space and presented it in several writings. He argued that God was not only reason, the Cartesian res cogitans, but also res extensa, a spatial being. The cosmos

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and the earthly world move and exist inside the res extensa, understood in its substance as infinite space. God inhabits this spatially infinite universe immaterially in each of its parts, just as a soul dwells within the h ­ uman body. Omnipresence in infinite space is an essential attribute of God, for More regarded God as a perfect being, and an absolutely perfect being has no spatial limits or bound­a ries. More substantiated his argument that God and space ­were the same, asserting that kabbalists had long called God Makom. He believed that God could in fact be found everywhere and was intrinsic, though pre­sent in space as incorporeal. He is the expanded immaterial being par excellence.26 It was in this re­spect that More’s belief in the infinite spaciousness of God dovetailed with the Lurianic Kabbalah, specifically Luria’s concept of Ein-­Sof, which More learned about by reading Kabbala Denudata. More and Knorr began an epistolary correspondence in 1670. Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1614–1699), who was a friend of both men, and the phi­los­o­pher (and More’s pupil) Anne Conway (1631–1679) served as intermediaries in their communication with one another. Even before the first part of The Kabbalah Unveiled was printed in 1677, Knorr sent More Latin manuscripts from Sulzbach, including manuscripts with translations of Emek ha-­Melekh, written by Naphtali Bacharach, and the Sefer ha-­Derushim, in addition to partial translations of the Zohar. In ­these manuscripts, More encountered Luria’s concept of zimzum and the contraction of Ein-­Sof. However, More did not find Luria entirely convincing on the subject of his understanding of the corporeality of God. Referencing the description of zimzum found in the Sefer ha-­Derushim, which also appears in Knorr’s translation in the first part of Kabbala Denudata, 27 More criticizes the Kabbala Denudata and his esteemed fellow scholar Knorr in his short essay “Quaestiones & Considerationes paucae brevesque in Tractatum primum Libri Druschim.” Knorr published More’s essay as part of The Kabbalah Unveiled, situating it immediately following his translation of the Sefer ha-­ Derushim: “How can it be that this Ein-­Sof, when it is by nature necessary, immovable, and equal in all its parts, withdraws itself from a point and leaves ­behind a large hole, in which the space for the creation of the worlds exists, as if God’s being ­were corporeal and as if the worlds could not other­ wise exist?”28 More criticized the idea of zimzum, ­because, as he saw it, the concept of God as infinite, unchangeable, and intangibly expansive is easily compatible and can coexist with the material, created world and its material expansion within the immaterial spatiality of God. But the idea that God



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contracts himself together like a material, corporeal creature and leaves ­behind a lacuna contradicts both his immateriality and his metaphysically documented eternal immutability. Luria’s argument that God as Ein-­Sof must withdraw and make room for the material world does not make sense to More. For him, the ac­cep­tance of the notion of zimzum, a self-­motion of the deity, is incompatible with the immutability, eternity, and necessity of God as an immaterial res extensa, an infinite and perfect but unchangeable substance. Knorr immediately included More’s objections, which he had received by way of letter, in the first part of Kabbala Denudata published in 1677, and responded with his own Amica responsio (Friendly Reply), which he also included in the text. In his Amica responsio, Knorr defends the idea of zimzum. He insists that zimzum does not leave ­behind an absolute vacuum; rather, only the omnipresence of divine light is diminished. When you empty a vessel containing fragrant oil, the fragrance does not entirely dis­appear.29 But More did not accept this argument and attacked both Knorr and Naphtali Bacharach’s Emek ha-­Melekh. He argued that Knorr’s comparison of the presence of God with the fragrance remaining in the emptied oil vessel (as well as the notion of God’s garment of light in tehiru, in the almost empty space evacuated by God in the ­middle of Ein-­Sof  ), misjudges, violates, and compromises the incorporeality of God and thus a fundamental teaching of Jewish and Christian metaphysics and theology. More’s final judgment in his Ulterior disquisitio (which Knorr also printed in Kabbala Denudata) is that the peculiar doctrine of the contraction and self-­movement of Ein-­Sof is not based on a solid philosophical foundation.30 ­Because Knorr included More’s objections to zimzum, as well as his disapproval of the doctrine of the sefirot and Adam Kadmon, in Kabbala Denudata, all of his readers learned of this dispute. More’s disagreement in no way detracted from the positive reception of zimzum. Lady Anne Conway, one of the first female early modern phi­los­o­phers and a student of More’s, who was closely involved in the correspondence between More and Knorr and a keenly observant reader of the first part of The Kabbalah Unveiled, did not share her teacher’s objections to zimzum. However, she appropriated the Lurianic ideas of zimzum and Adam Kadmon, which she read about in Kabbala Denudata, in a manner typical of the Christian Kabbalah. She interpreted Adam Kadmon as Christ, Christ as the second person of the Trinity, thus emerging from a zimzum of the divine ­Father. We see this gesture in the annotations to the first chapter of her monograph The Princi­ples of the

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Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, printed posthumously in Latin in 1690 and in En­glish in 1692: THE Ancient Hypothesis of the Hebrews, as to what pertains to the latter Contents of this Chapter, is this: 1. Seeing God was of all the most exceeding g­ reat and infinite Light, and yet the chiefest Good: For this Reason he would make Creatures to whom he might communicate himself: But ­these could in no wise bear the exceeding greatness of his Light: And hereunto belong ­those Scripture sayings, God dwelleth in an inapproachable Light. No Man hath seen God at any Time, &c. 2. He diminished therefore (for the sake of his Creatures) the highest Degree of his most intense Light, that ­there might be room for his Creatures, from whence Place immediately arose, as it ­were a certain Circular Vacuity or Space of Worlds. 3. This Vacuum was not a mere Privation or Non ens, but a certain real Position of Light, diminutively, which was the Soul of the Messias, called by the Hebrews, Adam Kadmon, which filled all that ­whole Space.31 Conway also refers to and quotes Kabbala Denudata several times in her book. Knorr von Rosenroth thus introduced zimzum, which Conway understood as a diminution of the divine light that leaves a round empty space and room for the worlds and Adam Kadmon (the Messiah-­Christ), not only to the university scholars in Cambridge but also to a female author and scholar for the first time. The mathematician Joseph Raphson, whose exact life dates remain unknown (we know he died around 1713), a fellow of Jesus College in Cambridge, and ­later a member of the Royal Society, was not a close friend but a respected colleague of Isaac Newton. Newton trusted Raphson enough (a rare occurrence indeed) to allow him to examine his mathematical manuscripts. Raphson was a specialist in algebra and translated Newton’s Arithmetica universalis into En­glish. But he was also acquainted with the drama surrounding Henry More and The Kabbalah Unveiled. Raphson coined the word pantheism in his early work De spatio reali, printed in London in 1697, and he classified the Kabbalah ­under this pantheism, as did Johann Georg Wachter in Amsterdam in 1699 in his work Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, practically si­mul­ta­neously, but with quite dif­fer­ent arguments. Raphson was re-



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sponsible for Kabbalah being equated with pantheism in ­England, while Wachter ­shaped the discussion about Kabbalah and pantheistic figures of thought in the German-­speaking world for an entire ­century through his combination of Kabbalah and Spinozism. In the very first chapter of De spatio reali, Raphson ranks Kabbalah among the pantheistic philosophies that have existed since antiquity. He sees pantheism in the doctrine of the material world contained in a spatially infinite substance. For this reason, Raphson considers the Lurianic Kabbalah and its spatially infinite Ein-­Sof to be pantheistic philosophies. But this, he argues, does not justify his condemning it. Raphson defends the Lurianic Kabbalah and the concept of zimzum against More, ­because he considers the doctrine of zimzum and More’s conviction of an immaterial, infinite space as an attribute of God to be compatible. Insofar as space is incorporeal and dif­fer­ent from ­matter, a contraction and movement of immaterial space does not preclude the concept of God as prima causa, the first immovable mover of ­matter. Raphson therefore shares More’s concept of immaterial infinite space, but not his critique of zimzum. In fact, the first chapter of De spatio reali is full of references to the Lurianic Kabbalah and also mentions zimzum. He argues that Makom is God’s name and attribute. And referring to Naphtali Bacharach, he asserts: “Ens enim primum substantia sua lucisque ejus plenitudine omnia implens, spatium in medio sui condendis mundis evacuatum, retractatione scilicet lucis suae, reliquit. Hinc inquam Ens primum non nisi infinita quadam amplitudine realiter extensum concipi possit. [. . .] Ipse est locus mundi, non vero mundus est locus ejus.”32 God as Ein-­Sof and infinite space is through zimzum and ­after zimzum the place of the world, but the material, empirical world is not God’s place. The world is contained within infinite God, but the infinite God is not contained in the earthly, material world. The world is in God, but God is not in the world. Raphson sums up the cosmology of the Lurianic Kabbalah along ­these lines. He became acquainted with the Lurianic doctrines, including the doctrine of the four worlds and tikkun from More, Kabbala Denudata, and also from original sources such as Aboab’s translation of Herrera’s Beit Elohim.33 Isaac Newton (1642–1727), a colleague of Raphson’s at Cambridge, was acquainted with Raphson’s works, as well as More’s works and Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata. Newton owned a number of kabbalistic works, and he certainly was aware of the concept of zimzum, but he does not comment on the Lurianic Kabbalah or zimzum anywhere in his printed opus, although he

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worked intensively through Kabbala Denudata. As Copenhaver demonstrates,34 Newton rejects equating God and space, as More and Raphson argue. For him, space is not an attribute of God, for God is neither space nor time. And one of the points of Newton’s infinitesimal calculus is that infinite series of numbers negate the existence of a totality: infinity excludes totality, ­because totality conclusively comprises all that is, whereas infinity, or infinite number series, remains unfinished and unlimited. Translated into the terminology of the Lurianic Kabbalah, this means the infinite, Ein-­Sof, always exceeds entirety. The infinite God transcends any and ­every totality.

Johann Georg Wachter: Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (Spinozism in Judaism) In addition to Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbalah Unveiled, the extensive polemic Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb by Johann Georg Wachter, published in Amsterdam in 1699, was pivotal for the reception of both zimzum and Spinoza in the German-­speaking world during the Enlightenment,35 influencing thinkers such as Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Maimon, and Schelling. Ostensibly obscured by its curious title, the primary focus of the polemic is the controversy between the twenty-­six-­year-­old author Wachter (1673–1757), who had come to Amsterdam in 1698 ­after studying theology and philosophy in Tübingen and Frankfurt an der Oder, and the much older Johann Peter Spaeth (­after 1640–1701), who converted from Chris­tian­ity to Judaism in the religiously liberal Amsterdam, and who adorned himself with the Jewish name Moses Germanus, reminiscent of his German origins.36 Moses Germanus had invited Wachter, his young fellow countryman, into his sukkah and expressed both verbally and in writing criticism of vari­ous Christian teachings, such as the virgin birth and the messiahship of Jesus. This led to a dispute. The preface and full title of the polemic hint at this conflict: Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb / Oder / die von dem heutigen Jüdenthumb / und dessen Geheimen Kabbala Vergötterte Welt / An Mose Germano sonsten Johann Peter Speeth / von Augspurg gebürtig / Befunden und widerleget von Johann Georg Wachter (Spinozism in Judaism / or / The World Deified by ­Today’s Judaism / and Its Secret Kabbalah / Addressed to Moses Germanus a.k.a. Johann Peter Spaeth / Born in Augsburg / The Opinion and Refutation of Johann Georg Wachter). This title suggests an interreligious controversy between a Christian and a freshly circumcised convert to Judaism with the curious name



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Moses Germanus, especially since the text was written not in the scholarly language of Latin but in German for a wide audience. In real­ity, however, this book was a savage public attack on Spinoza, Kabbalah, and Judaism as such, for which the dispute with Moses Germanus, who was neither a kabbalist nor a Spinozist, provided only a pretext. Wachter accuses the “godless Spinoza”37 and the no less godless “Spinozism” (a neologism of Wachter’s) of denying the “extra-­worldliness” of God,38 that is, the cardinal separation of the world and the otherworldly God, of creature and creator, as well as freedom of ­will—­teachings that form the foundations of religion and all moral laws and norms. At the same time, Wachter assumes that Spinoza’s central idea that world and nature are the immanent unfolding of the one infinite divine substance (meaning that God and nature are therefore not substantially dif­fer­ent and separate), originates from Kabbalah. The Kabbalah is the “Spinozism in Judaism” to which the polemic’s title directly refers; for Wachter, it is the source of the godlessness of the Jew Spinoza and Spinozism. Citing this origin and the intellectual proximity of godless Spinozism to the Kabbalah as a secret Jewish doctrine, Wachter then justifies even more ferocious attacks against Judaism in general. He asserts: “Das Judenthümb ist ein aus Religion und Atheisterey zusammengemengter Quarck” (Judaism is nonsense, a mixture of religion and atheism).39 He also argues that the majority of the Torah is a “Heydnish-­Egyptisches Gesetz” (heathen-­ Egyptian law).40 To “show off Moses as the ­great ocean of all the wisdom that has flowed into the world” is the “miserable self-­deception” of the Jews.41 Wachter also denies Jews any intellectual originality, an anti-­Semitic prejudice that would ­later rear its ugly head in the writings of Richard Wagner and in the National Socialist propaganda of the Third Reich. He asserts: “Woraus ihr sehen könt / daß ihr nie niemahl nichts erfunden / sondern allzeit anderer Völcker Nachäffer und Lehrjungen seyd” (From which you can see / that you have never in­ven­ted anything / but have always been imitators and apprentices of other ­peoples).42 In the preface to his polemic, Wachter proclaims that “the Jews have a completely dif­fer­ent God than we do.” 43 Wachter denies the revelatory character of the Torah, Moses as a prophet, and also the notion of the Jews as the chosen ­people, stating that the Jews worship a dif­fer­ent God than the Christians, their religion is “nonsense” (Quarck), the “Jewish synagogue” is “a child of perdition.” 44 At the same time, this attack on Spinoza represents the first time that a Jewish atheist became the target of anti-­Semitic prejudice. Traditionally,

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Christian anti-­Judaism since ancient times had attacked Jews for remaining faithful to Judaism, for “stubbornly” holding fast to their religion and commandments, for not converting to Christ and Chris­tian­ity or undergoing baptism. The prob­lem with Jews, according to centuries of Christian anti-­ Judaism, was that they remained Jewish.45 Every­one knew that Spinoza had been banned and expelled by the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Wachter refers to him as an ex-­Jew (“Ex-­Judaeus”) and considers him godless. He brands Spinoza an atheist, and he holds Judaism (“Jüdenthumb”) and Kabbalah responsible for producing a Jewish atheist. We see ­here in Wachter’s polemic a new type of anti-­Jewish prejudice: the worst ­thing about Judaism was no longer its religious obduracy and the fact that Jews remained faithful to the Jewish religion. Instead, Wachter complains that the truly abysmal ­thing about Judaism is that it produces atheistic Jews like Spinoza. By accusing Spinoza of Jewish atheism, Wachter creates the prototype for a new, modern anti-­Semitic bogeyman: the Jewish atheist. This ste­reo­t ype has persisted for centuries. In the twentieth ­century, anti-­Semites believed that the descendants of ­these “Jewish atheists” ­were the godless “Jewish revolutionaries” of the Communist Soviet Union. In his introduction to the 1994 reprint of Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, Winfried Schröder asserts that Wachter was a ­free thinker and rationalist, rather than an anti-­Jewish polemicist and defender of Christian theology like the Hebraist and proto-­a nti-­Semite Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654– 1704). Like Wachter, Eisenmenger was active around 1700. He published his major work Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Unmasked) in 1711. Schröder argues that in his attack on Moses and the Torah, Wachter disavows the Old Testament as a Christian source to such an extent that he deliberately tears down an entire pillar of the Christian Bible and Christian doctrine.46 Pious Christian readers of his work such as Jacobi overlooked the fact that Wachter adopts the position of a theological naturalism that rejects the particularistic claims of, for example, both Jews and Calvinists to the same degree. They also ignored the fact that Wachter undermines the belief in revelation, in Judaism as well as in Chris­tian­ity, by referring to natu­ral knowledge of God and morality. However, Wachter’s rationalism does not make his polemic against Judaism any less violent, harsh, or dangerous. It likely made no tangible difference to the Jews who lived during Wachter’s day ­whether it was a knowledgeable Christian Hebraist like Eisenmenger or a radical, philosophically educated deist such as Wachter who was responsible for shaping and disseminating anti-­Semitic prejudices, making fun of Jews and their religion,



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slandering them, and declaring their faith null and void and godless. ­Either way, this kind of rhe­toric contributed to Jews getting hurt or even killed. While the Christian kabbalists, Knorr von Rosenroth being a prime example, saw the Kabbalah as the bridge between Judaism and Chris­tian­ity, a key to both Holy Scriptures, Wachter, however, viewed Kabbalah as the dividing line between the Jewish and Christian understanding of God, reproaching it with an accusation of godlessness. Wachter’s polemical combination of Kabbalah and Spinozism, which consciously ignores Spinoza’s own explicit and sharp rejection of Kabbalah in the Tractatus theologico-­politicus,47 has preoccupied the reception of and scholarship on Spinoza well into the twentieth ­century. For Wachter, Spinoza’s thought and philosophy stems not from the Cartesian but rather the kabbalistic tradition. Not only Jacobi, Herder, and Schelling, but also some of the main thinkers responsible for the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, followed in Wachter’s wake.48 The misleading association between Kabbalah and Spinozism has rightly provoked many knowledgeable readers to disagree, but it nevertheless significantly influenced the reception of Kabbalah in the Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment. And this occurred, despite the fact that Wachter was not proficient in Hebrew and was incapable of reading the kabbalistic sources in the original. Incidentally, complete ignorance of Jewish source texts is another characteristic that distinguishes Wachter from Eisenmenger. While Eisenmenger distorts Jewish sources, Wachter simply ignores them. What Wachter knew about the Kabbalah and its authors, he drew from Knorr von Rosenroth. Wachter explic­itly abuses Knorr, against his ­will, as it w ­ ere, as a key source for a new form of anti-­Judaism. Wachter made generous use of the Kabbala Denudata as a collection of sources to help him identify the Kabbalah. He concedes that Knorr’s magnum opus exposes the “whores’ writings” (Huren = stücke) of the Kabbalah from the Jewish authors’ own and unadulterated sources, for the ostensible benefit of the Christian reader.49 Wachter in turn translated Knorr’s Latin translations of original Hebrew and Aramaic texts into German whenever necessary. Spinoza’s doctrine of God and cosmogony, which appears in the first part of his 1677 Ethics and pre­sents the idea of an immanent development of the one infinite divine substance, occupied a key position in Wachter’s criticism of Spinozism. For this reason, Wachter selected passages from the Lurianic Kabbalah in Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata that deal with Ein-­Sof and its inner development prior to the creation of the world. In his search for parallels between the Kabbalah and Spinoza’s doctrine of God, Wachter came across the doctrine

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of zimzum, as described in Knorr’s Latin translation of Chayyim Vital’s description of the pro­cess of zimzum from the Sefer ha-­Derushim and passages from Herrera’s Porta Coelorum. He then translates ­these passages related to zimzum, Adam Kadmon, and the emanation of the sefirot into German to support his general thesis that the Kabbalah, like Spinoza, denies the extra-­ worldliness of God and therefore conceives of the world as an immanent unfolding of the one infinite divine substance, called Ein-­Sof in Kabbalah. The first German translation of Chayyim Vital’s description of zimzum owes its origin to Johann Georg Wachter’s polemical accusation that Judaism fails to recognize the extra-­worldliness and transcendence of the Creator God and instead deifies the pre­sent and vis­i­ble world of the creature.50 To prove this accusation, Wachter quotes Knorr von Rosenroth’s Latin translations from texts of the Lurianic Kabbalah, including Vital’s description of the zimzum pro­cess from the Sefer ha-­Derushim and Herrera’s philosophical interpretation of this pro­cess, which appears in Knorr’s translation and summary. Wachter employs this quotation to substantiate his analogy between Spinoza’s basic idea that God is an infinitely extended substance that develops immanently and unfolds itself as a natu­ral substance, and Ein-­Sof, the infinite of the Lurianic Kabbalah, where “God [is] simply every­thing [. . .] in the primordial state [im vorwell = tigen Stand].”51 In the works of Spinoza and in the Kabbalah, which Wachter equates with Judaism, he believes that nature and the world are and remain part of the infinite divine substance. He is concerned that ­there is never a separation between God and nature/ world, between transcendence and the mortal world, heavenly and earthly. However, nature/world remains divine without this separation and differentiation. In other words, the world is deified ­because it remains part of the divine substance, as Wachter’s subheading “Deified World” (Vergötterte Welt) postulates. This is the argument that Wachter intends to prove with the zimzum quotations from Knorr’s The Kabbalah Unveiled. Wachter first quotes Knorr’s text in Latin and then adds his German translation. Chayyim Vital’s description of zimzum from the Sefer ha-­Derushim, cited by Wachter as the writing of “Lorja,” reads as follows in his German translation: Wisse / daß ehe die Ausflüsse ausgeflossen / und die Geschöpffe geschaffen worden sind das höchste Licht in unendliche Weiten ausgespannet war / und alle mögliche örther anfüllete / so daß in demselben Licht kein leerer Orth / noch lediger und lichtloser



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Raum erschien / sondern alles voll Lichtes des Unendlichen schimmerte darumb daß sonst nichts war als ein unendlich ausgespantes Licht auf allen seiten sich selbsten gleich / und dasselbe Licht hieß das Ensophisch Licht / oder das Licht des Unendlichen. Nachdem es aber diesem Ausgespannten ins Gemüth kam / eine Welt zu schaffen / und durch seine Beströhmung die Ausflüsse hervorzubringen / und die Vollkommenheit seiner würckenden Kräfften / Nahmen und Zunahmen / zu offenbahren (welches die Bewegungs­ ursache der Schöpfung der Welt war;) So hat dasselbe Licht sich irgendswo an einem gewesen Punct geöffnet / und von demselben als dem Mittelpunct rundumb getrennet / und an die seiten ausgewichen / so daß ein leerer Orth / der lichtlose Raum genandt / davon entstünde / der auff allen Seiten gleich weit von seinem Mittelpunct / da das Licht anfänglich sich trennete / abgelegen war. Nach dieser Zusammenziehung und Entfaltung des Göttlichen Lichtes / durch welche mitten in dem vollen Infinito eine Ledigkeit gelassen wurde / war solchergestalt schon ein Raum gemacht / in welchem die Ausflüsse / Geschöpffe / formierungen / und Wercke existieren konten. Derhalben hat das Infinitum eine gewisse Linie erschaffen / die von dem Licht ihres Concavi, von den öbersten Theilen zu den untersten reiche / und hat sie geleitet und hernieder gelassen in das erst besagte spatium. Das oberste Theil dieser Linie war abgeleitet von dem Infinito selbst / welches es auch zu nähst berührte: Die anderen Theile reichten unterwarts durch den leeren Raum / und vermittelst dieser Emanation hat das Infinitum hervor gebracht / geschaffen / formiert / und gemacht alle Welten. Diese Linea vertratt die Stelle eines Canals / durch welche die Ströhme des obersten und unendlichen Lichtes in die Welten innerhalb diesem spatio abfliessen möchten.52 [Know / that before the emanations emanated / and living beings ­were created, the highest light was stretched out into infinite vastness / and filled all pos­si­ble places / so that in the same light no empty space / nor single and lightless space appeared / but every­ thing full of light of the Infinite shimmered / so that nothing e­ lse but an infinitely stretched out light on all sides was equal to itself / and the same light was called the Ensophic Light / or the Light of the Infinite. But ­after it occurred to this Unharnessed Light / to

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create a world / and to bring forth the emanations / and to reveal the perfection of his potent powers / names and attributes / (which was the cause of the movement of the creation of the world;) Thus the same light opened itself somewhere at one point / and separated from that point all around as the central point / and retreated to the sides / so that an empty space / called the lightless space / would be created / which would be on all sides equidistant from its central point / ­because the light separated itself in the beginning. ­After this contraction and unfolding of the Divine Light / through which a detachment was left in the ­middle of the full Infinito / a space was already made in this way / in which the emanations / living beings / formations / and works could exist. For this reason, the Infinitum created a certain line / which stretched from the light of its Concavi, from the highest parts to the lowest parts / and guided it down into the aforementioned spatium. The uppermost part of this line was derived from the Infinito itself / which it also in turn touched: The other parts reached downward through the empty space / and by way of this emanation, the Infinitum brought forth / created / formed / and made all worlds. This linea represented the site of a channel / through which the currents of the supreme and infinite light enter the worlds within this spatio.] ­ ecause this excerpt is not self-­explanatory, Wachter immediately follows B Herrera’s philosophical interpretation (like Knorr, he names the author as “Irira”) and translates Knorr’s shortened summary according to Herrera into German: In dem 12. Cap. wird von der Zusammenziehung des Unendlichen gehandelt von welchem gesagt wird / daß es durch dieselbe seinen zukünfftigen Geschöpffen einen orth gemacht / und in demselben einen Fußstapffen seiner hinterlassen habe / welcher seye der Sitz und das Gefäß des darein zugiessenden Lichtes / aus welchem hernach Adam Kadmon geworden ist / und vermittelst desselben die übrigen Wesen. Insonderheit wird hier erkläret / was dieser Urplatz eigentlich seye nemblich eine allervollkomneste substanz, die erste Creatur / welche das Maß ist aller anderer Wesen / und der General-­ raum aller Cörper. In diesen Raum habe Ensoph sein Licht und Krafft hinein gegossen / und denselben also formieret und vollstän-



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dig gemacht. So daß Adam Kadmon, die erste Creatur des Unendlichen / seiner Existenz und Wesen nach nichts anderes sey / als derselbe Raum / und das in denselben gegossene Licht.53 [Ch. 12 is about the contraction of the Infinite, which is said / that through this very contraction it created a place for its ­f uture living beings / and in it left a footprint of itself / which is the seat and the vessel of the light pouring into it / from which Adam Kadmon was created ­after / and all other beings through the very same Adam Kadmon. ­Here, it is explained in par­tic­u­lar / what this primordial place actually is, namely, an all-­perfect substance, the first creature / which is the mea­sure of all other beings / and the general space of all bodies. Into this space, Ein-­Sof poured its light and power / and thus formed and made this space complete. So that Adam Kadmon, the first creature of the Infinite / would be in its existence and essence nothing ­else other than the same space / and the light poured into that space.] To better explain ­these two quotations, Wachter then also provides visualization, inserting a black and white repre­sen­ta­tion of zimzum, bound into the printed book edition between pages 86 and 87 (Figure 14). This illustration shows the concave, dark interior (“Epistomium concavi”) in the midst of the infinite divine light (“Lux Infiniti”), in which the ten circular sefirot clearly stand out, connected to the straight line of light that extends from the top to the center of the black, lightless vacuum. As the text below the illustration states, the first man, Adam Kadmon, is ostensibly depicted ­here, “in the belly of the Infinite along with the ten source spirits [Kwel-­geistern], according to the description of R. Lorja in the book Drushim.”54 Following the two quotations, Wachter summarizes the entire pro­cess of zimzum once again with his own hypotheses and concludes that Adam Kadmon, the primordial man who developed in zimzum, is not a creature created by God, but merely a modification of the divine substance: “From this figure it is clear and obvious / that Adam Kadmon is not actually a creature with its own name / but merely a modification of the divine substance.”55 The same applies to the worlds that emerge from Adam Kadmon. They, too, are not a separate creation from the Creator, but merely modified divine substance. Wachter simply chooses to ignore the passages from Lurianic texts in Knorr’s work that deviate or possibly lend themselves to an alternative

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Figure 14. First depiction of zimzum in a German-­language book: Johann Georg Wachter, Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (Amsterdam, 1699), supplement, inserted between pages 86 and 87. The ten sefirot are drawn as ten white (light) rings in a round, lightless black vacuum as the midst of the light of Ein-­Sof (“Lux Infiniti”). The sefirot are fed with light from the infinite light of Ein-­Sof by the rod-­shaped Adam Kadmon.

interpretation. Even Knorr’s Latin summaries of Herrera gloss over and omit Herrera’s decisive distinctions between Ein-­Sof and Or Ein-­Sof, emanator and emanations, between unchanging divine substance and the contracting light. In this re­spect, Wachter’s interpretation of precisely ­these passages does not strike the reader as implausible: Both the Kabbalah and Spinoza seem to argue that the world is only a modification of the one infinite substance of God. Wachter does not call this pantheism per se, but Jacobi ­later does. But Wachter sharpens his interpretation of the Lurianic Kabbalah in the sense of his general thesis of the deification of the world even further: If the world is only a modification of the divine substance, then it remains



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divine. It ­will then be deified, he fears. The otherworldliness of God, a foundation of Jewish and Christian orthodoxy, dis­appears. But if we believe that, Wachter argues, that would be atheism. Using ­these premises, Wachter generalizes the Kabbalah, equating it with Judaism. He then conflates the Lurianic Kabbalah with the philosophy of the godless Spinoza in detail. He joins the pro­cess of zimzum with a superficial interpretation of natura naturans in the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics, thus creating the cliché of Atheisterey (atheism) in Judaism. The intention that underpins Kabbala Denudata is thus turned upside down. The Kabbalah is no longer the ancient wisdom that connects Judaism and Chris­tian­ity. Wachter distorts Kabbalah, making it the core of atheism in Judaism. This “atheism” is, Wachter argues, what separates Judaism from true Chris­tian­ity. Zimzum must enter the eigh­teenth ­century saddled with the burden of this anti-­Jewish ste­reo­t ype. The popularization of the Lurianic Kabbalah through compilation, translation, and distribution in print allows Christians to access and study it, but it also allows Jews and Judaism to be abused and tangibly defamed.

Johann Franz Budde: In Defense of the Kabbalah Within a year of the publication of Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, Johann Franz Budde immediately challenged Wachter’s thesis defaming the Kabbalah. Johann Franz Budde (1667–1729), professor of philosophy and theologian from Halle, Germany, wrote his works Defensio Cabalae Hebraeorum contra auctores quosdam modernos (1700) and the Dissertatio philosophica de Spinozismo ante Spinozam (1701) in defense of Judaism and the Kabbalah. In ­these short writings, Budde, equipped with a solid knowledge of both Spinoza and the Kabbalah, confronts accusations of atheism against the Kabbalah and sharply criticizes Wachter and his compilation.56 Although Budde’s challenge did not dampen the success of Wachter’s book Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, it nonetheless provoked Wachter to revise his thesis during his lifetime. In his Latin Elucidarius Cabalisticus, completed in 1702 and published first in 1706, he attempts, in opposition to Budde’s thesis that Kabbalah and Spinoza have nothing in common,57 to rescue his equating Spinoza with Kabbalah by altering his portrayal of Spinoza’s philosophy. He argues that only Spinoza’s readers would have assumed that he equated nature and God. In his concept of nature presented in Ethics (Pars I, Prop. 29, Scholium), Spinoza draws a

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distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. According to Wachter, Spinoza ruptures the equation of God with nature, thus initiating the idea that ­there was a difference between cause and effect, creator and creature, God and world.58 Without a real working knowledge of the Kabbalah, Wachter uses his Elucidarius Cabalisticus to retract his accusation that the Kabbalah deified the world and recuperates Spinoza by claiming that Spinoza intended to understand the one infinite substance spiritually rather than materially. Spinoza, and the Kabbalah by association, thus becomes a kind of “metaphysics of the spirit” (Geistmetaphysik).59 With this emendation in Wachter’s approach, zimzum no longer plays any role for him. In contrast to Wachter, Johann Franz Budde, his prominent critic, had knowledge and farther-­reaching interest in the Kabbalah. In his Introductio ad Historiam Philosophiae Ebraeorum (Halle, 1702), he briefly reprimands Wachter again but does not portray Spinoza as a Jewish phi­los­o­pher in this four-­hundred-­page history of the entirety of Jewish philosophy from its beginnings to the pre­sent. The Kabbalah, on the other hand, plays an integral part of Budde’s account of the history of Hebrew philosophy. The text begins with the thought, morals, and writings of biblical figures such as Enoch, Samuel, and Moses. Budde continues, discussing the rabbis of the Talmud, such as Rabbi Akiba and his disciple Shimon bar Yochai, the pos­si­ble author of the Zohar. He also includes a discussion of the Sefer HaBahir and Pirke Avot, as well as famous Jewish phi­los­o­phers of the ­Middle Ages such as Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, Hasdai Crescas, Joseph Albo, and the kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla. In the next two hundred pages of the book, Budde briefly discusses the Christian Kabbalah, including the figures of Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, and Henry More. He then arrives at Luria, providing a detailed description of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the sefirot, the parzufim, as well as zimzum, all of which is based on Kabbala Denudata as his primary source. Characteristic of Budde’s portrayal is that he makes no distinction in his history of philosophy between biblical and Talmudic thought, nor between medieval Aristotelianism and Kabbalah. He counts all of this indiscriminately as Jewish philosophy, Philosophia Ebraeorum. In this re­spect, Budde follows the tradition of Pico della Mirandola and the philosophia perennis. Unlike Pico or even Knorr von Rosenroth, however, Budde no longer treats the doctrines of the Kabbalah and Jewish philosophy as eternal and everlasting truths. Instead, he arranges this information chronologically, placing Jewish thought on a timeline. H ­ ere in Budde’s Introductio ad Historiam Philosophiae Ebraeorum, Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah, categorized as an aspect of Judaism,



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become for the first time the subject of history. ­Here, Jewish philosophy and the Kabbalah are historicized. Zimzum is merely a detail in this history of Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah. On its own, it does not interest Budde at all. From Kabbala Denudata, Budde meticulously quotes and reproduces the two longer Latin passages from Knorr’s translation of the Sefer ha-­Derushim and from Herrera (which Wachter had previously quoted and translated into German). Budde offers his readers the realistic description of the zimzum pro­cess found in the Sefer ha-­Derushim60 as well as Herrera’s interpretation.61 He pre­sents this information in a straightforward manner as a quotation from Kabbala Denudata, citing volume and page numbers precisely and without additional comment. Budde is only ­really intrigued by the emanation of Adam Kadmon. Once more, he quotes The Kabbalah Unveiled when he recounts how Henry More interpreted Adam Kadmon from the Sefer ha-­Drushim as Christ, the second person of the Trinity.62 Additionally, Budde gives a much broader account of Knorr’s reaction to More, which appears in the second volume of The Kabbalah Unveiled. In the treatise De Revolutionibus Animarum (On the Transmigration of Souls), Knorr presented Adam Kadmon not simply as the Messiah, but as the “Animam Messiae,” the “Soul of the Messiah.”63 The immaterial world of souls, the souls of angels, as well as ­those of ­humans, emanate from Adam Kadmon, just like all the lower worlds. In Budde’s portrayal, Adam Kadmon is something like the first created Neoplatonic primordial soul, or world soul, a thought that Herrera had already touched on. For Knorr, the soul of the Messiah is this world soul. For the Christian kabbalist Knorr, the creation of souls and their emanation through the “soul of the Messiah,” through Adam Kadmon, also implies their redemption. Thus, the world soul is Christianized. Budde, however, does not contemplate or develop this further, but only quotes it.64

Johann Jakob Brucker: Zimzum in the Critical History of Philosophy With Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770), zimzum became the subject of the modern historiography of philosophy. He traces, differentiates, and deepens Budde’s historicization of Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah. When he composed his major work Historia critica philosophiae, published in Leipzig in 1742–1744, Brucker was a Protestant pastor in Kaufbeuren and rector of the

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Latin school ­there. His Historia critica philosophiae comprises five volumes and an appendix totaling more than six thousand pages, which Brucker wrote entirely on his own. This was an enormous task and remains even ­today an unsurpassed scholarly achievement.65 In this massive work, Brucker endeavors to tell the story of all philosophies known at the time, from antiquity to the pre­sent. He does not, however, write the history of philosophy from Ionia to Jena (Germany), that is, from the ancient Greeks to German idealism, which Hegel made customary in the nineteenth ­century. The tradition of connecting ancient with German philosophy ­later culminated in Heidegger’s preposterous dictum that ­g reat thought could only be found in Greek or German. In contrast, Brucker pre­sents historical-­critical philosophical historio­ graphy, all philosophies, regardless of their religious or national origin and regardless of their age, as principally equal. Brucker is, however, better acquainted with the newer Eu­ro­pean phi­los­o­phers. He begins with the philosophy of the ancient Hebrews, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Scythians, and Greeks, continues with the philosophy of the Romans, then the skeptics, Neoplatonism and neo-­Aristotelianism, Jewish and Arabic philosophy of the ­Middle Ages, the philosophy of the church f­athers in the East and West, scholasticism, the Re­nais­sance, the Reformation, as well as modern times, from Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, Thomasius, Leibniz to Christian Wolff. Additionally, he touches upon the “philosophia exotica” of the Chinese, Japa­nese, and Canadian First Nation ­peoples, as well as the phi­ los­o­phers of Cambridge Neoplatonism and con­temporary theosophy. In this compendium of all philosophy, Brucker portrays many ­things disproportionately, sometimes in strange and incorrect ways, but he does not judge any philosophical tradition: no philosophy is too meager, too strange, or too insignificant to be included and analyzed. Brucker aspires to thoroughness and fastidiousness. He had an extremely broad concept of philosophy, presenting the history of philosophy as a very broad field of study. Every­thing that has ever been thought of and handed down in writing anywhere in the world has a place in this compendium, if verifiable by source evidence. As the title presages, Brucker writes the history of philosophy with the critical historical claim of the Enlightenment philosopher—­that is, he reads and quotes the written sources in the original when he can. In instances when this is not pos­si­ble, he relies on scholarly books and reports written about the ideas of other thinkers and ancient ­peoples, if they appear reliable to him. All of this unfolds with a detailed and critically verifiable footnote



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system, with sources cited, and long indexes. For the Kabbalah, which he classifies ­under Jewish philosophy as Budde did before him, Brucker relies mainly on Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata. This is also how zimzum makes its way into the modern history of philosophy. Brucker inherits the practice of classifying Kabbalah as Jewish philosophy from the Christian Kabbalah since the time of Pico della Mirandola. He is familiar with and quotes the Christian kabbalists.66 But he clearly changes the taxonomy of Jewish philosophy that had previously dominated the works of Knorr and Budde, by distinguishing in Jewish philosophy since the ­Middle Ages between exoteric and esoteric Jewish philosophy. He classifies the Kabbalah as “philosophia Iudaeorum esoterica, sive cabbalistica,”67 while Maimonides and Judah Halevi represent in his view the “philosophia Iudaeorum exoterica.”68 This taxonomy has had long-­term and wide-­reaching effects on the scholarship of Judaism. What Brucker classifies as exoteric Jewish philosophy is considered by Julius Guttmann in the twentieth ­century to be the philosophy of Judaism,69 namely, the rationalist religious-­philosophical tradition of Jewish Platonists, Aristotelians, Hegelians, and Kantians from Philo via Judah Halevi and Maimonides to Franz Rosenzweig, which Guttmann clearly distinguishes from the Kabbalah as esotericism and mysticism. ­After the Hebrew University was founded in Jerusalem, Julius Guttmann became the first academic chair of exoteric Jewish philosophy ­there, while Gershom Scholem was appointed to the newly created chair for the study of Kabbalah. Exoteric Jewish philosophy and esoteric Kabbalah ­were thus separated not only taxonomically but also institutionally as separate fields of research and teaching. While Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata ­shaped the interpretation of the Kabbalah as “Doctrina Hebraeorum Transcendentalis et Metaphysica” simply omitting medieval Jewish metaphysicians such as Ibn Gabirol and Maimonides, Brucker introduces in his history of philosophy a distinction between exoteric and esoteric philosophy for the first time. He counts the Kabbalah as esoteric philosophy. For this reason, zimzum shifts from exoteric to the field of esoteric Jewish philosophy. Brucker had no par­tic­u­lar interest in zimzum per se, but rather in Adam Kadmon. For him, the creation of Adam Kadmon, which zimzum makes pos­si­ble, is the first and most impor­tant dogma of the kabbalistic system, ­because Adam Kadmon is the first man and Son of God. Brucker describes the creation of Adam Kadmon, using Luria as source, and, like Wachter and Budde before him, draws his description, precisely quoted and with precise

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page numbers given in the critical apparatus, from Knorr von Rosenroth’s Latin translations of the Sefer ha-­Derushim and the Porta Coelorum of “Irira” (Luria) in Kabbala Denudata. Brucker’s description of zimzum begins with a Latin paraphrase of Knorr’s translation of the “libri Druschim.” The footnote for this work contains an inconspicuous reference to the German translation of this passage in Wachter’s Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, also cited with the exact page number: “Priusquam emanarent emanantia et creata essent creata, lux suprema extensa fuit plenissime, et implevit omne ubi.”70 He then argues in a scholarly digression (“excursus”) that this kabbalistic doctrine of divine fullness, the pleroma, had parallels in ancient Alexandrian and Oriental philosophy. Following this digression, Brucker returns to the topic of zimzum. He contends that without the weakening of the extremely power­f ul shine of light, neither the world nor anything ­else could have come into being. This is why the “Or Haën-­Soph,” or “Lux infiniti,” withdrew its light from a point in its center, leaving ­behind a somehow empty place (“sic relictus est locus quidam vacuus”). The kabbalists, he says, call this contraction zimzum (“Hanc contractionem Cabbalistae vocant Zimzum”).71 In the empty space created by zimzum, a line emanates like a channel through which light falls downward into the darkness. Light flows out of this channel in the form of ten circular sefirot. The line then takes on a human-­like shape, and this shape with its limbs is called Adam (“Haec figura vocatur Adam, id est homo”). Adam Kadmon, according to Brucker, is the macrocosm, the first-­risen Son of God, the first creature, the first emanation, and the first created ­thing, which contains all other primary ­causes of creation within itself.72 Brucker follows up his description and characterization of Adam Kadmon with a graphic repre­sen­ta­tion of the dark space emptied by zimzum amid the white light of Ein-­Sof, in which the channel of light and the ten sefirot emanating from it appear brightly on a darkly shaded background. The name “Adam Kadmon” is inscribed in the channel, but other­wise the picture has no captions. Brucker’s illustration resembles the pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of zimzum that we find in Wachter. A ­ fter the illustration, Brucker, once again quoting the “liber Drushim,” according to Knorr, describes how the four lower worlds emanate out of Adam Kadmon. Brucker explains the emanation of divine light from the skull, eyes, nose, ears, and beard of Adam Kadmon as portrayed in the Sefer ha-­Drushim as a purely symbolic narrative that a phi­los­o­pher need not take literally. But then how is the figure of



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Adam Kadmon to be understood? Brucker explains that this figure, following the example of what we have now come to know as the prevailing Christian Kabbalah interpretation of Adam Kadmon, represents Christ, the second hypostasis of the Trinity. Brucker quotes the Christian creed, “Filium Dei unigenitum,” the only begotten Son of God through whom every­thing was created (“Per quem omnia facta sunt”), the “mediator” between the infinite God, the world, and ­humans. According to Brucker, this is how Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, Henry More, and Budde interpreted Adam Kadmon.73 But Brucker also brings up Wachter’s objections to the Christianizing of Adam Kadmon in Elucidarius Cabalisticus.74 Using the rhetorical tools of Christian Trinity theology, Wachter had argued that Christ was the second person of the Trinity, and according to the Christian creed, a being that exists with the ­Father (“consubstantialem Patri”). Adam Kadmon, however, cannot be said to exist within Ein-­Sof following the act of zimzum. The Lurianic Kabbalah describes Adam Kadmon as an emanation of the highest emanator, as the induced, not the first cause, as a creature made by the Creator. ­Here, Brucker hints at the possibility of a discrepancy with the Christian kabbalists without explic­itly distancing himself, hiding ­behind Wachter’s arguments. His counterargument is to understand Adam Kadmon as the Log­os from the Alexandrian philosophy of Philo, the Word and the world reason born of God. It was easier for Brucker to reconcile Adam Kadmon with this concept than with the Trinity doctrine.75 Brucker soberly states in his summary of the Kabbalah chapter in the Historia critica philosophiae that the Christian teachings of the Trinity, of Christ as Creator and Mediator and other Christian dogmas are not contained or developed in the Kabbalah.76 The Enlightenment phi­los­o­pher Brucker thus renders judgment of the Christian Kabbalah: the assertions about Christian teachings allegedly contained in the Kabbalah do not stand up to critical historical, philosophical investigation. Following his discussion of Adam Kadmon, Brucker’s history of philosophy also turns to other topics related to the Lurianic Kabbalah. Using The Kabbalah Unveiled as a point of departure and with the aid of pictorial repre­sen­ta­tions, he describes for twenty pages (!) the doctrine of the sefirot.77 He then turns his attention to the doctrine of the four worlds,78 as well as the doctrine of the angels, spirits, and parzufim,79 and the souls and the doctrine of the transmigration of souls in the Kabbalah. At the end, he praises the newer, Lurianic Kabbalah, which he argues is much more clearly

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Figure 15. Repre­sen­ta­tion of the ten sefirot with their Latin name, depicted as circles filling the vacuum created by zimzum and surrounded by the light of Ein-­Sof. In the center, we see the “Mundus materialis,” the earthly world. From Johann Jakob Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1742), 1020.

written and philosophically understandable than the occult works of the older Kabbalah, such as the Sefer Yezirah, Sefer HaBahir, and the Zohar.80 But we must, and ­here he speaks directly and expressly in opposition to Wachter, absolve the Kabbalah of the accusation of atheism.81 The enlightened philosophical historian Brucker thus acquits the Kabbalah of the charge of atheism.



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Friedrich Christoph Oetinger: Kabbalah and Pietism The Württemberg Pietist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782) read Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata while studying theology at the Tübinger Stift (Protestant seminary located in the southern German university town of Tübingen), as he notes in his handwritten autobiography, which was only published posthumously.82 It may well be that reading Knorr’s work awakened his interest in the Kabbalah, ­because during his student years in Tübingen (1722–1727), Oetinger, in addition to his intensive study of Jacob Böhme and the church ­fathers, emphasized the study of Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible, and rabbinical lit­er­a­ture. As a student, he read the works of Joseph Albo, Abrabanel, Saadia Gaon, and Bahya ibn Paquda. The difficult task of reading the Zohar even prompted him to seek out Jewish teachers who could introduce him to the kabbalistic “Fontes.”83 Oetinger completed his studies, during which he was deeply immersed in the works of Leibniz, Malebranche, and Christian Wolff. ­After finishing, he was undecided about searching for a pastorate in Swabia. Instead, he journeyed north to Frankfurt am Main in 1729. ­There, he visited the Frankfurt city councilman Fende. A friend whom Oetinger knew through letter correspondence had introduced him to Fende. ­There, in the councilman’s home, the wealthy, unmarried Maria Catherina Schütz, the highly educated “Maiden Schützin” ( Jung fer Schützin) who was well known and well connected in the city of Frankfurt, gave Oetinger, much to his delight, a copy of The Kabbalah Unveiled, which was difficult to obtain at the time. Fende asked Oetinger to stay and put him in touch with Koppel Hecht, the most learned Frankfurt kabbalist at the time: “Councilman Fende brought to me the most learned kabbalist, the Jew Coppel Hecht. He won me over with unusual questions from Jewish philosophy, asking me what Arikh Anpin [Extended Countenance] and Ze’eir Anpin [Lesser Countenance] was in God. When I visited him, it was Sukkot (Feast of the Tabernacles). He demonstrated to me chronologically and talmudically using the rarest of sources, that Plato had been the disciple of Jeremiah and had gotten his fundamental ideas from him. I thanked God for this act of Providence.”84 The Kabbalah was, according to Oetinger, an equally impor­tant effort on the part of both Jews and Christians to find the right interpretation of the Word of God. Meeting a teacher like Koppel Hecht seemed to him an “act of Providence” (Schickung). Hecht instructed Oetinger for several weeks, and he thanked God for having met this Jewish teacher:

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“I loved him more and more,” writes Oetinger.85 We have no extant works by or biographical details for Koppel Hecht, but we can see from Oetinger’s brief description how close and friendly the social contact was and how unbiased the religious dialogue between the tolerant Christians and the kabbalists in Frankfurt in fact was. Both sides clearly accepted the idea that the Jewish interlocutor was on equal footing with the Christian in conversation, representing the Jewish position in relation to the Christian one, and that ­these religious differences could be allowed to persist. This tolerance even applied to the old controversies of the doctrine of the Trinity and the messiahship of Jesus as the second person of the Trinity: “He spoke: Let berutha, vehi rajah, Maelaekh hamashiakh: ­there is no division of persons in God, the Messiah is not to be understood as the second person; the proof is the King Messiah. In the Zohar, He is indeed higher than the olam azilut, higher than the emanated world, but He is at all times called the King Messiah in the kabbalistic sense, not as the second person.”86 From Frankfurt, Oetinger first traveled to Jena in the autumn of 1729, and from ­there he continued on to Halle. Halle had become a Eu­ro­pean center of Christian Hebrew studies, but also of the Pietist mission to the Jews, following the establishment of the Institutum Judaicum et Muhammedicum by Johann Heinrich Callenberg in 1728. Oetinger spent about half a year in Halle, studied Kabbalah ­there, and bought an expensive hand-­ copied manuscript of Sefer Ez Chayyim by Chayyim Vital, which was not yet available in print at that time. He writes: “I learned with a kabbalist, a Jew in Halle, studied the book Ez Chayyim, bought the expensive manuscript, and turned all my thoughts to the Philosophiam Sacram Cabbalisticam.”87 ­After describing his intensive study of the Kabbalah with a Jewish teacher in Halle, Oetinger’s autobiography falls ­silent on the subject of the Christian Hebraists and Old Testament scholars in Halle and Jena. In May 1730, he set off for Herrnhut to visit Count Zinzendorf and the pietistic Herrnhut Brethren Church. ­After a short sojourn ­there, he traveled to Berleburg, the center of radical Pietism in northern Germany, and fi­nally returned to Tübingen in 1730. For years, Oetinger made a living as a highly educated lecturer at the Tübinger Stift. He remained a theology teacher at the seminary, as he had theological reservations about taking on a pastoral position. On a second extended journey from 1733 to 1735, he returned to Herrnhut, where he attempted for months in vain to teach Greek and Hebrew to the charismatic Zinzendorf, so that the count might read the Holy



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Scriptures in the original. But the Pietists in Herrnhut preferred to listen to the count’s spiritual songs rather than read the Bible.88 Oetinger then journeyed to northern Germany and the Netherlands. On a third extended journey from 1735 to 1737, Oetinger met Johann Georg Wachter, who was by that time an el­derly man, in Leipzig. Oetinger engaged him in animated yet moderate conversation about Spinoza, Spinozism, and the Kabbalah. They talked about how to “give the Spinozist system a tolerable meaning.”89 A deep interest in Kabbalah remained a constant in Oetinger’s theological thought and writings throughout his life, even ­after he accepted a position as pastor in Hirsau in 1739, married, and started a large ­family. He drew his knowledge not only from the manuals of Knorr, Budde, and Brucker, but he also studied and bought original copies of kabbalistic texts. And he learned Kabbalah directly from kabbalists, which made him an exception. In the eigh­teenth ­century, at least in Germany, ­there was no more knowledgeable and learned Christian kabbalist than Oetinger. But one ­thing distinguished Oetinger from the old Christian Kabbalah. He no longer considers kabbalistic doctrines such as zimzum to be philosophoumena from the philosophia perennis, but instead builds them into his theological writings and sermons as specifically Jewish theologoumena. For him, they no longer constitute philosophical world wisdom but are Jewish religious truths that also have meaning for pious Christian ­people. We find comments on the doctrine of zimzum in Oetinger’s most famous works. However, he does not describe the pro­cess of zimzum as he knew it from Vital’s description or Kabbala Denudata. He does not recount the details of the zimzum pro­cess, but it is clear that he conceives of zimzum as a theological figure of thought. He abandoned the idea of a philosophia sacra cabbalistica, but he heaps considerable praise on zimzum as an impor­tant theological component. Oetinger defines zimzum as “the contraction of God in himself, so that he could create,”90 in his book Öffentliches Denckmal der Lehrtafel einer weyl. Wirttembergischen Prinzessin Antonia, published in 1763. Oetinger’s book offers an analy­sis of the baroque allegorical kabbalistic triptych that depicts, among other ­things, Princess Antonia of Württemberg (1613–1679), also known as the “Minerva of Württemberg.” She designed and commissioned the instructional panel (Lehrtafel), painted in oil around 1660. Princess Antonia was herself a kabbalistic scholar and could

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read Hebrew. The painting can still be seen t­ oday in the Protestant Trinity Church in Bad Teinach, located in the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. In Oetinger’s day, the painting served as an altarpiece. He had reasonable access to study this work in detail ­because he lived in neighboring Hirsau. In his book on the subject, Oetinger pre­sents zimzum as a kabbalistic doctrine of creation theology. But for Oetinger, zimzum has more than just a creation-­theological meaning, it also plays an entirely new Trinity-­theological role in his official, church-­approved theological “Dogmatik,” the 1765 Latin Theologia ex idea vitae deducta. In this text, Oetinger conceives of God himself as an eternal life, rather than the eternal, unmoving mover, as philosophy since the time of Aristotle had understood him. In this work, Oetinger endeavors to derive his entire theology from this idea of God living, moving, and developing from eternity and in eternity. He argues: “God himself is an indissoluble life [. . .], not a resting being, but progressing from one point of manifestation to another.” In addition, the inner-­Trinitarian relationship of God to Christ before the creation of the world, and even its relationship in eschatological perspective, is in flux. For the inner-­Trinitarian “mutual revelation” between God and Christ, ­Father and Son, mutual attraction and manifestation through living encounter and movement are needed. The reason for this is: “Neither a manifestation nor a creation can take place without attraction, what the Hebrews call zimzum.”91 Oetinger pre­sents the intra-­divine life, the intra-­divine interrelation between God and Christ, according to the model of zimzum. The revelation and manifestation of the inner life of the divine, as well as the creation of the world, cannot occur without intra-­divine zimzum. This idea would ­later become impor­tant for Schelling. One can hardly define the significance of zimzum in more vigorous theological terms.92 With Oetinger’s pietistic thought in Württemberg, zimzum becomes the doctrine of a theology of the living God enriched with knowledge from the Kabbalah.

Clemens Brentano: Zimzum Despite Antisemitism—­Postscript We can see the wide arc of the impact of Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata in the context of the dispute concerning Friedrich Jacobi, and in Oetinger’s charismatic influence on Schelling, Hegel, Franz von Baader, and Gotthilf



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Heinrich Schubert. We also see it in the histories of philosophy by Budde, Brucker, and Dietrich Tiedemann, and fi­nally in the burgeoning Kabbalah research in the Wissenschaft des Judentums. But apart from Adolphe Franck, Franz Joseph Molitor (the phi­los­o­pher and last impor­tant Christian kabbalist in Germany),93 and Clemens Brentano, the authors of the Romantic and Biedermeier periods no longer had any use for The Kabbalah Unveiled. Clemens Brentano, a staunch Catholic and virulent anti-­Semite to boot, was also an avid book collector and, of all ­people, owned a personal copy of Kabbala Denudata.94 This was the same Clemens Brentano who in 1811 during meetings of the Christian-­G erman ­Table Society (Christlich-­Deutsche Tischgesellschaft), which barred Jews, baptized Jews, the French, and ­women from membership in the organ­ization, gave speeches actively arguing against Jewish civic equality and made satirical mockery of “the Jews.”95 From this copy of Kabbala Denudata in his private collection, Brentano, who knew no Hebrew, may have acquired some knowledge of zimzum, which he dresses up in a kind of late Romantic pocket cosmogony in some verses of his lengthy epic poem Romanzen vom Rosenkranz (Romances of the Rosary). This unexpected poetic turn of the zimzum motif in no way represents the conclusion to the history of the reception of The Kabbalah Unveiled. Nonetheless, ­here in the verses of the anti-­Semitic Brentano, the concept of zimzum from Kabbala Denudata forms a part of the history not only of German philosophy, theology, and intellectual history but also of German lyrical poetry: You read in the first book, How God’s infinite shining, The Or Haensoph, flowed endlessly Without darkness. How a dark space in its center, In which was born the world, Emanated from the light that had Contracted itself through a wanting. How in the traces of the withdrawal The light emanated in manifold spheres, Encircling the darkness of the space Won out and encompassed by light.

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And how every­thing was formed Adam Kadmon was born Arising from him The ten powers, the sefirot. As the four worlds ­were emanated, Wanting came to life: Assiyah, Beri’ah, Azilut And Yezirah, the Face of God.96

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Shabbateans and Anti-­Shabbateans

The two most famous Jews of the seventeenth ­century, Baruch Spinoza and Shabbetai Zevi, though roughly the same age, could not have been more dif­ fer­ent from one another. The only ­thing they had in common was that they represented extremes on the vast continuum of Jewish life that existed at the time. And in the end, they ­were both banished from their synagogues and branded heretics in their respective Jewish communities. Spinoza (1630– 1677), who in his philosophy had equated the immanence1 of God with nature and therefore denied the transcendence of the God of Israel and his revelation, was banished from the synagogue in his hometown of Amsterdam in 1656. Following the cherem, he could only carry out his irreverent philosophical existence and his radical enlightenment in secret due to the stench of heresy and atheism.2 It comes as no surprise that Spinoza chose the motto “Caute”—­“Be cautious”—­for his seal. Spinoza dis­appeared almost completely from the consciousness of his Jewish contemporaries and the Jewish public. However, Spinoza was ­later rediscovered as the forerunner of Jewish modernity and as the first secular Jew, first during the Haskalah3 and then in the nineteenth c­ entury by authors such as Heinrich Heine, Berthold Auerbach, and Moses Hess. And then in the twentieth c­ entury, Albert Einstein and David Ben-­Gurion wrested him from his previous reputation as a heretic and declared him one of the most impor­tant figures in all of Jewish history. Zionists installed him into the pantheon of secular Judaism as one of the greatest Jewish thinkers and scholars.4 Shabbetai Zevi (1626–1676), Spinoza’s con­temporary on the other side of the Jewish world, was born in Smyrna (­today: Izmir, Turkey) and was banned in his home city for the first time in 1651 ­because he claimed to be the Messiah. In ­doing so, he openly ­violated the halakhic commandments

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and the rules of the synagogue. Spinoza was forced out of the synagogue, ­because he contested the validity of the halakhah and disobeyed its commandments. Shabbetai Zevi, on the other hand, was banished ­because he believed that he, as the Messiah, was not subject to the halakhic commandments. Spinoza was forced out ­because he was too far removed from the God of Israel, Shabbetai Zevi ­because he transgressed God’s law. But Zevi accumulated companions and followers who believed him to be the Messiah and savior of the world. As a result, he triggered a wide-­reaching messianic movement that shook the very foundations of seventeenth-­century Judaism. Nevertheless, Zevi’s numerous opponents during his lifetime, as well as Jewish historiography, labeled him, this kabbalist and rabbi from Smyrna, as a false Messiah. When not outright ignoring him entirely, the Haskalah and the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) considered Shabbetai Zevi to be an embarrassing pseudo-­Messiah, an eccentric religious aberration, who amounted only to a brief footnote in Jewish history. It was not ­until Gershom Scholem wrote a detailed scholarly biography dedicated to Shabbetai Zevi, which spans over one thousand pages and portrays him as a mystical Messiah, that Zevi was rescued from both oblivion and ideological denunciation.5 Shabbetai Zevi was born on a Sabbath, which is why his parents named him “Shabbetai.” He was born not just on any Sabbath, but on Tisha B’Av in the Jewish year 5386 (in August 1626 of the Christian calendar), a holiday on which Jews mourn the destruction of the ­Temple in Jerusalem and their dispersion into galut, or exile. According to Jewish belief, this diasporic existence ­will endure ­until the Messiah fi­nally gathers his ­people of Israel, leads them back to Zion, and rebuilds the ­Temple. For this reason, the life of Shabbetai Zevi from Smyrna, born on that par­tic­u­lar Sabbath, was charged with messianic symbolism since the time of his birth, long before the young ascetic follower of the Lurianic Kabbalah began to see himself as the Messiah in 1651, following a series of dreams and visions. ­Later, anointed with costly, fragrant herbs (Messiah means “Anointed One” in Hebrew), he walked through the streets of Smyrna, singing psalms in his melodious voice and breaking the commandments of the synagogue. Finding legitimacy in his own claim that he was the Messiah, he spoke loudly and publicly against all prohibitions in the synagogue, even uttering the ineffable name of God before the assembled congregation. ­Because of (or perhaps despite) be­hav­ior such as this, he attained no real recognition of his self-­imposed status, at least initially. Zevi was simply banished time and again



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from the Jewish communities of Smyrna, Thessaloniki, and Constantinople, seen as a kind of “holy fool.” For many years, he led an erratic, wandering life, including time spent in Jerusalem and Egypt. It was only when Zevi found his prophet and apostle in the young rabbi and kabbalist Nathan of Gaza (1643–1680) in 1665 that the “holy fool” would become a crucial figure in the lives of many con­temporary Jews. Nathan of Gaza was a profound expert in the Lurianic Kabbalah, like all impor­tant Shabbatean rabbis that followed him. When Nathan began to proclaim, in speeches, letters, and mystical writings, that Zevi was Israel’s promised Messiah and foretold that the redemption of the world was close at hand, tens of thousands of ­people from all corners of the Jewish world, from Poland to Morocco, from Amsterdam to Yemen, converted to this Messiah in a very short period of time. They sold their belongings, packed their trunks for travel, and made preparations to abandon their old lives and leave every­thing ­behind so that they could return to the Holy Land with the Messiah. The seismic shock of the messianic movement triggered by Shabbetai Zevi caused the greatest religious turmoil to rabbinical Jewry since the destruction of the Second ­Temple by the Romans. “Shabbateanism” caused orthodox rabbinical Judaism to falter from within—­not, as one might reasonably expect, in response to moments of external persecution and distress such as the Crusades or the Chmielnicki pogroms that took place in Poland in 1648–1649—­ but in par­tic­u­lar ­because some of the most pious Jews of the time believed Zevi to be the Messiah. It was not some kind of atheism, but rather the messianism within Judaism itself, fueled by the Lurianic hope for tikkun, for salvation, that brought the customs, practices, and institutions of rabbinical Judaism into unpre­ce­dented upheaval. The centuries-­old practice of vigilantly waiting for the coming of the Messiah had suddenly come to an end. No other religious event could threaten the existence of rabbinical Judaism and its claim to religious authority as much as the sudden appearance of the pseudo-­Messiah Shabbetai Zevi, who addressed the full potential of Jewish messianism and activated it, ushering in a sense of pandemonium that had tremendous social ramifications. Tens of thousands of Jews, rich and poor alike, believed in the dawn of redemption and in Shabbetai Zevi as the promised Messiah, although he by no means fulfilled the usual expectations one associated with the Messiah. He was not a Jewish king victorious on the battlefield, who established his rule in the land of Israel and led the Twelve Tribes of Israel back to Zion. Rather, in terms of ­today’s therapeutic language of psychopathology, Zevi

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Figure 16. Shabbetai Zevi in 1665, from Thomas Coenen, Ydele Verwachtinge der Joden (Amsterdam, 1669).

was likely manic-­depressive. This was a man who, in euphoric states of enlightenment, performed an illegal wedding ceremony between himself and a Torah scroll, thus symbolically marrying the Messiah to the Holy Scriptures. But then, during long months of depression, he barely left his room, ­because he “wept for Israel,” as his followers explained. It was only Nathan of Gaza who could theologically condense t­ hese contradictory aspects of Zevi into a new image of the Messiah, which found widespread circulation in his handwritten and frequently copied manuscripts.6 And fi­nally, it was Nathan who not only justified the worst catastrophe in the life of the Messiah Shabbetai



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Zevi, namely, his conversion to Islam, but discursively transformed it into a step that was necessary for the redemption of the world. Conflicts arose with Ottoman authorities in the Holy Land ­because of the Messiah’s po­liti­cal and territorial claims ­there. The sultan had Zevi arrested during a stay in Constantinople. Faced with the choice between execution and religious conversion, Shabbetai Zevi chose Islam and donned the turban as early as September 1666, just one year ­after Nathan of Gaza had proclaimed him Messiah. Nevertheless, although ­under constant supervision by the Ottoman authorities and at times ­under ­house arrest, Shabbetai Zevi continued his messianic work ­until his death in 1676. The Ottomans ­were mistaken when they assumed that they had undermined and destroyed the belief in Zevi’s messiahship by forcing him to convert to Islam. Not even Zevi’s betrayal of Judaism through conversion was sufficient enough to destroy the faith that his closest followers had in him as Messiah. Nathan of Gaza explained the conversion of their pseudo-­Messiah as a prerequisite necessary for salvation, a way for him to proselytize and redeem even ­those of other faiths. The worst sin, apostasy, was justified as the key to this salvation. Some of his disciples even followed his example by converting to Islam. ­These converts, who formed secret sects of Shabbatean crypto-­Jews (Turkish: dönmeh), continued to exist in Turkey u ­ ntil well into the twentieth ­century. The waves of Shabbatean commotion even reached Amsterdam in 1665. Isaac Aboab de Fonseca (of all ­people!), chief rabbi of the Amsterdam Sephardic community, one of the religious authorities responsible for banishing Spinoza, converted to the messianism of Shabbetai Zevi.7 The fervent Aboab and other Shabbateans in Amsterdam even went so far as to introduce prayers for the Messiah Zevi into their synagogal worship. Aboab had the prayer books altered so that they contained this supplemental material. Zevi’s disciples repented and asked God for forgiveness of their sins. Alms ­were collected and distributed to the poor. Some guilders ­were also sent east to the Holy Land. A new sense of eschatological earnestness and piety found its way into the community. We must remember that converts to Zevi suddenly believed that the coming of the Messiah and the redemption of the world would take place during their own lifetime. When the Messiah relocated to the Holy Land, many Amsterdam community members wanted to be ­there in Jerusalem to experience his presence directly. A group of wealthy Shabbateans chartered ships to sail to the Holy Land, despite the obstacle posed by an En­glish naval blockade that stood in their way. Even the remains of some deceased buried in the Jewish cemetery of Ouderkerk ­were to be dug

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up, completely contrary to halakhic rules concerning the treatment of the dead, so that they could be buried once again in the hallowed ground of the Holy Land.8 Only a few, such as the North African Sephardic kabbalist and rabbi Jacob Sasportas (1610–1698), maintained a sober stance in the face of this collective agitation, warning of the potential ­hazards of Shabbetai Zevi and his activities. Sasportas and ­those who criticized Zevi initially found only reluctant listeners, even ­after the news of Shabbetai Zevi’s conversion to Islam and apostasy reached Eu­rope via Italy in 1666. Glückel of Hameln, who, like Sasportas, resided in Hamburg, observed the messianic excitement in the Jewish communities ­there. In her Yiddish memoirs, she describes how her pious father-­in-­law sold his ­house and farm in Hameln, along with all of his furniture, and embarked for Hamburg with large travel crates containing his remaining belongings, so that he might embark from ­there on a passage to the Holy Land. She also relates how he fi­nally unpacked ­these crates ­after three long years, well ­after Zevi’s apostasy had become a well-­k nown fact and all hopes of redemption had been dashed.9 A Messiah who converted to Islam could not have been the anticipated Messiah of Israel. As a con­ temporary eyewitness, Glückel, the pious as well as demure businesswoman, described the excitement, especially in the Sephardic communities, anytime the latest news of Shabbetai Zevi arrived. She aptly uses the meta­phor of pregnancy and childbirth to explain the messianic “contractions” that ­people ­were experiencing—­that is, the upset and misfortune that they believed would accompany the coming of the Messiah (before salvation and redemption are fully realized). In the case of Shabbetai Zevi, the sharp messianic “contractions” that ­people felt ­were actually the spasms of a false pregnancy, as the intense expectations surrounding the Messiah’s arrival ­were bitterly disappointed and literally vanished into thin air a­ fter his apostasy: About this time ­people began to talk of Sabbatia Zevi [the Messianic pretender]. But “woe unto us that we have sinned” and never lived to see what we had heard and nigh believed. When I think of the “repentance done” by young and old my pen fails me—­ but the ­whole world knows of it! O Lord of All Worlds, hoping as we did that Thou hadst shown compassion on Israel and redeemed us, we ­were like a ­woman who sits in ­labour and suffers mighty pangs, and thinks once her suffering is over she ­shall be blessed with a child; but it was only hear-



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kening ­after a wind. So, dear God and King, it befell unto us. Throughout the world, Thy servants and ­children rent themselves with repentance, prayer and charity; for two, yea, for three years Thy beloved ­people Israel sat in ­labour; but ­there came forth naught but wind.10 The disappointment was ­great. But not every­one who lived through this historical moment was as disillusioned as Glückel. Some followers clung to the idea of Zevi’s messiahship even ­after his death in 1676. He died exactly ten years to the day ­after his conversion to Islam. They believed that apostasy was in fact part of their Messiah’s clandestine mission. Of course, such talk had to take place in discreet, secret circles, ­because the anti-­Shabbatean voices, such as ­those of Jacob Sasportas, who made the persecution of Shabbatean activities and convictions his life’s work, and who, together with like-­ minded rabbis, imposed a ban on Shabbateans and crypto-­Shabbateans, seeking to drive them out wherever suspicion arose. Their anti-­Shabbatean views now prevailed in the broader Jewish public. ­After Isaac Aboab died in 1693, the now el­derly Sasportas received a rabbinical appointment in Amsterdam. ­Under his authority, Shabbateanism became the epitome of heresy. Nevertheless, the remaining Shabbateans in Eu­rope, Egypt, and the Holy Land maintained discreet, conspiratorial networks whose members interpreted the apostasy and death of the Messiah Shabbetai Zevi as a temporary retreat into shrouded mystery. His followers kept the hope alive that, analogous to the difficult, protracted forty-­year period that the ­people of Israel spent wandering in the desert, Shabbetai Zevi would return among the nations in 1706, exactly forty years ­after his conversion.11 Shabbatean theologies developed among ­these crypto-­Shabbateans, which made the apostasy and death of the false Messiah the starting point for new interpretations of the world and history. Thus, in the Shabbatean theology of Abraham Miguel Cardozo (ca. 1630–1706), which evinced an obvious parallel to Chris­tian­ity in its evocation of the figure of Christ, Shabbetai Zevi was reinterpreted as the suffering servant of God as seen in Isaiah 53, who triumphs over the crisis caused by the sins of the ­people of Israel and the preponderance of sin in the world. Cardozo identified Zevi’s apostasy and death, in total opposition to halakhah and Jewish tradition, as antinomic acts of salvation and deliverance for the sake of redemption, through which the Messiah overcomes sin by ­going among the vari­ous ­peoples (non-­Jews) of the world, engaging in their deeds, living their lives, and “being buried among the wicked” (Isa. 53:9).12

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Cardozo was murdered by his nephew in 1706. He did not have to endure for long the disappointment that the Shabbateans felt when Zevi failed to return. For their part, Nechemiah Chayon and other Shabbatean rabbis countered this disappointment by recalculating and determining that 1740 would be the year when their Messiah would make his (re)appearance. The opponents of Shabbateanism reacted to ­these acute, repeatedly prolonged notions of the end times by consistently persecuting and branding any kind of messianic hope, any hint of desire for the world to come, as Shabbatean heresy. Messianism fell ­under the general suspicion of Shabbateanism and was mercilessly persecuted, even when the person or ­matter in question had nothing to do with Shabbetai Zevi. The last prominent rabbi who felt the sting of the suspicion of Shabbateanism was the Talmudist Jonathan Eybeschütz, who resided in Altona (Germany) during the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century. But Shabbateans and anti-­Shabbateans alike found inspiration in the Lurianic Kabbalah. Both followers and opponents of Zevi knew what the terms zimzum, shevirat ha-­kelim, and tikkun meant. The fight for or against Shabbetai Zevi was also always a strug­gle over interpretive sovereignty of the Lurianic Kabbalah. When the Haskalah ­later gained steam, the maskilim no longer took ­these disputes seriously and put an end to them by challenging the intellectual authority and power of the rabbis themselves and establishing a new, secular elite of Jewish intellectuals.13

Nechemiah Chayon: Words of the Messiah One of the most extraordinary Jewish books, and one of the first ever printed in Berlin,14 is the Sefer Oz le-­Elohim (Power of God), written by the subversive Shabbatean Nechemiah Chayon (ca. 1665–ca. 1730). Chayon’s book was published in 1713 in the Prus­sian capital ­under the name of Baruch Buchbinder, a largely unknown book printer. The text of Oz le-­Elohim was set using expensive Hebrew letters obtained from Amsterdam. ­There are many unusual t­ hings about this book. For one, it is the first printed book of Shabbateanism. ­Until its publication, ­there had only been handwritten manuscripts that circulated clandestinely among the Shabbateans. But now, heresy raised its head in print and in public. Though not a single explicit reference to Shabbetai Zevi appears in the entire work, it was nonetheless written and printed by a suspected crypto-­Shabbatean. Chayon apparently threw caution to the wind, ignoring any regard for the followers who remained in hiding



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or for the power­f ul enemies of the claimant Messiah. He ventured to publish a book that included a short text called Meheimanuta de-­Khula (The Secret of All), which Shabbateans believed Zevi himself had written. Moreover, Chayon used his book to comment widely on the text that he titled Meheimanuta de-­Khula, as if it ­were an authoritative rabbinical source.15 At least that’s how anti-­Shabbatean critics and inquisitors attacked the book in the de­cades that followed. They argued that Chayon provocatively released in printed form the mysterious, supposedly au­then­tic text by Zevi, affixing to it, without even a hint of subtlety, the title “The Secret of All.” Prior to the printing of his book, the short text that Chayon cribbed and meticulously discussed had only existed as a handwritten, secretly disseminated pamphlet known as Raza de-­Meheimanuta (The Mystery of the True Faith),16 which he renamed Meheimanuta de-­Khula. The extraordinary ­thing about Oz le-­Elohim, which also helps to contextualize the peculiar history and emergence of this book, was that it was published in Berlin. At the time when this book was printed, Berlin was a relatively young, small, and intellectually completely insignificant Jewish community, which did not even have its own synagogue when Chayon was ­there in 1713. Berlin’s first community synagogue, located in the Heidereutergasse, was still ­under construction at the time. The synagogue was first opened and inaugurated in 1714, with the Prus­sian queen Sophie Dorothea and other royal personalities in attendance. Chayon was an entirely obscure traveling rabbi with a chaotic life story. Historical evidence confirms that he spent time in Alexandria, Jerusalem, Safed, Smyrna, Uskup, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Livorno, Venice, Prague, and ­later Amsterdam, Breslau, and Frankfurt. He died in North Africa. He only spent a few months in the Prus­sian capital. It is pos­si­ble that he temporarily resided in Berlin for the explicit purpose of having his books printed ­there. He had prob­ably already previously written Oz le-­Elohim in Egypt between 1702 and 1708 and brought the manuscript with him to Berlin, where it appeared in print in 1713. In a similar vein, he also published in Berlin in the same year a collection of homilies on the weekly sections of the Torah, which he had previously written in Prague. He gave this collection the title Divrei Nechemiah (The Words of Nechemiah), which also contained no direct reference to Shabbetai Zevi and Shabbateanism, but did make reference to the coming redemption of the world that was expected to take place in 1740.17 Chayon, despite all his assertions that he was not a Shabbatean, aroused suspicion with his claim, which appeared in the prefaces to both Divrei

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Nechemiah and Oz le-­Elohim, that God’s divine revelation remained incomplete. He maintained that God had not concluded his revelation with the Written and Oral Torah and the Prophets, the interpretation of which the rabbis had been in charge of mediating since ancient times, in Jewish communities, from one generation to the next. According to Chayon, God may instead reveal himself anew to pious Jews of each generation. Chayon’s provocative message was that all pious persons have individually, on their own, without the authority and interference of the rabbis, the right and freedom to penetrate into the deepest secrets of divinity, to explore and study them. This assertion brought Chayon ­under the general suspicion of Shabbateanism: What could a Messiah and his impending salvation be, if they ­weren’t a renewed revelation of God? Even the preface to Oz le-­Elohim seemed to confirm ­every suspicion of heresy that preoccupied the anti-­Shabbateans. Chayon, in the preface (“Hakdamat ha-­Rav ha-­Mechaber”) to Oz le-­Elohim, makes his argument quite openly. He asserts that first, the study of the Ma’aseh Merkavah, metaphysics, or the upper, divine worlds, which the ­great Maimonides had reserved solely for rabbinical and academic scholars, can also be studied by common pious folk (fol. 4); second, the study and interpretation of the Kabbalah can also be practiced individually by each person, even without the mediation of a rabbi, and its message can be understood by every­one (fol. 5); and third, the knowledge and understanding of the deepest real­ity of God’s divinity (meziut elohuto) through the study of the Talmud, the Mishnah, and the Haggadah is only pos­si­ble in conjunction with the Kabbalah, again, on an individual basis and without the oversight of rabbinical authorities (fol. 6f.). This caused agitation indeed, ­because ­here, in a printed text, the rabbis’ official authority, elitist scholarship, and mono­poly on interpretation ­were publicly questioned, argumentatively undermined, and the study of the Kabbalah was demo­cratized and individualized in a highly provocative manner. Chayon’s message is tantamount to pious anarchy: anyone can penetrate the deepest secrets and the deepest real­ity of the divine without rabbinical authority. At that time, Berlin had no prominent rabbi and also no anti-­Shabbatean opposition. What is more, Berlin had no well-­k nown Jewish printer with a reputation to lose. In Berlin, a rabbi like Chayon, who was suspected of Shabbateanism, was able to print books that contained ­these kinds of ideas. He likely exploited this unique opportunity in King Frederick William’s capital city (the book’s full title even mentions the Prus­sian ruler) and transgressed



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the prohibition on the esoteric transmission of the Shabbatean message. Individual piety and religious anarchy are publicly encouraged ­here. The main section of Oz le-­Elohim consists of two separate, detailed commentaries that Chayon organizes into two columns opposite one another on the page. He situates the concise text of Meheimanuta de-­Khula, printed in boldface, in the center of the page between ­these two columns of commentary (see Figure 17). We ­will recall that Meheimanuta de-­Khula was the text that Shabbetai Zevi himself had supposedly penned. By placing the “au­then­ tic” Zevi text in the center of the page, surrounded by his own commentary, Chayon imitates an accepted format used in commentaries on Hebrew sources, and thus honors it as if it ­were a canonical text, in effect endeavoring to legitimize it. Chayon’s first commentary, entitled Beit Kodesh ha-­ Kodashim (The House of the Holiest of the Holy), examines and comments on Meheimanuta de-­Khula’s consistency with the Zohar, for the purpose of affirming its authority and truth. The second, far more in­ter­est­ing commentary is called, like the entire book, Oz le-­Elohim. In it, Chayon discusses pos­si­ble objections and prob­lems with Meheimanuta de-­Khula. In both commentaries, Chayon reflects on and asserts the real­ity of zimzum: meziut ha-­ zimzum (fol. 1cd). Against all objections, he insists on the ontological real­ity of zimzum. He argues that we cannot explain zimzum and the condition that empty space must be cleared in Ein-­Sof for the worlds as a mere theoretical object of ­human thought (inyan ha-­machshava), ­because ­human thought, within the other­w ise completely amorphous Ein-­Sof, also needs first and foremost a space for ­humans and their thoughts (fol. 1d). In other words: the ­actual clearing of the space in Ein-­Sof through zimzum is the precondition for ­humans to have a place to make the zimzum pro­cess an object of ­human thought. For Chayon, zimzum is not an intellectual game or meta­ phorical scenario, but in truth it is an antecedent real­ity. This conceptual prerequisite for zimzum also applies to the real­ity of the change of the divine ­will in Ein-­Sof. The divine ­will for zimzum and creation must have been a real occurrence before anything moved in the original, infinite simplicity of Ein-­Sof. In order for anything at all to take place in Ein-­Sof, which according to all previous authors and authorities of the Kabbalah is a very ­simple and homogeneous entity, the divine volition must have actually desired something ­else, something that was not ­simple, that is, zimzum and the creation of the worlds. The initially ­simple, infinitely positive spirit within Ein-­Sof itself must have changed, and this change is not just an idea but a real­ity (fol. 1d).

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Figure 17. Nechemiah Chayon, Sefer Oz le-­Elohim (Berlin, 1713), fol. 1. In bold print in the ­middle between the columns, we see the text supposedly written by Shabbetai Zevi, with two separate commentaries highlighting the ostensibly au­then­tic Zevi text in the two surrounding columns.

Using several columns of text to explain this idea, Chayon insists on the original, incomprehensible, and inaccessible simplicity of Ein-­Sof. According to Chayon, as the name “the Infinite” indicates, Ein-­Sof has no end. But Ein-­Sof also has no beginning, which is why it could also be called Ein-­ Reshit, the “beginningless” or “without a beginning.” And within Ein-­Sof, ­there is also initially no goal, no direction, no intention, no inside and no



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outside, “no how and no why,” as Chayon states in Meheimanuta de-­Khula (fol. 1a). Ein-­Sof is unexplorable (ein cheker) for ­humans, as it is pure simplicity and indeterminacy. Therefore, the real­ity of a change of ­will and the real­ity of zimzum had to come about in order for a change within the sheer infinite simplicity of Ein-­Sof to take place. But why did the w ­ ill in Ein-­Sof change? “Lama nishtane harazon?” Using this question as a point of departure, Chayon develops his own theory of the inner life of Ein-­Sof. He asserts that the amorphous, unfathomable, and impalpable simplicity of Ein-­Sof was penetrated and activated by an inner force, the soul of ­every living being (“nishmatah dekol chayyei”) that existed within Ein-­Sof. This is how both the ­will to create and zimzum came about. According to Chayon, this psychic power or invigorating vital force that exists within Ein-­Sof in turn brings w ­ ill and dimension to Ein-­Sof, and with it, change and diversity. Following zimzum, the emanation of the worlds and creation take place according to the ideas explained in Lurianic Kabbalah: Adam Kadmon emanates the sefirot, the vessels break. However, with the reconfiguring of the parzufim, Chayon describes only two configurations: Malka Kadisha, the Holy King, and the shekhinah, a male and female ele­ment, austerity (din) and mercy (rachamim), respectively. Unified with one another, ­these ele­ments produce a son. Chayon identifies this son as the God of Israel, who operates in time and history and immediately begins, as the Torah describes, with the creation of the world in seven days. In actuality, zimzum therefore serves as a starting point for a theogony in which the living God of Israel arises from the infinite simplicity and ­simple infinity of Ein-­Sof.18 This juxtaposition of the infinitely ­simple Ein-­Sof that is beyond h ­ uman comprehension and the biblical God of Israel, who reveals himself to the world and gives his commandments to the ­people of Israel, betrayed once again Chayon’s Shabbatean leanings. This juxtaposition was a legacy of the Shabbatean theology of Abraham Cardozo, who, like Nathan of Gaza before him, had distinguished the inaccessible Ein-­Sof and the androgynously engendered biblical God of Israel.19 It is this heritage, even without a single mention of the name of Shabbetai Zevi in the entirety of Oz le-­Elohim, that seized the attention of the anti-­Shabbateans. Already in July 1713, Zevi Hirsch Ashkenazi (1658–1718), the ­father of Jacob Emden and chief Ashkenazi rabbi of the famous Amsterdam community,20 issued a ban on Chayon on account of Oz le-­Elohim. Eminent rabbis in Venice, Prague, and Frankfurt withdrew their haskamot (rabbinical letters of approval) that ­were printed in Chayon’s books or declared

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them to be forgeries. They deferred to the savage anti-­Shabbatean polemics that now broke out against Chayon. The works of a Shabbatean could not be endorsed, especially not ­those that included the words of the Messiah. The anti-­Shabbatean rabbi Moses Chagiz (1671–1751), an ally and collaborator of Zevi Hirsch Ashkenazi in Amsterdam, spurred influential Italian rabbis to join the fight against the heretic Chayon in the following months and years. One of ­these rabbis was Joseph Ergas in Livorno.21 And ­because the logic of the anti-­Shabbatean campaign maintained that absolutely nothing a heretic wrote could ever be correct, Ergas attacked, among many other t­ hings, Chayon’s assertion regarding the real­ity of zimzum.

Zimzum in Livorno: Joseph Ergas and Immanuel Chai Ricchi Joseph Ergas was a distinguished rabbi in Livorno, Italy. He was born ­there in 1685, the scion of a Marrano ­family. He died ­there in 1730. His teachers ­were Samuel Fez, who instructed him in halakhah, and Benjamin ha-­Kohen Vital from Reggio, who introduced him to the Kabbalah. Joseph Ergas, as far as we know, did not often leave Livorno, but he was nevertheless extremely well-­versed in the Jewish world and beyond. In the eigh­teenth ­century, the port city of Livorno was a center of maritime trade in the Mediterranean, a ­free port since 1675, as well as Tuscany’s gateway to the world, a city that was home to numerous wealthy Jewish merchant families with international contacts and to several synagogues and one of the most intellectually significant and largest Jewish communities in Italy. Above all, Livorno had the largest Sephardic community in Eu­rope in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, even larger than the one in Amsterdam. Being a rabbi in Livorno was, so to speak, a title of honor, in that Livorno was an eighteenth-­century Jewish metropolis in terms of religion, intellectual might, and economic power. The community was characterized by the “port Jews,” ­those internationally active Jewish merchants of predominantly Sephardic origin who, ­after the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal, settled in the port cities throughout the Mediterranean, but also in western and northern Eu­rope. They traded with Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the sea. As a result of this life spent in cosmopolitan port cities, as well as access to international communication and maritime trade with non-­Jews, they ­were contributing to the modernization of Jewish life already in the seventeenth and



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Figure 18. Livorno around 1760, copperplate engraving, from Thomas Salmon, Lo stato presente di tutti i paesi e populi del mondo, vol. 21 (Venice, 1758), figure 93. © Dario Matteoni, Livorno (Rome, 1988)

early eigh­teenth centuries.22 The “port Jews,” including the Jews of Livorno, ­were socially and culturally open to the interests, customs, needs, and morals of non-­Jews as a result of their many contacts with the non-­Jewish world; they dressed like the Christians of the city and, like them, displayed their prosperity by buying expensive paintings, furniture, and books. Livorno’s reputation in the Jewish world was so illustrious that even at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, the Berlin maskil (Jewish Enlightenment thinker) Isaac Euchel proclaimed that Livorno’s Jewish society with all its conviviality was a utopia to which enlightened Jews in Ashkenaz should aspire. In Euchel’s unfinished Hebrew epistolary novel Iggerot Meshulam (Meshulam’s Letters; Berlin, 1787), 23 incidentally the first epistolary novel in Hebrew lit­er­a­t ure, the protagonist Meshulam describes the joyous cele­ brations, the entertaining gatherings and customs, as well as the social equality of ­women among the Jews of Livorno as a role model for the strictly observant, patriarchal-­rabbinical, premodern, and unenlightened Jews in the Jewish communities of large cities in northern and eastern Eu­rope.24 The Jewish Enlightenment writer Euchel, who never actually traveled to Livorno, pre­sents his readers in the religiously and culturally narrow Ashkenazi world with a utopian literary role model that was everyday life for the rabbi and kabbalist Ergas. Ergas was always well informed about cultural, scientific, and po­liti­cal events from all over the world on account of the travelers

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and the news transported by shipping and maritime trade. He knew what was happening internationally throughout the Jewish world, and he himself published his books in Amsterdam and London, the two port cities that rivaled Livorno in cultural and economic importance, both of which boasted internationally connected Jewish communities, with an intellectually cosmopolitan Jewish merchant community, as well as a plurality of vari­ous synagogue communities and a large number of Jewish book printers. In ­these cities, the cultural and religious modernization pro­cesses taking place among Jews ­were at that time already much more advanced than in the backward, religiously strictly observant, purely Ashkenazi communities of Prus­ sia, Poland, Bohemia, Galicia, and Belarus, where the Haskalah would not arrive with its call for modernization and enlightenment ­until the end of the eigh­teenth ­century. Ergas’s central concern was his fight against Shabbateanism, namely, against the Amsterdam-­based Shabbatean Nechemiah Chayon and his two works Divrei Nechemiah (The Words of Nechemiah) and Oz le-­Elohim (Power of God) printed in Berlin in 1713. Ergas composed polemics attacking Chayon in the form of two pamphlets, with the titles Tokhachat Megullah (Public Rebuke) and Ha-­Sod ha-­Nachash (“The Secret of the Serpent”), both of which ­were printed in London in 1715. We must also view the editorial and publishing history of Ergas’s principal work, Shomer Emunim (Guardians of the Faithful), first published posthumously in Amsterdam in 1736, within the context of his long anti-­Shabbatean campaign. In that book, Ergas seeks to compose an exoteric and compelling portrayal of the main doctrines of the Kabbalah, in direct opposition to what he saw as the distortions of Shabbateanism. The copper frontispiece of Shomer Emunim depicts Moses in the upper center, holding the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, with a caption that reads “Rabbenu ha-­Kadosh” (Our holy teacher), framed by two baroque putti (Figure 19). Beneath the book’s title, which is placed in the center of the frontispiece, we see a rabbi standing on an open square in a city under­ neath a clear sky, with a baroque church or synagogue in the background. This figure is depicted like a Greek phi­los­o­pher teaching an audience made up of a large crowd of listeners of vari­ous ages. This allegorical image shows the Kabbalah as exoteric teachings, made available for public consumption. Shomer Emunim’s dialogic form presumably also serves its pedagogical purpose. In the book, we encounter a back-­and-­forth between two orthodox Jews, Shaltiel, who adheres only to the teachings of the Written and



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Figure 19. Joseph Ergas, Shomer Emunim (Amsterdam, 1736), copper frontispiece. © Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

Oral Torah, and Yehoyada, who also believes in the mystical and esoteric aspects of revelation. They represent ­here, if you ­will, a baroque didactic dialogue that takes place between the two souls beating in Ergas’s chest, between halakhah and Kabbalah. The work is carefully divided into numbered sections. The dialogue takes place between the younger Shaltiel, who epitomizes the “stooge” playing second fiddle to the older Yehoyada, who instructs his interlocutor in the Kabbalah. As such, the first section of this Hebrew text

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pre­sents the principal doctrines of the Kabbalah in general, in an exoteric baroque printed work intended for a Jewish readership, while the second part of the book is dedicated to presenting the Lurianic Kabbalah. We must also read Ergas’s discussion of the zimzum in the second part of Shomer Emunim in the context of his campaign against Shabbateanism. Ergas argues for a meta­phorical understanding of zimzum, citing Herrera and Menachem Asariah Fano, in opposition to a literal understanding of zimzum as an ­actual, naturalistic pro­cess within Ein-­Sof before the creation of the worlds, an interpretation that his readers knew from Chayyim Vital’s writings, which the Shabbateans also claimed and promoted. The discussion of zimzum comprises sections 34–43 in the second part of Shomer Emunim and is structured according to five lines of reasoning:25 1. Quotation of Vital’s depiction of zimzum and exposition of the prob­lem (sec. 34) 2. Ten arguments that weaken the literal interpretation of zimzum (sec. 35) 3. Zimzum is impossible, even if one wants to comprehend it only as an occurrence of divine ­will (secs. 36 and 37) 4. Kabbalistic texts that understand zimzum meta­phor­ically (secs. 38–41) 5. The real meaning of zimzum (secs. 42 and 43) Section 34 of Shomer Emunim begins with a quotation presumably from Chayyim Vital’s manuscript Mavo ha-­She’arim (Introduction to the Gates), which suggests a naturalistic, physical understanding of zimzum: “Know that before the emanator brought forth the emanation of all worlds, Ein-­Sof filled the space. [. . .] Provided that every­thing was filled with that light called Ein-­ Sof, and that ­there was no fr ­ ee place in it, Ein-­Sof itself had to contract its existence and light and create a ­free space to allow the worlds to emanate in its midst [. . .].” Ergas follows this quotation with his own physical argument against this naturalistic description of zimzum and the literal, verbatim (peshat) understanding of it as an ­actual pro­cess in Ein-­Sof before the emanation of the worlds—­a notion that prevailed in Vital’s school of thought and also among the Shabbateans. Ergas asks his readers, as a kind of thought experiment, to imagine a dark room closed on all sides, with a torch lit in the ­middle. As Ergas argues, the light of the torch would evenly illuminate



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the entire room without ­there being an empty, unlit space anywhere in the room. If one now lights a second torch in the room in addition to the first, its light would again fill the ­whole room in addition to that of the first, without ­there being an empty space anywhere, even though the light of the first torch already fills the room. The light of the torches overlap each other without creating an empty space or the necessity for an empty space. It is not at all clear what prevents the natu­ral light from spreading evenly throughout the room and how an empty space should form t­ here. If natu­ral light behaves in such a way that it can and must absorb another substance like the light of a second torch without the need for an empty, lightless space, think about how much more this applies to the heavenly light of Ein-­Sof during the emanation of the worlds! Consequently, Ein-­Sof does not require an empty, lightless space (which, if we ­will recall, according to Vital’s description, can only occur through zimzum) in order to emanate the worlds through its light and in its light. Therefore, an interpretation of zimzum as a natu­ral, physical pro­cess, or even a pro­cess that is physically necessary prior to the emanation of the worlds, does not hold ­water. ­After dismantling the naturalistic understanding of zimzum in section 34 with a physical line of reasoning, Ergas then lists in section 35 arguments explaining why the naturalistic understanding threatens even the foundational princi­ples of the Jewish faith. Yehoyada lists ten such arguments for Shaltiel’s benefit. ­Here Yehoyada, the kabbalist, refers repeatedly and directly to the Zohar, Tikkunei Zohar, and Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim. Ergas pits the authoritative sources of the kabbalistic tradition recognized by all kabbalistic schools against the naturalistic “misinterpretation” found in the Lurianic Kabbalah:26 1. To whom should one compare God, what image would be equal to him? doubts the prophet (Isa. 40:18). And one should not render an image of God, according to the Torah (Deut. 27:15). Chayyim Vital even actually agrees with this. If, however, one understands zimzum literally, then in the description of the pro­cess of zimzum, Ein-­Sof would indeed be depicted as a round circle around an empty space; one would, God forbid, therefore attribute a form to and make an image of him! 2. It is said that the Lord must not be ­imagined ­either as a letter or as a point. This is a fortiori true when, as is the case for Vital, the light of Ein-­Sof is represented as a line in empty space.

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Contrary to all doctrine, this imparts to God a physical dimension as with created, earthly ­things. 3. If Luria says that we can only imagine Adam Kadmon in the image of man in order to have even the smallest possibility of understanding this figure, how much more must this limitation of a literal, naturalistic understanding of Ein-­Sof be true when its shape is portrayed as a circle or a line? Ein-­Sof thus can only be described anthropomorphically, and zimzum only allegorically, in accordance with ­human capacity. 4. God himself, his essence, is unknown to man. We know him only through his works. ­Human thought cannot substantially grasp God through any notion or concept, even if any physical conception of God ­were replaced by a spiritual one. But if one takes zimzum literally, h ­ uman thinking would depict God in accordance with the purely h ­ uman conceptions of a circle, an empty space, or a straight line in this space, and would thus attribute h ­ uman concepts to him. 5. Many passages in the Zohar and Tikkunei Zohar say that ­there is not a single place where God does not exist. If we understand zimzum literally, then we find ourselves in contradiction with the impor­tant doctrine of the omnipresence of God. God would therefore not be pre­sent in the empty space resulting from zimzum, into which only a line that resembles a filament leads. Even the doctrine of reshimu, that remnant of divine light that, according to the teachings of Joseph ibn Tabūl, remains in the empty space, cannot reconcile this contradiction. For if one understands reshimu to be of divine substance, then God would not ­really have withdrawn from that space at all (which corresponds to the argument in section 34 that states that the light of Ein-­Sof requires no zimzum to take place prior to the emanation of the worlds). 6. Zimzum, understood in a naturalistic way, contradicts the doctrine of the immutability of God in his capacity as creator of the world, which is universally accepted in the Zohar (and in medieval Jewish philosophy): God is an unmoved mover, that is, as the first cause and cause of all ­causes, he sets the world in motion without himself being affected by this movement.



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However, the pro­cess of zimzum in the ­middle of God alters God spatially and quantitatively, which is an absurd notion since God is a motionless mover. 7. Ein-­Sof is defined in the Tikkunei Zohar as a ­simple, homogeneous, and perfect unit, in which t­ here is no division, no separate parts, no fragmentation. If zimzum is understood literally, this understanding becomes untenable, b­ ecause ­there would be division and in­equality within Ein-­Sof. 8. “Quantity” is a category that can only refer to m ­ atter and material objects. Emanation, on the other hand, is an immaterial pro­cess that defies quantitative mea­sure­ment. Therefore the emanation of the ten sefirot cannot be mea­sured quantitatively. This applies all the more to zimzum, which is a radical negation of quantity, ­matter, and limit. If, however, we understand zimzum literally and naturalistically, we then speak in quantitative terms of an intrinsically immaterial pro­cess. 9. Every­thing that exists at any place in space is material and physical. Ein-­Sof is the place of our world, but has no place itself and is immaterial. If one understands zimzum literally, then Ein-­Sof would withdraw itself from its center and thereby make itself a place, materialize, and thus be subject to spatiality (God forbid!). 10. Four of the most famous kabbalists, Shabbetai Horo­witz, Nachmanides, David ibn Zimra, and Moses Cordovero all agree that God possesses neither body nor physical form and that the attributes of finite bodies such as movement, place, and mutability cannot be applied to God. If we take zimzum literally, then we attribute to Ein-­Sof ­these same corporeal attributes, which is a violation of the cardinal doctrine of God’s incorporeality. Section 35 builds its allure on the basis of Joseph Ergas’s immanent reasoning. Demonstrating vast knowledge and at times virtuoso skill, Ergas plays off the doctrines of God from medieval Kabbalah and its early modern systematicians (such as Cordovero and Horo­witz) against a literal understanding of zimzum, using ten separate arguments. His purpose is to unsettle the notion of a literal interpretation and prove it wrong. In ­doing so,

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Ergas demonstrates ­great aplomb. He meticulously cites the medieval and early modern sources of the kabbalistic tradition, with references to ­every single passage in the respective scriptures. As we see in section 34, Ergas makes absolutely no mention of the Shabbateans, not a single syllable. In section 36, Ergas uses the figure of Shaltiel to pre­sent an attempt to save the literal interpretation of zimzum. Shaltiel gives a lecture on Menachem Asariah Fano (1548–1620) and his distinction between Ein-­Sof as a ­bearer of a ­will and the ­will unto itself in his works Pelah ha-­Rimmon (A Piece of the Pomegranate; IV 2) and Yonat Elem (Dove of Silence; ch. 2). ­Couldn’t one assume the presence of a literal zimzum in the ­will of Ein-­Sof instead of within Ein-­Sof itself? Yehoyada responds to Shaltiel’s question in section 37 using three arguments: 1. If a place devoid of divine w ­ ill (makom panui) can in actuality come about through zimzum within the divine ­will itself, how can the Zohar (Tikkunei Zohar 17a) say of God: “­there is no place where you are not”? For this reason, ­there cannot be a place in the divine ­will where God does not exist. 2. If t­ here is neither change nor chance in God, as most Lurianic writings acknowledge, then this also applies to the divine ­will. However, if t­ here is no change and no coincidence in the divine ­will, then zimzum cannot actually (i.e., literally) take place e­ ither. 3. In the book Adam Yashar (Honest Man), Luria writes (in actuality, the book is a pseudonymous compilation by Jacob Zemach, one of Vital’s students) that in the infinity of the Ein-­Sof ­there are neither limits nor concepts nor thought. Therefore, t­ here is no agency within Ein-­Sof where such a zimzum could actually take place. This would mean, and ­here Ergas repeats his argument from section 35, that one was making use of an anthropomorphic idea of Ein-­Sof, which would then clash with the prohibition of graven images. ­ fter dispensing with Menachem Asariah Fano’s distinction between Ein-­ A Sof and the ­will of Ein-­Sof, Shaltiel asks Yehoyada (sec. 38) ­whether the view that ­there was no and had never been an ­actual zimzum in the literal sense represented his own personal opinion or ­whether ­there w ­ ere also other kabbalists who shared this view. This rhetorical question provides Ergas the opportunity in section 39 to have Yehoyada name all the kabbalists who



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dismiss the notion of zimzum in the literal sense. Ergas identifies three well-­ known kabbalistic voices that support his opinion: Menachem Asariah Fano, Joseph Delmedigo from Candia, and Abraham Cohen Herrera. Ergas makes no mention of Israel Sarug and his book Limmudei Azilut, since this work was considered to have been written by Luria himself. Ergas reports that Menachem Asariah Fano wrote in Yonat Elem (ch. 2) that the word zimzum was only a ­human form of expression—­a statement that suggests a meta­phorical rather than a literal interpretation of zimzum. And in Novelot Chokhmah (Fallen Fruit of Wisdom; Basel, 1631, 49b), Joseph Delmedigo had clearly pointed out that he employed terms such as place, space, descent, ascension, zimzum, and ­others, which might seem to suggest something along the lines of material and corporeal realities in Ein-­Sof, solely for the purpose of making himself understood in ­human discourse. Without naming the author directly, Ergas refers to passages in the book Sha’ar ha-­Shamayim (Gates of Heaven; part 5, chs. 8 and 12), 27 that is, the abridged Hebrew translation of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo, which Isaac Aboab de Fonseca had prepared and published in Amsterdam in 1655. According to Ergas, the passages that he mentions from Herrera’s text champion the same position as Delmedigo. In response to Shaltiel’s question why Luria did not expressly write (!) that his discussion of zimzum revolved around a meta­phor (Hebrew: mashal), that is, an allegorical ­human way of expressing the idea, and that ­there is no true ­human conception of Ein-­Sof (sec. 40), Yehoyada succinctly states: Luria did in fact say this very clearly and unambiguously! He then cites a long quotation verbatim from Vital’s Mevo She’arim (71b), which was attributed to Luria (sec. 41). ­There, Vital states, according to Ergas, that no assertions can be formulated about any of the events that took place prior to the emanation of the ten sefirot. And we can only speak of the emanation of the sefirot with the help of meta­phors and analogies. Ergas would have his readers believe that the h ­ uman mind cannot create an image of Ein-­Sof itself. Ergas makes reference to similar assertions from Otzerot Chayyim, citing passages about Adam Kadmon: if we speak of the head, ears, eyes, and other externalities, we do this only in order to be understood in ­human language at all. We are not permitted to speak at all about his essential nature and factuality. If, however, this line of reasoning applies to the discussion of Adam Kadmon, Ergas continues his argument, then this applies even more so to the discussion of Ein-­Sof. From this, we must conclude that the images, such as the circle and the line, which Luria used in the context of zimzum,

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­ ere merely meta­phors meant to make them understandable, but by no w means constituted utterances about the essence and actuality of Ein-­Sof. Ergas could end his argument ­here. ­After he demonstrates that, first, a zimzum of light is both physically and experimentally impossible; that, second, a literal understanding of zimzum is incompatible with the authoritative teachings of medieval and early modern Kabbalah; that, third, we can conceive of no zimzum in the divine ­will; and that, fourth, texts that are ascribed to Luria himself plead for a merely meta­phorical understanding of Ein-­Sof and thus implicitly also of zimzum, a literal understanding of zimzum seems to be out of the question. But Ergas does not endeavor to discredit zimzum entirely. We know for certain that Luria spoke of zimzum, this much remains undisputed—­but only meta­phor­ical­ly! But then we must ask ourselves why Luria uses the zimzum meta­phor at all and what the deeper meaning of this meta­phor might be. What is the secret (sod) of zimzum? With the following explanations of the true meaning of zimzum, Ergas concludes his discussion of it in Shomer Emunim in section 43. And his explanation of the mystery of zimzum entails a surprise. He maintains that in effect, Luria’s discussion of the omnipresent light of Ein-­Sof is ­really about the infinite, unrestricted power or strength (Hebrew: koach) of God. Ergas explains that with the lack of an “empty space” for the creation of the world in Ein-­Sof, Luria’s depiction highlights that ­there was no place for finite and ­limited objects such as the worlds within the infinite power of God. The creation of a finite real­ity pre­sents a prob­lem for God’s infinite real­ity. This is why the infinite power had to withdraw itself, as if contracting its infinite powers within itself, in order to create an empty place in which the finite worlds could emanate. But this, Ergas maintains, was not what Luria ­really intended to say. He asserts that Luria instead relies on a meta­phor so that his interlocutors would be able to understand what he wished to communicate. We merely speak as if Ein-­Sof creates an empty place within its infinite power. However, God, in fact, does not create beings with his infinite, absolute power, but rather he does so with a finite power, so that the products of his creative energies, that is, all finite creations, can exist at all. The reason why Luria introduced the zimzum meta­phor, Ergas concludes at the end of his discussion, was to convey the idea that even though Ein-­Sof is infinite and limitless, it nevertheless contains a kind of ­limited power within itself. Ein-­Sof can contract its power and thus limit it in such a way that creation, which is formed through Ein-­Sof ’s ­limited powers, is able to endure ­these powers, so that all of creation may exist and not be destroyed by the infinite exercise of infinite power.



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Roland Goetschel has aptly argued that we must view Ergas’s meta­ phorical explanation of zimzum as an attempt to reinterpret zimzum in the sense of the linear doctrine of emanation found in medieval Kabbalah.28 The unmoved mover high above emanates his divine light in increasingly diluted form linearly downward and thus generates the worlds and the descending levels of all beings that are farther and farther away from the divine light. What is specific about Ergas’s attempt is the didactic pre­sen­ta­tion and the embedding of his argument in anti-­Shabbatean polemics.29 However, Ergas’s argument, unlike ­those of his pre­de­ces­sors, makes undeniably clear how the merely meta­phorical understanding of zimzum deflects its radical theological and philosophical ramifications, nearly silencing them altogether. Ergas weakens zimzum to a mere meta­phor for the self-­limitation of divine power in the transition from the infinite to the finite. Ergas expressly denies the self-­movement and development of God in and through creation, thus re-­ enthroning God as the unmoved mover and causa causarum. What is particularly surprising about Ergas’s dissolution of the zimzum meta­phor is the translation of the meta­phorical “light” of Ein-­Sof into koach, the power or strength of God. If Ergas is correct and a meta­phorical conception of the “light of Ein-­Sof ” is untenable, this invalidation would not only apply to Luria, but would also have consequences for the entire constellation of images and meta­phors of light in the Kabbalah—­imagery that is based on Plotinus and Plotinism.30 ­Because, if we follow Ergas’s line of thinking, why ­wouldn’t the “light of God” be a meta­phor in the Zohar or in the writings of Cordovero or the works of other authorities, if it is a meta­ phor when Luria discusses it? It is not clear from reading Shomer Emunim ­whether Ergas was actually conscious of or intended this radical and comprehensive consequence of his dissolution of the imagery of “light” in the power of God for the entire Kabbalah. From a theological point of view, Ergas suggests that God can only create the world and maintain its existence by restricting his potentia absoluta into a potentia ordinata through the self-­ entangled transformation of absolute power into a relative, controlled, and ordered power. Unlimited power, including the infinite power of God, would other­wise destroy every­thing in its wake. Thinking in terms of physics, however, Ergas translates ­here light into power. Light is just an old expression for power. For a rabbi familiar with the sciences such as Ergas, this may already have something to do with the triumph of Newtonian physics in the eigh­teenth ­century. In terms of causal mechanics, effects require a cause, the initiation of movement requires force,

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not light. Of course, a pious rabbi and kabbalist like Ergas would never mention in his book a non-­Jewish physicist by name, let alone that of any other goy. But if we take Ergas’s dissolution of the meta­phor of the light of Ein-­ Sof seriously, ­there can be no return to Plotinus and the imagery of light found in medieval Kabbalah. In Livorno, the modernization of the Jewish world had already been well ­under way for some time. And Italian rabbis like Ergas ­were much more familiar with the newest discoveries in modern medicine and physics than the rabbis in Ashkenaz, where the Enlightenment had not yet even begun to stir. In plain language, Ergas tells his readers: in the beginning, ­there was not the light, but rather the power of God. “In the beginning, ­there was power,” Goethe’s Faust would ­later say at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century. Let us turn our attention now to a reaction, if not a response, to Ergas’s 1736 Shomer Emunim. Immanuel Chai Ricchi’s book Yosher Levav (Sincerity of the Heart) appeared one year ­later in 1737 and like Shomer Emunim was printed in Amsterdam. We can reasonably conclude that Yosher Levav was intended as a reaction to Shomer Emunim, ­because Immanuel Chai Ricchi (1688–1743) was one of the rabbis of Livorno who had signed and issued the haskamah, the statement of authoritative rabbinical approval that permitted the printing of Ergas’s Shomer Emunim, which appears in the book prior to the book’s preface. Ricchi therefore became well acquainted with Shomer Emunim when it was printed six years a­ fter Ergas’s death. One year a­ fter the publication of Shomer Emunim, Ricchi takes a critical stance with re­spect to Ergas in his own book, reacting in par­tic­u­lar to Ergas’s plea against a literal understanding of the real­ity of zimzum with his own cautiously formulated defense of the actuality of zimzum. Nevertheless, Ricchi did not situate Yosher Levav specifically as a direct response to Ergas, for he articulates his arguments against Ergas’s criticism of zimzum in an indirect manner. Ricchi endeavors to rescue zimzum, working from an entirely new basis: on the one hand, he argues ontologically that God’s creation of the world ex nihilo cannot take place and is also inconceivable without an ­actual zimzum. ­Because if a pro­cess of zimzum does not occur ontologically and realistically, then that nothingness that is necessary for creation ex nihilo does not come about in Ein-­Sof. If, as Ergas claims, zimzum is only a meta­phor for an inconceivable, inexplicable, inner pro­cess within Ein-­Sof and therefore does not actually amount to this pro­cess itself, then the concept of creation ex nihilo lacks an ontological basis.



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On the other hand, Ricchi admits that Ergas, whom he expressly praises and honors, and his arguments for a purely meta­phorical conception of zimzum are entirely valid and that the dispute over the correct understanding of zimzum cannot be solved purely rationally and on the basis of reason alone. At this point, Ricchi introduces scriptural proof from the Torah as the ultimate criterion for making a determination and thus attempts to precipitate a decision regarding the correct understanding of zimzum that is based on the Holy Scriptures and their authority. Where reason does not suffice, the pious must consult the Torah. Not much is known about the rabbi and kabbalist Ricchi. In 1727, ten years before Yosher Levav appeared, he had published an exposition of the Lurianic Kabbalah entitled Mishnat Chassidim in Amsterdam. In his exceedingly in­ter­est­ing preface to Yosher Levav, he explains that, ­after his many years of activity as a rabbi in Livorno, he was called to Aleppo in 1736 and moved t­ here with his f­amily. He officiated in a place that, he writes, already belonged to the Holy Land, to Erez Israel, according to the kabbalists’ understanding. Aleppo could lay the same claim to sacredness as other cities in the Holy Land.31 In fact, Aleppo is only a three days’ journey from Safed and Meron, the pilgrimage sites of the kabbalists. He composed Yosher Levav in Aleppo. As Ricchi describes in his preface, Bible verses provided him the impetus for writing the book. While in Aleppo, he experienced a period of time in which he repeatedly woke up with par­tic­u­lar Bible verses bouncing around in his pious head. This jolt of Scripture swarming through his mind first occurred on Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), 6 September 1736, and then on several additional occasions in September and October 1736. They ­were Bible verses upon which he had previously meditated.32 Ricchi had interpreted this form of inspiration from Bible verses that takes place right at the moment of waking while in the Holy Land, in the sense of the Talmudic tradition (BT Berakhot 57b), as a divine cue and “minor prophecy” (nevuah ketanah), especially since the prophet Elijah had appeared to him in a dream and spoken with him, as he describes in Yosher Levav.33 While reflecting on his dreams and ­these Bible verses, his thoughts had touched upon the prob­lem of the proper understanding of zimzum, which had prompted him to begin his book with a discussion of zimzum. The purpose of the book is not, Ricchi explains, to satiate some desire for a quarrel, but rather to shed light on the deep, pious concern that the discussion of zimzum arouses. Ricchi begins his exposition with theological considerations regarding the unity of God: all kabbalists refer to God, the first and last cause of the

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world, as Ein-­Sof, in order to express the limitlessness of his existence, his unity, his power, and his providence.34 If, however, God’s existence and unity are infinite and eternal, an idea that follows from this most general characterization of Ein-­Sof, which we find in the works of the kabbalists, nothing exists within the infinite Ein-­Sof other than Ein-­Sof itself. This means that nonentity (nothingness) does not exist, no world, nor anything ­else. Ricchi enthusiastically quotes the book Pirkei de-­Rabbi Eliezer: “Before the world was created, ­there was only Him and His name.” This doctrine, according to which only God and his holy name existed (and nothing ­else) prior to the creation of the world, is also the foundation of the rabbinical doctrine of creation from nothing (Hebrew: yesh me-­ein), which developed somewhat parallel to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo that Christian church f­ athers espoused.35 According to this doctrine, the world is not formed, as Aristotle previously taught, from ­matter that previously existed alongside God prior to the creation of the world. Before creating the world, God was alone, the only being, and he only creates ­matter at the moment of creation, as the Bible depicts. God alone is the creator, he creates the world purely out of himself, out of nothing ­else. Based on this conviction and doctrine, explaining how it is pos­si­ble that something ­else can emerge from Ein-­Sof in its infinity and unity has always been a central prob­lem for Kabbalah. This is, according to Ricchi, why zimzum is necessary. Zimzum first makes space within Ein-­Sof for this nothing, into which God can create the world, that is, a being other than God himself. Ein-­ Sof must first withdraw from its omnipresence, so that another being, dif­ fer­ent from it, the world, can arise. Ricchi describes this pro­cess in Ein-­Sof as follows: And when the time had come that it arose within his holy ­will to pass from potentiality to realization, so that being would be created out of nothing for the first time, in order to endow that which he newly created with his goodness and to make known to us the enormous magnitude of his powers—­based on the honorary title of his being, It pulled itself together with the fullness of its strength and cleared an empty space and a nothingness [makom rek ve-­ein] within itself, in order to create within its midst new being that would announce its strength and live upon its goodness. In order to endow this being permanence and stability from within and without, Ein-­ Sof then, in its ­great goodness, released a fine filament from the es-



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sence of its own existence, as if it ­were stretching its fin­ger into the ­middle of that place that remained as the space of that contraction [zimzum] from the light of its being and existence, ­after it had left this place. And the filament was not stretched from one side to the other of that place of zimzum, but only to its center, as it is written in the works of ARI [Luria].36 This description of zimzum differs markedly from that of Chayyim Vital. Ricchi was certainly acquainted with Vital’s conception of zimzum, which he quotes elsewhere in Yosher Levav. In the very first sentence, it becomes clear that Ricchi expressly wishes to situate zimzum in the context of creation from nothing, ­because he uses right ­here, in the passage quoted above, the rabbinical term for “creation from nothing”: yesh me-­ein. ­After Ein-­Sof had made the decision in its ­will to create being out of nothing for the very first time, it withdrew using all its strength and created an empty place and a nothingness within itself, in Hebrew makom rek ve-­ein. ­Here, Ricchi repeats the ein of yesh me-­ein, thus identifying the empty place created by zimzum with the nothingness of creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). Vital never discussed this nothingness. According to his description, the light of Ein-­Sof withdraws from an empty, lightless space in the ­middle of Ein-­Sof, leaving ­behind a vacuum. The valence that light occupies in this discourse is the second striking detail by which Ricchi’s description of zimzum differs from that of Vital. Ricchi writes nothing of the withdrawal of light, only of the tension of the power (koach) of God in zimzum. In his description of zimzum, Ricchi, without naming him directly, makes an explicit connection to Ergas, who declared the “light” of Ein-­Sof to be a meta­ phor for the infinite power of God. This is the kernel of Ricchi’s ontological argument supporting the actuality and a literal understanding of zimzum. Without a realistic zimzum, which God resolves in his infinite ­will before all time, ­there is no nothingness within the infinite and omnipresent Ein-­Sof, which the universally recognized doctrine of creation out of nothingness describes. ­Because initially ­there exists nothing other than the infinite unity and existence of Ein-­Sof. Only an ­actual pro­cess of zimzum makes this nothingness pos­si­ble, that is, that place where the divine being is not, precisely ­because it has withdrawn from it. God can then emanate the world into that nothingness through that straight line (filament) and release into existence a being other than divine being. In short: without a real, a­ ctual zimzum, t­ here is no nothingness

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and no creation ex nihilo. Ricchi’s ontological argument excludes, entirely contrary to Ergas, a purely meta­phorical understanding of zimzum. Nonetheless, Ricchi remains cautious in his argument beyond this point. He maintains that God could have hypothetically created the world without creation from nothingness (creatio ex nihilo) and without zimzum—no one could think and imagine only this idea.37 And in his omnipotence, God could even potentially undo zimzum, fill the empty space again, and return it to its initial state. But all of this remains pure speculation. Ricchi insists that rational reasoning has its limits. His own argument supports the literal understanding of zimzum. Ricchi has no doubt that an ­actual zimzum took place. But he rejects speculations about the shape, the condition, the emotions, and the actions of Ein-­Sof prior to zimzum. This is why he refrains from entering into a debate about Ergas’s ten arguments against the literary understanding of zimzum—­this would defy rational argument. In fact, he speaks of his former colleague and fellow rabbi with extremely warm regard. Ricchi only wishes to object to Ergas’s claim that Luria himself understood zimzum meta­phor­ically, by citing Vital’s Ez Chayyim, which clearly supports a literal understanding of zimzum.38 But not just Vital, midrash and the Torah itself also support the literal interpretation of zimzum. In the Midrash Genesis Rabbah (48:2), it says: “The Holy One, Blessed be He, is the place of the world, but the world is not His place.” Ricchi interprets it with regard to the zimzum as follows: If zimzum actually took place, then God is the place of the world, ­because the world would come into being in a place in the ­middle of Ein-­Sof where God is not pre­sent. God is the place of the world, ­because the world is in God, but God does not have his place in this world, which is dif­fer­ent from him. If, on the other hand, zimzum is understood meta­phor­ically, then the world itself would remain the place of God, without any separation having taken place. But the Torah says (Exod. 33:21): “See, ­there is a place near Me.” Ricchi understands this as the confirmation that God is the place of the world, but, as the midrash says, the world is not the place of God. In other words: the midrash cannot be understood at all without the actuality of a real zimzum. God could not be the place of a world dif­fer­ent from him, in which he is not, which is therefore not his place. Without that necessary change in the being of the world from God’s being through ­actual zimzum, God would remain omnipresent in the world. The world would be his place, but without ­human freedom and responsibility. According to this line of thought, the Kabbalah would be a pantheism—­the very ­thing that Wachter accused



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Spinoza of and Jacobi ­later accused Lessing of. But Ricchi is a theist. He resorts to the Torah and midrash in order to defend his literal interpretation of zimzum against rationalist challenges and speculations. This sort of recourse to tradition may not be to every­one’s taste, but for a pious rabbi and kabbalist like Ricchi, it is not at all surprising. And it is worth noting that only de­cades ­after Ricchi, Moses Mendelssohn, in his defense of Lessing against Jacobi’s accusation of pantheism, which he articulates in the Morgenstunden (1785), as well as Schelling, leaned on the exact same idea contained in the midrash to which Ricchi took refuge: we are to think of God as Ein-­Sof and hen kai pan (the one and all) without any danger of regressing into pantheism only in such a way that the world is in God, but God is not in the world. The world that is dif­fer­ent from God, from which God has withdrawn, remains in God, but God is not in the world that he has left to ­humans and their freedom. God is the place of the world, but the world is not God’s place. We can almost certainly rule out the idea that all of ­these thinkers ­were acquainted with Ricchi’s Yosher Levav. The work and its author, who died only a few years ­after its publication, have remained largely unappreciated. Ricchi’s book and Ergas’s Shomer Emunim share a similar fate. However, Baruch of Kosov largely ­adopted Ergas’s book in his Ammud ha-­Avodah (1763), at least in terms of form and overall message. Shomer Emunim thus made its way out of Livorno and Amsterdam and arrived in eastern Eu­rope. But Ammud ha-­Avodah was not available in print form ­until 1854, so Ergas’s book likely influenced the nineteenth-­century Chassidic Re­nais­sance far more than Ergas’s contemporaries in the second half of the eigh­teenth ­century.39

Moses Chayyim Luzzatto: Tikkun in Zimzum In November 1729, an el­derly Joseph Ergas in Livorno received a substantial letter from Moses Chagiz, who alerted him to Shabbatean activities in Padua. The primary suspect, according to Chagiz, was a young rabbi by the name of Moses Chayyim Luzzatto, scion of one of the oldest and most respected rabbinical dynasties in all of Italy. Luzzatto was born in Padua in 1707 and grew up ­there. He maintained that, starting in 1727, a maggid, an angel or a higher voice willing to divulge divine secrets to ­human beings, was making regular, sometimes daily appearances to him during his prayers and meditations. He had even written kabbalistic writings ­under the influence of this

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voice. The maggid had also provided him with visitations of Moses, Elijah, Metatron, Abraham, Adam Kadmon, and the Messiah. Luzzatto shared all this with a circle of like-­minded, ascetic young men that he had gathered around him, who together awaited the imminent coming of the Messiah and the salvation of the world in tikkun. Ergas, who years before had supported Chagiz’s campaign against the Shabbatean Chayon and had himself written polemics directly targeting Chayon, nevertheless could not and would not participate in the accusation of Shabbateanism being made against Luzzatto. Even if the messianic hopes of Luzzatto’s circle in Padua ­were unsettling, they ­were not directly heretical. Even the prominent rabbis Samson Morpurgo and Isaiah Bassan (the latter had been Luzzatto’s teacher) did not wish to confirm the suspicion of Shabbateanism against Luzzatto. Regardless of their reservations, Chagiz nonetheless succeeded once again in unleashing a controversy. In Luzzatto’s case, the rabbis Jacob ha-­Kohen in Frankfurt am Main and Ezekiel Katzenellenbogen in Altona interfered in the controversy, as well as many well-­k nown Italian rabbis, namely the Venetian rabbinate.40 The twenty-­three-­year-­old unmarried rabbi and kabbalist Luzzatto presented a conundrum. Luzzatto had enjoyed a reputation for being a genius since childhood. He was well versed not only in traditional rabbinical knowledge of Talmud, Kabbalah, halachic and ethical lit­er­a­ture, but also in Hebrew poetry. And, having grown up in the university city of Padua, he was also intimately familiar with Eu­ ro­pean philosophy and the classical languages, as well as profane (i.e., non-­ Jewish) Italian culture and lit­er­a­ture. He had published his first book at the age of seventeen, and the maggid sometimes appeared to him on a daily basis. ­Under the influence of ­these epiphanies, Luzzatto was able to churn out entire treatises with lightning speed. Like Shimon bar Yochai and Isaac Luria before him, Luzzatto had around him a chavura of close companions from Ashkenaz, Italy, and the Balkans, all of whom actively desired, by way of asceticism, prayer, and fasting, to contribute to and hasten the imminent redemption of the world. The rabbinical authorities must have been suspicious of a charismatic miracle rabbi such as Luzzatto, with his many prodigious talents, but also dubious activities. Although Luzzatto was able to defend himself skillfully against all accusations of heresy, by 1730 he found it necessary to yield to the pressure exerted by the Italian rabbinical authorities, especially ­those in Venice. He surrendered his kabbalistic writings to his teacher Bassan for safekeeping and swore a vow that he would no longer rec­ord the revelations of the maggid and would no longer teach Kabbalah.



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Luzzatto’s agreement to a compromise, however, did not succeed in putting an end to the conflict, ­because it was unable to rid the world of the suspicion of Shabbateanism. The vow, which was directed against the undeniable messianic beliefs and activities of Luzzatto’s chavura, compelled Luzzatto and his companions to adopt pretense and secrecy. The entire group appeared unwilling to give up their shared belief that the end times of salvation had already begun. Moses Luzzatto married in 1731, thereby “normalizing” his way of life, but he saw himself and his young wife, Zipporah, as the reincarnation of the biblical Moses and his spouse Zipporah. He interpreted his own marriage as a symbol of the ­union of the female presence of God in the world, the shekhinah, with the transcendent divine husband in  the heavens.41 Luzzatto, whom his contemporaries in the eigh­teenth ­century ­were already rev­er­ent­ly referring to with the acronym “RaMChaL,” certainly did not lack a deeply religious sense of mission as God’s chosen instrument. In 1732, Luzzatto wrote, in violation of the vow he had sworn, a text entitled KL’Ch Pitchei Chokhmah (138 Openings of Wisdom). This treatise is a foundational systematic theosophical discussion of all basic concepts and elementary ideas of the Lurianic Kabbalah in light of the imminent redemption to be brought about by the Messiah and tikkun. Luzzatto’s text situates the eschatological tikkun right next to zimzum, the first act and the presupposition of all creation. When the attacks against Luzzatto and his chavura in Padua did not come to an end in the following years and when highly regarded Venetian rabbis once again openly accused Luzzatto of heresy,42 he departed from Italy in 1735 and moved with his ­family to Amsterdam, where the much more tolerant rabbinate ­there left him in peace. ­Here in Amsterdam, Luzzatto wrote a number of kabbalistic and ethical texts, as well as Hebrew poetry and even a few theatrical works. He per­sis­tently protested the accusation of Shabbateanism levied against him. Although he admitted that he was acquainted with some works by Nathan of Gaza, Luzzatto’s writings lack any reference to Shabbetai Zevi. The Messiah whom Luzzatto awaited was neither Shabbetai Zevi nor a reincarnation of this false Messiah. Unlike many crypto-­Shabbateans and even the Frankists, Luzzatto never believed in salvation through sin43 and never performed or approved antinomistic, anti-­ halakhic acts, as his ethical works attest. Instead, he believed that the days of the Messiah could only be hastened through asceticism and good, halakhically observant deeds. In 1743, Luzzatto emigrated with his ­family from

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Amsterdam to the Holy Land. He died in Acre, not yet forty years old, of an epidemic that broke out ­there. Basically, Ergas and Luzzatto agree with one another in that they both understand zimzum in symbolic terms. In this re­spect, ­there is no difference between Ergas’s Shomer Emunim and Luzzatto’s KL’Ch Pitchei Chokhmah. In this point too, Luzzatto differs completely from the Shabbateans Nathan of Gaza, Abraham Cardozo, and Nechemiah Chayon. For Luzzatto, zimzum is not a real activity of Ein-­Sof and in Ein-­Sof. In any case, zimzum, like all other intra-­divine and premundane occurrences, can only be communicated through signs and symbols (otiot). Real­ity, Luzzatto writes, only exists in the created world. However, language does not “­really” depict this real­ity; it can only use signs and symbols: “­Because ­there is no real­ity for language, except in the signs/symbols [otiot].” 44 But this is where the similarity between Luzzatto and Ergas ends. While Ergas offers instructive dialogues regarding Kabbalah in Shomer Emunim, but remains completely within the immanence of kabbalistic discourse, Luzzatto’s KL’Ch Pitchei Chokhmah is more like a philosophical treatise on the basic terminology and concepts of the Lurianic Kabbalah, in terms of both form and content. The 138 “openings” are memorable in character and resemble the brief philosophical propositions in Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), except that Luzzatto’s brief propositions are not followed by a lengthy “Demonstratio” (a demonstration more geometrico) as one finds in Spinoza’s work, but by a sometimes multipage, argumentative perush (explanation) that interprets the respective “opening,” or proposition, in philosophical terminology in a reflective and deliberative manner. Luzzatto omits extensive descriptions of topics such as the pro­cess of zimzum or shevirat ha-­kelim. In terms of organ­ ization and structure, but also in its attempt to reproduce and excogitate upon Lurianic ideas using philosophical terminology, Luzzatto’s work more closely resembles Spinoza’s Ethics than the kabbalistic immanence of Ergas’s Shomer Emunim. The prelude to the 138 Openings of Wisdom is more reminiscent of Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710), where Luzzatto endeavors in several propositions to explain to the reader that the unity and uniqueness of God (yichud) consists of the fact that only his good ­will creates the world (Patach/Proposition 1) and that he wants the best, along with the perfection of this world. Although God, the emanator (ma’azil), accords space for evil in the world, he only desires goodness to endure in the world (Prop. 2). And God, in his benevolent direction and providence with the best of intentions and according to his



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desire for good, ­will lead every­thing to a good end (Prop. 3). In the end, ­under divine guidance, the Eternal One is ­after all the improver and perfecter of nature, all ­things ­will turn in tikkun ­toward the good and God’s uniqueness ­will be revealed (Prop. 4). This reads like a Hebrew primer to Leibniz’s theory of preestablished harmony, but Luzzatto evinces a sense of eschatological consequence and urgency that is completely absent from Leibniz’s philosophy. In Luzzatto’s text, tikkun is not, as in Leibniz’s best of all pos­si­ble worlds, the result of the teleological optimization of the world over time, as Lebniz envisaged in God’s rational planning of the world, but rather Luzzatto anticipates that it ­will take place in the very near ­f uture. Nonetheless, we cannot overlook Luzzatto’s interest in theodicy, despite his imminent expectation of the appearance of the Messiah. Evil and wickedness in the world threaten the supposition of God’s omnipotence and goodness in creation. Therefore, Luzzatto repeatedly emphasizes that the divine ­will and direction, that is, providence, permit evil, but also bring the world to a good end in tikkun. The dominant role that divine providence plays for the world, Luzzatto immediately notices, is in complete contradiction to the Lurianic conception of Ein-­Sof. For Luzzatto, this contradiction endows zimzum with a very special significance. ­Because Ein-­Sof of the Lurianic Kabbalah is not only the infinite and unlimited, it is also the nonpurposeful (bilti-­tachlit), the nonteleological, as Luzzatto explains in Patach/Proposition 24 and in the long perush that accompanies Patach 24. Ein-­Sof is without purpose, and only through zimzum does it leave this state of nonpurposefulness: “On account of zimzum, It [Ein-­Sof] set about to do something outside of itself, this is what Ein-­Sof wanted, Blessed may It be, and It left its purposelessness [et bilti-­tachlito] and chose for itself the path of finite activity, and this is called the zimzum of Ein-­Sof, Blessed may It be.” 45 This quotation makes clear two impor­tant distinctions with regard to zimzum. On the one hand, zimzum is a boundary and a bridge between the original teleological indifference and nonpurposefulness of Ein-­Sof and the teleology of every­thing created, which, from the first diminished light sparks of reshimu ­until tikkun, subordinates all of creation to divine providence and thus leads to a good end. Only through zimzum is the nonpurposefulness of Ein-­Sof overturned, as Luzzatto affirms in Patach 24, and Ein-­Sof abandons its own teleological indifference in ­favor of causing creation. In contrast to Leibniz’s conception of God, Ein-­Sof, according to Luzzatto’s interpretation, has no premundane plans or intentions for the world prior to zimzum.

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Luzzatto asserts that divine providence only becomes engaged once zimzum has taken place. On the other hand, Luzzatto argues, zimzum does not take place within Ein-­Sof, but is rather a function that takes place outside of Ein-­Sof (pe’ulah chuz mimeno), which in turn does not affect Ein-­Sof itself. Ein-­Sof remains untouched by zimzum, an assertion comparable to the arguments we find in Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo. Like the God who appears in the Aristotle-­inspired Jewish religious philosophy of Maimonides and in the kabbalistic writings of Cordovero and Herrera, Ein-­Sof remains, in Luzzatto’s view, the unmoved mover of the world.46 Zimzum, on the other hand, like ­every activity, is finite, although it is not itself the act of creation. Rather, zimzum, as a finite activity of ending and limiting, first creates the finite empty space for emanation and creation, for Adam Kadmom and the sefirot. Zimzum is not itself an act of creation, it does not itself belong to the created, ­because zimzum does not materialize in anything concrete. Rather, we should understand it as the condition of creation and the boundary between Ein-­Sof and the act of creation. The radical eschatological consequence of this assertion—­that divine providence and teleology are not the product of God’s eternity, but only begin with zimzum and achieve their telos of completing and perfecting the world with tikkun—­only becomes clear to Luzzatto’s readers if we take into full account the author’s acute messianic expectation of an imminent eschaton. Tikkun ­will not take place in some far-­off distant ­f uture, but rather in a near ­f uture that almost touches the pre­sent. Luzzatto hoped to be on the cusp of tikkun, which for him held more immediacy than zimzum. He situated the entirety of world history and its teleology along a spectrum, with zimzum at one end and tikkun at the other. As Luzzatto says in Patach/­ Proposition 30: It is rooted in zimzum that t­ hings w ­ ill occur according to the guidance of the world [i.e., divine providence] ­until the end, meaning that deteriorations ­will become real, but the end of all ­things ­will bring every­thing back to tikkun, the final salvation, and that the unity in its truth ­will become vis­i­ble. [. . .] When creation is created, situations arise that corrupt the good of God, evils which we call sitra achra [the other, evil side of the world]. [. . .] But this evil ­will be overcome by the power of improvement and perfection ­until all deteriorations and setbacks return to tikkun, and then the unity ­will acknowledge itself in its truth.47



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Figure 20. Moses Chayyim Luzzatto, KL’Ch Pitchei Chokhmah (138 Openings to Wisdom), (Warsaw, 1888), Patach 30, p. 42.

Once Ein-­Sof, which originally possessed no telos, leaves its nonpurposefulness ­behind, tikkun as the good end of all ­things has already been rooted and established in zimzum, despite all the adversities of the world and the sitra achra. Using turns of phrase that nearly approximate Hegelian diction, Moses Chayyim Luzzatto explains that he awaits this tikkun, the end of the world through the achievement of perfection, in which the unity of God recognizes itself in its truth. He believes tikkun ­will occur during his lifetime. Unfortunately, he was to be disappointed and died prematurely. A silver lining to Luzzatto’s tumultuous biography: the Chassidim would ­later enthusiastically receive his works, but in their case, without any preoccupation with imminent eschatological expectations.

Chapter 5

The Origins of Chassidism

Chassidism, the major spiritual revival movement that originated in the eigh­ teenth ­century among eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews and stressed a renewed concept of piety, marks an impor­tant turning point in the history of the impact of the Lurianic Kabbalah, especially regarding zimzum. Handwritten manuscript copies of texts that ­were central for the Lurianic Kabbalah had been widely disseminated in eastern Eu­rope, including the Chassidic world. However, the Chassidim did not merely dutifully transmit and comment on ­these writings; they also fundamentally reread and reinterpreted them. In ­doing so, Chassidism formulates entirely innovative, in­de­pen­dent, and bold interpretations of zimzum. The boldness of ­these interpretations lies, among other reasons, in the fact that at least some Chassidic schools not only conceive of zimzum as an intra-­divine event but also imagine it, for the first time in the reception history of zimzum, as a ­human activity. Chassidism’s strongly anthropomorphic image of God reverberates through their understanding of zimzum. God’s zimzum becomes the model of pious ­human “self-­a nnihilation before God,” what the Jewish enlightener (maskil) Salomon Maimon, a con­temporary and observer of the Chassidim, called Chassidism’s religiously motivated, spiritual withdrawal of one’s own self in the ascetic retreat from the materiality of the earthly world and one’s own body.1 Even if the Chassidic concept and practice of h ­ uman self-­ annihilation and abandonment of the material world ­doesn’t always precisely reflect divine zimzum, we can see how the theomorphism (godlikeness) of ­humans becomes an act of imitatio Dei in their anthropomorphized version of zimzum. While the founder of Chassidism, the miracle-­working folk healer Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, maintained a positive outlook on the sensory, earthly



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enjoyment of life and love for creation, which corresponded to his belief that God was pre­sent in all ele­ments of creation, his most impor­tant student, Dov Ber of Mezritch (1704–1772), considered ritual, purity, and asceticism to be of utmost importance. Withdrawal from and restraint on the terrestrial plane are considered positive, salutary be­hav­iors of the pious in the brand of Chassidism that Dov Ber of Mezritch founded. ­Because flight from the world and asceticism enable devekut, literally, “adherence” to God, which unites the pious soul with God in prayer and meditation. Assisting and contributing to eschatological tikkun, a major component of the Lurianic Kabbalah, no longer defines the purpose and actions of the pious, but rather the pious affirmation of life and a focus on living in the pre­sent. The hope for an eschatological, even messianic redemption and the transformation of the world in tikkun does not drive Chassidism as a movement. The Lurianic hopes for messianic redemption had been thoroughly compromised and disgraced by the antinomistic messianic movements of the Shabbateans and the Frankists. Unlike the Lurianic Kabbalah, Chassidism does not strive to bring about the redemptive transformation of the world, but rather it endeavors to transform one’s individual way of life and personal practice of piety within an unchanged world, which remains in need of redemption and continues to wait for the Messiah. Self-­transformation in piety, not transformation of the world, is the driving force within Chassidism; devekut instead of tikkun. In the history of Christian mysticism, too, we find notions of asceticism and withdrawal as the mystic’s attitude ­toward the world, but the Chassidic claim to zimzum as a model of ­human earthly be­hav­ior has no parallel in the Christian world nor in the Christian reception history of the concept of zimzum. Zimzum as a ­human be­hav­ior or practice did not exist in Christian Kabbalah, theosophy, or philosophy ­until the twentieth ­century. On the other hand, beginning at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century and continuing to the pre­sent day, prac­ti­tion­ers in the Chassidic world have repeatedly reprinted (and even translated into other languages) the Chassidic texts that propagate “zimzum” as the pious renunciation of and the withdrawal from the world, that is, as acts of ­human be­hav­ior to which the pious and reverent should strive. Both zimzum as an intra-­divine event and zimzum as the ­human practice of “self-­annihilation before God” are pre­sent and relevant in the Chassidic world to this day.

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Dov Ber of Mezritch: Self-­Annihilation Before God Dov Ber Friedmann, widely known by his honorific title, the Maggid (preacher) of Mezritch, was considered during his lifetime to be the most impor­tant follower of Ba’al Shem Tov, the original founder of the Chassidic movement. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (ca. 1700–1760) had achieved ­great fame as a rabbi, kabbalist, magical faith healer, and charismatic preacher, beginning in 1740, ­until his death in 1760. He died in the town of Międzybórz in the Kingdom of Poland (pre­sent day: Medzhybizh in Ukraine). The marvelous life and wondrous deeds of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, which earned him the honorary title “Ba’al Shem Tov” (literally: “Master of the Divine Name”), the miracle worker who helped ­people and healed them with the holy name of God (Shem), are ­today entwined with the many anecdotes and other aspects of Chassidic folk culture that have contributed to the dissemination of the tales of his miraculous deeds and healing, his wise advice, his joyous piety, and even his repeated ascents to heaven. The Ba’al Shem Tov did not pen ­these details about his life himself, as his strengths lay in the spoken word and the miraculous deed. His followers, who flocked from near and far, venerated him almost as a saint. His students and admirers first spread ­these anecdotes about the Ba’al Shem Tov, his deeds, and his teachings, by word of mouth. ­These stories about the Ba’al Shem Tov ­were then ­later committed to paper and posthumously published as Shivchei ha-­BeShT, in both Hebrew and Yiddish.2 Rabbi Dov Ber Friedmann (1704–1772), like many other curious and enthusiastic followers of the BeShT (abbreviation of the name Ba’al Shem Tov), visited the miracle-­working rabbi for a time in Międzybórz. But unlike the holy and downright mythically venerated figure of the Ba’al Shem Tov, Dov Ber Friedmann first began systematically gathering students around him following his Chassidic apprenticeship in the shtetl Mezritch in Volhynia (Ukraine). He established a Chassidic “court” ­there, where he, with the authority endowed him by the honorary title of “Maggid of Mezritch,” ruled over his disciples and followers as if he ­were a Jewish prince of a feudal state.3 The Maggid of Mezritch was not a miracle healer like the Ba’al Shem Tov, but, as his honorary title “Maggid” indicates, a preacher. As a charismatic leader and speaker, he guided the religious and spiritual lives of his followers at his court in Mezritch, obliged them to obey him, and actively dominated all other aspects of their everyday existence. ­Later, he sent his



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missionaries out to the most remote parts of the Rus­sian Empire, the Habsburg monarchy, and even to central Eu­rope, to found new Chassidic cells. The Maggid also enjoyed substantial economic benefits in the form of the donations and gifts rendered by his followers and their families. With ­these funds, he was able to afford a considerably lavish and splendid court. As a curious, eighteen-­year-­old yeshive bokher (yeshiva student), Salomon Maimon (1753–1800), attracted by the reports of other Chassidim, also paid a visit to the Chassidic court of the Maggid in Mezritch only a few years before the august leader’s death. The Maggid, who by this time was an el­derly man, was at the height of his power and splendor. Maimon describes his stay in Mezritch ­after embarking on a long journey, which he most likely made on foot all the way from Lithuania to the Ukraine, in the first volume of his Lebensgeschichte, published in 1792. In Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte (The Autobiography of Salomon Maimon), Maimon not only offers his large German-­ speaking readership the first and most vivid description of the strange, new, and largely unknown movement of Chassidism to appear in German language and lit­er­a­ture, but also provides his readers a precisely written personal account of the court of Dov Ber of Mezritch, the influence the Maggid wielded over his students, as well as his physical appearance and personality: I arrived on the Sabbath for the festive meal and found that a large number of impor­tant men from all over the region had gathered for the occasion. The ­great man fi­nally appeared, cutting an impressive figure, dressed as he was in a white Atlas robe. Even his shoes and his tobacco container ­were white (among the Kabbalists white is the color of grace). He gave each one of the arrivals a Schalom, that is, the ­great man greeted each of them. We sat down to eat, and a solemn silence reigned during the meal. ­After we had finished, the leader sang a celebratory, spiritually uplifting melody. He held his hand in front of his forehead for a few moments, then began to call: “Z. from H.! M. from R.! S. M. from N.”—­the names and places of residence of all the new arrivals, something that astonished us more than a ­little. Each one of us was asked to recite a verse from the Holy Scripture. We did this. Thereupon the leader began to give a sermon, taking the verses we had recited from dif­fer­ent books of the Holy Scripture, he linked them together with such artistry that they seemed to form a single ­whole. Even more extraordinary was that each of us felt the part of the sermon

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dealing with his verse contained something referring directly to his own pressing personal concerns. Naturally, we ­were amazed.4 It was not long before Maimon’s initial fascination with the charismatic Maggid of Mezritch, his sermons, and exegeses, which he makes no attempt to disguise in his recollection, began to wane. Maimon soon left the Maggid’s court. When reading his life story, which he wrote down and published more than twenty years ­after the events described, we can discern the critical distance that separated him from Kabbalah and Chassidism ­after he left his traditional, observant Jewish home in eastern Eu­rope and emigrated to Berlin during the era of the Enlightenment and the Haskalah.5 Maimon portrays the Maggid of Mezritch as a figure who fascinated his followers, a preacher with a certain amount of improvisational skill. Maimon also depicts the Maggid as a wealthy and well-­dressed, highly sophisticated charlatan, an authoritarian and cynical “superior,” who exerted absolute power over his enthusiastic disciples, including their personal life, their ascetic practice, and their pious duties. But Maimon remained an exception and a nonconformist throughout his life, not only among the Chassidim of eastern Eu­rope, but also l­ater in his life among the maskilim in Berlin.6 The overwhelming majority of his followers and students, unlike Maimon, remained loyal to the Maggid of Mezritch. Many revered and viewed him as the legitimate successor of the Ba’al Shem Tov. Many of his students also ­later became famous rabbis and directors of Chassidic schools, including Levi Isaac of Berdichev, Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Elimelech of Lyzhansk, Jehiel Michael (Michel) of Złoczów (Zolochev), Aron of Karlin, Mendel of Vitebsk, Abraham Kolusker, as well as Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the founder of the Chabad movement.7 The court of the Maggid in Mezritch was one of the central points of origin from which the explosive spread of Chassidism radiated throughout eastern and central Eu­rope. Even Pinchas Ha-­Levi Horo­witz (1730–1805), the stern chief rabbi of Frankfurt am Main in the late eigh­teenth ­century and archenemy of the Jewish Enlightenment,8 was a pupil of the Maggid of Mezritch. Zimzum for Israel

Just like the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Maggid of Mezritch also left ­behind no writings of his own. The impromptu sermon that Salomon Maimon portrays in his autobiography illustrates a focus on oral tradition and homily that was



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Figure 21. Title page of the book Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov by Dov Ber of Mezritch (Korets, 1781). The final letters of the title that are printed in bold and in large type, “Dalet Vav Bet,” highlight the author’s first name, Dov.

prob­ably typical at the court of the Maggid. However, the Maggid instructed his students to rec­ord his sermons by jotting down notes while he spoke. In 1781, a few years ­after his death, Shlomo from Luck, one of the Maggid’s students, published in Korets a collection of such transcripts ­under the title Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov (The Maggid’s Words to Jacob) with the subtitle Likkutei Amarim (Collected Sayings).9 The title and subtitle aptly express the character of ­these transcripts: the rather loose “collected sayings” contain the message that the Maggid of Mezritch had for all Jews, for all of Israel. The work addresses all of Israel ­here in the title as “Ya’akov,” referring to the biblical patriarch Jacob whom God renamed “Israel” a­ fter he wrestled with the angel.

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Korets, where this text and many ­others ­were published, was a shtetl only twenty kilo­meters from Mezritch. Korets has been one of the most impor­tant printing locations for Chassidic scripts since the first Hebrew printing com­pany was founded ­there in 1776. Due to the keen interest of the Chassidim in the Lurianic Kabbalah, it was no coincidence that the Berlin maskil and book printer Isaac Satanow printed Chayyim Vital’s Ez Chayyim for the first time in 1782 in Korets, using the version that Meir Poppers had assembled,10 just one year ­after Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov appeared in print. He chose to publish his edition of Ez Chayyim specifically in Korets, and not in Berlin, where no one would have shown any interest in it. Satanow made Vital’s text available in printed form on the book market for the first time, meaning that anyone could access and read it. He thus uncoupled the text from oral tradition and made it exoteric. Further editions appeared in 1784 and 1785, testifying to the book’s marketable success. The Jews of eastern Eu­rope considered Ez Chayyim to be the canonical work of the Lurianic Kabbalah. Before Satanow’s intervention on the book market in 1782, Vital’s text could only be found in handwritten manuscript form. Now, Ez Chayyim was available as a printed book! On the one hand, the Maggid of Mezritch is symptomatic of the ­great interest among the Chassidim in the Lurianic Kabbalah in general and Ez Chayyim in par­tic­u­lar. On the other hand, he is also to some degree responsible for its popularity, ­because he was obviously very well acquainted with the writings of both the Lurianic Kabbalah and Vital’s Ez Chayyim. He frequently alluded to them in his homilies. His followers have merely followed his example ever since. The Chassidim are the group in the Jewish world among whom the Lurianic Kabbalah enjoys the greatest popularity. The Chassidim still fervently read the writings associated with the Lurianic Kabbalah, just as they always have, and reprint them in new editions and print runs. In all of this, the Maggid of Mezritch did not view himself as a disciple or commentator of the Lurianic Kabbalah. Though he leans heavi­ly on Luria’s authority, he only makes use of a handful of his images and concepts for the purpose of creating his own unique sort of “theosophical anthropology.”11 The extremely long, highly intricate, and rather technical descriptions of the sefirot, the parzufim, and all the pro­cesses of emanation that fill dozens of pages in Ez Chayyim simply fall through the cracks in the Maggid’s deployment of Vital’s work. One of the concepts that the Maggid nonetheless adopts from the Lurianic Kabbalah is zimzum.



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­Because zimzum relates first and foremost to the creation of the world, we should not be surprised that the first section of the first part of the collection Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov makes reference to the concept of zimzum. In this first section, the Maggid immediately associates zimzum with the central ideas of his doctrines: God’s love for Israel and his righ­teous ­people. For even before the Holy One created the world and revealed the Torah, Israel existed in him in his thoughts and ­will. And this privileged position that Israel (i.e., the Jewish ­people) occupies in the ­will of the Holy One, even before he had thought about the creation of the world, stems from the Holy One’s desire that the zaddikim ­will always originate from Israel, from one generation to the next. The zaddikim, the righ­teous, who according to Chassidic doctrine ­will one day redeem the world, occupy the thoughts of the Holy One before he even creates the world. Therefore, the Holy One, by concentrating himself, so to speak, retracted to some degree the infinite holiness of his light that existed prior to zimzum and creation, much like a ­father who somewhat scales back his reason (mezamzem et sichelo), when he wishes to explain something to his young son. He concentrates himself in his wisdom by way of zimzum: “As the Holy One, blessed be he, was gladdened by the [­f uture] deeds of the zaddikim, he concentrated himself within himself, and this zimzum is called wisdom. Zimzum occurred for Israel, and also love brought zimzum into being.”12 For the sake of his love for Israel and his zaddikim, God concentrates himself in his wisdom in zimzum before the world is created. Meanwhile, God founded the earth with wisdom, as it says in the Bible (Prov. 3:19) and as the Maggid also explains elsewhere: The Lord founded the earth with wisdom, i.e., the name [God] restricts itself and dwells in wisdom. [. . .] And that is said about the highest wisdom. From ­there, it flows out from one level to the next, ­until it reaches the end of all levels, and at the end of ­these levels, wisdom reveals itself again. [. . .] And this wisdom is recognized and seen in this world, namely, in the needs of all ­things, which he needs for his world and his plea­sure. And this is the life force and existence force of that ­thing. And the wise one understands that this is the same in all aspects of ­every world, namely, that its beginning is his wisdom, and at the end of it, wisdom ­will be revealed again, and that is the wisdom of the lower world ­until the end of all levels.13

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In contrast to Chayyim Vital’s understanding, the Maggid pre­sents zimzum not as a proto-­physical pro­cess that creates an empty space for creation within the deity, but rather as a pro­cess that entails the weakening of God’s omnipotence, which is tempered to wisdom. The Maggid interprets ­here the biblical assertion that God founded the earth with wisdom in such a way that God withdrew himself and concentrated himself in his highest wisdom. This wisdom flows into all stages and phases of creation and is therefore pre­ sent in the world from beginning to end. God’s wisdom is thus recognizable to ­human beings: the fear of the Lord, understood by the Chassidim as pious observance of his commandments, is the beginning of ­human knowledge/wisdom, as the Bible says in Proverbs 1:7. In all ­things and details, and at all stages of creation, God’s wisdom is pre­sent as their life force and vitality. The God-­fearing recognize it as wisdom, for fear (piety) in the presence of the Lord, that is, observance, marks the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. With such declarations, the Maggid of Mezritch turns zimzum into something anthropomorphic: It is no longer the nameless Ein-­Sof that contracts itself to make room for the world, for Adam Kadmon, for the sefirot, the four worlds, and all the other technical details that the traditional Lurianic kabbalists have to offer. ­There is no place for such erudition in the Maggid’s homilies. He articulates an anthropomorphic image of God and describes how Ha-­Shem, the Holy Name and personal God, restricts himself in his wisdom and dwells within it, out of love for his p­ eople Israel. Like a living being, God is influenced by his love for Israel and only then concentrates himself in his wisdom. The “Holy Name” creates the world like a master world-­building architect with this wisdom, filling it with vitality and the joy of existence. This is, and ­here we see one of the innovative, trail-­ blazing aspects of the positive conception of creation in Chassidism, God’s love for his creation, and in par­tic­u­lar for Israel, which, prior to the beginning of all time, prompted him to distill himself through zimzum into wisdom, and then through wisdom create all of creation and sustain its existence. God’s anticipation of Israel in the world is his most impor­tant reason for zimzum and creation. God chose his ­people (Ya’akov/Israel) to be the object of his love well before zimzum and creation: And behold, when [the ­people of] Israel arose in the premundane thought [of the Creator], ­there stood before him the plea­sure and joy that he would one day have in Israel, blessed be he, and



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precisely this is the essence of zimzum, and every­one who is wise ­will understand this. For that was it, when he began to think of the enjoyment that he would one day greet from Israel, who are now finite beings and have a limit. And in ­every place to which the mind is directed, that is where the life force is concentrated [mezumzam]. And that’s the way it is. When [Israel] arose in [his] thoughts, he restricted himself, as it ­were, and Israel thus came into being. For had ­there been no zimzum, the worlds in which Israel now exists could not have existed. But since zimzum did exist, the worlds ­were able to endure it and every­thing came into being.14 Without zimzum ­there can be no Israel. Without his zimzum, God would not have been able to take plea­sure in the existence of his ­people Israel in this world. God’s love for and joy in Israel provide the motivation for his zimzum. This is, so to speak, the first central, theogonic, and at the same time cosmogonic message of the doctrine of zimzum, as the Maggid of Mezritch formulates in his collection Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov, in the “words of the Maggid to Israel.” ­Human Zimzum

Fascinating and pathbreaking though it may well be, the Maggid of Mezritch’s greatest innovation in the realm of Lurianic Kabbalah and its epoch-­ making conception of God’s zimzum prior to and for the purpose of creating the world, however, does not lie in the anthropomorphic introduction of God’s joy over Israel as the impetus and motivation ­behind zimzum. Chassidism’s greatest and truly revolutionary innovation since the Maggid of Mezritch has been the humanization, or anthropomorphizing, of zimzum. The notion of God’s self-­contraction is transferred to ­human beings, who are created in God’s image. Zimzum thus becomes an expression of ­human be­hav­ior. ­Humans, according to the Maggid of Mezritch, the zaddikim withdraw, restrict themselves, concentrate themselves within, and efface themselves. ­Humans withdraw from the world and from other ­people, relinquish earthly, material ­things, and evacuate their place in this world to be able to unite spiritually with God. ­Human zimzum is a psychological, ­mental, spiritual act, but it also manifests itself in entirely practical be­hav­iors of self-­retraction and release, of

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renunciation and withdrawal into concrete acts of asceticism, such as forgoing sleep, food, and marital sexuality, which allow the pious both time and space for intensive study and prayer. The Maggid’s sermons do not yet conceive of zimzum in the sense of a ­human act that is universally available to and pos­si­ble for all ­people. For the Maggid of Mezritch, zimzum always relates specifically to Israel and the zaddikim. Acts of ­human zimzum are kind of imitatio Dei for the zaddikim, the “righ­teous.” Imitating God and withdrawing from the world and from earthly, material t­ hings make it pos­si­ble for the zaddikim to leave the fallen, sinful world ­behind and to approach God, who dwells in zimzum. This mystical withdrawal from the world through zimzum enables the zaddikim to step away from their earthly existence, to return to God through prayer and ecstasy, and even to achieve an ecstatic ­union with God in devekut, the most intimate approximation of and “attachment” to God. Self-­annihilation and self-­abandonment through the ­human version of zimzum thus lead to unio mystica with God, who resides in zimzum. The Chassidism of the Maggid of Mezritch differs radically from the Lurianic Kabbalah with re­spect to the mundane be­hav­ior of the pious and their goals. For Luria and his disciples, it is the destiny of the ­human being, or to be more precise, of the Jewish ­human, ­after the breaking of the vessels and Adam’s original sin (which anticipates the sin of all ­human beings) to bring about tikkun and to restore a terrestrial world that is ­free of sin and evil by way of God, asceticism, study, the fulfillment of the commandments, and penance. In contrast to this inner-­worldly, mystical-­practical contribution that (Jewish) ­people make in the restoration of a ­f uture healed world in this world, which the Messiah ­will then complete. The Maggid of Mezritch represents a completely dif­fer­ent model of redemption. In the Maggid of Mezritch’s view, the task is to overcome the malevolent, fragmentary material world and lead it back into nothingness. The pious must take part in this. By withdrawing from the world, they bring this material fallen world back into nothingness to God through Torah, prayer, and good works. Instead of tikkun, instead of improving and perfecting this world, the Maggid’s lesson is the nihilation of the world. This negation of the world begins with a “self-­a nnihilation before God,” as Salomon Maimon describes and characterizes the be­hav­ior of the zaddikim. As Karl E. Grözinger has shown in his precise portrayal of the world-­ fleeing, nihilating mysticism of Dov Ber of Mezritch,15 the Maggid under-



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stood the ­human version of zimzum as flight from the world to be a goal for all the pious, who are each able to achieve the status of zaddik by way of the arduousness of asceticism. The concept of the zaddik in the singular, the exemplary miracle worker who, as a charismatic leader, gathers and guides a group of Chassidim around him, did not yet exist during Dov Ber’s day. This idea was first developed by Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye and ­later by Elimelech of Lyzhansk, a student of the Maggid, and then embodied a generation ­later by Nachman of Bratslav.16 For the Maggid of Mezritch, however, every­one still has the potential to become a zaddik. The Maggid asserts that the h ­ uman zimzum of withdrawal from the earthly, material world is an option for all the pious of Israel. At the same time, presumably out of re­spect for the divinity of the event and its religious value, the Maggid does not resort specifically to the concept of zimzum per se when he speaks of the h ­ uman retreat from the world and the escape from the world of the self. Nevertheless, the zaddik, as the Maggid views this figure, is committed to an imitatio Dei, which he discusses using other, analogous terms.17 According to the Maggid of Mezritch, contributing to the annihilation of the worlds, which find themselves in a state of disorder and sin ­after the rupture of the vessels, by means of the return of all being to nothingness, is one of the reasons why God created h ­ umans: “The purpose of the creation of humankind is to upheave the worlds to their roots, that is, to bring them back into nothingness, as it was before, through Torah, prayer, and good works, so as to help bring them back to God, blessed may he be.”18 Section 66, a key passage in Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov, not only names the destruction of the world as one of the reasons for the creation of ­humans, but also indicates the means that the zaddik employ to achieve this: through Torah, prayer, and good works. The Maggid urges the zaddikim to contribute at least spiritually to the negation of the world by giving up their own self and devoting themselves entirely to Torah, prayer, and good works, thereby healing the fall of the world ­after the rupture of the vessels. In the outer world, the zaddik must be piously devoted to keeping the commandments and ­doing good works. In general, only the coming of the Messiah can heal and save the world’s physical exterior. For this larger task, the zaddik can exert only ­limited influence, for he is unalterable in the physical world on account of his corporeality. But the zaddik’s prayers and strict observance of Jewish religious law ­will once again raise the spiritual interior side of the world, the divine word, back to the divine roots, into the divine nothingness:

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Even if we see that the h ­ uman body experiences no ascent, but remains in its place as at the beginning [of the mystical elevation], it is only the outwardly material execution of the commandment by which the deed is bound to him, while he himself, the acting person, is its executor. [. . .] And afterward he leads it up to the word of the commandment, for then, when he fulfills the commandment, the word rests on the commandment. ­Because then the interiority of the world experiences an ascent, that is, the word that man speaks while studying, praying, and fulfilling the commandments. And the word is the interiority. That is why he ascends to God with ease, praised may he be, by means of the intention [kavvanah] of he who does so.19 The zaddik’s self-­abandonment and self-­effacement, which enable him to surrender completely to the Torah, prayer, and ­doing good works, is pos­si­ble, according to the Maggid, through his self-­withdrawal and self-­diminution (haktana).20 He withdraws his own physicality and materiality (gashmiut) as far back as is pos­si­ble for a physical earthly being, he obeys the commandments, but he largely strips himself of his physical existence and bodily needs, thus preparing himself for his spiritual ascent to God through study, prayer, and benediction. The Maggid’s model of redemption implies more than the old Platonic separation of material corporeality and immaterial soul, which rises up to God from the dark, earthly caves. For the zaddik negates his individuality by affixing himself so closely to God ­after his ascent that he unites with God in this pro­cess of attachment (devekut) to form a unio mystica. This is the subjective side of ascension; the objective side is that the zaddik contributes to the redemption of the world through his ascension. For the Maggid of Mezritch, devekut, the mystical attachment to God, which culminates in the ­union of the ­human intellect with God, has two sides. On the ­human side, the zaddik must leave his own physicality and materiality completely ­behind and consider himself to be nothing; he must ecstatically overcome his own self-­preservation and self-­assertion in prayer. And from the divine side, the Holy One must limit his original, unlimited brightness (behirut) through several zimzumim (in the plural) to such a g­ reat extent, so that the zaddik can even endure this ­union with God at all. The Maggid describes the ­human side in the preparation for the devekut as a complete overcoming of earthly material sins, drives, and needs: “The lower [earthly] zaddik is the one who establishes a connection from below to



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He [the One] who is above. He must thereby consider himself to be nothing, so that he can connect every­thing together. [. . .] And through this, every­thing is connected upward, when man arrives at the characteristic of nothingness. [. . .] ­Because all excesses of eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse stem from the materiality of ­things. But if a person negates himself, then he is separated from all excesses and is completely repentant.”21 Only the recognition of the negation of oneself before God makes the zaddik ready for ­union in the devekut. But God must also prepare himself for becoming one (achdut), through plural zimzumim, other­wise man would not be able to endure the abundance of light, that limitless brightness, which appertains to Ein-­Sof before the pro­cess of zimzum. ­Here, the Maggid refers to the understanding of zimzum, widespread in the Lurianic Kabbalah, as a restriction of the infinite divine power, the light and energy of the infinite. God must retract and dilute his infinite light by way of several zimzumim, so that his light and energy remain tolerable for the finite worlds, vessels, and creatures and do not destroy them: “And the Holy One, blessed may he be, brought about several zimzumim through several worlds, so that he may become unified [achdut] with man, ­because other­wise man would not be able to tolerate his brightness. And for his part, man must separate himself from all materiality to such a degree that he may ascend through all the worlds and become one [achdut] with the Holy One and his existence may be sublated.”22 According to the Maggid of Mezritch, the highest form of ­human wisdom and piety comes into being in the zaddik’s contemplative withdrawal from all materiality and sensuality and in the negation of his own consciousness before God. This ascetic abstention from the world, which eschews sin and the senses, is the prerequisite for the zaddik’s entirely immaterial, ecstatic ­union with God. The world no longer has no meaning for the ecstatic zaddik. In becoming one with God through mutual zimzum, he surrenders the world and self. Salomon Maimon, the phi­los­o­pher and eyewitness to the Maggid’s court, experienced this be­hav­ior and attitude among the zaddikim firsthand. He ­later described it with razor-­sharp precision: “Their worship consisted of a self-­overcoming: withdrawing their thoughts from all ­things except God, even their own individual selves, and merging with God. This, they believed, produced a sort of self-­suppression. They would ascribe any actions they performed in that state to God, not to themselves.”23 Maimon makes it clear to his readers that he rejects the Maggid’s version of “self-­annihilation before God” as a way of life. He left Mezritch soon ­after and emigrated to enlightened

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Berlin a few years l­ater. T ­ here, u ­ nder the influence of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, Maimon ­adopted an attitude ­toward life and the world that was diametrically opposed to that of the zaddikim. Like so many other maskilim of his generation, the enlightener Maimon relied on autonomy, on purely ­human self-­care and self-­determination as an enlightened, unobservant Jew in this world. He preferred self-­preservation and sensual self-­enjoyment without divine commandments and without proof of God. T ­ hese two diametrically opposed, extreme, and irreconcilable ends of the spectrum are pious Chassidic self-­a nnihilation, on the one hand, and enlightened, autonomous self-­determination without religious observance and commitment, on the other. Modern Jews have been moving back and forth between the two opposites, self-­annihilating devekut and self-­affirming autonomy, ever since.

Shneur Zalman of Lyady: Zimzum for the Average Man Shneur Zalman (1745–1812), from the town of Liozna in northern Belarus, was a young married man when he arrived at the court of the Maggid of Mezritch in 1764, some years before Salomon Maimon. He remained ­there for several years. The Maggid singled him out as one of his most impor­tant students. In 1767, Zalman set out for the shtetl of Lyady as a rabbi and a preacher and established his own Chassidic court ­there. He lived and taught in Lyady ­until 1812, when he fled the advance of French troops during Napoleon’s campaign in Rus­sia. While on the run, Zalman died in December 1812 in the shtetl Hadicz, where he was buried. Shneur Zalman was one of the best systematic thinkers to have studied with the Maggid of Mezritch. He also possessed profound knowledge of halakhah, which was his specialty as a rabbinical scholar. Shortly before he died in 1770, the Maggid commissioned Shneur Zalman to compose a new Shulchan Arukh specifically for Chassidic readers. The Maggid asked Zalman to update the famous Shulchan Arukh, written by the ­great kabbalist and halakhist Joseph Karo from Safed, who had taught Cordovero and Luria, and to adapt it for the circumstances in Ashkenaz. Zalman completed this commission, an extraordinarily honorable task, and published an overhauled Shulchan Arukh, which became known as the Shulchan Arukh Ha-­Rav, in order to differentiate Zalman’s revised version from Karo’s original. The appearance



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Figure 22. Shneur Zalman of Lyady (1745–1812). Engraving by an unknown artist (1798).

of Shulchan Arukh Ha-­Rav elevated Shneur Zalman to the position of halakhic authority in the Chassidic world. This work has played such a significant role for the Chassidim that it has been reprinted and reissued on several occasions during its long reception history, most recently in 2006 in New York. But Shneur Zalman’s most famous book is his kabbalistic text Likkutei Amarim, which has become a canonical work and benchmark among the Lubavitch Chassidim. Likkutei Amarim is also known more casually by the title Tanya (“We have learned,” Baraita, e.g. BT Nidda 30b), in reference to the first word that appears in the book. Shneur Zalman is considered to be the founder and the first rebbe of this globally active movement within Chassidism, which takes its name from the Belarusian city of Lubavitch (Belarusian: Lyubavichi). Shneur Zalman’s son Dovber Shneuri, whom the rebbe raised and appointed as his successor, settled in Lubavitch and made the city the headquarters of the Chassidic dynasty that his ­father had begun. Lubavitch remained the center of this movement ­until the turmoil brought about by World War I, when the Lubavitch Chassidim ­were forced to flee their city in 1915. The Lubavitch group is also known as the Chabad movement (ChaBaD is an acronym formed from the names of the three upper sefirot, Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at). The Lubavitch Chassidim have been centered in Brooklyn, New York, since 1940, following the group’s persecution in World War II. They have venerated and continue to venerate Shneur Zalman as their founder and refer to him with the Yiddish honorary title “Alter Rebbe” (Old Rabbi).

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The Lubavitch Chassidim ensure that the works of the Alter Rebbe are often updated and reissued up to the pre­sent day. They pay par­tic­u­lar attention to the kabbalistic work Tanya, ­because this text is said to have spread the message of the BeShT (Ba’al Shem Tov) and the Chassidim to all corners, cities, and countries of the earth that are inhabited by Jews. Since the time Tanya was first printed in 1796 in Slavita, it has been used to promote the redemption of the world. In accordance with the programmatic missionary zeal of the Chabad movement, the Lubavitch prac­ti­tion­ers must also bring the writings of its founder to the most remote corners of the world. Thus, this Hebrew work has become the most widely distributed Chassidic book, reprinted in hundreds of places around the world since its publication in 1796. Shneur Zalman not only founded a new Chassidic dynasty, but he also embodied a new style of Chassidic leadership. While the charismatic leadership of the Ba’al Shem Tov was linked to his legendary miracle working and his approach ­toward life, the Maggid of Mezritch, on the other hand, emphasized in his ascetic mysticism and in his sermons that the zaddikim and all of his followers ­were to strive to withdraw from the earthly, material world for the purpose of attaining the ecstatic ­union with God. But only a narrow elite of religious virtuosos was able to practice the Maggid’s mysticism of extreme negation, as soon became apparent. As a popu­lar religion for millions of Jews living in the barest and poorest conditions in Rus­sia and Poland, “self-­annihilation before God” proved incompatible with the imperatives of sheer physical self-­preservation. This soon became clear to the Maggid’s students, who carried his message to the farthest corners of eastern Eu­rope. For this reason, in Tanya, Shneur Zalman of Lyady consistently valorizes halakhic orthopraxis, the faithful observance of the divine commandments in everyday life, as a godly act, on par with devekut itself. Zalman’s approach to halakhic observance differs from the Maggid’s stark prerequisite of devekut as the ideal religious life. For the Alter Rebbe, halakhic observance has equal value: “It is by no means the case that the devekut of thinking and intellect of Him [God] are above the devekut of ­those who accomplish the mitzvot [commandments] in a­ ctual practice.”24 In contrast to his teacher the Maggid, Shneur Zalman of Lyady’s teachings evince a strong hierarchical structure, with the rebbe as charismatic leader at the top and his followers below. The Alter Rebbe directed his writings and teachings, especially Tanya, to the beinonim, Hebrew for “average ­people.” The first book of Likkutei Amarim is titled Sefer shel Beinonim. The



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beinonim have both good and bad within them. They stand, as their Hebrew name suggests, as an intermediary between the two. They strive to overcome evil and sin within themselves and to conform to the ideal of the zaddik. But striving for this ideal, mystical devekut and immersion in God, also requires a halakhically observant way of life ­here on earth that remains faithful to the Torah. ­Every pious person is supposed to maintain this way of life while also striving ­toward the zaddik ideal. The beinonim therefore remain attached to their earthly nature. The material, earthly world, with its many temptations and sins, can never be fully overcome, even by way of mystical immersion. The beinoni can never completely withdraw from the earthly world. For this reason, the zaddik remains an unassailable ideal. The rebbe as spiritual leader becomes a model for and the embodiment of this ideal. ­Because the ideal of the zaddik is so difficult to achieve, the Lubavitch Chassid, as an average person, requires access to the rebbe and his charismatic spiritual guidance. The generally egalitarian mysticism of the Maggid of Mezritch, in which all Chassidim are qualified to become zaddikim, becomes in the Lubavitch dynasty a popu­lar form of Chassidism composed of average, Torah-­observant ­people who allow the charismatic authority of a rebbe, along with his sermons and teachings, to guide them. The rebbe’s charismatic leadership qualities and the claim to power based on charisma are even considered hereditary in the Lubavitch dynasty. Chosen sons, grand­ sons, and male descendants of the Alter Rebbe have led the Lubavitch Chassidim and the Chabad movement since the time of the Alter Rebbe’s death. In this re­spect, the Lubavitch dynasty is an almost classic example of what Max Weber characterized as “hereditary charisma.”25 The Lubavitch rebbes have always legitimized their claim to charismatic authority based on their hereditary lineage, as direct descendants of the Alter Rebbe. Similar to a hereditary monarchy, the grandeur of the rebbe became a hereditary princi­ ple within the Lubavitch dynasty; paternal lineage has legitimized each successive rebbe’s claim to power and authority. ­There have been seven Lubavitch rebbes thus far, each of whom has selected and determined their successor, the next Lubavitch rebbe, from among the vari­ous descendants of Shneur Zalman. This chain of hereditary charisma, which has served as a source of legitimization of the rebbe’s claim to leadership, only came to an end with the seventh Lubavitch rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died childless in 1994 and failed to appoint a successor. The Lubavitch Chassidim even venerated Schneerson as a Messiah. However, this Messiah had neither

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c­ hildren nor successors. This is why ­there has been no Lubavitch rebbe since 1994. As a result of the additional influence of vehement intra-­Jewish criticism of Schneerson as a false Messiah, 26 the Chabad movement has since shifted its focus. Chabad endeavors, without a rebbe, to continue its existence as an inner-­Jewish missionary movement, whose primary purpose is to lead secular Jews and ­those who are not religiously observant back to a halakhic, observant, Jewish-­focused way of life. Just as the Alter Rebbe specifically addressed only everyday, average Jews, the beinonim, the Lubavitch ­today seek to bring average, nonreligious Jews back to teshuva, to penance and conversion back to Torah and halakhah, in their everyday lives. Tanya remains a foundational text for the Lubavitch Chassidic movement, the most active Chassidic movement ­today. And zimzum remains one of their most valuable doctrines. Zimzum as God Entering Himself

Section 21 of Likkutei Amarim, also known as Tanya, holds a key to understanding the Alter Rebbe’s doctrine of creation, cosmology, and zimzum. In the view of Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the world has no in­de­pen­dent existence and no place outside of God. Rather, the world ­after creation always remains within the creator. Creation is an internal pro­cess within God. Therefore, ­there is also no place that is godless, that is, ­free from God, in the created world. The world is and remains the inner world of God. This begins with the creation of the world through God’s “word,” which the creation account in the book of Genesis relates: “God said: ‘Let ­there be light’; and ­there was light” (Gen. 1:3). In section 21 of Likkutei Amarim, Shneur Zalman explains how we should understand creation through the “word” of God. With man, the word is separated from man as soon as it has left his mouth. It is dif­fer­ent from God’s “word.” God’s word is never separate from God’s self and never leaves God. “It is dif­fer­ent for the Holy One, blessed may He be: His Word is not, heaven forbid, separated from His blessed self, for nothing exists outside of Him, and ­there is no place devoid of Him. Therefore, His Word is not like our word, God forbid, just as His thoughts are not our thoughts.”27 The discussion of the “word” of God during creation itself is, according to the rebbe, an anthropomorphic form of explanation for the benefit of the common ­human audience. The “word” of God actually stands as a generally understandable term for the pro­cess by which the light and life force of the



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world emanate from Ein-­Sof. At the same time, however, the “word” and the thought of God remain united with him in the closest ­union, just as God’s longing and desires as well as God’s intellect and wisdom remain united with him in the closest ­union. The following applies to God: “His blessed word is only called ‘word’ in the manner of an anthropomorphic explanation, in the sense that, as with earthly man [below], his word reveals to the listener what is hidden and sealed in his thoughts. In the case of the blessed Ein-­Sof high above, this means that the light and life force which has been poured out, when they emerge from him, from a state of concealment to revelation, in order to create and maintain worlds, are called ‘word.’ ”28 Biblical reference to God’s “word” means light and life force that emanate from God and create and maintain the worlds but are never separated from God and do not initiate pro­cesses in God himself. Theogony and emanation of the worlds are pro­cesses of God entering himself, of the inner development of the divinity in himself, rather than pro­cesses of the self-­emanation of God into another being that is alien to or separate from God. ­Because outside of God, according to the rebbe, t­ here is nothing, no godless space. In creation as a pro­cess of pure divine immanence, Shneur Zalman of Lyady asserts (in contrast to Chayyim Vital) that zimzum does not change anything ­either. We should interpret the zimzumim, the plural form of zimzum, to which the rebbe refers, not as the creation of a space and a world that would be dif­fer­ent from the deity, but as a deep inner self-­change within the deity, which does not even allow something dif­fer­ent to arise within itself. Even ­after the worlds are emanated through the “word,” God’s “word” remains united with God’s essence and existence as it was before creation. As Shneur Zalman makes explic­itly clear, emanation cannot alter the essence and unity of God at all.29 The emanation of light and life force, yetziat or vechiyut, only changes the created ­things and worlds, not God. Through numerous and dif­fer­ent contractions, zimzumim, the deity ­causes a gradual outflow of life force into the resulting created vessels, the worlds, and individual ­things. God’s zimzumim, in their multiplicity and diversity, in the chain of ­causes and effects, temper the effect of the life force emanating from God on the created and thereby restrict this God-­given light energy so that creation can maintain its existence without being destroyed by an excess of power and energy. The zimzumim operate continuously and serve to dilute the outflow of the originally infinite divine life force on the created and the fragile finite vessels of the created. They clothe and conceal the outflow of divine light so that the created worlds do not perish due to an excess of

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divine energy. The zimzumim mediate God’s infinite power and strength to a degree that the terrestrial world can tolerate: Indeed, the Holy One’s word and thought, may he be praised, are absolutely united with his essence and existence, even ­a fter his blessed “word” has materialized in the creation of the world, just as united as before the creation of the worlds. ­There is no change whatsoever in his oneness with himself; t­ here is but change only on the part of the created ­things, which receive their life force through his blessed “word,” as it becomes active in the creation of the worlds. [The Holy One in his] “word” gives life force to the worlds through a pro­cess of gradual descent from cause to effect [. . .] through many and dif­fer­ent zimzumim ­until all created ­things can receive their life force and existence from him without being destroyed.30 Zimzum as Hester Panim

Shneur Zalman of Lyady adheres to the rabbinical doctrine of creation out of nothing (Hebrew: yesh me-­ein). But he explains this doctrine through his neo-­platonic conception of the outflow of light and divine life force from Ein-­ Sof, which is ­limited by zimzumim. The creation out of nothing, yesh me-­ ein, is a yesh me-­Ein-­Sof in Shneur Zalman’s view. Being (yesh) emerges from the ein (nothingness) of Ein-­Sof. However, through this ­limited, restricted light, God and the world remain forever connected and are never separate. The worlds arise in God as an inner-­divine pro­cess. ­There is no strict separation between the creator and the created. For Zalman, zimzum is not a proto-­physical pro­cess of the ­actual separation of divine and nondivine, as Vital sees it, but an inner-­divine movement of the moderated and mea­sured emanation of light and life force, as Sarug sees it. We are therefore not, the rebbe stresses, to understand zimzum literally, but rather as a purely ­human way of speaking about a numinous, inner-­divine event.31 Shneur Zalman explains that zimzum is a pro­cess, in the sense of the Neoplatonic tradition, whereby the originally infinite divine omnipotence and energy are tempered to fit the needs of earthly ­things. He also asserts that the plural zimzumim, which take place within the intra-­divine pro­cess of the gradual containment of unlimited divine power, work to make this power gradually more finite, ­until God’s divine life force is rendered compatible with earthly vessels. Zalman follows this up in section 21 of Likkutei Amarim with



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a bold and radical theosophical move. He combines the concept of zimzum with the notion of hester panim. In rabbinical tradition, hester panim, “the hiding of the [divine] face,” refers to God’s radical turning away from his ­people of Israel ­because of their sins. When the Lord no longer lets his face shine upon his ­people and turns away from them, Israel is then threatened with suffering, ruin, and catastrophe. In the Torah, God threatens the ­people of Israel with hester panim as a punishment if they break their covenant with God and pay homage to foreign gods: “Then My anger ­will flare up against them, and I ­will abandon them and hide My countenance from them. They ­shall be ready prey; and many evils and trou­bles ­shall befall them. And they ­shall say on that day, ‘Surely it is ­because our God is not in our midst that ­these evils have befallen us.’ Yet I ­will keep My countenance hidden on that day, ­because of all the evil they have done in turning to other gods” (Deut. 31:17–18). The Psalms also describe the fear of hester panim, which might befall not only the entire ­people of Israel but also the individual sinner. Not only an entire sinful p­ eople, but also the individual sinner is shaken and shocked by the fear of the hiding face of God. David implores God not to hide his face and asks God to allow his divine grace to prevail despite the sinner’s transgressions and to save him from all distress: “For You, O Lord, when You ­were pleased, made [me] firm as a mighty mountain. When you hid Your face, I was terrified” (Ps. 30:8); “O Lord, I seek Your face. Do not hide your face from me; do not thrust aside Your servant in anger; You have ever been my help. Do not forsake me, do not abandon me, O God, my deliverer” (Ps. 27: 8–9). Hester panim is mentioned in the Torah and the Psalms, and ­later in the rabbinical tradition, as God’s punishment for both the ­people of Israel and the individual sinner. When his ­people break their covenant and become unfaithful to God and when the sinner sins, God hides his face, turns away from them, and, withdrawing his help, leaves them to a catastrophic fate, making them vulnerable to their enemies, all manner of suffering, and the afflictions of the world. Some notable Jewish authors such as Eliezer Berkovitz have even interpreted the Shoah in the twentieth ­century as the result of God’s hester panim. According to this interpretation, God turned his countenance away, and this hester panim resulted in millions of deaths: the Shoah, the catastrophe.32 Shneur Zalman of Lyady radically reinterprets this traditional understanding of hester panim as God’s punishment for the sins and apostasy of his ­people Israel, but also of individual sinful Jews. He writes: “And all zimzumim

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are a kind of hester panim, which hide and darken the light and the life force that arise from His blessed ‘word’ so that they are not emitted in a radiance so power­f ul and of such magnitude that the lower worlds cannot withstand them.”33 ­Here, Zalman expands hester panim into the cosmological realm and specifically connects it to God’s actions during creation. In ­doing so, Zalman ascribes the hiding of the divine face in hester panim a positive valence. Zalman’s interpretation does not view hester panim negatively, as a par­tic­u­lar form of punishment, but rather, views it positively, as a kind of cosmological protection mechanism for all creatures. The gradual zimzumim thus modulate the limitless, unbearably bright light and the omnipotent life force within the godhead so that it may be a creative rather than a destructive force. Zimzum, understood as hester panim, protects and spares all creatures. The zimzumim hide the divine countenance from all ­things created, which would not be able to endure the sight and full glory of the divine countenance. This concept corresponds with another biblical tradition: no one may look upon the face of God and live. God thus said to Moses: “But [. . .] you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live” (Exod. 33:20). Shneur Zalman combines ­these two traditions together homiletically. Hester panim dilutes the destructive omnipotence of divine light and divine energy (the sight and effect of which no living being could endure) to such an extent that it no longer destroys the life of the creatures, but rather feeds them life-­giving energy. God’s creations receive the divine life force and are able to live. Let us also take note ­here that the rebbe softens the temerity of his reinterpretation by speaking of “a kind of hester panim,” thus characterizing his formulation as meta­phorical. The significance of this bold reinterpretation, however, is clear. In his love for all that he created, God protects his creations by concealing his true countenance, by moderating his originally limitless, destructive life force through the pro­cess of the successive zimzumim. Creation is pos­si­ble and remains bearable for all creatures only by way of the moderation of divine omnipotence in zimzum. According to the Alter Rebbe, hester panim is not an act of divine punishment, but rather an act of divine love for all of God’s creations. Zimzum as the Origin of the Diversity of Life Forms

The remaining discussion in Tanya of zimzum and its consequences evinces a more conventional character.34 In section 38, Zalman explains in greater



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detail how the zimzumim, as continued acts of hester panim, dampen the outflow of divine light and life force and thereby “clothe” the divine light. Zimzumim and hester panim are depicted as clothing for the continuous pro­ cess of divine emanation that ensures creatio continua. Continued acts of zimzum keep the world and all its creatures in existence and prevent them from falling back into the nothingness from which the world was created. All of this takes place by way of numerous and differentiated zimzumim, which create, maintain, and regulate all life in the world. In ­doing so, dif­ fer­ent zimzumim create and maintain both organic and inorganic life. Every­ thing depends on the dosage of divine light and life force, or ve-­chiyut, made pos­si­ble by the zimzumim. In section 48, Shneur Zalman repeats the impor­tant observation that if the emanations had emanated from the Or Ein-­Sof without zimzum as an intermediary pro­cess, ­there would be no finite worlds at all and no finite and thus ­limited creatures. Without zimzum, ­there would be no finite creation in its diversity as we find it in our world. Without zimzum ­there would be only a chain of cause and effect, but no formed, finite creatures. Therefore, zimzum is also the formative princi­ple of the world. Without variously dosed zimzumim, creatures of dif­fer­ent shapes and types would not exist. The varying quality of the divine light brought about by vari­ous contractions of this light forms the upper and lower worlds. ­Here, the Alter Rebbe once again refines his conception of zimzum. The varying amounts of graduation, dampening, limitation, scarcity, clothing, and hiding of the divine light enable and sustain the diversity of forms throughout the heavenly and earthly worlds. The ­human being as body and soul, the plants, and even the stones, that is, the intellectual, organic, and inorganic world, receive their specific form, materiality, real­ity, and life energy through the varying zimzumim of light and life force emanating from God and within God.35 Each of God’s creations thus receives the appropriate amount of light and energy. In this re­spect, the zimzumim even explain and ensure the physical and biological structure of the world created and ­shaped by the divine light and life force. In the Alter Rebbe’s view, zimzum thus structures astronomy, physics, and even biology. ­Here, we see a thoroughly modern aspect of Tanya in action: Shneur Zalman always speaks of light and life force, or ve-­chiyut, which emanate from Ein-­Sof. In ­doing so, Zalman intentionally initiates a terminological and factual expansion of the language found in traditional texts of the Lurianic Kabbalah, such as Vital’s Ez Chayyim, which he specifically quotes in

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section 38. Prior to Zalman, Luria and his successors only speak of the emanation of light (or), while leaving out any mention of chiyut, life force. In the entire Neoplatonic tradition, it is only light that is always emanated from God. However, according to the scientific knowledge that was available at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, light as the sole primary material for the creation of life could no longer serve as a sufficient explanatory princi­ple. Using the concept of God’s life force, the Alter Rebbe therefore introduces an emanate reminiscent of Henri Bergson’s élan vital, which can serve to explain the emergence of graduated organic and inorganic life in the world, a development that responds to the specific state of scientific learning at the time. Or, light, is merely another name for the life force, chiyut, the rebbe explains.36 An emanation of the full divine life force, muted by the vari­ous zimzumim, ­causes and accompanies the emergence of the diversity of terrestrial life. The zimzumim are a type of hester panim, with each reflecting a specific degree of God’s hester panim. Shneur Zalman of Lyady sums up with a poetic turn of phrase: “And behold, even the ­waters reflect the countenance [panim] of God.”37

Nachman of Bratslav: The Fundamental Godlessness of the World Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was a con­temporary of Schelling and Hegel and, in a significant way, albeit divided by ­great distances, their con­temporary at the threshold of modernity. Born in 1772 in Medzhybizh, the geographic focal point of the work and miracles performed by his great-­grandfather, the BeShT, Rabbi Nachman saw himself as the appointed heir of a Chassidic dynasty and as the last link and terminus of a kabbalistic tradition that had begun with Shimon bar Yochai, the second-­century rabbi whom kabbalists revered as the author of the Zohar, which continued with Luria, and further on down to the BeShT, with the line ending with Nachman himself. This legacy weighed heavi­ly on him. He had to conform personally to the highest standards, in both his teaching and in his way of life. ­Because he was the great-­g randson of BeShT, the founder of Chassidism, the Chassidim, of course, had ­great expectations for him and his ­f uture. For as long as he could remember, Nachman believed that he had been born to be a zaddik. This was his calling. But throughout his short life, he tormented himself with the question of what kind of calling this was exactly. As a teenager, in addi-



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tion to his daily prayers in the synagogue, he sought out the solitude necessary for the hitbodedut, the solitary, hours-­long prayer that he recited directly to God in Yiddish, his ­mother tongue. He prayed in a quiet room or alone in nature, and he ­later encouraged his followers to embrace this belief in prayer as well. At the same time, he was plagued by an awareness of his sinfulness, as he did not succeed in suppressing his sensual desires (in par­tic­u­ lar, his sexuality) to the extent that he deemed necessary for satisfying the demands that a ­great zaddik should impose upon himself. Furthermore, moments of ecstatic closeness to God that he experienced during prayer constantly alternated with times in which he experienced a heartfelt, deeply personal sense of the absence of God in the world. ­These moments when Nachman perceived God’s absence plunged him into deepest despair and depression. Entirely dif­fer­ent from his great-­grandfather, Nachman was neither a miracle healer nor a zaddik filled with a pious, earthly joy of existence. Rather, his conduct and way of life corresponded more closely with the image of the zaddik as a suffering servant of God (Isa. 53). As the German phi­los­o­pher Hegel once said of his fellow phi­los­o­pher Schelling, Nachman received his training in front of an audience. Wherever he went, what­ever he did, the Chassidic audience expected ­great ­things from the BeShT’s great-­grandson. At the age of eigh­teen in the Ukrainian village of Medvedevka, near Kiev, as a young, newly married rabbi and still something of a Chassidic child prodigy, Nachman began to gather a small circle of followers. For years, he was continuously afflicted with doubts as to w ­ hether he was destined to be a hidden zaddik (zaddik nistar), or a famous zaddik (zaddik mefursam) who accomplished his deeds in public and was venerated by many followers. But a change came about during his trip to Palestine, which he undertook in 1798/1799, accompanied only by a single companion.38 As Arthur Green demonstrates in his intriguing analy­sis in Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, Nachman interpreted and experienced this trip to the Holy Land as a journey of initiation.39 ­After his return to the Ukraine, Nachman first visited other zaddikim, before fi­nally settling in Bratslav in the summer of 1802, following a two-­year sojourn in Zlotopolje, where his many enthusiastic followers venerated him as zaddik ha-­Dor, the greatest zaddik of his generation. In the years 1805 and 1806, however, he was deeply driven by doubts that he might not in fact be the Messiah and savior of Israel, whom God would send among his ­people during a time of greatest turmoil. ­There was much to speak for his candidacy as Messiah: On his maternal side, he was the great-­grandson

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of BeShT, and on his paternal side, he was a Davidide, a direct descendant of King David. He had even set foot on the holy ground of the Holy Land during his journey to Palestine, fulfilling yet another prerequisite for messiahship. The birth of his only son and heir, Shlomo Ephraim, in 1805 first strengthened Nachman in his belief that he was the Messiah, but the unexpected death of Shlomo Ephraim from a childhood disease caused him to retreat from this idea. In 1807, Nachman began to show the first symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis, to which he eventually succumbed in 1810. He died in Uman, in Ukraine, on the high holiday of Sukkot. He was buried ­there, and the Bratslav Chassidim venerate his grave to this day. Rabbi Nachman died among his followers, burning up with fever, spitting up blood, and praying the holiday liturgy. He remained the suffering zaddik and role model to the end. Even the description of his death contains features similar to that of a hagiographic legend.40 The Godlessness of the Modern World as Personal Experience

In all this, Rabbi Nachman was neither a Ukrainian backwoodsman nor a “backworldsman,” to use Nietz­sche’s pun. Rather, Nachman embodied the seemingly nearly impossible mixture of a Chassidic saint and a con­temporary of the modern age. This Chassid was no stranger to the Enlightenment and rationalism in western Eu­rope, and he was acquainted with the intra-­Jewish challenge that the Haskalah presented in Berlin and Prus­sia. Nachman was also aware of the nationwide introduction of over one hundred Haskalah schools throughout Galicia between 1782 and 1806, where, against the hesitant re­sis­tance of pious circles, all Jewish ­children ­were obliged to attend state Jewish schools in the name of enlightenment, civic improvement, and compulsory education. The introduction of this wide-­reaching educational policy not only took place in the vicinity of the Podolian and Volhynian strongholds of Chassidism, in Brody, Tarnopol, and Lvov, but also throughout the entire region of Galicia. By decree of Emperor Joseph II, the traditional religious upbringing and way of life of the boys in the cheder was replaced by instruction in secular, non-­Jewish school subjects like mathe­ matics and geography, taught by enlightened Jewish teachers.41 Nachman and his followers ­were all too conscious of the fact that the godless Enlightenment was just around the corner and threatened to supplant the traditional and pious Jewish way of life.



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Nachman had also learned about the French Revolution, whose leaders beheaded the king thought to be appointed by God himself. Nachman even saw the consequences of the revolution firsthand, as he was forced to interrupt his Palestine journey, when Napoleon Bo­na­parte’s troops besieged Acre in vain in 1799. Though Nachman did not personally observe the “world soul on ­horse­back” (which Hegel called Napoleon ­after seeing him in Jena), and, even though he did not read newspapers, he had nonetheless traveled widely and his followers, many of whom had also traveled far and wide, kept him well informed of current world events, such as the new anti-­Jewish policy of Czar Alexander I that went into effect in 1804. Nachman’s par­tic­u­lar sense of modernity, especially in relation to the older zaddikim, means that he understands his Chassidism as the answer to the challenge of a godless modern world and modern atheism, which he sees at work in the Enlightenment and in rationalism. Zimzum plays a key role in this confrontation between Chassidism and the Enlightenment, ­because it explains the genesis of atheism. It was first zimzum, God’s contraction, that actually created a space that was empty of God. Zimzum is the condition necessary for the possibility of creation, but at the same time also makes way for a real sense of atheism. The world came into being and exists within a godless space. It is itself a space from which God is absent. Nachman agreed with the methodical atheism of the modern natu­ral sciences in that he believed that the world is ­shaped by the absence of God. But how did this noteworthy confluence come about? How was it that an eastern Eu­ro­pean Chassid, who never attended an institution of higher education nor studied Enlightenment writings, found common ground with Enlightenment ideas regarding the key issue of godlessness in the empirical world? For this, we must have a look at Nachman’s biography. In Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, Green demonstrates that the experience of the absence of God and the impossibility of feeling his presence in this world formed the core of Nachman’s experiences during his youth. This sense of God’s absence ­later became a subject of his autobiographical writings, as well as some of his famous stories and teachings, which Martin Buber made available to readers in the non-­Jewish world.42 In t­ hese writings, Nachman repeatedly discusses the absence of God and the desperate, tormented search for his closeness. Nachman can only explain the absence of God as a personal experience that he often describes in terms of zimzum. In zimzum, God actually clears a godless space in which the world

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exists without God, a world in which sin, evil, and innocent suffering are pos­si­ble. Zimzum as a cosmic event or pro­cess sheds light on Nachman’s personal, subjective experience on a smaller scale. The experience of feeling God’s absence is undeniable, even though all devout and pious ­people thirst for God’s closeness, presence, his shekhinah (i.e., “indwelling”), as well as a physical, sensual experience of God’s existence in the world. ­Here, Nachman follows a hermeneutic pattern that is generally common in Chassidism. Chassidic masters break down quasi-­metaphysical, cosmological ideas originating from the Kabbalah, such as zimzum, and anthropomorphize them into categories and emotions of inner life and religious introspection.43 Not unlike Dov Ber of Mezritch, Nachman personalizes zimzum, transforming it into a ­human experience. Rabbi Nachman creates a new figure of the zaddik: that of the suffering zaddik, whom he himself embodies as the leading zaddik of his time. The suffering zaddik suffers on account of God’s absence from the world, as well as his inability to feel and experience God directly. He suffers from God’s distance, from the fact that despite unremitting prayer, asceticism, the greatest pos­si­ble domination and suppression of sensual desires, and strict compliance with the commandments, he always fails to achieve close proximity to God and is unable to bridge the distance between himself and God. It is Nachman’s almost paradoxical message to his followers that in the face of God’s absence in this world they should always seek his closeness and overcome the world’s distance from God through prayer.44 Reason, philosophy, and rationality can do nothing at all to solve this prob­lem. They do not make it pos­si­ble to attain closeness to God. Nachman is an anti-­rationalist and an anti-­philosopher, and he warns his followers against rationalism and philosophical investigation. This applies even to the most respected Jewish phi­los­o­phers. Maimonides’s Moreh Nevukhim (Guide for the Perplexed; 1190), the principal work of Jewish religious philosophy of the M ­ iddle Ages, was forbidden in Bratslav. At odds with reason and rationalism, Nachman relies on faith, emunah. According to Nachman, however, emunah is not a belief in the Holy Scriptures, rabbinical traditions, or kabbalistic teachings. Rather, emunah is a religious attitude and intuition that is deeply rooted in the heart, not in the mind, which helps the pious to master the adversities, demons, and challenges of his religious life. As a concept, emunah represents the infinite longing, the feeling and the desire to be close to the God who is absent in the world—­a God whose absence further exac-



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erbates the suffering of the pious in the world. Emunah is the heart of Nachman’s religious teaching.45 Nachman thus posits emunah as the opponent of reason so absolutely that even God’s rationality is called into question. Nachman strips God of all rationality. As such, his God is suspended from all ties to the law of nature and reason. In his omnipotence, God has the ability to create, against all rationality and logic, a square triangle. He is not the god of the phi­los­o­ phers. Nachman’s radical fideism, a kind of credo quia absurdum, negates the rationalism not only of the Enlightenment and Haskalah, but also of medieval Jewish philosophy. The dominance of emunah over reason, according to Arthur Green’s analy­sis,46 is a clear indication of a paradigm shift in Chassidism itself. In the second half of the eigh­teenth ­century, the most impor­ tant inner-­Jewish opponents of Chassidim ­were the Shabbateans and the Frankists on the one hand, and the Lithuanian mitnaggedim on the other. For Nachman, the Haskalah represents the most impor­tant inner-­Jewish opponent of his day, animosity that would remain formative throughout the nineteenth ­century. For the nineteenth-­century eastern Eu­ro­pean Haskalah, in marked contrast to the Berlin Haskalah of the eigh­teenth c­ entury,47 Chassidism is the archenemy. Twofold Atheism

Section 64 of the Likkutei MoHaRaN (abbr. for Morenu Ha-­Rav Nachman; Collections of Our Teacher Rav Nachman) summarizes the crisis-­conscious, modern Chassidism of Rabbi Nachman, his perception of the absence of God, his doctrine of zimzum, and its connection to atheism, bringing them together as if ­under a magnifying glass.48 Green dates the composition of this section to 1805 or 1806. The written text or the transcript of the text was published while Nachman was still alive. Since that time, the Likkutei MoHaRaN, including this section, have appeared in numerous editions that the Bratslav Chassidim have released. Nachman says ­here: When He set about creating the world, however, ­there was no place in which to create it, for all was Eyn Sof. He therefore withdrew His light to the sides, and through this withdrawal (zimzum) a void was formed. Inside this void, all the “days” and “mea­sures” came to be; they are the creation of the world.

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Now this void was essential for the Creation of the world, for without it ­there would have been no room for the world to exist. At the same time, God’s withdrawal in forming the void remains incomprehensible ­until the end of time. Two contradictory ­things must be said of it: the void comes about through zimzum, the withdrawal of God. ­There is, as it ­were, no God ­there, for if divinity ­were pre­sent in it, it would not be a void, all would be Eyn Sof, and ­there would be no room for Creation. Yet in a deeper sense, surely ­there is divinity ­there nevertheless, for nothing exists without His life-­flow. For this reason, it ­will be pos­si­ble to understand the void only in the ­Future.49 In section 64 of Likkutei MoHaRaN, Nachman unilaterally emphasizes that zimzum is causally responsible for the manifest absence of God in the world that he created. In order to create the world, the formerly omnipresent God had to clear first an empty and therefore also godless space. The world is created within this empty space where God is absent. At first, Nachman faithfully follows in the footsteps of Vital’s description of zimzum. But then he deviates from Vital in his description of the emanation pro­cesses into the empty space. In his version, Nachman inserts his personal leitmotif, that is, the suffering caused by God’s absence from the world, back into the pro­cess of creation itself. Zimzum explains God’s absence. The space that zimzum empties, into which the world is created, is a place marked by the absence of God. The world is thus created and emanated into a godless space. Nevertheless, the pious know that the creation of the world and the finite ­things in the world could not exist without the life force emanating from God. Nachman must therefore propose an unsolvable paradox. On the one hand, God must have actually withdrawn completely from the empty space in order to make room for the creation of the world. By necessity, he is absent from this vacuum. On the other hand, without the emanation of divine life force in the vacuum, nothing could come into being. God is therefore somehow pre­sent in his creations as life force (Hebrew: chiyut), at least in traces. According to Nachman’s conviction, the paradox of the doctrine of creation can neither be resolved nor understood by the pious in the pre­sent world, however much they may long for the full presence of God in the world. ­Humans are thus confronted with an equally ontological and epistemological dilemma.50 This world cannot exist without God’s withdrawal into his



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transcendence and absence. The world exists where God is not. This is the principled, so to speak, ontological atheism of the doctrine of creation itself. Zimzum creates a place of godlessness, the absence of God, which nevertheless would never come about without God’s active involvement in this pro­cess. God actively participates in ontological atheism by way of zimzum. Furthermore, we find in the world and creation the traces and remains of divine active power, without which God’s creations could not exist at all. But we never find, Nachman complains, God’s full presence and nearness, for which the pious so lovingly yearn. This is the aporia of the mono­the­istic doctrine of creation and the notion of zimzum par excellence: creation can only exist in a place from which the Creator has withdrawn and is absent. This aporia, contrary to the longing of the pious, cannot be resolved in the pre­sent world, but must merely be accepted. We w ­ ill only be able to understand this aporia in the ­future messianic world of redemption, when the world as we experience it now ceases to exist. Only then ­will we be able to solve this religious-­epistemological dilemma. In the world of the pre­sent, on the other hand, the pious man must remain at a loss in the face of this aporia. As a result of this impotence of reason, the aporia drives the pious ­toward emunah, that is, to faith. Emunah must help the pious overcome the most impor­tant consequence of the fundamental absence of God for the world and in the world, so to speak. And the most impor­tant consequence is a sense of atheism in the form of the absence of God. Nachman distinguishes two kinds of atheism (Hebrew: epikorsit).51 First, ­there is the ideological, as Nachman says, external atheism of the Enlightenment, and second ­there is the ontological atheism of the Creator himself. We find this distinction explained in section 64, immediately following the discussion of the aporia of creation: Know that ­there are two types of heresy [atheism]. ­There is one heresy which is derived from “extraneous” wisdom. Of this heresy it is said: “Know what to answer the heretic.” [The claims of] this heresy may be answered, for they come from “extraneous” wisdom, brought about by the breaking of the vessels. ­Because the light was too bright, the vessels ­were broken, and it was thus that the qelipot came into being, as is known. This extraneous wisdom was derived from ­there, from the breaking of the vessels [. . .] For this reason, he who falls into this sort of heresy, even though he should have fled it, may find a way to be saved from ­there. [. . .] Since all this is

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derived from the broken vessels, which ­were intermingled with sparks of holiness and fallen [divine] letters, one can find divinity and “mind” t­ here, to resolve the questions that result from this sort of heresy [. . .]. Therefore, [remnants of] divinity [elkut] and reason can also still be found ­there to solve the difficulties of that atheism stemming from the external wisdoms. [. . .] But ­there is still a second kind of heresy [atheism], based on wisdoms that are not wisdoms. Only ­because they are deep and incomprehensible, they seem to be wisdom. [. . .] Since it is beyond the power of the ­human mind to solve certain difficulties, they are considered deep. In truth, however, ­those difficulties are not to be solved, ­because the difficulties of this atheism come from the empty space, and from the fact that ­there is no divinity in the empty space, so to speak. Therefore, ­there is no solution for this atheism, which comes from that empty space, from which the divinity, so to speak, withdrew [zimzem].52 The first type of heresy, ideological atheism, stems from external wisdoms, chokhmot chizoniot, and teachings. Nachman does not explic­itly state which external wisdoms lead to atheism, but he labels them as external, that is, not genuine and au­then­tic, not factually appropriate. They are external opinions. And prob­ably the most impor­tant ­thing ­here is that ­these wisdoms and opinions are external from Judaism. Nachman implies ­here the wisdoms of non-­Jewish philosophy, science, and the Enlightenment. ­These are wisdoms of the corrupted reason. They are the result of the breaking of the vessels and are connected with the kelippot, the shards of evil. The godlessness of this ideological atheism, which consists of external wisdoms of the enlightened world and rationality foreign to Judaism, stems from evil, from the corruption of disposition and conduct. But since the pious know about the origin and the ­causes of this godlessness, and since ­there exist the holy sparks of God’s light in the world in addition to the shards of evil, this godlessness is of the external wisdoms. Kant would have called it “rationalizing” (Vernünftelei). In princi­ple, it was curable: heretics, atheists, and rationalists can turn back and entrust themselves to other, inner, genuine Jewish wisdoms. The ideological atheism of external wisdoms and opinions is a conse-



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quence of evil, but therefore also accidental and reversible. It is not fundamental and can be corrected by superior insight. The other kind of atheism, the ontological atheism of the fundamental godlessness of the world, which Nachman already mentions at the beginning of section 64, is, however, indisputably founded in the structure of creation itself. The empty space into which the world was created is indeed godless in the wake of God’s withdrawal. This raises a real quandary and an epistemological dilemma for ­human intellect, which it cannot solve by means of reason and by its own power, as much as the pious long for the proximity and presence of God in the world. To a world in which, according to zimzum, God’s transcendence is secured at the price of his absence, this fundamental atheism, this godlessness of the world, is ontologically inherent. God is always somewhere e­ lse, not in the world. In passages such as this in Likkutei MoHaRaN, we can clearly see that Nachman of Bratslav believes that zimzum offers an explanation for the deepest and most pressing prob­lem of his spiritual life: the agonizing experience of God’s absence and remoteness from the world. For Nachman, zimzum is not a meta­phor, but a deeply emotional real­ity. God has truly withdrawn, leaving ­behind a God-­empty world in which only sparks of divine light still bear witness to his existence. Permanent closeness to God is foreclosed in this world—­even to the most pious. Even the zaddik must h ­ azard the paradoxical assertion and testify and prove it with his emunah, the deepest feeling of faith. Through his emunah, he may recognize that God is always ­there, even though God cannot be found in the world and despite the difficulty in being assured of his nearness. This fundamental paradox becomes explicable and comprehensible through zimzum as the very real act of God. For the pious, ­there is no escape from the ontological aporias of the second kind of atheism, just as t­ here is no way out for the world of philosophy and rationalism. The only difference is that this circumstance does not disturb the rationalists, ­because they do not seek God in the world. However, this is not the case for the pious of Israel, whom Nachman envisions overcoming the godlessness of the world through emunah. The pious in their emunah believe that God envelops the world and is for this reason also always a part of it. Nachman thus immediately follows up his statement regarding the fundamental godlessness of the world: But Israel, by means of faith, transcends all “wisdom,” even such heresy as is derived from the void. They believe in God without any

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intellectual inquiry, by the ­wholeness of their faith. [They affirm that] God both fills and surrounds all the worlds. He is, as it ­were, inside all the worlds, and yet He surrounds them. But ­there must remain some space between His immanence and His transcendence, for if not all would be one [and the world could not exist.] Thus the void from which God has withdrawn, and inside which He created the universe, surrounds the entire world, and God is also without, surrounding the void itself.53 Therefore one must also say that he fills all worlds, i.e., all creation that he created into the empty space. At the same time, he surrounds all worlds, including the empty space. And in between he separates the empty space, from which the divinity has, so to speak, withdrawn.54 For faith, no godless space exists. And ­after zimzum, when God surrounds the world, he also fills it. God is transcendent, but for faith he is also immanent in the world. God ­really did withdraw from an empty space at his center and created the world in this space. The world exists within a godless space, but for the believer, God is nonetheless pre­sent within it. God is pre­ sent and transcendent everywhere around this godless space, and within the empty space, he is pre­sent immanently in the world of his creations. Nevertheless, the transcendence and immanence of God are separated by the godless space, and the world can only exist and continue to exist ­because and as long as this God-­empty space exists. The empty space cleared by zimzum marks the difference between God’s transcendence and his immanence. The world exists within the nothingness of this God-­empty space, but without this nothingness of God, it would be nothing other than God and one with him. Without zimzum and the absence of God, ­there is no world. The absence of God is the conditio sine qua non of the existence of the world. Thus, even for the pious, the atheism of the modern world is already inherent in the creation made pos­si­ble by zimzum and is at the same time plausibly explained by zimzum. The emptiness of God and atheism, ­these intellectual and spiritual challenges of the modern world that the Chassidim have faced, can only be overcome by the faith of Israel. In his emunah, the Chassid can establish a sense of proximity to God. Torah and prayer are the two ele­ments at each stage of the pious person’s approach to God. Prayer and faith bridge and transcend the separation between the world and Ein-­Sof, between the worshipper and God.55



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The modernity of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and his spiritual impact, which continues to be felt to this day, hinges on the fact that he was prepared to stare what he thought ­were the dangers of the Enlightenment and rationalism directly in the eye and to challenge the abysses of the modern world and the godless way of life with the aid of his Chassidic doctrine of emunah. With his criticism of reason and rationalism, which affirm the godlessness of the world, and with his salto mortale from godless reason back to emunah, Nachman is, admittedly without being aware of it, a distant Jewish companion of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. In Jacobi’s fideism, too, faith overcomes the nihilism of the godless world and rationalist Enlightenment philosophy. Both are prepared to sacrifice intellect in the name of faith. And they are only too glad to do so.

Chapter 6

God’s Contraction in German Idealism and Romanticism

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: The Immanent Ein-­Sof One of the most unusual episodes in German Idealism and Romantic intellectual history was the rediscovery of Spinoza’s philosophy.1 The Dutch phi­ los­o­pher’s re­nais­sance was ushered in with the appearance of a book that was less the result of serious philosophical inquiry than something more along the lines of investigative journalism. The book in question is none other than Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (On the Teachings of Spinoza, in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn), first published in Breslau in 1785. The book proposes that Gott­ hold Ephraim Lessing, the famous German dramatist and thinker, was an avowed follower of Spinoza, meaning that he was a “Spinozist.”2 And let us not forget that Spinoza’s teachings, also referred to as “Spinozism,” had previously been accused of pantheism, fatalism, and atheism.3 As its title suggests, the bulk of Jacobi’s book is composed of public letters addressed to Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing’s well-­k nown orthodox Jewish friend and a philosophical theist. In his book, which is full of anecdotes and makes for intriguing, easily consumable copy, Jacobi accuses Spinoza of atheism. “Spinozism is atheism,” 4 Jacobi asserts. ­Because of his ostensible ardent enthusiasm for Spinoza, Lessing must also be an atheist, or so Jacobi would have his readers believe. But the main prob­lem with Jacobi’s report was that Lessing never admitted to being a Spinozist, neither publicly nor in any form of writing. For that reason, Jacobi’s only source consisted of a series of private conversations



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that he presumably had with Lessing in 1780. Lessing had died in 1781 and was therefore unable to deny Jacobi’s posthumous accusation. ­There was no one to contradict Jacobi’s outrageous claim that Lessing had confessed to Spinozism during ­these private meetings and was therefore, according to Jacobi’s accusation, an atheist. The only witness to this alleged confession was Jacobi, Lessing’s denouncer. Jacobi’s disclosure, however, was a well prepared and cleverly staged publicity stunt. Prior to the publication of his book, Jacobi shared the news of Lessing’s Spinozism in letters sent to Berlin, addressed to Mendelssohn, via the intermediary Elise Reimarus. Jacobi intended to provoke Mendelssohn into a response, hoping that the august maskil might publicly distance himself from Spinoza and perhaps even his friend Lessing as well. While Mendelssohn asked for further details about Jacobi’s report in private letters, placating Jacobi by playing along with the accusations levied against his dead friend, he prepared a public defense of Lessing slated to appear in the book Morgenstunden (Morning Hours). Jacobi, however, struck preemptively by including excerpts of his letters to Mendelssohn in his book, in effect staging a media sensation. Jacobi claimed that Lessing was an atheist! And he claimed that Lessing’s friend, the enlightened Jewish thinker Mendelssohn, refused to deny the accusation, even though Jacobi insisted he had given Lessing’s friend ample warning by sharing his discovery prior to the publication of his report. Jacobi forced Mendelssohn to respond to ­these accusations. In his 1785 book, Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes (Morning Hours or Lectures on the Existence of God), Mendelssohn defends his friend Lessing’s “refined pantheism” as philosophically and religiously innocent. Since Lessing retained his belief in the existence of a ­human spirit that was apart from God and that exercised ­free ­will, Mendelssohn explains, individual acts of ­free ­will and the responsibility of mankind remained intact as the basis for religion and morality. Jacobi’s accusation of fatalism and atheism therefore lacked any foundation.5 And in his 1786 polemic piece, An die Freunde Lessings (To the Friends of Lessing), which he himself delivered to the printer mere days before his death, Mendelssohn goes on the offense. While Mendelssohn defends Lessing as a refined pantheist, as he did in the Morning Hours, he also accuses Jacobi of dishonesty and lack of judgment. Jacobi had disingenuously publicized the content of confidential, personal discussions with Lessing, even though the veracity of this account could not be confirmed ­after Lessing’s death, and the deceased was unable to defend himself

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against the accusation of atheism. Further, in his rebuttal, Mendelssohn argues that Jacobi made use of some of his letters without consent. This included correspondence that the famous German Jewish phi­los­o­pher had both written and received, which Jacobi not only reproduced, but also in some cases truncated and even adulterated, with the intent to misconstrue statements and sentiments articulated in ­these letters. Above all, Mendelssohn levies two main points of criticism against Jacobi. He maintains that Jacobi had neither understood Lessing’s well-­k nown irony, a key component of both his writing and his conversational style, nor had Jacobi successfully comprehended and accurately represented Spinoza’s Ethics. Mendelssohn not only rejects Jacobi’s own general sense of skepticism directed ­toward enlightened rationalism’s philosophy of reason, namely, that of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Lessing (which Jacobi decried as atheist), but also his confessional plea for a pious salto mortale, a somersault from philosophical rationalism into religious belief. Mendelssohn saw himself and Lessing, along with Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff, on the side of the thinkers who obviously gave far more credit to reason and philosophy than “Herr Jacobi.” All the same. Jacobi had successfully ignited the scandal that he had sought to provoke. The scandal made Jacobi famous, and editions of his book, which he personally revised and expanded, ­were reprinted in 1789 and 1819. In addition to Mendelssohn, whom he addressed directly in his book, his readers included Goethe, Hamann, Kant, Herder, Wieland, Fichte, Hegel Schelling, the ­brothers Schlegel, Baader, Molitor, as well as the maskilim Salomon Maimon and Isaac Euchel. Jacobi’s staging of the scandal, not to mention his superficial and abbreviated summaries of Spinoza’s teaching, presented in a kind of bullet-­point format, successfully ignited tremendous interest in Spinoza among his eighteenth-­century contemporaries. Jacobi’s rekindling of a Spinoza readership tellingly often featured buzzwords that Spinoza himself had never used, such as hen kai pan (Greek for “one and all”), pantheism for the presumption of an intramundane world source and atheism for the denial of an extramundane God, fatalism for causality without teleology and for ethics without ­free ­will.6 Herder and the young Schelling directly engaged with Spinoza’s Ethics.7 No history of philosophy was published without a discussion of Spinoza and his works. And in 1802, the theologian Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus assembled the first edition of Spinoza’s Opera omnia ever published in Germany.8 Jacobi borrowed from Johann Georg Wachter’s Spinozismus im Judenthumb (1699) and Elucidarius Cabalisticus (1706) and equated Spinozism with



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“Cabbalisterey,” which also caused a sensation among his readers. According to Jacobi, Spinozism amounted to “cabalistic philosophy” (Cabalistische Philosophie),9 and Spinoza merely developed the doctrines of the “philosophizing kabbalists,” using only “abstracted terms.”10 In this manner, Jacobi equates Kabbalah and Spinozism, accusing both of atheism. While Jacobi was acquainted well enough with Spinoza’s work to quote it, he had, however, clearly never read a kabbalistic text in the original, nor was he capable of citing such a text. Nevertheless, Jacobi, like Wachter before him, accused Spinoza and the kabbalists of “atheism,” using clumsy, deliberately false generalizations. Kabbalah was the atheism that resided in Judaism, or so the argument went. In addition to Spinoza, t­ here w ­ ere other atheists among the Jews, who at that time ­were striving for civic improvement and po­liti­cal equality ­under the leadership of Mendelssohn in Prus­sia and other Christian monarchies of Eu­rope. According to Jacobi, their atheism consisted of denying the transcendent and transmundane nature of God, as well as gainsaying the concept of creatio ex nihilo. The “spirit of Spinozism” and of the philosophizing kabbalists was “ex nihilo nihil fit” (nothing comes from nothing).11 This was the crude po­liti­cal, philosophical, religious, and ideological context in which Jacobi also mentions zimzum, and which he, like Wachter, referred to as “Contraktion.” What Lessing had in common with Spinoza and the kabbalists and what made him an atheist, following Jacobi’s logic, was that Spinozism did not recognize “any distinct cause of entities [in this world] dif­fer­ent from this world.”12 As a result of this denial of a transcendental or transmundane causation of all entities within the world, ­there could be no transition from the infinite to the finite. In an exceedingly ­simple, plausible, albeit frequently incorrect, portrayal, Jacobi uses this premise at the beginning of his book to explain the teachings of the one, all-­encompassing, infinite substance in Spinoza’s Ethics. Like Wachter before him, Jacobi describes Spinoza’s infinite substance as “Ensoph” to suggest Spinoza’s intellectual overlap and agreement with the Kabbalah. According to Jacobi, kabbalistic phi­los­o­phers and Spinoza replace an emanating Ein-­Sof with an “immanent Ensoph,” meaning a cause of the world that exists within the world and is eternally unchanging, namely, part of one singular substance: a cause that is one and the same with its consequences.13 This “inherent cause,” the “immanent Ensoph,” also known as the one, all-­encompassing material substance possesses neither understanding nor ­will, for it is infinite nature itself. This cause has neither a single thought

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nor a determination of the ­will, but rather merely the initial primary substance of thought or ­will. For this reason, the immanent Ensoph can pursue neither intentions nor goals (“final ­causes”). Instead, the immanent Ensoph is real outcome and real cause all at once.14 The immanent Ensoph, or the one single material substance, is a world of causation without finality. Within this one material substance, thoughts and ­will are not ­free; rather, they are made simply to exist. We are mistaken when we believe that we act out of wrath, love, generosity, or out of our own rational determination. In truth, our actions, emotions, and passions are produced and caused by something within the immanent Ensoph, which possesses neither thoughts nor feelings and does not operate according to reason. Additionally, the immanent Ensoph has no existence unto itself above or beyond the world: “Spinoza’s one infinite substance [. . .] does not have [. . .] a definite or complete existence, neither for itself alone nor beyond the individual ­things.”15 In his book, Jacobi reports that Lessing told him Leibniz had also been a secret Spinozist and had acknowledged only an intramundane but no extramundane origin of the world. As Leibniz saw it, or so Jacobi’s portrayal would have us believe, the divinity existed “in a perpetual state of expansion and contraction: this was the creation and existence of the world.”16 Though Jacobi does not make a single direct reference to any part of Leibniz’s works, we can see in this quotation that he explic­itly plays with the motif of zimzum ­here, implying that the “Spinozist” Leibniz had argued that the creation and existence of the world ­were made pos­si­ble through contraction and expansion within the immanent Ensoph, within the deity, or to put it another way, within the one infinite substance. In contrast to Wachter, Jacobi’s remarks do not contain a single description of the zimzum pro­cess. The retraction of light, the creation of the empty space within Ein-­Sof, the emanation of the world—­none of this is pre­sent in Jacobi’s writings. Jacobi is not at all interested in a systematic naturalist description of zimzum, like the one we find in Wachter. This kind of description would also be incompatible with Spinoza’s thought. Spinoza’s writings contain no portrayal of zimzum. He explains movement in nature as the result of causality, that is, cause and effect, whereas Jacobi explains that the perpetual play between expansion and contraction is a prerequisite for movement and causality to take place within the immanent Ensoph. Thus, all that remains of zimzum in Jacobi’s work is the concept of contraction as both the permanent princi­ple of movement and the interplay of expansion, a concept we do not find in Spinoza.



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In contrast to the kabbalists—­a fact that Jacobi does not disclose, ­because he is not familiar with their texts—­the interplay that takes place within Ein-­ Sof is no longer characterized by contraction and emanation, but rather by contraction and expansion. The Neoplatonic outpouring of light in the pro­ cess of emanation is replaced by the Aristotelian relation of cause and effect (or causality and potentiality). In Spinoza’s thought, we already see that, ­under the influence of Descartes, the kabbalistic model of emanation, as seen in Herrera, is superseded by “natu­ral causality” (Kant). In this regard, Jacobi is correct in his interpretation of Spinoza. According to Spinoza’s way of thinking, it truly was about an immanent origin of the world. The natura naturans is the cause, and the natura naturata is the effect. Jacobi merely translates the relationship of causality back into “kabbalistic” terms, which he attributes to Spinoza, in that he makes expansion, instead of emanation, the opposite of contraction. This pairing of contraction and expansion characterizing natu­ral causality, however, d­ oesn’t end with Jacobi’s contrivance. Instead, the idea of the interplay between contraction and expansion continued to exert an influence on the reception history of zimzum, even making an appearance in Schelling’s writings. In other sections of his book, Jacobi nonetheless claims that Lessing knew about and was even deeply familiar with the zimzum motif. In this instance, Jacobi is concerned not with philosophy or the contraction of the immanent Ensoph, but rather with wit and playfulness. H ­ ere, we see an example of zimzum as self-­withdrawal on a perhaps all too ­human level. Jacobi explains that Lessing could take plea­sure in the thought that “in order to preserve himself, he found that he must, from time to time, withdraw into himself to some extent.” “Lessing was very attached to this idea, and he ­adopted it without fail, sometimes in jest, sometimes in all seriousness.” In a moment of lightheartedness, while during a stay at Johann Wilhem Ludwig Gleim’s home in Halberstadt, when they wanted to take a stroll in the garden ­after dining, despite the rain, Lessing apparently said: “You know, Jacobi, I might just have to [withdraw into myself]. I answered: I might have to do this as well. Gleim looked at us as if we ­were both foolish.”17 Another anecdote reveals a reference to zimzum during a witty exchange of words between Jacobi and Lessing: “once Lessing said, with a half-­smile, that he himself was perhaps the supreme being, presently in the state of the most acute contraction.” Jacobi jokingly responds to the notion of Lessing as the supreme being in zimzum, saying: “I pleaded for my existence.”18 If we permit ourselves to believe Jacobi, Lessing understood and appreciated the

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thought of contraction not just in a philosophical sense, but was also sufficiently familiar with the concept to employ it in witty conversation or as a useful punchline for the occasional joke. We ­will recall that it was not the Hebrew word zimzum, but rather the concept of the contraction of the supreme being that became familiar to Jacobi’s many prominent readers, as well as many of Lessing’s friends. Jacobi’s readers had to decide ­whether to interpret, as Mendelssohn did, the anecdotal conversation about self-­contraction between Lessing and Jacobi as an example of Lessing’s irony, meaning that it had no real bearing on his personal religious convictions, or ­whether to give credence to Jacobi’s denunciation of Lessing as a “Spinozist” and “atheist” who ridiculed the “supreme being.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: The Ages of the World Schelling does not use the word zimzum in the entirety of his works and letters, not even once. Nevertheless, zimzum, which Schelling translates as God’s “Contraktion,” provides the decisive foundational concept under­lying some of his most impor­tant and, still t­ oday, most influential writings. Though the word zimzum is missing, the subject ­matter is ­there. The kabbalistic conception of God’s contraction is the only ele­ment derived from the Kabbalah that truly gains systematic, philosophical significance in Schelling’s work. In the following, I illustrate how Schelling received and interpreted this idea, with par­tic­u­lar focus on how and why he modified it in continuously new and vari­ous ways, turning it into a philosophical concept, reconceptualizing it, and fi­nally transforming it into the foundation of a philosophy of the living God.19 A Late Discovery

Schelling readers and enthusiasts only noticed the proximity between the concept of zimzum in the Lurianic Kabbalah and Schelling’s understanding of God’s contraction relatively late, as the texts in question that delve into the question of God’s contraction ­were not published during the phi­los­o­ pher’s lifetime. The works that I focus on in my discussion ­here are Schelling’s so-­called Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (Stuttgart Private Lectures), as well as vari­ous drafts of his Die Weltalter (The Ages of the World). Schelling com-



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posed ­these works between 1810 and 1815 and presented their content only partially in the form of public lectures. Schelling’s son did not publish ­these works ­until ­after his ­father’s death, when they appeared in his Sämmtliche Werke (Collected Works).20 The last of over a dozen drafts of Die Weltalter ­were not discovered in Schelling’s estate ­u ntil the twentieth ­century, and ­these drafts have also been published, provided they ­were found at least partially intact.21 In a letter written to Rudolf Ehrenberg in 1917, Franz Rosenzweig was the first to suggest the parallel between the Lurianic Kabbalah and Schelling in terms of “God’s entry into himself.”22 ­Today, this letter is viewed as the “primordial cell” that would ­later generate his 1921 work Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption). Rosenzweig’s observation about Luria went unnoticed for a relatively long period of time. It was not u ­ ntil a­ fter the Second World War that Ernst Benz23 and Wilhelm August Schulze, 24 inspired by Gershom Scholem’s work on the Kabbalah, further investigated Schelling’s reception of the Kabbalah, including the theme of zimzum. Scholem also referred to Schelling’s reception and philosophical treatment of the zimzum motif in a lecture that he presented at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin) shortly before his death in 1982. The lecture was entitled “Die Stellung der Kabbala in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte” (The Role of Kabbalah in Eu­ro­pean Intellectual History). In this lecture, Scholem, however, does not provide a more detailed explanation of the connection between Schelling and the Kabbalah, explaining only that Schelling, like Hegel and Baader, must have learned about the Kabbalah by way of Oetinger and Brucker’s philosophical history. 25 Schulze’s research made it clear that Schelling, while still residing at his parents’ home, had already been become familiar with kabbalistic themes by way of the works of the Swabian Pietist and kabbalist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702– 1782). In 1799, Schelling, at Ludwig Tieck’s suggestion, began to study the works of Jacob Böhme, 26 who had also been influenced by the Kabbalah, as well as Oetinger’s works beginning in 1802.27 Nevertheless, as far as we know, it seems that Schelling, in contrast to Oetinger28 or even his own con­temporary and correspondent Franz Joseph Molitor (1778–1860), 29 never studied Rabbinics or the Kabbalah with a Jewish teacher. And in contrast to ­these other Christian kabbalists, Schelling did not own copies of any kabbalist writings in the original, which ­were difficult for Christians to procure, as orthodox Jews ­were forbidden to teach or sell kabbalist materials to non-­Jews. And even if he had managed to get a

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hold of some of ­these texts, Schelling would have found it nearly impossible to make sense of them, as they would have been far too complex for him to understand without the help of someone knowledgeable enough to guide him. In any case, Schelling does not directly quote any specific kabbalistic work at any point in his writings; he merely mentions to some extent rather questionable sources pertaining to the Kabbalah.30 Although Schelling, the son of a professor who was a skilled specialist in “Oriental” philology, as well as being a distinguished student of ancient languages and Hebrew in his own right, having completed all the necessary philological prerequisites at the Tübinger Stift, he apparently never studied works of the Kabbalah directly in the original, but was familiar with their content only through the mediation of Christian kabbalists.31 Schelling always held the Hebrew Bible in high regard (VIII 271–274), emphasizing both its theological and philosophical significance. Throughout his life, he adhered to the conviction that Hebrew was the original language and the language of God, a conviction that becomes apparent when we consider his etymologies from the Hebrew.32 Schelling knew and made use of Hebrew and Aramaic dictionaries, and he was familiar with the system of gematria. He already began putting his Hebrew knowledge to use in the writings from his youth,33 initially with his master’s thesis on the story of original sin from the book of Genesis, leading up through his final works Philosophie der Mythologie (Philosophy of My­thol­ogy) and Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation). During his Munich years following 1806, which ­were definitive for his education in religious philosophy, Schelling was a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften (Acad­emy of Sciences and Humanities) and was even the organ­ization’s temporary director. Although the Königliche Hof-­ und Staatsbibliothek (Royal Court and State Library) ­housed at the time the foremost collection of Hebrew-­language and kabbalistic texts in the entire German-­speaking realm, and Schelling had relatively easy access to this impressive collection, ­there is no evidence that he borrowed a single manuscript or publication during his time ­there.34 In summary: Schelling only and exclusively absorbed Kabbalah indirectly, that is, through works that, like Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae, discussed and referred to kabbalistic sources. The works of Oetinger clearly exerted the strongest influence on him. What was true in general of Schelling’s experience reading Kabbalah was also true especially for his knowledge of the Lurianic concept of zimzum,



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which he incorporated into vari­ous essays to think through the concept of the contraction of God. Schelling prob­ably only held works of the Lurianic Kabbalah in his hand on one single occasion. In 1833, more than twenty years ­after the contraction of God became a key concept for him, he borrowed on behalf of his friend Molitor four Hebrew codices, handwritten copies of Ez Chayyim by Chayim Vital, as well as the work Ozzerot Chayyim (a text attributed to Vital), from the well-­k nown Munich collection and had them sent to Frankfurt.35 It was Molitor, rather than Schelling, who in fact studied t­ hese codices in the original. ­W hether Schelling ever carefully read the fruits of Molitor’s research remains doubtful. We know that Molitor sent Schelling a copy of his magnum opus, Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition, the singlemost significant work of Christian Kabbalah in the nineteenth ­century, which was published in four volumes in 1827, 1834, 1839, and 1853. Although Molitor sent Schelling a dedication copy, ­there is no written evidence of Schelling’s reaction to or engagement with Molitor’s work. All the same, Schelling advocated on his friend’s behalf for the decades-­long financial support that Molitor received from the Bavarian king to study Kabbalah. For his part, Molitor waited in vain, like many ­others,36 for Schelling to publish his Philosophie der Weltalter and was unaware of Schelling’s reflections on the contraction of God when he published his own “deduction of zimzum” (Scholem) in the second volume of his Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition.37 Sources

Since Schelling did not directly engage with Lurianic works, how was it that he became acquainted with the concept of zimzum? An educated Eu­ro­pean audience, even ­those who had no command of Hebrew, gained familiarity of the Lurianic Kabbalah through Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s massive, multi-­volume publication The Kabbalah Unveiled (Kabbala Denudata). The Kabbalah Unveiled made excerpts from the Lurianic Kabbalah available to Christian readers in the form of systematically ordered Latin translations. Since the Re­nais­sance, the Kabbalah had been considered a part of the hermetic tradition and the philosophia perennis, but with Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689), it was recognized, as the subtitle to The Kabbalah Unveiled—­ Doctrina Hebraeorum Transcendentalis et Metaphysica (The Transcendental and Metaphysical Doctrine of the Jews)—­indicates, or, as we find in Zedler’s Universal-­ Lexicon (1743), as “a divine metaphysics.”38 Certainly contrary to the original

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intention of the kabbalists themselves, the Kabbalah gained among Eu­ro­ pean intellectuals, even among Kabbalah objectors such as Johann Georg Wachter39 and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,40 the reputation and status of a “Jewish philosophy.” Jacobi’s 1785 Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn was a philosophical bestseller and of pivotal importance for the philosophical development of the young Schelling, namely, for his interest in Spinoza.41 And, in the context of his supposed conversations with Lessing about the Kabbalah, Jacobi also does not refer to the Hebrew term zimzum, but rather to the “Kontraktion” or “Contraktion” of God, who must “to some extent retreat into himself, in order to preserve himself.” 42 In Germany, especially in Schelling’s Swabian home, it was Oetinger’s works, next to Jacobi’s book, that propelled zimzum to become known—­ even popu­lar—as the most prominent concept of the Lurianic Kabbalah.43 Schelling’s proximity to Oetinger was almost familial. Schelling’s ­father possessed copies of Oetinger’s primary works in his private library, and he was Oetinger’s successor in office as prelate in Murrhardt. In 1803, the young Schelling was married in the same church in Murrhardt in which Oetinger was buried. In 1802, Schelling asked his ­father to purchase all available works by Oetinger and had them sent to Jena. He even owned autographed copies of Oetinger’s autobiography.44 All of this is to say that it is certain that Schelling was not acquainted with the entire scope of Luria’s zimzum from the original. Rather, he was familiar with the version of the concept presented in Oetinger’s works, boiled down to the abstracted, “closer portrayal of the Jewish system,” with zimzum defined as “God’s retreat into himself, so that he could create.” 45 Inspired by this notion of zimzum, Schelling initiated a transition from his identity philosophy to a philosophy of a living God, as evident in his 1804 Philosophie und Religion. This philosophy of a living God would make up the entirety of his ­later work, beginning with his Freiheitsschrift from 1809.46 Schelling’s acquaintance with Franz von Baader ­after 1806, and his intensive preoccupation with Jacob Böhme’s works, certainly exerted a decisive influence on this greatest caesura in his intellectual work.47 While the Kabbalah had influenced both Christian theosophists,48 and Schelling openly admitted their influence on his thought,49 the Lurianic Kabbalah and zimzum did not play a role for ­either of them. Neither Böhme50 nor his ­great interpreter Baader51 gave any consideration to the contraction of God for the purpose of creation and the preservation of the world, which represents a



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significant departure from Chayyim Vital’s description and approach. Zimzum as God’s contraction is a specifically Jewish concept, with which the tradition of Christian mysticism and philosophy was not at all familiar ­until the late seventeenth ­century.52 In the wild mix of themes from alchemy, teachings on electricity, speculative physics, Neoplatonism, astrology, and other aspects from Christian and Jewish theosophy, which gained considerable significance in the Romantic period,53 zimzum was one of the few ele­ments clearly definable as Jewish. In German idealism, zimzum was known and received as a figure of thought of the Kabbalah qua “Jewish philosophy.” Schelling merges Böhme’s portrayals of reason and unreason, the wrath and depth of God, with the Lurianic conception of zimzum (which Oetinger had previously articulated), not simply as ornament or meta­phor, but rather into a general, coherent, and exoteric philosophical conceptuality that served as the foundation of an entirely new philosophy of the living God, which broke with the metaphysical traditions of God as “unmoved mover.” Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (Stuttgart Private Lectures)

Historically speaking, we can narrow down the manner through which Schelling learned and received the concept of zimzum. Jacobi, Oetinger, and Brucker w ­ ere the sources that introduced Schelling to the concept of God’s contraction before the creation of the world. But this concept gained such autonomy and significance within his system of thought that the evidence of the reception merely serves to raise more questions than it answers. Except for a short, pathbreaking treatise written by Jürgen Habermas,54 the question of what motivated Schelling philosophically to introduce this concept, as well as how he utilized and transformed it over the course of his vari­ous works, remains unanswered to date. This question, however, eludes a historical explanation, and an answer can only be systematically reconstructed by way of thoughtful consideration. The contraction of God appears for the first time in Schelling’s collected works as a term and subject of interest in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen from 1810 (VII 429). ­These lecturers constitute an overview, an extremely abbreviated and systematic summary of Schelling’s widely known Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of ­Human Freedom), also known as the Freiheitsschrift (Freedom Essay), from 1809. ­These lectures only expand on

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the content of ­these writings in a few places. The contraction of God is the most impor­tant and extensive expansion. Schelling’s initial philosophical prob­lem, which underpins the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, as well as the three ­later drafts of his magnum opus Die Weltalter from 1811, 1813, and 1814/1815, is the question of how God as the Absolute was able to differentiate within himself, become finite, and manifest himself in the finiteness of the world.55 As the Absolute, God is every­ thing: a being that does not have anything before or outside of itself, a being that can develop only by engendering itself (see VII 432). God is the absolute identity of the ideal and the real, the subjective and objective, freedom and necessity. In this absolute identity of opposites, however, ­there is no difference, and no determination is pos­si­ble. Every­thing is all the same, complete indifference and indistinguishability prevail (VII 428). Only when God as the Absolute separates and differentiates himself into himself is it also pos­si­ble for differentiation to occur. It is only ­after God as the absolute real and ideal, the objective and subjective, necessity and freedom—­and what­ever further opposites ­there might be—in fact divides himself that philosophical determinations can take place. So that anything and thereby something capable of differentiation can exist at all, God as the Absolute must create existence for the real within himself. And this is precisely what necessitates God’s contraction. “Contraction [. . .] is the beginning of all real­ity” (VII 429). God contracts himself freely and completely into the real, he breaks open the absolute identity of his being, and creates real­ity and existence for himself first through his contraction: “God makes himself ” (VII 432). Despite every­thing, the essential identity of the real and ideal, the objective and subjective, necessity and freedom, as well as unconscious and conscious, the irrational and rational, wrath and love in the Absolute, that is, in God, before and beyond which nothing exists, is not nullified. God’s contraction first engenders real­ity for the unity of ­these per­sis­tent opposites in God. Real­ity is thus taken out of the oneness and indiscernibility of the Absolute and placed into existence and thereby becomes determinable through philosophy. The unity of the opposites in God would not be able to persist if God ­were only contraction. Every­thing would remain in constant retraction, in eternal withdrawnness and concealment (VII 440). Rather, God’s expansion into the ideal, subjective, freedom, spirit, rationality, and self-­consciousness corresponds to God’s contraction into the real, objective, necessary, into ma-



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terial, the irrational, and unconscious. God contains the forces of both contraction and expansion within him, which unfurl in opposition to and against one another. God is the dynamic tension in the unity of ­these forces and opposites: “He cannot contract himself into the real without expanding himself as the ideal, he cannot establish himself as the real, as an object, without establishing himself at the same time as a subject [. . .]; and both constitute one act, both are si­mul­ta­neously absolute” (VII 434). During the Weltalter period, the pairing of the terms contraction and expansion replaced the terms attraction and repulsion, which the young Schelling had borrowed from Kant’s natu­ral philosophy.56 Departing from Kant, Schelling reformulated the first princi­ples of all dynamics and movement in nature, deeply and primarily, however, as princi­ples in God.57 In ­doing so, the Romantic conception of nature as an organism replaces the causal-­mechanical worldview of the Enlightenment. Organic meta­phors, such as diastole and systole or ebb and flow (VIII 231), represent the pro­cesses in God and the forces in nature equally. Only several years ­after the Weltalter period, through the dominance of the Aristotelian princi­ples of potentiality and actuality as an inner condition of divine relation to itself, Schelling revised this cadence of contraction and expansion in God and in nature in his late works Philosophie der Mythologie and Philosophie der Offenbarung. This is where Schelling separates God’s internal relationship, even his own theogony, from the pro­cesses of nature. It is not ­until his very late philosophy that Schelling conceives of nature as external from God, using a theologically orthodox way of thinking.58 The concept of God’s contraction in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen makes it pos­si­ble for Schelling to formulate a theogony, an initial beginning in the becoming of God and the divine “act of self-­differentiation” (VII 431) out of the Absolute. What’s more, this theogony out of the Absolute identity also functions as a cosmogony. This is ­because God’s contraction into the real creates a being within God himself, which is the basis of all beings in the existing world. To redress the central ideas presented in his Freiheits­ schrift, Schelling also differentiates in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen between “the being, as far as it exists, and the being, as far as it is simply the reason for existence” (VII 357). God unites both. He exists. And: “­Because ­there is nothing before or beyond God, he must therefore contain the ground [Grund] for his own existence within himself ” (ibid.). Nature and the world also exist “in” God, insofar as he is the “ground” (read: “base” or “cause”) for every­thing that exists. The ground is the “primary nature” in God (VII 358

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and 361). But nature and the world are not identical with God; they differ from the existing God. They simply share the same ground (Grund) with the existing, manifest God of religion. Schelling returns to the topic of the structural difference between the ground and the existence in God in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, using a vocabulary of ontological difference: God divides himself through contraction into “being” (Sein) and “entity” (Seiendes). Contracted into his “being,” he is “ground” for himself as “entity,” the living, manifest, and revealed God, expanding in love. As cause and “being,” God is therefore also “component” and “material” of ­every “entity” in the world (VII 436–439). The existing God himself “is beyond nature” (VII 437): Nature is, as well as reason, always within him and subordinated to him. But even in their difference, the existing God and the pre­sent world both have the ground for their existence in one and the same being, into which God contracted himself in the beginning out of the Absolute. Being Before Thought

The introduction of the concept of God’s contraction in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen implicitly raises at the same time more of Schelling’s philosophical difficulties, which he himself sees and through this introduction covertly recognizes. First and foremost, and this is what makes contraction so meaningful for Schelling’s entire Weltalter period, the concept serves as an answer to Hegel. With the publication of Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit) in 1807, Hegel presented his own philosophical system and declared his right to ascend to the philosophical leadership in Germany. He was no longer simply one of Schelling’s “followers” and a fellow comrade in arms; rather, he threatened to overtake Schelling’s position. In the years following 1807, Hegel was Schelling’s only truly serious contender. Hegel’s philosophy could not simply be overridden; on the contrary, he critically superseded Schelling’s own early positions.59 The thought of God’s contraction now countered one of the polemical statements that Hegel had made in the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, which specifically targeted the weakness of Schelling’s identity philosophy and subsequently initiated the alienation between the two phi­los­o­phers: “To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute every­thing is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfillment, to palm off its



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Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black—­this is cognition naïvely reduced to vacuity.”60 With the concept of the initial contraction of God, Schelling disentangles and resolves in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen the very prob­lem “that in the Absolute every­thing is the same,” meaning the indistinguishability and complete indifference ­toward the absolute identity of God (who is no longer the absolute “I” of identity philosophy). Schelling considers God’s “self-­restriction” to be the factual beginning of an “act of self-­differentiation” of the Absolute (VII 431f.) that in turn allows for the ­actual differentiation on the side of philosophy through the ­actual separation of opposites in the Absolute, and the night of indistinguishability, in which all cows are black, fi­nally comes to an end.61 Knowledge is the knowledge of something. If ­there is knowledge of the Absolute and in the Absolute, it must also provide something existent and real in the Absolute. This comes first through God’s contraction into a being that is dif­fer­ent from the entities in the existing world. At the beginning of all knowledge, which is essentially, ­later, also the key to Schelling’s polemic against Hegel’s Logik and “negative philosophy” in general, ­there must be with the contraction already in the Absolute a real act of God and not merely a cognitive or logical operation: his self-­restriction into “being” necessarily opens all thought and all earthly “entity” from then on to inspection. That anything—­through God’s contraction—­even exists is the condition of the possibility of his perceptibility, be it in the Absolute or the finite. Thought and philosophy ­will forever serve as the a posteriori of God’s contraction into being. With his introduction of this concept, Schelling not only manages to stave off the “intellectual view” that he had borrowed from Fichte and previously incorporated as the princi­ple of knowledge in his transcendental and identity philosophy and had all too often only speculatively misused. He also removes any a priori at all from his philosophy. All thought and knowledge exist a­ fter that beginning of being in the contraction; from that point on, philosophy always thinks of something preexisting that is not constituted through the transcendental “I.” ­After 1809, Schelling no longer considered philosophy to be transcendental logic; it became, through narrative, something more like a straightforward report, a transcendental “history” (WA I 8) of ­these proceedings in God. The phi­los­o­pher becomes the historian of the Absolute.62

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Unground and Ein-­Sof

The concept of God’s contraction resolves a further impor­tant philosophical prob­lem that Schelling encountered, which the Freiheitsschrift had previously posed. The bold separation of reason from existence in this text was an attempt that allowed Schelling, contrary to Jacobi, Carl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schlegel,63 to admit to a correctly understood pantheism that equally claims to be compatible with the God of the Scriptures and the theologians. Contrary to Enlightenment theism and its causal-­mechanical conception of God as a mere primal “cause of the world” (Kant: “Welturheber”),64 and acting as the epitome of the Romantic thinker, Schelling rescues the divinity of nature, which Fichte’s scientific teachings—­a “complete massacre of nature” (VII 445)—as well as Hegel’s philosophy of the spirit had profaned and degraded. Schelling does not, however, lapse h ­ ere into the other extreme of a sleek pantheism, which he himself had previously advocated in his natu­ral philosophy in 1806: “God is essentially nature, and the reverse” (VII 30). Through the separation of God into ground and existence, God is nature, but not the reverse. Nature is not God, but rather exists as a divine ground in God. Nature is thus dif­fer­ent from the living and existent, the manifest God of the Scriptures. God as ground is the substance, which becomes subject in God as existence. As existence, God and man who is made in his image are ­free. Therefore, evil is pos­si­ble in the system of correctly understood pantheism. The Freiheitsschrift is a “metaphysics of evil” (Heidegger)65 with its separation of ground and existence as a condition of the possibility of ­human freedom within God. The metaphysics of evil resolves on its own accord the theodicy prob­lem,66 which had inexplicitly accompanied Schelling in his identity philosophy since 1801.67 ­W hether in Bruno, in Philosophie und Religion, or in Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie (Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature), Schelling understood the finite to be a fall from the Absolute. The mere existence of the finite was the cause of evil in the terrible real­ity of the world. The Deus sive natura of identity philosophy was necessarily responsible for this evil, which could not be gotten rid of in the intramundane. Since the Freiheits­ schrift, the bad and the evil can subsequently be ascribed to the abuse of ­human freedom; they are no longer qua finiteness a necessary ele­ment of that finite world. Above all, with the origin of evil no longer being necessary, the possibility of a ­f uture vanquishing of evil through love becomes conceivable once again.



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Schelling simply presented in his Freiheitsschrift this differentiation between origin and existence, which made all this pos­si­ble, as his innovation, without indicating whence he found the justification for assuming that such a split between ground and existence in God should be understood as the Absolute. Schelling did not explain how and why it could come to this separation and differentiation in the Absolute, in the absolute indifference of the “Ungrund” (unground), as Schelling writes in the Freiheitsschrift in agreement with Böhme (VII 406f.). He had written that the “unground,”68 the Absolute, splits itself into the binary of ground and existence (ibid.). However, the notion of this splitting in the Absolute remained an assumption that Schelling would neither further explain nor develop.69 It was the concept of the contraction of God in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen that first achieved such a justification. With the contraction, a separation of opposites in the Absolute takes form, which allows for a philosophical differentiation. All differentiation, however, is predicated on the original separation of “unground.” In kabbalistic terms, it is the separation of God as Ein-­Sof into ground and existence based on his beginning contraction in his being that is the origin of every­thing that is. In Schelling’s thought, only the oppositionally striving tension of forces, the continued contraction in their opposition to the continued expansion, can then perpetually maintain the separation of ground and existence, being (Seyn) and that which is (“das Seyende”) in God. For Luria, as Chayyim Vital depicts his teacher’s thought, God is the “unground,” the fathomless infinity of Ein-­ Sof, which contracts itself and thereby creates other—­namely, empty—­space into which the world emanates. The continued contraction of God from himself into himself is for Schelling the contraction of the Absolute into its ground, alongside and opposite the expansion of entities and finite beings. For Luria, continuous emanation as the opposite to continuous contraction of the Ein-­Sof is the condition for the possibility of further existence and of the creatio continua of the world (VII 441). The Drafts of Die Weltalter

Schelling’s vari­ous drafts for a philosophy of Die Weltalter (The Ages) deal then, like a theme with variations, almost exclusively with God’s contraction, which previously in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen had only been a beginning and part of an entire, developed philosophical system. Schelling never managed to write beyond the first age, “The Past.” And the world’s

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past is at its core the events in God prior to the existence of the pre­sent world; it lifts and is stamped by God’s contraction: “Beginning lies where ­there is attraction. All being is contraction” (WA I 23). Already in the first Weltalter draft from 1811, Schelling takes seriously his claim to write a specifically Christian philosophy. The Freiheitsschrift and the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen had also been positioned against theistic metaphysics, in that Schelling asserted them to be a philosophy of the living God: “a God propped up by metaphysics suits neither our head nor heart” (VII 429). Now, however, Schelling avows himself explic­itly to Chris­tian­ity, which he at one point clearly sets apart from Judaism and the Greek world: the Jews know one God, the Greeks (Hellenes) many gods, but only Christians have the “most proper” and “truest” doctrine of the Trinity (WA I 69). It is the Trinity, whose inner life Schelling broadly develops over the course of the drafts of Die Weltalter, that now serves as proof, next to the unity of his philosophy with the Holy Scripture, of a true Christian philosophy. The doctrine of the Trinity also considerably shifted Schelling’s conception of contraction. Already in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, Schelling’s concept of contraction was very dif­fer­ent from that of Vital’s zimzum. According to Schelling’s thinking, God contracts himself from the “unground” (void) or the absolute indifference (VII 406) into the real, into ground or existence. God thereby creates in the “unground” a foundation so that anything at all may exist. God contracts himself into a specific “place” in the “unground,” which then becomes the ground for all that exists (VII 406ff., 434). For Vital, on the other hand, God as Ein-­Sof withdraws himself in the pro­cess of zimzum from a point in the ­middle of Ein-­Sof and thus creates a space that is not God. God allows the world to emanate into this empty, not-­God space. According to Vital, God creates through zimzum space in himself. According to Schelling, God creates space through contraction beyond himself as ground of all beings. For Vital, God contracts himself away from a place; for Schelling, he contracts himself into a “place,” namely, the ground. Time does not play a significant role in the Lurianic Kabbalah, but it becomes a principal theme for Schelling in his sustained efforts at writing Die Weltalter.70 ­These reflections are some of the most meaningful thoughts on time and eternity, at least in the nineteenth ­century, and they have a de­ cided influence on the philosophy of Rosenzweig and Heidegger in the twentieth ­century. In metaphysics since Aristotle, eternity was considered everlasting time. For Schelling, however, eternity is not the same ­thing as



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everlasting temporality. Schelling’s central question is how God, the Eternal and the Absolute, can establish within himself a beginning of time, for he is a living God with an internal life before and beyond the world and all earthly time. Only in the “unground” is t­ here an empty, unrestrained, terrifying eternity (WA I 93 and 98). Through contraction, however, God always sets a beginning to life, movement, and thus also temporality. This conclusion leads Schelling to a variation of the biblical phrase “to every­thing ­there is a season, and a time to e­ very purpose ­under the heaven” (Eccles. 3; see WA I 84) to a critique of the empty concept of linear, infinite time a priori. Time exists only ­after the beginning, ­after God’s contraction into being. ­Every being, “quite simply every­thing has its own time in itself,” “for in each and ­every ­thing time itself arises anew, springing forth directly out of eternity itself ” (WA I 78f.). The divine ground, from which every­ thing originates, separates temporal beings from eternity. We must assume that dif­fer­ent times already exist in the living God himself, namely, the temporal dimensions of past, pre­sent, and ­f uture. Only God freely rules over the times in and of themselves, while on earth every­thing is subject to time and ruled by it (WA I 83–85). This is where the Christian Trinity comes decidedly into play in Schelling’s thought. God’s contraction is no longer the contraction belonging to Luria’s thought, namely, zimzum, which ­causes the creation of Adam Kadmon and the world, that is, the creature (that which has been created). Schelling, on the other hand, conceives of it much more as an inner-­divine contraction. The time dimensions of past, pre­sent, and ­future originate from the Trinity’s internal self-­animation, entirely equivalent to the Christian doctrine of faith put forward at the Council of Nicaea. God the F ­ ather contracts himself in the past into himself and thereby generates a son, “the Word,” the Log­os, who ­later ­will descend and be revealed in the earthly world as Christ (John 1). The Son represents pre­sent time, expansion, and love in the Absolute, as opposed to the ­Father who represents contraction and judgment (WA I 58f  ). The Holy Spirit, as the third persona of the Trinity, originates and proceeds beyond the tension of contraction and expansion, in cooperation between ­Father and Son,71 between divine wrath and heavenly love; as such, it is the ­f uture, the “one that divides and ­orders the dif­fer­ent times” (WA I 82). The internal pro­cesses of the Trinity—­Father, Son, Holy Spirit—­create the basis for the three dimensions of earthly time: past, pre­sent, ­f uture. The same powers that manifest in the Trinity also manifest in the earthly world: the contracting power of the ­Father, the expanding power of the Son,

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and the organ­izing power of the Holy Spirit “form” the world (WA I 85). Schelling thus critiques the theologians’ orthodox doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, just as he had previously done in the Freiheitsschrift and in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (VII 373, 436). The vis­i­ble world emanates from the divine world as ground (Grund); it is not created from nothingness. The Trinity shapes, it does not create. Ex nihilo nihil fit (cf. VII 165). For God is the One and the All. The assertion “that God is every­thing” (VII 343) precludes the possibility of an empty nothingness next to him. And it precludes that ­there can be nature outside of God. The one and same contraction in the Absolute thus engenders a double effect: it makes pos­si­ble in the beginning the inner life of the divine Trinity and creates at the same time the ground and beginning of the existence of the finite world. The theogony of the Trinity and the cosmogony of the world and the times are intractably bound up in a pro­cess of contraction. Both pro­ cesses run ­limited, incomplete, and forever changeable into an unknown ­future. In the contraction, the Absolute is bound to history, and God is bound to the world, ­because the events in God reflect themselves unmediated in time and the world; the events in the world on the other hand act as a mirror of the internal life of the divine and the active powers at work in it. The categorical difference between God and the world is largely leveled out, but nevertheless remains preserved. Contraction in the Trinity

Schelling corrects this consolidation of the Absolute and history in its first moving princi­ple, God’s contraction, in a ­later draft of Die Weltalter from 1814/1815, which Schelling’s son published in 1861. In fact, he does so with the help of the concept of God’s contraction: Schelling doubles the contraction. Schelling assumes a first contraction within the Trinity. By way of this contraction, God develops himself, analogous to his argument in the 1811 draft, from an unknown, indifferent Absolute to a living God in the form of three persons. The contraction of the ­Father, the expansion of the Son, and the reconciliation of their conflict within the Holy Spirit constitute intra-­divine periods of self-­development and self-­revelation. God only gradually becomes conscious of himself and becomes manifest when he develops from the indifferent Absolute into a being consisting of three persons of the Trinity. The internal divine life exists in God’s development from the unknown into the



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known, the unconscious to the conscious, in proto-­psychoanalytic terms, it is the development from “It” to “He” (VIII 255) with the help of contraction.72 A second contraction of the now fully unfolded Trinity corresponds to the first contraction for the genesis of the Trinity overall: The God of the Trinity contracts himself into the ground and into being, and thereby creates space for the existence of the world. Through self-­contraction, the God of the Trinity becomes Being, which is the cause of all earthly beings and entities (VIII 232 f.). Out of his expanding, overflowing love, which overcame this contraction, nature, the spiritual world, and the world soul (Weltseele) emerge in­de­pen­dently (VIII 249–252). “Nature is not God,” it had, following God’s contraction of One into All, “proceeded from the divine so to speak,” but is itself separate from God, though nevertheless still grounded in the divine ground (VII 244). For Schelling, the creation of the world nevertheless remains identical to the emergence out of God, who is contracted in the ground (Grund). Using a daring application of etymology, he derives the word contraction from contract, and then contract from the Hebrew Brit (covenant), and fi­nally Brit from bara, the verb for “creation” in Genesis 1:1 (VIII 333). The self-­development and self-­differentiation of God proceeds first through the double contraction from an indifferent Absolute to a living God, who is every­thing in every­ thing at the end of all times. He thus transforms from an implicit to an explicit God. God becomes All from One (VIII 312). This begins with his contraction. By presuming the existence of a double contraction, Schelling restores the difference between God and the world in this final extant draft of Die Weltalter. Contraction within the Trinity is something dif­fer­ent from the contraction of the Trinity that follows it. The Christianizing of the concept of God’s contraction through his deployment of the Trinity is not entirely unique to Schelling. For example, we can find this application, expressed in other terms, in Oetinger’s thought. For Oetinger had interpreted the Lurianic figure of Adam Kadmon, who was already emanated as the prototype of the earthly Adam before the creation of the world from Ein-­Sof, as Jesus Christ. And he wrote of a zimzum of Adam Kadmon, ergo Christ, which followed God’s zimzum. Oetinger had thereby emphasized the divine nature of Christ, to dispel that suspicion of Arianism73 and to vindicate the first sentence of the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the word” (John 1:1) would then in Christian terms be: in the beginning of all creation, it was not a created ­thing, that is, Adam Kadmon,

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that emerges, but rather the divine Messiah and Log­os Jesus Christ. Without zimzum, ­there was neither creation nor revelation. The concept of God’s contraction held a similar cardinal position in Schelling’s entire Weltalter period, just as it had in Oetinger’s works. But around 1815, Schelling’s broad systematic reflections on this concept came to an end. The concept appeared once more, very prominently, but also very briefly (VIII 354, 381) in his lecture Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrake (On the Divinities of Samothrace) from the same year, which he presented to the Acad­emy of Sciences on the name day of the Bavarian king. And unlike the Weltalter drafts, he permitted the lecture to be published as an addendum to the same. As he does ­later in the Philosophie der Mythologie and in the Philosophie der Offenbarung, in this lecture, Schelling appears less interested in the inner life of the divine, concentrating instead on God’s externalization in the my­thol­ogy and revelation of the ­peoples in the existing world. Schelling argues that mono­the­istic religion based on revelation and polytheistic my­thol­ogy are similar, though priority is of course given to revelation, the manifestations of the mono­the­istic God.74 Contrary to the religious criticism and research on my­thol­ogy of his day, Schelling adheres to the idea that Hebrew was God’s language, the original language. First, the Babylonian language confusion serves as the origin of polytheism and my­thol­ogy, and Pentecost is the cele­bration of the vanquishing of polytheism and my­thol­ogy through the revelation. Schelling searched in Hebrew for the etymological roots of the names of the deities and demigods in all religions. According to Schelling, Brahma is thus derived from bara (XII 543). With ­these kinds of etymological exercises, Schelling is the unacknowledged role model for Molitor’s Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition, as well as for Isaak Bernay’s75 Der Bibel’sche Orient (The Biblical Orient), which was published in Munich in 1821, just six years ­after the Divinities of Samothrace. Schelling’s late philosophy describes the inner life of the divine according to the Aristotelian formula of actuality and potentiality. As such, God’s contraction no longer plays a role in this much more static model of a theogony of God. Nevertheless, the primacy of God’s being before all thought, which Schelling first developed in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen and the Weltalter drafts, remained a feature of his late philosophy. God’s being and his revelation are pre­sent in all reflection. With the help of the concept of God’s contraction, Schelling’s primacy of being over thought, which overtook Hegel, preformed not only the polemic that the “left” Hegel students



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formulated against Hegel,76 but also the modern existential primacy of existence over essence, a philosophy of real­ity in contrast to the pure theory of the henceforth “negative philosophy.”77 Søren Kierkegaard, the ­father of all existential philosophy, notes in his diary entry on 22 November 1841, ­after attending Schelling’s lecture in Berlin on his Philosophie der Offenbarung, during which Schelling spoke about the relationship of philosophy to real­ity as an “episteme tou ontos,” a science of being,78 around which all thought is or­g a­nized: “I am so pleased to have heard Schelling’s second lecture—­ indescribably. I have sighed for long enough and my thoughts have sighed within me; when he mentioned ‘real­ity’ in connection with the relation of philosophy to real­ity the fruit of my thought leapt for joy within me as in Elizabeth.”79 God’s action during creation creates real­ity, which predicates all thought. “Contraction,” Schelling had already written in 1810, “is the beginning of all real­ity” (VII 429).

Franz Joseph Molitor: The Deduction of Zimzum “In our estimation, it is nearly impossible to grasp the idea of creation, without accepting that the divine limits itself and at the same time makes itself receptive to the creature. ­Because in that the divine brings forth the creature, it is no longer merely the only being, but rather ­there exists for it another being.”80 With ­these lines, Franz Joseph Molitor characterizes the significance that he attributed to zimzum: it is impossible to comprehend the concept of creation without accepting the idea that the infinite divinity places limits on itself, in an act that makes it pos­si­ble for ­there to be another being in addition to the heretofore one single divine being. When Molitor published ­these lines in 1834 in the second volume of his Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition, he was acknowledged by his contemporaries as the foremost Christian expert on Judaism and the Kabbalah. The first volume of his Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition, published anonymously in 1827  in Frankfurt am Main, was widely reviewed in line with the flourishing interest in mysticism and theosophy in German Romanticism and Biedermeier. The name Molitor became known, and the volume established the authority of the Frankfurt private tutor who was both a Catholic and a Freemason.81 ­There was even a French translation published in Paris in 1834 of the 1827 volume. The third and fourth volumes

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of Philosophie der Geschichte appeared in Münster in 1839 and 1853, respectively. In 1857, a considerably expanded edition of the first edition from 1827 was published. ­These four volumes, though disparate in terms of content, which repeatedly cite in Hebrew passages from the most diverse kabbalistic works from all epochs in the original, demonstrate Molitor to be the most knowledgeable and well-­read Christian kabbalist of the nineteenth c­ entury and prob­ably the most prominent Christian authority of the Kabbalah since Christian Knorr von Rosenroth.82 In contrast to Schelling, with whom he corresponded in letters and to whom he sent dedicated copies of his books to Munich, Molitor studied the kabbalistic texts in their original, with assistance of rabbis and Jewish scholars, whom he compensated for their tutelage. He thus endeavored to pre­sent conceptions, ideas, and concepts derived from the Kabbalah in his philosophy, to pro­cess and consider them further. Molitor’s appropriations of the Kabbalah are at times flawed and idiosyncratic; they are ahistorical, ­because they regard the kabbalistic sources not as historical documents, but rather as an expression of an ancient mystical Jewish tradition. And Molitor’s adoptions subject kabbalistic sources to his own theosophical and philosophical interests and ideas. But his knowledge cannot be denied. Molitor studied t­ hese texts intensively for over forty years.83 Even among the Jewish scholars who in ­those years ­were developing the Wissenschaft des Judentums, t­ here w ­ ere few who possessed a comparable quantitatively comprehensive, as well as qualitatively detailed, knowledge of kabbalistic source material that was on par with Molitor’s seemingly indefatigable expertise. Born in 1779 in Oberursel (in the Taunus region, located near Frankfurt am Main), Molitor studied philosophy and law and became a teacher at the Frankfurt Philanthropin in 1807, a Jewish school inspired by the Haskalah and opened ­under Napoleon. He dedicated his work as a pedagogue to educate Jewish ­children to grow into emancipated, equal, and cultivated citizens. Molitor left the Philanthropin and his circle of colleagues, made up of enlightened, liberal Jewish teachers such as Michael Hess, a­ fter a few years, but the impetus to concern himself with Judaism as a religion, with Jewish teachings, and the Hebrew language was born during his time spent at the Philanthropin. In 1815 or 1816, Molitor met the Freemason and kabbalist Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld and presumably pursued ­under his influence an interest in Kabbalah. From then on, ­until shortly before his death in 1860, Molitor continuously sought out Jewish scholars, whose names remain unknown to this day, so that he could learn Hebrew, Aramaic, the Talmud,



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and the Kabbalah from them or ask them to translate difficult texts for him. In 1828, ­after the success of the first volume, Molitor abandoned his life as a teacher to devote himself fully as an in­de­pen­dent scholar to his study of Kabbalah and his writings. He was supported by stipends, including funds granted by the Bavarian king. Furthermore, Molitor was engaged in several Frankfurt Freemason lodges and functioned as a coeditor of the extremely noteworthy Unpartheiische Universal-­Kirchenzeitung, in which Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, in mutual tolerance and ­under the assumption of full equality of religions and confessions, exchanged news and could write about con­temporary religious questions. The Universal-­Kirchenzeitung appeared in 1837 for only one year; however, it is one of the most profound pieces of evidence of a genuine Jewish-­Christian dialogue in the nineteenth ­century. When Molitor died in 1860, the young Jewish Zohar scholar and rabbi Adolf Jellinek wrote in an obituary that Molitor should be entered into The Book of Yasher as a zaddik umot ha’olam, on account of his public advocacy for Judaism and the Jewish ­people.84 And Gershom Scholem also admits in his famous 1937 letter to Salman Schocken, entitled “Ein offenes Wort über die wahren Absichten meines Kabbalastudiums” (A Frank Word About the True Intentions of My Kabbalah Study), that he had become interested in Kabbalah and became a Kabbalah scholar ­after reading Molitor’s work during the First World War.85 The elaborate title of the first volume captures the subject of Molitor’s concern and program in writing this work: Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition in dem alten Bunde und ihre Beziehung zur Kirche des neuen Bundes. Mit vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf die Kabbalah (Philosophy of History or on the Tradition in the Old Covenant and Its Relationship to the Church of the New Covenant, with Preeminent Consideration Given to the Kabbalah). Molitor announces ­here that his philosophy of history is a philosophy of a common salvation history of Judaism and Chris­tian­ity, in which the Kabbalah, as the oldest and an authoritative tradition, provides the foundation for the mystical doctrines of both religions and thus serves as a bridge between Judaism and Chris­tian­ity. At the same time, it unlocks the truths about God, creation, revelation, and even morality, shared by both religions. Without denying the distinct liberal Catholic perspective, Molitor indicates in this book that the Jewish rabbinical tradition, including the Kabbalah, is an undeniable component of the common salvation history, as God intended, shared by Jews and Christians, since the time of Adam’s fall u ­ ntil ­f uture salvation. For Molitor, the original Jewish Tradition, which he names

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in the title, referring to the Hebrew Bible including the Oral Torah, that is, oral doctrine from the Talmud, Kabbalah, and rabbinical lit­er­a­ture, is the precondition also for Christian doctrine, Christian self-­understanding, and Christian salvation history. “Salvation comes from the Jewish ­people” (John 4:22) is the New Testament motto and leitmotif of the Philosophie der Geschichte. For this reason, Christians must learn Jewish traditions and their truth, ­because this is relevant to salvation and ­will help Christians come to a better understanding of the Bible and their own doctrines. Due to this significant connection between Chris­tian­ity and Judaism, the Kabbalah earns special “consideration,” as the title of the work indicates, as it offers a key to the hidden truths of the Jewish tradition, the Bible, the Talmud, halakhah, as well as prayer, rituals, and doctrines on purity. What is more, the Kabbalah in fact also contains deep truths for Christian understanding, including revelation, inner-­divine life, the secrets of creation, and spiritual life, which Molitor’s philosophy is meant to accentuate, conceptualize, and make accessible for his readers. Molitor’s approach is noteworthy and unique among his Christian contemporaries and considerably dif­fer­ent from the philosophies of history that Lessing, Fichte and Hegel, Schelling and Baader, Friedrich Schlegel and Joseph Görres developed, in that he does not articulate any notion of historical superiority of Chris­tian­ity over Judaism, on account of the supposed fact that Chris­tian­ity, from a world historical perspective, inherited and overcame Judaism. Rather, without denying his own Christian perspective, Molitor insists on the unsurpassable, underrecognized salvific truth of Jewish traditions and the Kabbalah for con­ temporary Chris­tian­ity. In a marked difference from the Christian history of theology and the history of philosophy of the Enlightenment and Romantic period, Molitor did not believe that Chris­tian­ity had surpassed Judaism and made it obsolete.86 Judaism and its traditions, and thereby its knowledge, remain relevant for the unavoidable shared salvation history of Judaism and Chris­tian­ity up into the pre­sent day—­a salvation history that God endowed, providentially desired, and would bring to a redemptive end.87 Even though Molitor, as a Catholic, is convinced of Christ’s return, which ­will save the Jewish p­ eople and Christians alike, Jews should cultivate their traditions in the pre­sent, maintain their covenant with God, and remain Jewish. Salvation comes from the Jewish ­people and God has secured it for them—­even without baptism. Extra ecclesiam salus. The first volume of the Philosophie der Geschichte from 1827 does not situate itself as an introduction to the Kabbalah, but rather outlines the philo-



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sophical agenda and offers a compendium of the entire scope of Jewish rabbinical lit­er­a­ture and the significance of that tradition for Chris­tian­ity. The second volume from 1834 pre­sents, leaning on the Lurianic Kabbalah, Molitor’s theosophical reflections on God, on the inner life of the divine, and on creation. The third volume from 1839 deals with rabbinical purity laws and rituals in considering the practical Kabbalah and the halakhah. In the fourth volume from 1853, Molitor pre­sents a dispute that he has with con­temporary philosophy and theology, thereby formulating a defense of the meaning of the Kabbalah and the Jewish traditions for a correct understanding of Chris­tian­ity. The revised first volume, which appeared in 1857, when Molitor was an old man, long forgotten by his contemporaries, anachronistically defends the venerable age of the Kabbalah as an ancient tradition against the historical-­critical methods of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and its historicization of the Kabbalah. For Molitor, the Kabbalah and its thought ­were and remained the oldest layer of tradition, which offers a mystical foundation for Judaism and Chris­tian­ity in their shared salvation history and their salvific truths. Molitor’s reflections on zimzum can be found in the second volume of his Philosophie der Geschichte from 1834. The content of this volume deals with the speculative knowledge of the divine, the speculative development of fundamental concepts of theosophy according to the princi­ples of the Kabbalah and with the imperative of divine revelation. Among the general princi­ples of theosophy, we find the divine “self-­limitation” as a precondition for creation.88 The Hebrew term zimzum does not appear in the sections on divine self-­limitation (§§ 240–288, II 148–172), but it is entirely clear that Molitor refers to zimzum when discussing divine self-­limitation, thus aligning himself with the Lurianic Kabbalah. Adam Kadmon and Azilah are even written in Hebrew letters in the text. And in the book’s appendix (II 242–261), entitled “Nachtrag einiger Stellen aus der Kabbalah” (Supplement Containing Some Passages from the Kabbalah), Molitor quotes classic texts of the Lurianic Kabbalah in Hebrew, along with German translations. He cites Shefa Tal by Horo­witz, Novelot Chokhmah by Delmedigo, Emek ha-­ Melekh by Naphtali Bacharach, and, above all, on multiple occasions, Vital’s Ez Chayyim, using as his source the manuscript ­housed at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, which Schelling had checked out in 1833 at Molitor’s request and had sent to Frankfurt.89 That is to say, Molitor develops the foundational concepts of his theosophy in direct engagement with the Lurianic Kabbalah.

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In his theosophical discussions and explanations, he differentiates between the “divinity in its appearance,” meaning how it shows itself externally during creation, and the “divinity in and of itself ” prior to creation, which the kabbalists call Ein-­Sof (II 56n1). His reflections on the self-­ limitation of the divine are not ­limited to the external description of the zimzum. Rather, Molitor attempts to trace zimzum as an internal necessity and intention of the divine an sich. He attempts to formulate a “deduction of zimzum,” as Scholem noted on the dust jacket of his personal copy of the second volume of Philosophie der Geschichte.90 For the beginning, Molitor’s deduction of zimzum is thus oriented ­toward and ­shaped by both the logic of negation (dialectics) and theology of the Trinity. In this re­spect, Molitor’s reflections on the self-­limitation of the divinity are an instance of theosophy in its pure form (Molitor rarely uses the term Ein-­Sof  ): Christian Trinity theology and negation logic from philosophy, which recalls the young Schelling and Hegel’s logic of being,91 meld together to form a theosophy, which adopts the depiction of zimzum from Luria’s Kabbalah, in effect raising this “self-­limitation of the divine” to the status of a foundational princi­ple. The foundational question of such a theosophy of zimzum is: How does a self-­limitation in the divine prior to creation come to be in the first place? Molitor’s deduction of zimzum begins in §240 with the thought that creation, or the “generating of the creature,” can be conceived as “continuous self-­negation” of the divine (II 148). Originally, before creation, the divine is “absolute, infinite positivity” and only that. A positivity that affirms itself in its infinite ­will and desires itself. ­Because this infinite ­will now “reflectively negate” itself, even the absolute infinite positivity is negated: the divine no longer desires to be pure, infinite positivity; rather, it limits itself through this negation. It’s not its positivity that is negated, just the infinity of the divine positivity: per self-­negation, the infinite positivity becomes the finite, l­imited positivity. For that reason, this “self-­negation” is a self-­ limitation. A self-­negation of the infinite divine positivity stands at the beginning of zimzum. Through self-­negation, a divine “not” comes to be, which limits its originally pure positivity. This first, limiting divine “not,” or as Molitor also describes it, this “not-­divine,” is first of all not a new positive real­ ity, but rather the possibility for creating a new, not-­divine real­ity beyond the ­limited positivity of the divine: the “creature,” also understood as creation outside of the divine. “This not of divinity, brought forth by the negative act of self-­negation, is actually a ­simple infinite potentiality, which hovers



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between being and not being and forms the foundation of the creature. This negative is in and of itself nothing other than the pure general form of creatureliness, as that of the not-­God-­being or the being beyond God” (II 149f.). Now that Molitor has established this “potential externality” of the creature beyond God, which can exist as potentiality hovering between being and not-­being only as long as the divine upholds its own self-­negation (II 150), he must explain how in the end the real­ity of the creature as a being beyond God can come into existence from the mere possibility of creation through intentional, continuous “self-­limitation” of the divine and the divine being. ­Here, Molitor once again brings the negation of the divine ­will into play. If a “not” and the possibility of the creature or being beyond God ­were posited through the negative, general not-­wanting of pure positivity, the thinking negation of the “infinite qualities of ­will” in the general divine ­will thus enables a differentiation of this ­will within itself, which Molitor calls the “emergence of separation” (II 151). Singular infinite qualities of the divine ­will that are dif­fer­ent and distinguishable from one another, through which the divine originally wants itself purely positively and through which it “magically creates” itself, would become finite through negation of the infinite divine ­will into differentiation. But despite becoming finite through negation, the now finite divine qualities are not negative, but rather have an outwardly positive effect. As “living, but not-­divine energies,” the divine qualities, which ­were made finite through negation, emerge positive from the divine and pass into the finiteness of the creature as living energies.92 The divine qualities do not directly launch in a “real manner” into the externality and the creature; rather, they simply cooperate, having been ­limited and made finite by negation, in a super­natural, “magical manner” that brings forth the creature. “This bringing forth of the creature, solely from the magic of the divine ­will, is called creation out of nothingness [creatio ex nihilo]” (II 152). This generating of the creature through the negating limitation of divine wanting is not a singular occurrence, for the pro­cess of generating energies outside of the divine remains bound to the permanent negation and limitation of the infinite inner-­divine powers of the ­will. The externality of the creature and the inner life and wanting of the divine remain securely bound in the permanence of negation. Without the original self-­negation of the divine, ­there would be no creation, and without permanent negation and limitation of the divine ­will, ­there could be no creatio continua. According to Molitor’s system of thought, creation out of nothingness is a creation out

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of “not.” This “not” is not an empty space, and it is not a hypostasized nothingness in opposition to a divine excess of being, but rather the continuous act of self-­negation of the infinite to finite. The creatio continua is permanent creation from nothingness. For this reason, as Molitor explains, we must understand zimzum as the self-­limitation of the divine created by its original self-­negation, which, like the self-­negation, remains permanent. According to Molitor, the divine is in no way coerced into its self-­ negation, this negation is much more a ­free act of divine love, in which the divine s­ ettles itself. The “dif­fer­ent,” difference-­creating act of negation is to be understood as “divine self-­settling at the same time and directly the act of the creature opposing itself ” (II 152f.). The entire “evolution” of creation consequently has its reason “in the inner ­free self-­determination of the divine” (II 153).

* * * ­ fter deducing zimzum as the self-­limitation from the original timeless A self-­negation of the divine and establishing it as a necessary precondition of creation, Molitor turns his attention to the pro­cess of creation itself. He conceives of the pro­cess of creation entirely in terms of the theology of the Trinity and interprets Adam Kadmon as the “Son” and the second person in the Trinity, through whom, following the Christian confession of faith, every­thing is created (an interpretation to which the Christian Kabbalah has reached time and again since Reuchlin).93 The explicit reference to Adam Kadmon sets Molitor’s speculative theosophy considerably apart from Schelling’s considerations in the Weltalter drafts, which ­were unknown to him. In contrast to Schelling, Molitor positions the internal differentiation of the Trinity in the divine ­will: “­Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are just one ­will that is distinguished by three directions” (II 154). The ­Father is the desire for infinite unity and commonality, the Son the desire for the infinite multiplicity and distinctiveness, the Holy Spirit the desire for infinite concreteness. Originally, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the infinite desire for the par­tic­u­lar and the desire for the concrete, remained undeveloped in the general ­will of the ­Father, Molitor explains, much like the sefirot originally and potentially, but invisibly and undifferentiated, slumbered in the infinite light of the Ein-­Sof (II 154). Already prior to the decision to create and before the original divine self-­negation, the idea of creation from eternity existed in the ­Father and his ­will. As it says in the Bible in



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Proverbs 8:22–31, God’s wisdom plays with the idea of creation before all time (II 154 and 155). The path from the playful possibility of creation to its completion and realization is made pos­si­ble by the self-­negation of the “self-­ negating divine ­will” (II 156). Through the inner “self-­limitation” of the infinite universal, the par­tic­u­lar and the creature’s externality outside of God become real: “the ontological mode of the creature, as the ‘not’ of the divine, is solely determined by the pro­cess of limitation of the divine. The bringing forth of the creature in its particularity takes place through the son” (II 156). If the Son ­were originally embodied in the universal positive ­will and self-­settling of the ­Father, his “particularity” was also contained as the “immanent operating agency” initially indistinct within the infinite unity of the ­Father. First, the eternal self-­negation of the universal w ­ ill of the F ­ ather fr ­ ees the particularity of the Son, through which the Son “goes forth from the ­Father and to the same enters into the relationship of externality and discernibility” (II 156). This “dif­fer­ent procreation of the Son,” which first establishes the difference between the ­Father and the Son, ­because of the self-­limitation of the universal divine ­will constitutes the initial step within the self-­development of the Trinity. A zimzum of the ­Father generates the Son. The Son of the infinite individual therefore becomes inner-­divine, the individual “who forms the first distinct beginning of the finite, the living type, and the operating agent of all creatureliness” (II 156). The intra-­ Trinitarian procreation of the Son is the “first prototypical incarnation of God for the emergence of creation” (II 157). It is the procreation of the incarnate Son that first makes the ­Father a ­father and opens the way to creation. In the Kabbalah, according to Molitor, the Son is named Adam Kadmon, or the primordial man, and the number of the ten sefirot is contained within him (II 156f  ). And that which Molitor’s speculative theosophy pre­ sents as the intra-­Trinitarian procreation of the Son, “the kabbalists” describe, Molitor explicates in clear imitation of the Lurianic Kabbalah, “in their realistic way,” as the return of the infinite, extensive light from a known place, “which is designated as the space for the worlds yet to be created.” Adam Kadmon emanated into this space. Molitor himself acknowledges ­here that he reinterprets the Lurianic Kabbalah and its depiction of zimzum. This reinterpretation has a reason based on theology of the Trinity. If we accept the “realistic” perspective of the Kabbalah, the Son as Adam Kadmon would leave the intra-­Trinitarian, substantial unity with the ­Father and would shift from the side of divine creator to the side of the created. Molitor contradicts

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this proposition. The Son remains pre­sent in the substantial unity with the ­Father—­a being with the ­Father—­even though he is already another person in this unity and has another position. The Son has, in comparison to the ­Father, a dual nature according to Trinity theology: “a dual existence, an inner, ­simple, infinite, and an external, separate, finite” one (II 159): Vere Deus, vere homo. On the one hand, the Son is within the Trinity one with the ­Father, although in this unity the agent of creation; but on the other hand, he becomes, out of love for the creature, Jesus Christ, he himself a man, a creature, as Molitor writes, referring to the prologue of the Gospel of John (II 156n1). The subject ­matter of Molitor’s theosophical considerations regarding the preconditions of creation is not in fact the earthly Jesus in the created world, but rather the Son of the ­Father before all time. Within the Trinity, the Son is, in his difference from the ­Father, “the real cause of the externalization of creation”: “if the Son does not enter into the negativity of his own particularity, no par­tic­u­lar ‘not’ of God’s self, and consequently no realistic externality would be pos­si­ble” (II 159). Within the Trinity, the Son is infinite particularity; only the “par­tic­u­lar ‘not’ of himself,” the negation of his infinity, makes pos­si­ble the finite particularity and thus the “real externality” or the being-­external-­to-­God of the creature. In the self-­negation and the self-­limitation of his infinite particularity to finite particularity, the Son is “the driving action to externalization in the divine” (II 159) and thus forms the transition from eternity into time (II 160). Creation takes place through the Son in his particularity. Through him, every­thing is created, just as the Christian creed states: per quem omnia facta sunt. The Holy Spirit remains the third person in the Trinity. How does one theosophically convey its existence with the creation of the world? To answer this question, Molitor once again relies on intra-­Trinitarian negation and self-­limitation. For “the real emergence of creation is, according to the teaching of the Kabbalah, at the same time the work of the continued divine self-­limitation. This self-­limitation is achieved ­because the Holy Spirit as the absolute ­will of concreteness exalts the ­Father and the Son through the concrete birth of their infinite universality and infinite particularity from eternity” (II 163). Christian belief states that the Holy Spirit originates from the ­Father and Son, but how are we to understand this origination in theosophical and kabbalistic terms? First, according to Molitor, the Holy Spirit negates itself from its infinite concreteness to the prototype of finite concreteness. The emergence of the Holy Spirit begins with the self-­limitation



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into concretion. But, and ­here Molitor makes a bold move, as princi­ple and person, the Holy Spirit, in relationship to ­Father and Son within the Trinity, is the “maternal, generative, birth-­giving princi­ple, in and through which the entire repre­sen­ta­tion of creation emerges. It is through the Holy Spirit that the divine reveals itself to the created, and it is also what unites the divine with the created. All creatures exist and live within the maternal Holy Spirit; it encompasses and carries the entirety of creation, filling it with its life-­giving power, like a m ­ other who nourishes her ­children and watches over them with careful love” (II 170). Molitor describes the Holy Spirit as a feminine princi­ple within the divine and within inner-­divine life. Regarding the creature ad extra, the Holy Spirit resembles a ­mother, who allows her self-­externalized love to flow out over all creation (II 171). The concretion of creation, its birth, conservation, and living power, is feminine and maternal. ­Here, zimzum is feminine, self-­ limiting concretion of the feminine princi­ple in the divine, of the Holy Spirit. Molitor explic­itly depicts the Virgin Mary, who bore the Son of God, as the “pure vessel and creaturely image of the Holy Spirit” (II 170n1). Moreover, “feminine love would not be found in the [earthly] creature if it did not have its foundation in the divine” (II 170n2). With ­these passages focusing on the two-­sexed inner and outer life of the divine, Molitor concludes the entire chapter about the foundational terms of theosophy. This kind of thinking about the two sexes, the masculine-­ feminine self-­development and self-­expansion of the Trinity into itself and outward into creation is considered unusual among the theologians and phi­ los­o­phers of Molitor’s day and age. For Hegel, spirit and world spirit are strictly masculine, not to mention the assumed masculinity of the Trinity. “Veni Creator Spiritus” (Come, Creator Spirit) says a famous hymn from the ninth ­century. The grammatical formulation in this Latin hymn explic­itly codes the Holy Spirit as masculine. For Molitor, however, the Holy Spirit is feminine. This feminization of the Holy Spirit might seem less astounding for the reader who knows that Molitor, with ­these repre­sen­ta­tions of the femininity within the divine, is very close to his Lurianic sources, without revealing this fact to the reader. The sefirot are connoted bipolar in terms of sex. In Sarug’s Limmudei Azilut, masculine strictness (din) and feminine mercy (rachamim) are already stirring in Ein-­Sof prior to zimzum. ­After the pro­cess of zimzum, during the emanation of the sefirot into the four worlds, both masculine and feminine powers are equally at work. And ­later, ­after to the shattering of the vessels, when the parzufim configure themselves, the

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masculine and feminine, Abba and Imma, become separate and active. The loving, sexual ­union of masculine and feminine powers in zivvugim (Molitor translates zivvug as “copulation,” thus demonstrating his knowledge of ­these depictions)94 piece the broken back together and restore balance and cosmic harmony both on earth and in heaven.95 They bring the fallen worlds a step closer to tikkun, the loving salvation. Molitor was familiar with ­these kabbalistic repre­sen­ta­tions from his study of Vital, of Horo­witz’s Shefa Tal, and Naphtali Bacharach’s Emek ha-­Melekh. In his theosophy, all of this translates into the femininity of the Holy Spirit and its maternal love for the earthly world.

* * * For Molitor, zimzum emerges from an original “self-­negation” of the divine in its eternal infinity. The infinite becomes “not-­infinite,” negated to the finite, and thereby the limitless is confined through negation, or, as Molitor says, ­limited. For this reason, the self-­negation of the infinity of the divine is a self-­confinement or “self-­limitation.” Zimzum is this divine self-­limitation through the original self-­negation of its eternal infinity. The divine negates and limits its own, pure positivity and its own infinite ­will before time, thus allowing for the possibility that beyond its own self-­imposed restrictions, something e­ lse, the “creature,” creation, the world, can emerge. Up ­until this point, Molitor’s deduction of zimzum is, in his own words, the self-­negation and self-­limitation of the eternal, infinite divine, a speculative, theosophical-­philosophical reflection on a genuine kabbalistic repre­ sen­ta­tion from the Lurianic Kabbalah—­something that a Jewish phi­los­o­pher might have penned. Molitor’s considerations become specifically Christian at this point, when he, fully aware of the deviation from the Lurianic sources he knew so well, defines the divine as the Christian Trinity of the ­Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and when he represents the emergence of the world ­after zimzum as the work of the Trinity. Diverging from Lurianic Kabbalah, Molitor does not conceive of Adam Kadmon as the prototype of the earthly Adam and of mankind in the upper world, but rather as the prototype of Christ, the uncreated but progenated Son of God, and the second person in the Trinity. Molitor structures the infinite ­will of the divine, which becomes finiteness and creation through self-­negation and zimzum of the finite ­will, as the Trinity. The ­will of the ­Father is the universal ­will for creation; the ­will of the Son is the ­will for



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particularity and thereby detachment of the earthly, that is, the “creature,” from the divine; and the ­will of the Holy Spirit is the ­will for concretion. The universal ­will of the ­Father opens the door to creation; the Son, or Adam Kadmon, fulfills the separation and detachment of creation from the divine—­ through him every­thing is made, just as the Christian creed affirms. And the Holy Spirit, which Molitor boldly interprets as the feminine ele­ment and the maternal strength set in opposition to the F ­ ather and Son within the Trinity, concretizes, accompanies, and preserves creation with maternal love. Not unlike the way zimzum activates and actualizes in the Lurianic Kabbalah the feminine powers and ele­ments in Ein-­Sof and then in the ten sefirot and the parzufim, the zimzum of the Christian Kabbalah and Molitor’s theosophy thus awaken the feminine ele­ment within the Trinity, paving the way for the eternal feminine in the divine to act as an outpouring of maternal love through the Holy Spirit. It is the feminine divine love that holds the world in its innermost together and preserves it. It could be a worthwhile endeavor to examine the work of the Frankfurt bachelor Molitor once more, through the lens of feminist theology. In the second half of the nineteenth ­century, Molitor’s work, his deduction of zimzum, as well as his concept of the femininity of the Holy Spirit, suffered from an almost complete lack of interest from readers. Rudolf Rocholl wrote his Beiträge deutscher Theosophie (Berlin, 1856) “with special re­ spect” for Molitor’s Philosophie der Geschichte and recognized his knowledge of the Kabbalah and his accomplishments in theosophy. ­After that, ­there ­were sixty years of silence, when nary a scholar cited or discussed Molitor anywhere. This began to change in 1916, when the young mathe­matics student Gerhard Scholem discovered several volumes of Philosophie der Geschichte in a used bookstore in Berlin and purchased them for a ­couple of Reichsmarks. Thanks to Scholem’s intervention, the Catholic kabbalist Molitor would be memorialized and honored with an entry dedicated to him in the Encyclopaedia Judaica.

Chapter 7

The Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums

The Haskalah, also known as the Jewish Enlightenment, of the eigh­teenth ­century largely ignored con­temporary Chassidism, primarily ­because ­there ­were no Chassidic Jews living in Prus­sia, southern Germany, or Alsace at the time. ­There ­were also no Chassidim to be found in Amsterdam, London, or northern Italy. Chassidism developed rapidly beyond the territory of Ukraine, expanding into Poland and Galicia, and Chassidic groups ­were and remained relatively mobile, at least in eastern Eu­rope, even ­after the partitions of Poland and the Congress of Vienna. Unlike their counter­parts who would join the waves of migration in the late nineteenth ­century, few Chassidim in the eigh­teenth ­century dared to make the ­great leap out of the eastern Eu­ro­pean shtetl into western Eu­rope, leaving their closed communities and strictly observant way of life ­behind. Instead, they tended to remain in their religiously and socially isolated culture, which in turn remained virtually unknown to the Jews of central and western Eu­rope for a considerable amount of time. Even the maskilim knew very ­little about the Chassidim. For the enlightened Jews in the West, Chassidism was a predominantly unfamiliar, exotic eastern Eu­ro­pean phenomenon. But by the beginning of the nineteenth ­century, when the epicenter of the Haskalah began shifting increasingly eastward following its original success among German Jews, in conjunction with the emancipation of the Jews in Prus­sia in 1812 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, conflicts and polemics ­were already fomenting between the maskilim and the Chassidim in the Rus­ sian Empire and the Kingdom of Poland—­conflicts that would last ­until ­after 1860.1 In the wake of the far-­reaching and compulsory introduction of



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the maskilic German Jewish schools (by government authorities) and the resulting school conflicts that lasted from 1782 to 1806, the Haskalah encountered hostility across the board from all traditionalist Jewish groups at the same time. 2 But in the Habsburg monarchy, as well as in the Rus­sian Empire, Chassidism, which was very popu­lar among the ordinary Jewish population, became for the maskilim the epitome of the uneducated, unsophisticated, backward-­living Jew. This had a noticeable influence on ­those maskilim who dedicated themselves to Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism, or what is ­today generally referred to as the academic discipline of Jewish studies) and wrote about Chassidism. The Haskalah’s relationship to the Kabbalah, on the other hand, was ambivalent. Depending on the scholar in question, it fluctuated between open rejection, disregard, tacit acknowl­edgment, and ­silent neutralization.3 Nonetheless, open sympathies for the Kabbalah are not entirely foreign among the Haskalah thinkers. In the Berlin Haskalah of the late eigh­teenth ­century, ­there ­were only two notable personalities who, ­because of their eastern Eu­ro­pean origins, ­were well acquainted with both Chassidism and the Kabbalah: Isaac Satanow and Salomon Maimon.

Isaac Satanow: Vital in Print Isaac Satanow (1732–1804) was the most impor­tant Jewish book printer in eighteenth-­century Berlin.4 Moreover, he was one of the most stylistically versatile and accomplished Hebrew writers of his generation. He mastered both rabbinical melitzah and biblical Hebrew, writing books in almost ­every genre of rabbinical lit­er­a­ture, including exegesis, Kabbalah, wisdom lit­er­a­ ture, Musar lit­er­a­ture (ethical writings), and even poetry.5 He printed Hebrew books from both rabbinical lit­er­a­ture and the Haskalah. As the root of his name suggests, he originally came from Satanow in Poland (Sataniv in modern-­day Ukraine), one of the leading Jewish communities in Podolia, an area with a very large Jewish population located near the border with Galicia. Isaac Satanow likely witnessed the beginning of the Chassidic movement in his homeland, which would become prime territory for Chassidism, before he traveled to Berlin in 1772 ­after the first partition of Poland, ­because the newly defined borders had severed key routes of the eastern Eu­ro­pean book trade. ­After several years of employment as a tutor and an in­de­pen­dent Hebrew printer, he was appointed by Daniel Itzig and David Friedländer to

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spearhead from 1782 to 1789 the newly founded Orientalische Buchdruckerey (Oriental Printing House), the first and most impor­tant printing ­house of the young Haskalah movement in Prus­sia.6 Satanow, though himself observant and a virtuoso of rabbinical lit­er­a­ture, was thus placed in charge of the Hebrew printing press in Berlin where the Haskalah printed its first and most impor­tant journal, Hame’assef (The Collector), as well as the first works of the new, enlightened Hebrew lit­er­a­ture and pedagogy designed as promotion for the enlightenment of all Jews, including ­those who did not speak German. The books that the Orientalische Buchdruckerey printed and made available ­were intended to advance the Enlightenment among Hebrew-­speaking Jews, especially in eastern Eu­rope, and to conquer the intra-­Jewish public for the Haskalah. Additionally, they circumvented the mono­poly controlled by traditional, devoutly orthodox Jewish book printers and w ­ ere able to print Hebrew works in their own Haskalah printing h ­ ouse without a haskamah (approval from rabbinical authorities) to distribute them on the massive Hebrew book market, especially in eastern Eu­rope. With his previous professional experience and excellent knowledge of the eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish book market, Isaac Satanow was precisely the right man for the job. Satanow, for all his devotion to the Haskalah, was also a businessman. Business acumen, rather than a sense of piety, may well have motivated him to print the works of Lurianic Kabbalah, against the original prohibitions and reservations of Luria and his students. In 1782, Satanow printed Chayyim Vital’s comprehensive work Ez Chayyim in the shtetl Korets, where many Chassidim lived. Vital’s work had previously circulated only as mass-­produced handwritten copies. But now, for the first time in its history, Ez Chayyim was available as a printed book,7 which fi­nally compiled Vital’s many manuscripts and notes, a task that Meir Poppers had wanted to accomplish in the early seventeenth ­century. The publication of Ez Chayyim breached a taboo. In one sudden moment, Luria’s esoteric teachings became exoteric. Printed as a book, Luria’s Kabbalah, mediated by Vital, was at once made public, available for purchase, and thus detached from the esoteric tradition of oral transmission that took place within the small circle of the initiated, pious, and worthy. Perhaps surprisingly, the Chassidim did not sanction this breach of taboo that the Berlin maskil Satanow committed in 1782; rather, they seemed to welcome it. They purchased copies of Ez Chayyim with such fervor that Satanow printed a second edition in 1784, and another one immediately ­after that in



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Figure 23. Title page of Sefer Ez Chayyim by Chayyim Vital, edited by Isaac Satanow, 2nd ed. (Korets, 1784).

1785. The edition was already typeset, the printing plates remained unchanged, the haskamot, which Satanow was able to attain, ­were already typeset. Satanow only had to reset the type for the publication year, which was printed in Hebrew letters on the title page, following the Jewish calendar. From that moment on, the esotericism of the Lurianic Kabbalah was indeed a ­thing of the past. And already in ­these early years of Chassidism (the movement was only thirty years old at that point), knowledge of the Lurianic Kabbalah was a m ­ atter of course. Zimzum, broadly presented in Vital’s work as a realistic event that took place prior to the creation of the world, had thus become exoteric. Many of the Chassidic talks and homilies that survive ­today demonstrate that the zaddikim could assume that their followers ­were already familiar with the concept of zimzum, and therefore it required no further explanation. Zimzum was folklore among the Chassidim. In Haskalah-­era Berlin, on the other hand, aside from Isaac Satanow, only Salomon Maimon, the other eastern

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Eu­ro­pean among the maskilim, had familiarity with zimzum and the Lurianic Kabbalah.8

Salomon Maimon: “­Running Wild with Reason” Salomon Maimon (1753–1800), as the reader learns in the ­fourteenth chapter of the first volume of his autobiography Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, first published in 1792, studied the Kabbalah intensively as a young man and read some of its major works, including the Zohar, Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim, and Vital’s Ez Chayyim.9 He was therefore already familiar with the Kabbalah when he traveled from Lithuania to the Chassidic court of Dov Ber of Mezritch in 1770, where he became acquainted with the Chassidic way of life with his own eyes and ears. Not unlike his reaction to the Chassidism of the Maggid of Mezritch, Maimon also directed something of a chilly, distanced attitude ­toward the Kabbalah. His philosophical lodestars ­were Maimonides, who inspired the self-­stylization of his name, and Kant. In his Lebensgeschichte, he proclaims his devotion to rationalism and enlightenment.10 Unlike many other enlightened Jews, however, Maimon does not immediately dismiss the Kabbalah as irrationalism or obscurantism, but instead characterizes it as “the art of ­running wild with reason.”11 Maimon acknowledges the theoretical Kabbalah, which he distinguishes from the practical Kabbalah, as “an art of building systematic knowledge on a foundation of idiosyncratic fantasies.”12 The practical Kabbalah, with all its multiday fasting exercises, prayers, incantations, and rituals, was unable to manifest any effects at all in the empirical world and must therefore be considered scientific nonsense. To substantiate this opinion, Maimon relates comical anecdotes based on his own experiences with a marked sense of humor. The theoretical Kabbalah, on the other hand, with its speculative theosophical systems, represents for the Kantian Maimon an implementation of reason, but unfortunately an implementation based on unscientific presuppositions. Theoretical Kabbalah employs reason in a systematic manner; alas, it degenerates and runs wild without proper results. The two “main Kabbalistic systems: Rabbi Moses Cordovero’s and Rabbi Isaac Luria’s,”13 are rationally constructed systems, but lack scientifically and philosophically tenable foundations. Luria’s system, according to Maimon, is presented in his student Chayyim Vital’s major work Ez Chayyim (der Baum des Lebens).



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Figure 24. Salomon Maimon (1753– 1800). Engraving by W. Arndt, 1800.

As his account suggests, Maimon was also acquainted with zimzum on account of Vital’s work, which he describes as follows: “Before the world was created, they say, the Divine Being occupied the ­whole of infinite space to the exclusion of all ­else. But then God wanted to create a world to reveal ­those of His properties that ­were intended for beings other than Himself. To this end, He withdrew into the midpoint of His perfection, whereupon He sent into the empty space He had thus created ten concentric circles of light. From ­these emerged vari­ous figures (Parzoffim) [sic] and gradations, all the way to the sensory world of the pre­sent moment.”14 Though he does not explic­itly mention zimzum by name ­here, Maimon’s summary of the pro­ cess of the “withdrawal of the Divine Being” resembles Vital’s depiction. However, Maimon immediately adds that he has strong doubts that this description can be true, if understood literally. He questions, for good reasons, the proto-­physical character of Vital’s account and doubts the factuality of zimzum: “I ­couldn’t imagine how ­these words could be true if understood literally, as most Kabbalists understand them. Nor could I imagine that ­there was a time before the world was created, for I knew from my More Newochim that time is purely a modification of the world, and, consequently, inconceivable without it. I could not picture how God could occupy a space, even an infinite one, nor how He, an infinitely perfect Being, could restrict His own perfection in a circular way to His midpoint.”15

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In his 1792 Autobiography, Maimon looks back retrospectively at the Kabbalah reading of his youth and the doubts he had at that time. He reiterates that he had already concluded that Kabbalah was not, as the kabbalists claim, a divine science, but a purely ­human science with highly questionable premises. And like Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, whose 1785 booklet Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (see the previous chapter) Maimon had obviously read, Maimon summarizes: The Kabbalah, including the idea of a constriction or limitation of God through zimzum, is nothing other than an “extension of Spinozism”: “The Kabbalah is, in fact, nothing other than an extension of Spinozism, which explains not only the genesis of the world through the restriction of Divine Being but also traces the genesis of ­every kind of being and the relation of each to the ­others back to a par­tic­u­lar property of God. As the ultimate subject and the ultimate cause of all beings, God is the Ensoph: the infinite, about which, taken as such, nothing can be predicated.”16 Unlike Jacobi, however, and Wachter before Jacobi, Maimon as a phi­los­o­pher does not consider the equation and close relationship of Kabbalah, Spinozism, and pantheism to be objectionable or dangerous. Rather, he agrees philosophically with Spinoza and the Kabbalah on this point: The world could not have come into being, had ­there been no creatio ex nihilo. Indeed, an emergence of the world from God himself as its first cause must be thought through philosophically. ­Here, the Kabbalah and Spinoza are philosophically correct in contrast to the Jewish-­Christian tradition of creation out of nothing: Thus, the creation of the world can be conceived neither as bringing forth something out of nothing, nor as the formation of something in­de­pen­dent of God, but only as a bringing forth out of God Himself. And ­because beings are of dif­fer­ent degrees of perfection, we can only suppose to explain their genesis as restrictions of dif­ fer­ent degrees of God’s Divine Being. ­Because this restriction must be conceived of as extending from the Infinite Being to materiality, we must imagine the beginning of the restriction figuratively: as the m ­ iddle point (the lowest point) of infinity.17 In ­these observations, Maimon brings Spinozism and Kabbalah together with zimzum in an inventive way, presenting Spinoza’s explanation of modifications of the one infinite substance as gradations of God’s self-­limitation. Maimon’s thoughts are uncannily similar to the gradually incremental zim-



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zumim postulated by Shneur Zalman of Lyady, who also describes the successive emergence and bringing forth of dif­fer­ent levels of the organic and the material through dif­fer­ent stages of self-­limitation of Ein-­Sof. But Zalman’s book Tanya was first published in 1796, four years ­a fter Salomon Maimon’s Autobiography appeared and twenty years a­ fter Maimon had left the Chassidic world in 1776 for the world of Enlightenment Berlin. Maimon and the Alter Rebbe never had cause to take note of one another. Incidentally, Salomon Maimon was not the first maskil who, like Jacobi, considered Spinoza to be a disciple of the Lurianic Kabbalah and assumed zimzum was an idea that originated in Spinoza’s works. Isaac Euchel (1756– 1804), the first editor and publisher of the Hebrew journal Hame’assef (The Collector) and the most eloquent reformer of Hebrew in the Haskalah,18 had also read Jacobi’s 1785 Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza. In his extensive Hebrew biography of Moses Mendelssohn, printed in 1788, which was the first scholarly biography to appear in the Hebrew language,19 and which appeared three years before The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, Euchel clarifies for his Jewish readers the dispute between Jacobi and Mendelssohn over Lessing’s supposed Spinozism and therefore his assumed pantheism. In a footnote on page  99, he explains to his readers that Jacobi uses the term ha-­Spinozisten (the Spinozists) when referring to followers of Spinoza who ­were born in Amsterdam and studied the “wisdom of the Kabbalah” (chochmat ha-­Kabbala) t­ here, together with a philosophy that combined the teachings of the kabbalists and the phi­los­o­phers, bringing together in par­tic­u­lar the teachings of the actuality of the divine and “zimzum.”20 However, with the exception of this single footnote that refers to zimzum in Hebrew, we find no other reference to the Lurianic Kabbalah in Euchel’s entire work or in his attitude ­toward the Kabbalah. We therefore do not know the exact origin of Euchel’s knowledge of the term zimzum. Perhaps Euchel learned it by reading Jacobi, perhaps through hearsay, or perhaps ­because he worked closely with Isaac Satanow for years at the Orientalische Buchdruckerey.

Peter Beer: Chassidism as a History of Sects The Prague maskil Peter Beer (1758–1838), who was about the same age as Maimon, shared Maimon’s critical, sometimes downright disparaging, attitude ­toward the Kabbalah. He quotes Maimon’s Autobiography, though he varies his fellow maskil’s original wording somewhat, stating: “The Kabbalah

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is a science that races with reason.”21 But unlike Maimon, he gives a comprehensive, detailed, and informative account of both Kabbalah and Chassidism, including their major ideas, works, and authors, although he tends to make tendentious judgments about them from a maskilic standpoint.22 This account of the Kabbalah and Chassidism is contained in Beer’s two-­ volume work published in Brünn (Brno) in 1822–1823, which bears the interminable title, Geschichte, Lehren und Meinungen aller bestandenen und noch bestehenden religiösen Sekten der Juden und der Geheimlehre der Kabbalah (History, Teachings and Opinions of All Religious Sects of the Jews That Have Existed and Still Exist and the Secret Doctrine of Kabbalah). Beer’s extensive publication is the first comprehensive historical and critical scholarly account of postbiblical Jewish religious history from the pen of a Jewish writer. The entire second volume of the work describes the Kabbalah, the Chassidim, the “Beshtians,” and the Shabbateans. This earnest and extensive, nearly two-­hundred-­page historical and critical account of the Kabbalah and the almost sixty-­page account of Chassidism, which is primarily based on the work Shivchei ha-­Besht and largely ignores the other Chassidic schools, are also firsts in the history of Jewish book publishing, despite their tendentious nature. The methodological impetus ­behind his proj­ect is evident in the work’s title. Beer portrays the religious history of rabbinic Judaism in a succession of vari­ous religious moments, groupings, and directions, which include, from ancient times up to the pre­sent, the Essenes, Pharisees, Samaritans, Hellenists, Sadducees, Karaites, kabbalists, Talmudists, Chassidim, Shabbateans, and the Frankists. In this heterogeneous history of the Jewish religion, ­there is no guiding rabbinical orthodoxy, no normative Judaism that is valid once and for all. For Beer, the Pharisees, Talmudists, and “rabbis” are also explic­ itly only “sects.” In Beer’s history of religion, ­there are only vari­ous heterogeneous “sects,” that is, religious groupings within Judaism in the past and pre­sent, which make up Jewish religious history in dif­fer­ent eras and centuries, partly in dispute with each other, partly existing parallel to one another, partly in competition with one another. From the “dregs” of this history of Jewish sects, whose views and practices he discusses broadly in the volumes of this work, the maskil Beer endeavors to rescue a “pure Mosaism” and an “original Mosaic religion,” which he insists can be found in the Hebrew Bible as the lasting, religiously essential core of Jewishness for Jews of the pre­sent.23 This sectarian history of Judaism, in which even the Talmudists are only a “sect” and do not embody orthodoxy, thus has, in addition to serv-



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ing at the altar of scientific knowledge, the ideological purpose of identifying the unchanging core of Judaism, freed from the centuries-­old ballast of heterogeneous religious developments and aberrations, for the benefit of his educated Jewish contemporaries who nonetheless found themselves religiously perplexed in the wake of the Enlightenment. Beer methodically assumes the impartial and distanced standpoint of the Enlightenment scholar and historian, who eschews a taxonomy that would seek to put a label on rabbinical orthodoxy, while si­mul­ta­neously categorizing the Karaites or Samaritans as “sects,” would represent a betrayal of the normative neutrality of science and the par­ameters of scholarly research and writing. Therefore, in his history of Jewish religion, ­there are only sects with their respective views, teachings, and rituals, which Beer reviews from the point of view of the rationalistic maskil and historian. ­There is, therefore, no normative Judaism that remains perpetually valid and true in Beer’s depiction, but he also fails to explain what “pure Mosaism” is. The two volumes of Beer’s work appeared in 1822 and 1823, exactly the same years in which the modern Wissenschaft des Judentums took wing in Berlin with the publication of the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Journal for the Science of Judaism), which was dedicated to the study of all aspects of Jewish history, religion, lit­er­a­ture, culture, and philosophy, including the everyday life of Jews.24 This also took place without religiously normative guidelines and from a critical and methodologically impartial standpoint. In Berlin, too, David Friedländer and Lazarus Bendavid, two veterans of the Prus­sian Haskalah, ­were involved in the new proj­ect of a modern science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Like Peter Beer, and despite their obligation ­toward normative impartiality, they made no secret of how ­little regard they had for the Kabbalah. And like Beer, they argued for religious reform of con­temporary Judaism, in par­tic­u­lar Jewish education. Friedländer and Bendavid dedicated themselves to the Jüdische Freyschule (Jewish ­Free School) in Berlin, while Beer had worked at the German Jewish secondary school in Prague since 1811.25 Beer’s two volumes, however, surpass the contributions of the two Berlin maskilim to the burgeoning Wissenschaft des Judentums many times over, quantitatively, as well as qualitatively. The second volume on Kabbalah, Chassidism, and Shabbateanism, which comprises nearly 450 pages, was to remain for de­cades the most comprehensive scholarly work written by a Jewish intellectual on the Kabbalah and Chassidism: it was well read, erudite, rich in sources and details, but also biased and tendentiously written from a

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rationalist point of view.26 Thus, Beer works with all written sources available to him at the time, such as Salomon Maimon’s Autobiography, without ever having personally visited or seen the Chassidim in Ukraine. Nevertheless, he is quick to judge, and in the passages about Chassidim in his sectarian history, he refers to the leading zaddikim as “chieftains,” a term that clearly expresses exoticizing and derogatory overtones.27 He then characterizes them as demagogic populist leaders of the raw, uneducated, and superstitious Jewish masses in Rus­sia and Galicia, who remain exploited by them. Blind obedience and faithful allegiance among the Chassidim ­toward the zaddikim, whom Beer portrays as lazy, ignorant, and only too happy to deceive their loyal and inept followers with all manner of legerdemain. In Beer’s view, the zaddikim thus embody a betrayal of enlightenment and reason. The skeptical criticism of the enlightened maskil regarding the role played by the zaddikim and their alleged miracles, as well as the blind obedience of their followers, was to remain, although less polemically than in Peter Beer’s work, a fixed topos in the Wissenschaft des Judentums. This perception has been granted a long life, with a discernible impact even ­today; one need only look at Israeli politics and daily press to see that this is the case. This view would not begin to shift ­until the appearance of Dubnow’s two-­volume Geschichte des Chassidismus in 1931. Beer’s depiction of the Kabbalah is characterized by a strategy whereby he synthesizes and homogenizes the divergent traditions embodied by the Sefer Yezirah, the Zohar, and the Lurianic Kabbalah into an overall composite picture of the “secret doctrine” of the Kabbalah, rather than distinguishing among and identifying ­these traditions and schools analytically and presenting them as discrete phenomena with their own histories. ­After all, he quotes Jacob Emden’s criticism articulated in his work Mitpachat Sefarim (Altona, 1768), in which Emden, the German Jewish Talmudist and champion of Orthodox Judaism, challenges the belief that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai wrote the Zohar in the second ­century. The Zohar’s purported age and authorship have been key to its reception in Jewish history and the authority with which it has been imbued. But overall, in an ironic twist, Beer imitates the kabbalistic tradition in that he assem­bles systematizing summaries like ­those found in the works of Gikatilla, Cordovero, and Chayyim Vital. Beyond that, Beer also explic­itly refers to Christian accounts of the Kabbalah, including ­those written by Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, Knorr von Rosenroth, and Wachter.28 Fi­nally, he even cites Herder’s disparaging judgment of the Kabbalah with what can only be described as overwhelming ap-



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Figure 25. The critical zimzum discussion, banished to a footnote. Peter Beer, Geschichte, Lehren und Meinungen aller bestandenen und noch bestandenen und bestehenden religiösen Sekten der Juden und der Geheimlehre der Kabbalah, vol. 2 (Brünn, 1823), 59.

proval.29 Thus, even the first Jewish account of the Kabbalah to appear in Wissenschaft des Judentums was influenced by the works of Christian kabbalists and Hebraists.30 Peter Beer’s somewhat casual reference to zimzum pre­sents an irresolute, synthesizing character. He clearly refers neither to Vital’s realistic description of the emergence of a vacuum, which Knorr von Rosenroth and Wachter both mention, nor to Sarug’s symbolic description of intra-­divine movement in Limmudei Azilut, even though we know that he had both Vital’s and Sarug’s original texts at hand. Instead, his synthesizing account of

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zimzum, which also includes a reference to the Christian kabbalistic interpretation of Adam Kadmon as the “Log­os,” the “Word” for Christ in the prologue to the Gospel of John, reads as follows: The doctrine of emanation consists in the following: Before creation began, the kabbalists say, God was the primordial one, the original source of all light, spirit, and life [. . .], closed within himself, a Deus abstractus as it w ­ ere, and in him was every­thing. Now when this infinite being de­cided to let worlds come into existence, not to reveal his essence, which remains unknown to all creatures, even to the most holy ones (Job 4:18), but solely to reveal his attributes, which are sublime above all ­things, so it happened by a concentration of his own essence that took place within himself, whereby space for creation was created.31 [. . .] God’s withdrawal into himself,32 they say, left in its wake certain traces on its sides, like circular waves on the surface of a body of ­water when you throw a stone into it. Just as ­these waves gradually dis­appear the farther that they move away from the point where the stone hit the ­water, this is how we can imagine ­those traces of the withdrawal of the primordial being, which remain closer to the nature of their original source, the less they move away from it in space, and conversely, the farther they move away from it, the farther they are from the original source. From the doctrine of emanation emerges the second doctrine, namely, the doctrine of the sefirot.33 [. . .] Regarding ­these sefirot, the kabbalists believe that the traces of God’s zimzum, or the withdrawal or concentration of his essence, add up to ten, which reveal themselves in the ten sefirot [eser sefirot], ­after he gave influence over all of creation to his created word Memrah or Log­os, or to his firstborn son Adam Kadmon.34 So much for the lines dedicated to zimzum, to which Beer other­wise does not attach any ­great significance. In contrast, however, he devotes many pages to the sefirot and their relationship to the Ein-­Sof in the kabbalistic traditions. But this, too, he accomplishes with ­little enthusiasm or precision. Beer considers all ­these ideas from the Kabbalah to be contrary to reason and does not conceal this opinion from his readers: “For in Kabbalah, reason has neither a seat nor a voice.”35 ­Here, he outlines a negative assessment of the Kabbalah



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that was to become a dominant narrative in Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth ­century. This assessment would not fundamentally change ­until Scholem’s rehabilitation of the Kabbalah in the twentieth ­century.

Adolphe Franck and Adolf Jellinek: Return to the Zohar Adolphe Franck was one of the most extraordinary scholarly figures in French Jewry in the nineteenth ­century.36 While he was a pioneer of Wissenschaft des Judentums in France, he pursued an academic ­career in philosophy and became a professor. He first ­rose to the rank of associate professor of ancient philosophy and then advanced to professor of natu­ral law and international law at the Collège de France, the Parnassus of the French academic world. It prob­ably did not hurt his ­career po­liti­cally that Franck wrote popu­lar philosophical lectures and books against communism, atheism, and pantheism in the French Second and Third Republics. In addition, he was the ideal personality to play the role of public representative of French Jewry. Among other achievements, Franck was vice president of the Consistoire Israélite and president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Born in 1809, in Liocourt, located in the department of Moselle, he both studied Talmud and was well versed in rabbinical lit­er­a­ture in his youth, in preparation to become a rabbi. But he changed tracks and de­cided to study philosophy and medicine at university. He subsequently found a position as a philosophy lecturer at the Sorbonne in Paris starting in 1840. ­After a sketch on the history of logic, he published in Paris in 1843 his first and at the same time most impor­tant work in the discipline of Wissenschaft des Judentums, entitled La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux. The young scholar Adolf Jellinek from Leipzig immediately translated this book into German in 1844, publishing it u ­ nder the title Die Kabbala oder die Religionsphilosophie der Hebräer (The Kabbalah or the Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews).37 The title of this book may owe something to Franck’s expertise as a phi­ los­o­pher and historian of philosophy, but it is also certainly indebted to Franck’s pre­de­ces­sors in the scholarly study and survey of the Kabbalah. ­These pre­de­ces­sors ­were not Jewish, but rather Christian kabbalists in the tradition of Pico della Mirandola and Reuchlin, whom Franck lists in his book as if in an introductory research report.38 Franck’s contribution to the Wissenschaft des Judentums follows the example of t­ hese Christian kabbalists

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and historians of philosophy. Like the Christian kabbalists before him, and Gershom Scholem in the twentieth ­century, Franck also shares a ­great appreciation for the Kabbalah. This appreciation distinguishes Adolphe Franck very clearly from most other Jewish protagonists of Wissenschaft des Judentums of his ­century. With his translator Adolf Jellinek, Franck argues against the majority opinion and suspicions of other scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums, insisting that the Kabbalah is neither a shameworthy pudendum in Judaism nor some shadowy obscurantism, but rather a subject wholly worthwhile of scholarly attention. In this re­spect, too, La Kabbale is a courageous, pioneering work. In fact, the title of this work does not reflect Franck’s view of Kabbalah at all. In this book, he explic­itly states that Kabbalah is not the religious philosophy of the Hebrews; it is Jewish “mysticism.” The point bears repeating: Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. This is Franck’s thesis. Before him, no one working in Wissenschaft des Judentums had held this opinion or advanced this thesis. This view of Kabbalah as Jewish mysticism became common currency in Wissenschaft des Judentums only as the result of Franck’s influence and insight. This remains the case even ­today. Jewish mysticism, Franck continues, like mysticism in Chris­tian­ity and Islam, stands between the “living tradition” of “oral revelation,” that is, between orthodox literalism and Oral Torah, on the one hand, and Judaism’s rationalistic philosophy of religion, on the other, in which its own reasoning complements and dominates the understanding of sacred scripture. Kabbalistic mysticism, between faith in revelation and philosophy of religion, is characterized by a “symbolic,” “figurative” understanding and interpretation of the holy texts.39 The “mystic” adheres neither to the literal faith in revelation of the common ­people, nor to the rational faith of philosophy of religion, for he understands “most dogmas, precepts and religious narratives merely symbolically.” 40 Unlike Peter Beer, who was critical of Kabbalah and nurtured a preconceived worldview, Franck is not interested in Shabbateanism, Frankism, or even con­temporary Chassidism, nor does he take stock of the Kabbalah itself. Rather, he poses the religious and historical question that asks about the origin and development of the Kabbalah. Franck, like his con­temporary Molitor, defends against all criticism the authenticity and the age of the Sefer Yezirah and the Zohar, whose authorship the kabbalists, but only few scholars, attribute to Shimon bar Yochai. Franck devotes the largest portion of his book to ­these two works, especially to the analy­sis and pre­sen­ta­tion of the Zohar. He concludes that the origins of the Kabbalah lie neither with Plato nor with



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the Alexandrian schools of Judaism, nor Philo or Chris­tian­ity. He argues that many ele­ments of the Kabbalah ­were derived from Persia and the Zend-­Avesta of Zoroastrianism and ­were combined with Jewish mono­the­ism.41 Given this fixation on the Zohar and the question of its age and origin, Franck has no interest at all in Lurianic Kabbalah. He treats Cordovero and Luria as “mere commentators without originality” who enjoyed “superstitious admiration” among their disciples, with Luria far worse than Cordovero: his “reveries” ­were “dreams of a morbid mind, aegri somnia vana.” 42 We see that Franck does not shy away from pathologizing Luria. For all his sympathy for the Zohar, Franck despises the Lurianic Kabbalah. He was familiar with the concept of zimzum from Chayyim Vital’s Ez Chayyim and from the Christian kabbalists, but nowhere in his book does he comment on it, much less shevirat ha-­kelim, tikkun and other concepts derived from the Lurianic Kabbalah. On this point, he also differs from the Christian kabbalists. Franck inaugurated Zohar research in Wissenschaft des Judentums, but he left the research of the Lurianic Kabbalah to his successors. Adolf Jellinek—­despite his criticism of Adolphe Franck, which he clearly expressed in his translation of La Kabbale in 1844—­nonetheless resembled Franck in his paramount interest in the Zohar. But as a Zohar scholar, he surpassed Franck by far and was in fact the most impor­tant Zohar scholar in Wissenschaft des Judentums ­u ntil Scholem and Tishby in the twentieth ­century. Contrary to the conviction of Franck and most Christian kabbalists, Jellinek argued that the Zohar was by no means a time-­honored ancient scripture dating from the second ­century. He establishes this argument in a short work titled Moses ben Schem-­Tob de Leon und sein Verhältniß zum Sohar (Moses ben Shem-­Tob de Leon and His Relationship to the Zohar), published in Leipzig in 1851. In his pathbreaking research, Jellinek proves philologically, using textual comparisons, that the Spanish rabbi Moshe de Leon penned substantial sections of the Zohar in the late thirteenth ­century (as opposed to the prevailing opinion up ­until Jellinek that it was an ancient text, dating all the way back to the second ­century). Jellinek’s argument constitutes the prevailing opinion within Kabbalah research even ­today, ­after Gershom Scholem took up his arguments. But Jellinek, like Adolphe Franck, showed no interest at all in the Lurianic Kabbalah. He neither analyzes nor mentions it in his numerous articles on the history of Kabbalah, which appeared between 1851 and 1853.43 In 1856, when Jellinek subsequently became a well-­k nown and popu­lar synagogue preacher in Vienna, where he worked ­until the end of his life, he almost completely withdrew from scholarly work.

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The Lurianic Kabbalah would, for the time being, remain unexplored in Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Isaac Misses: Zimzum of natura naturans We know practically nothing about the biography of Isaac Misses. Historical evidence attests only to the dates of his birth (1802) and death (1883) and his contact with Heinrich Graetz. Nevertheless, scholars have determined that he is the author of two relatively brief German volumes comprising ninety-­t wo and ninety-­four pages, respectively, which he published as Zafnat Paneach. Darstellung und kritische Beleuchtung der jüdischen Geheimlehre (Zafnat Paneach [Interpreter of the Secrets]: Pre­sen­ta­tion and Critical Illumination of the Secret Jewish Doctrine) in Krakow in 1862 and 1863, where he presumably also lived and wrote for a time.44 It becomes clear in ­these volumes that Misses was learned in both philosophy and Kabbalah; he presumably studied the works of Adolphe Franck and Adolf Jellinek and quotes Jellinek’s studies on the Zohar and Heinrich Graetz’s dissertation Gnosticismus und Judenthum (Gnosticism and Judaism; Krotoszyn, 1846). Misses was a philosophical chameleon. At first glance, he seems to have been a mixture of a Kantian and an orthodox Jew when he declares mono­ the­ism to be a “postulate of practical reason,” 45 arguing that the substance of Judaism lies neither in its philosophical nor its mystical tradition, but rather in halakhah.46 This Jewish iteration of Kantianism, with its preference for practical reason in the determination of what was essential in Judaism, namely, halakhic orthopraxy, does not, however, convince Misses to reject the Kabbalah, or the “secret doctrine,” or mystical tradition outright, as many of his fellow maskilim did. In fact, his Darstellung und kritische Beleuchtung der jüdischen Geheimlehre regards the Kabbalah critically, but sympathetically, and in it, he endeavors to reconstruct and critically pre­sent its essential contents by way of philosophy. In the second volume of his Darstellung, Misses essentially employs the Hegelian dialectic of being and essence. He concludes his argument with the terms natura naturans and natura naturata, clearly borrowed from Spinoza, but without mentioning Kant, Hegel, or Spinoza by name. On the other hand, he specifically mentions Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz. Misses thus obviously took no umbrage in presenting himself to his readers as a philosophically knowledgeable mind.



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Figure 26. An entirely unknown author. Isaac Misses, Zafnat Paneach. Darstellung und kritische Beleuchtung der jüdischen Geheimlehre, vol. 1 (Krakow, 1862).

Misses devotes the first volume, which seems to have been originally intended as a series encompassing more than two issues, to rehabilitating Jonathan Eybeschütz. He defends Eybeschütz against Jacob Emden’s accusation of being a Shabbatean. Misses illustrates that Eybeschütz was not only a famous Talmudist, but also an educated scholar, well versed in both philosophy and Kabbalah. To draw his conclusions, Misses uses Eybeschütz’s letters, which the chief rabbi of Krakow, Simon Schreiber, had in his possession and made available to Misses. Over long stretches of the first volume, Misses reconstructs Eybeschütz’s doctrine of creation, which is based on both Maimonides and Isaac Luria.47 First, Misses illustrates how Eybeschütz negotiates the doctrine of creation in Judaism according to Maimonides, who conceived of God as the “first mover.” Misses then elaborates on Luria and the doctrine of zimzum. Eybeschütz, according to Misses, problematizes the notion that zimzum was a real event. He explains, on the one

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hand, that the unity and everlasting identity of Ein-­Sof, the infinite, is always assured in the doctrine of God, but, on the other hand, the contraction of Ein-­Sof in zimzum changes the infinity of the infinite. The assumption of a barrierless infinite before zimzum and a ­limited infinite through zimzum pre­sents two dif­fer­ent forms of infinity of the Ein-­Sof. This assumption, however, contradicts itself, for how can God be infinite and limitedly infinite at the same time? This then contradicts the assertion of the unity and perpetual uniformity of Ein-­Sof.48 From this thought, Eybeschütz concludes that one must understand zimzum meta­phor­ically. How that first leap from Ein-­Sof to zimzum, from infinity to self-­limitation and finiteness, took place, remains a “mystery” and a “miracle” that exists beyond ­human comprehension.49 Misses summarizes Eybeschütz’s doctrine of creation in four points: (1) As Ein-­Sof, God is the first cause (like Maimonides says); (2) zimzum, and the biblical God acting as creator, are the first effect of the first cause; (3) the sefirot are instruments, not parts of the divine, for creation, and (4) they generate the universe and our earthly world. The leap from first cause to the first action is the product of a miracle. In the account that Misses elaborates, creation can only take place in time and as a result of the first action.50 Misses concludes his first volume with praise for the “deeply sophisticated,” “scientifically grounded kabbalistic system of Chabad, a branch of the Chassidic cooperative in Belarus,” which he intends to illuminate in further issues.51 That did not happen, but Misses perceives Chassidism as the legacy of Lurianic Kabbalah and, very dif­fer­ent from Peter Beer and ­later Heinrich Graetz, recognizes the religious thinking of the Chassidim, at least that of Chabad, as well conceived, scientifically based, and worthy of critical philosophical examination. While the first volume reconstructs Jonathan Eybeschütz’s opinion regarding the doctrine of creation and zimzum, the second and, as far as we know, last volume of Misses’s account pre­sents a philosophical interpretation of Luria’s doctrine of creation, which is tacitly, though unequivocally, guided by Chayyim Vital’s Ez Chayyim. Misses explains at the beginning of the second volume that the older phase of the Kabbalah ended with Cordovero, while Luria represents the newer phase.52 He includes a ten-­page excerpt from Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim in Hebrew as an addendum to the book. Other­wise, Misses devotes himself entirely to the critical, philosophical illumination of the newer kabbalistic cosmogony found in “Lorje” (Luria).” Misses expresses the critical character of this account by indicating to



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his readers that they must conceive of the kabbalistic descriptions of the creation of the world, particularly ­those pertaining to zimzum, in meta­phorical terms. He maintains that kabbalists perceive Ein-­Sof and zimzum by way of a kind of intellectual anthropomorphism and must therefore lean on the rules and terms available to them via their own ­human reason; their description of cosmogony must also be tailored to the ­limited intellectual power of comprehension of their readers and listeners.53 The distinction between Ein-­Sof and Or Ein-­Sof, which Misses knows from Ez Chayyim without ever mentioning Vital’s name (he only refers to Luria), Misses interprets as the philosophical difference between the essence and the appearance of the divine, between the infinite (Ein-­Sof  ) as the true being of the divine and the light of the infinite (Or Ein-­Sof  ) as the appearance of the divine. We can therefore only grasp the appearance of the divine via negativa as nonfinite, which eludes both closer conceptual definition and aesthetic perceptibility. The kabbalists, Misses explains, conceive of the appearance of the infinite as light, which we are also meant to understand meta­ phor­ically, as it is useless ­here to evoke the literal light that we experience on earth or the terrestrial plane. Rather, we must conceive of the infinite light, Or Ein-­Sof, as a term that is meant to suggest the aesthetic perceptibility of the absolute, preconceptual divine infinity.54 Now, the distinction between Ein-­Sof and Or Ein-­Sof, the essence and the appearance of the divine, according to Misses’s account, is not simply asserted in thetic terms, for we must still explain how appearance develops from essence. Misses does this by introducing the concept of a double zimzum (an idea that clearly contradicts Vital). During the initial zimzum ad intra, the essence concentrates itself into its appearance (or manifestation), that is, Ein-­Sof concentrates itself into Or Ein-­Sof. During this stage, prior to all creation, determinability, and perceptibility, an initial, purely intra-­ divine zimzum takes place in the Absolute itself, which Misses refers to as zimzum rishon.55 This first, abstract, and purely intra-­divine zimzum ad intra—­from essence to appearance—is followed by a second zimzum ad extra, as we know it from Vital’s description. The Or Ein-­Sof withdraws itself and in ­doing so forms an empty space (makom panui), which is then filled and illuminated by a ray of infinite light (kav).56 To make creation pos­si­ble, as in the existence of something besides God in general, it must therefore, according to the Kabbalah, be preceded by dif­fer­ent agreements, namely: the very first

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concentration of the essence of God, so that the appearance of God becomes pos­si­ble, i.e., the infinite light Or Ein-­Sof and the self-­ revelation ad intra. The first concentration, according to the kabbalists, would also be the most difficult, i.e., the most unfathomable for us, ­because it would have to take place in the essence of the infinite itself, while all the ­others took place or take place only in the appearance, i.e., in the still infinite light [. . .]. But in this infinite appearance—­revelation ad intra—­again a second concentration must proceed zimzum hasheni to make pos­si­ ble the appearance of the finite—­the revelation ad extra—­the infinite in its appearance would have to withdraw to leave an empty space for the finite, but also send into this empty space a ray of itself to bring forth the existence of the finite that did not previously exist.57 Following this argument, Misses justifies the anthropomorphic description that the kabbalists use in face of the fact that ­human language as a finite system cannot speak of the Absolute, which is in princi­ple the Absolute and the Infinite and therefore beyond all ­human comprehension.58 In the same way, we are to understand any discussion of the ten sefirot, the four realms of azilut, beri’ah, yezirah, and asiyyah, and the five parzufim, as anthropomorphic and therefore meta­phorical. A critical pre­sen­ta­tion and illumination of the “secret doctrine” that Misses promises his readers in the title, must thus thematize and examine the necessarily anthropomorphic language of the kabbalists and then translate it into philosophical terminology. ­Here, at the end of the second volume, Misses resorts to Spinoza’s distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata when he pantheistically interprets the transition from God as Or Ein-­Sof, or infinite appearance, to nature. Misses designates the world of azilut, the emanation of divine light into empty space, as natura naturans, while he determines beri’ah, yezirah, and asiyyah to be worlds that emerge from emanation, structured by natura naturata.59 In the hy­po­thet­i­cal quintessence of the volume, Misses, as Wachter had previously done in 1699 (but in his case in opposition to Spinoza), pre­ sents the Lurianic Kabbalah as a pantheistic conception of God and the world. But in ­doing so, he thereby also shares Jacobi’s and Salomon Maimon’s view of the Lurianic Kabbalah as Spinozism, ergo pantheism. According to Misses, ­t here is no in­de­pen­dent world outside of the singular and infinite God for the pantheism of the Lurianic Kabbalah. The complexity, diversity, and



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mutability of the world emanate from God’s all-­encompassing, generative nature, while their supposed in­de­pen­dence and self-­sufficiency are mere “illusion”: A. ­There is only one necessary substance or one single in­de­pen­dent being (which is the same ­thing) = God. B. This being is, according to its inner nature, absolutely ­simple, infinite in time and space, and the epitome of all perfections and realities, and uses its powers of creation wisely. C. As can be concluded from the above, t­ here is nothing in­de­pen­ dent outside of this being: every­thing that exists, exists only through it and in it.60 In sum, Isaac Misses’s scientific approach is in its methodology strikingly similar to that of Franz Joseph Molitor on the Christian side of Kabbalah research, although Molitor does not interpret the Lurianic Kabbalah as pantheism. Both Molitor and Misses intend for the philosophical illumination and explanation in the manner of a philosophy of Kabbalah to recuperate the religious doctrines and contents of the Kabbalah for the pre­sent. Like Molitor, Misses does not research and study the Kabbalah to historicize it as a variant of mystical Jewish tradition from the past, as many scholars in Wissenschaft des Judentums have endeavored to do. Rather, Misses wants the critical, philosophical account to pre­sent the Kabbalah to his contemporaries as a thoroughly con­temporary and enduringly current form of religious thought concerning the origin of the world. Critical actualization of kabbalistic thinking was, if one may trust his famous confession in An Open Word About the True Intentions of My Kabbalistic Studies of 1937, also the fundamental impulse powering the young Gershom Scholem at the inception of his Kabbalah research.

Mordechai Teitelbaum: The First History of Zimzum Mordechai Teitelbaum wrote the first scholarly history of the Lurianic concept of zimzum. Largely ignored, Teitelbaum’s history of zimzum was entirely unique ­until Scholem’s research arrived on the scene. Scholem, as his personal copy of Teitelbaum’s history in the Hebrew University and National Library in Jerusalem demonstrates, was deeply familiar with this history of

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zimzum and studied it intensively. The fact that the scholarly world of Wissenschaft des Judentums did not come to know and cite this history of zimzum ­until the ­middle of the twentieth ­century is not just the result of the extensive disinterest in or even the prejudices held against the Lurianic Kabbalah, but it likely also has something to do with Teitelbaum as the author and the place where his history was published. Indeed, we know nothing of Teitelbaum except that he was a Lubavitcher Chassid who tucked the first scholarly history of zimzum into the second volume of a Hebrew monograph that he wrote on the Alter Rebbe and Chabad founder, Shneur Zalman of Lyady. The fruits of this ­labor appeared ­under the title HaRav MiLadi UMifleget ChaBaD (The Rav of Lyady, His Life, Works, and System, and the History of the Chabad Sect). The first volume, published in Warsaw in 1910, offers a comprehensive biography of Shneur Zalman of Lyady, containing distinctly hagiographic characteristics. In the second volume of this work, printed in Warsaw in 1913, Teitelbaum describes in the first chapter the prob­ lem of the doctrines of emanation in rabbinical lit­er­a­ture and in Kabbalah before Luria. In the second chapter, he traces the history of zimzum from Luria to Shneur Zalman of Lyady, and then in the third chapter, he pre­ sents of the special doctrine of zimzum of the “Rav of Lyady”—­and all of this in less than sixty pages. Then, in the second volume, he discusses other teachings of the Alter Rebbe. The idea of a self-­development of the divinity (elohut), according to Teitelbaum’s first chapter, emerges alongside the doctrines of emanation since Plato and Philo. Initially, the doctrines of emanation describe the gradual development of the heavenly worlds and spheres from above down to the earthly world with the help of light. The idea of emanation came to Judaism, namely, also to the Kabbalah, from ancient philosophy, which Teitelbaum describes with reference to Graetz, Zunz, but also to Neander and Buhle’s history of philosophy. But in the Kabbalah, ideas about the self-­ development (hishtalshelut) of the divinity even before the pro­cess of emanation and creation emerged. Among the kabbalists in the ­Middle Ages, one also finds the idea of Or Ein-­Sof, the infinite divine light that fills all space up ­until the moment when the self-­development of the divinity begins with zimzum.61 According to Teitelbaum, this notion of Or Ein-­Sof and zimzum, however, does not yet appear in the Zohar, the principal text of medieval Kabbalah, thus aligning himself with the Zohar research of David Joel and Manuel Joel. Teitelbaum further explains that the concept of zimzum does not yet appear in the works of the kabbalists Joseph Karo and Moses Cor-



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Figure 27. This book contains the first history of the doctrine of zimzum. Mordechai Teitelbaum, HaRav MiLadi, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1913), bilingual title page. Gershom Scholem’s copy, Scholem Library Jerusalem.

dovero, Luria’s immediate pre­de­ces­sors in Safed. In fact, it was Isaac Luria who developed the concept (shita) of zimzum, as Teitelbaum approvingly quotes Heinrich Graetz, rejecting the ­theses put forward by Erich Bischoff,62 as well as Jakob Winter and August Wünsche,63 postulating that Cordovero had already developed a doctrine of zimzum prior to Luria.64 Teitelbaum’s second chapter then deals with the development and dissemination of the concept of zimzum from Luria to Shneur Zalman. Luria, Ha’ARI, placed par­tic­u­lar emphasis on the doctrine of zimzum, which his disciple R. Chayyim Vital recorded in his books ­after hearing Luria’s oral teachings. Vital’s rec­ords detailing the order and procedure of zimzum, Teitelbaum explains, dominate the attestations and writings on zimzum in the subsequent reception history. Hence, the reason why Teitelbaum widely quotes and paraphrases Vital’s realistic account of zimzum. But he is quick to mention that doubts regarding the literal conception of t­ hese descriptions of zimzum and the creation of an empty space in God, and the pro­cess of emanation into this space, ­were already beginning to crystallize within the circle of Luria’s disciples. In the Sefer ha-­Derushim, which Teitelbaum quotes

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verbatim, we find that a literal understanding of zimzum is strictly rejected, ­because zimzum pertains to “spiritual facts” (devarim ruchaniim) that we can only comprehend as a parable (mashal). R. Sheftel Horo­witz outlines a similar argument in Shefa Tal. Other students of Luria, including most notably Vital, on the other hand, insisted on the real actuality of their teacher’s doctrine of zimzum. Teitelbaum further outlines the dispute between ­these two schools up ­until the time of R. Joseph Ergas of Livorno, whose works Teitelbaum praises for their clear pre­sen­ta­tion of the controversy. Particularly within the context of his analy­sis of Ergas’s Shomer Emunim, Teitelbaum cites many contributions to this controversy. Ergas was the first kabbalist to describe and discuss arguments and texts from both sides of this long controversy, but, in the end, he rejected the literary understanding of zimzum. To reinforce Ergas’s position, which does not at all resemble the Rav of Lyady’s view, the Chassid Teitelbaum cites ­later lit­er­a­ture, such as Peter Beer’s rejection of the literal sense of zimzum, as well as an essay by Philipp Bloch in the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums of 1905.65 Teitelbaum does not reference the opinions of Sarug or Herrera at all. However, Ergas did not convince most kabbalists, and ­there ­were scholars who continued to insist on the truth and literalness of Vital’s account, most notably Immanuel Chai Ricchi, whose book Yosher Levav Teitelbaum paraphrases at length.66 Jacob Emden, like Ricchi, was also an adherent of the literal understanding, while his opponent Eybeschütz questions the causal connection between zimzum and the first cause. Delmedigo and Menachem Asariah of Fano also rejected a literal understanding of zimzum. In the end, however, this entire controversy only appeared in the Mediterranean, in Italy and Sefarad—­not in Ashkenaz, where it remained unknown. In “Poland,” any discussion of or occupation with the (Lurianic) Kabbalah had been a rare occurrence ­until the appearance of the BeShT. Knowledge of the Kabbalah, including the doctrine of zimzum, had spread to Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine ­under the influence of the BeShT and his disciple Dov Ber of Mezritch, as well as their subsequent followers.67 Teitelbaum illustrates how the BeShT’s doctrine of zimzum is influenced by his “pantheism,”68 for while God does indeed clear a space to establish the worlds, this space is never entirely empty, ­because every­thing, including God and the world, is perpetually filled with God. God himself is the place (makom) of the world and nature (tevah). For his part, Dov Ber of Mezritch offers nothing new on the subject compared to the BeShT, except that his



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teachings are more clearly articulated and more speculative. He thus describes several zimzumim, with which God dampens his brightness, as it would other­wise destroy every­thing finite. Teitelbaum substantiates ­these doctrines in detail with quotations from both texts. Among Dov Ber’s numerous disciples, Teitelbaum explains, ­there are some who completely ignore zimzum, while ­there are only a few who have successfully penetrated the depths of his speculation on zimzum. For example, Teitelbaum explains, the doctrine of R. Levi Isaac of Berdichev is only superficially based on Dov Ber’s ideas, and he fails to pre­sent a conclusive doctrine of the divine and creation. Teitelbaum attributes a more comprehensive understanding of zimzum to R. Nachman of Bratslav, whose Likkutei MoHaRaN he quotes in excerpts. In par­tic­u­lar, he emphasizes the ongoing connection between zimzum and the tension between being and nothingness in Rabbi Nachman’s thought. But none of the other Chassidim of any era, neither Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, nor R. Shlomo of Luck, nor any other disciple of Dov Ber of Mezritch, was able to extract so many speculative aspects from the doctrine of zimzum as R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the hero of Teitelbaum’s treatise. ­After presenting the history of zimzum from Luria to the Chabad rebbes, Teitelbaum’s third chapter delves into an over thirty-­page analy­sis of the Alter Rebbe’s doctrines of zimzum, which need not be recapitulated ­here. Teitelbaum’s ­great accomplishment is that he provides a detailed analy­sis of the history, the shifting tides, and the controversy surrounding the doctrine of zimzum since the time of Luria. He demonstrates, on the one hand, a profound knowledge of Lurianic sources and of Chassidism, while, on the other hand, evinces keen knowledge of the specialist scholarly lit­er­a­ture of Wissenschaft des Judentums, as well as a methodical, well-­trained sense of judgment. This makes his history of zimzum first and unique in the Jewish sources. We do not know ­whether Teitelbaum was unaware of the history of zimzum among Christian kabbalists and Hebraists, or ­whether he had no desire to know them and did not dare mention them. He does not write a single word related to the Christian reception of the Kabbalah, much less address the specific concept of zimzum.

Chapter 8

Zimzum in the Twentieth ­Century

At the beginning of the twentieth ­century, the scholarly world knew almost nothing of the astonishing history of the concept of zimzum, at least not in central Eu­rope. In the nineteenth ­century, scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums published no significant studies on the Lurianic Kabbalah. In his widely read eleven-­volume History of the Jews (1853–1875), Heinrich Graetz depicts Luria as a minor character and allots him a negative reputation. Graetz holds the “Lurianic hoax” and the “invasive plant” of “Isaac Lurja’s [sic] kabbalistic reveries,” which had, not unlike weeds, overgrown ­every aspect of Jewish religious life, responsible for Judaism’s “distortion and atrophy” in the early modern period.1 From Vital and Sarug to Herrera and Aboab, Graetz defames the Lurianic school of thought as a single sequence of “delusion” and “swindle.” He does not delve at all into the massive corpus of texts that the Lurianic Kabbalah produced and limits his discussion to only seven pages in the tenth volume of History of the Jews. Isaac Luria and Chayyim Vital ­were the point of inception of what Graetz depicts in his historiography as the harmful, inveterate, effusive, and anti-­scientific “unconditional autocracy” of the Kabbalah in Palestine, beginning in the last three de­cades of the sixteenth ­century.2 He holds Israel Sarug and Herrera liable for the spread of the “Lurjanic [sic] Kabbalah” in Eu­rope.3 Graetz mentions zimzum only once during his entire eleven-­volume magnum opus, in a single footnote, rendered in Hebrew letters. As a commentary on Luria’s idea that the divinity “contracted itself into itself,” he claims: “The doctrine of the self-­contraction of the divinity, sod ha-­Zimzum, seems to have been established by I. Luria.” 4 Beyond this brief reference, which at least acknowledges Luria’s authorship, Graetz does not describe zimzum in any detail.



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Graetz, the most influential Jewish historian of the nineteenth ­century, regarded Kabbalah in general as an irrational aberration of Jewish history and religion. For this reason, he eschews any detailed discussion of the ­actual content of Lurianic texts, which in his view would be entirely superfluous. Instead, he offers his readers moral and religious value judgments on the topic. He personally attacks the most impor­tant kabbalistic authors and discredits them ­either as obscurants or impostors. Graetz was firmly convinced that the Lurianic Kabbalah had wreaked untold havoc on Jewish history by elevating the “mendacious work of the Zohar to a status equal to that of the Holy Scriptures and the Talmud” and by seducing broad circles of Eu­ro­pean Jewry into false piety and intellectual backwardness—­a grievance that only the Haskalah and the Enlightenment could remedy.5 Graetz’s completely negative historiographical attitude ­toward the Lurianic Kabbalah became decisive for the pedagogical and religious worldview at the conservative Breslau Rabbinical Seminary, founded in 1854, where he was an instructor. But even the Reform Judaism of Abraham Geiger, as well as the Neo-­Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Azriel Hildesheimer, showed no interest in Jewish mysticism, let alone in the Lurianic Kabbalah.6 It found no footing in the world and self-­image of nineteenth-­century German Jewry, where Reform rabbis strove to pre­sent Judaism as an enlightened, ethically minded mono­the­ism,7 while Neo-­Orthodoxy conceived of Judaism entirely in terms of halakhic observance and strove to unite this religious orthodoxy with bourgeois German education.8 ­There was ­little room for the Kabbalah with its theosophical and exegetical speculations in ­t hese two diametrically opposed and competing conceptions of Judaism, and even less room for Kabbalah in the worldview, work ethic, and educational canon of the forward-­looking Jewish bourgeoisie striving for personal and social pro­gress in the German Kaiserreich. In the realm of philosophy, the triumph of Neo-­Kantianism in the late nineteenth ­century nearly drove the speculative idealism of Schelling, Hegel, Molitor, and Baader out of the universities; the Neo-­Kantians even suspected mysticism of irrationalism.9 Representing the viewpoint of many of his Jewish and Christian contemporaries, Hermann Cohen, a student of Graetz in Breslau, the founder of the Marburg School of Neo-­Kantianism and the most influential Jewish phi­los­o­pher of the Wilhelmine Empire, generally excludes the Kabbalah from Judaism as a religion of reason and ignores kabbalistic texts, refusing to include them as au­then­tic mono­the­istic sources of Judaism

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in his primary work on the philosophy of religion, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism), published first in 1919. Kabbalistic and Chassidic manuscripts and prints slumbered forgotten in libraries, or, as the young Gershom Scholem discovered to his surprise when he began to study Kabbalah during World War I, they could be found in second­hand bookstores for rock-­bottom prices.10 It was only in eastern Eu­rope that the texts of the Lurianic Kabbalah ­were more readily available, for in Chassidic circles, they ­were considered relevant and ­were therefore studied, printed, and reprinted. Some of ­these prints, such as that of Chayyim Vital’s Ez Chayyim, edited by Menachem Heilperin (Warsaw, 1890), or Israel Sarug’s Limmudei Azilut, edited by Samuel Kahn (Munkacz, 1897), are still used in research ­today, having been repeatedly reprinted in the Yishuv and then in Israel to satisfy the Chassidic demand for ­these texts. But the mainstream Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany ignored ­these publications, and the obvious interest they satisfied in the Chassidic world, just as Wissenschaft oversaw the research on the Lurianic Kabbalah by Misses and Teitelbaum, which also originated in eastern Eu­rope. The publication of Martin Buber’s Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (The Tales of Rabbi Nachman; 1906) and Die Legende des Baal-­Schem (The Legend of the Baal-­Shem; 1908) sparked renewed interest in eastern Eu­ro­pean Chassidism, a Jewish world that was completely dif­fer­ent from the bourgeois Judaism of central and western Eu­rope. In the Jewish world of eastern Eu­ rope, according to the impression that Buber’s books transmit, au­then­tic, vibrant, approachable, holistic Jewish folk piety, mysticism, and belief in miracles thrived, which the bourgeois, German-­a ssimilated Jewish citizen could only look back on with nostalgia. Beginning with this reawakening of an initially still quite directionless interest in mysticism as an au­then­tic, pre-­ bourgeois, and pre-­rationalistic form of religiosity, which fascinated both Jewish and Christian anti-­bourgeois and anti-­materialistic intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth ­century, the Kabbalah began to regain the focus of an ideological and scholarly reevaluation of Judaism. However, in his numerous and extensive works on Chassidism, Martin Buber himself did not attach much importance to the zimzum. In his collected writings Schriften zum Chassidismus from 1963, out of more than 1250 pages on Chassidism, t­ here are barely seven pages for the zimzum. They name only Chayyim Vital and the Maggid of Mezritch, and from the source texts only Ez Chayyim. But Buber does recognize that the zimzum is a “key concept of Kabbalah.”11



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Franz Rosenzweig: God’s “Entry into Himself ” Given the ignorance at the time of the entire scholarly world regarding the Kabbalah, it is unclear how the young Franz Rosenzweig gained even a superficial knowledge of zimzum and the Lurianic Kabbalah. Rosenzweig (1886–1929) had hardly any knowledge of Jewish traditions on account of his liberal Jewish upbringing. It was only ­a fter a near-­conversion to Chris­tian­ ity in 1913 that he began to deal more intensively with Judaica. It is even more astonishing that a letter he penned to his cousin Rudolf Ehrenberg on 18 November 1917, which appeared in his 1937 Kleinere Schriften (Shorter Writings), came to light as the “primordial cell” of his 1921 book The Star of Redemption. This letter illustrates how Rosenzweig had in 1917 already begun systematically developing the central themes that would form the crux of The Star of Redemption five years l­ater in 1921, namely, God’s being, revelation, creation, and redemption. The letter also shows that Rosen­ zweig had identified a parallel between Schelling’s philosophy of the ages of the world (Weltalter) and the Lurianic Kabbalah. Rosenzweig had become acquainted with Schelling’s philosophy ­after reading a 1913 edition of Schelling’s The Ages of the World released by the Reclam publishing ­house (known for its pocket­book editions of German classics).12 It was not only Rosenzweig’s par­tic­u­lar use of the term and meaning of “primordial world” in the first of three sections of The Star of Redemption, but also his insistence on the existence of the inconceivable real­ity and God’s being prior to all thought, prior to the creation of man and the world, are reminiscent of the cardinal influence of Schelling’s Weltalter philosophy on the entirety of Rosenzweig’s philosophy of religion, and in par­tic­u­lar his principal work. But how Rosenzweig came to be acquainted with the “Lurjanic [sic] Kabbalah,” which he mentions in the “primordial cell” letter, remains unknown. What we do know for certain is that in 1917, Rosenzweig hardly knew enough Hebrew to read any text of the Lurianic Kabbalah in the original. In terms of the specific language that Rosenzweig employs, it is also unclear what other texts might have served Rosenzweig as sources for descriptions of the Lurianic Kabbalah. But we do know that Rosenzweig, like his teacher Hermann Cohen and his ­g reat philosophical adversary Hegel, maintained a markedly negative preconception of the Kabbalah. His personal “Gritli” letters also make no secret of his disinterest in the Kabbalah.13

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Even more astonishing is the fact that Rosenzweig associates and concedes the parallel between Schelling’s Weltalter philosophy and Lurianic Kabbalah in the “primordial cell” letter. He has in mind the concept of zimzum when he articulates the idea of “God’s entry into himself ” (Verinnerung). Through this pro­cess of internalization, God, initially the indeterminate and indifferent “Absolute,” begins to develop in the primordial world, that is, before the creation of our world. Through this first internalization, he develops first into a self and establishes himself as a first beginning. Rosenzweig, like Schelling before him, does not make explicit use of the term zimzum. But Rosenzweig identifies a point that both Schelling and the “Lurjanic Kabbalah” share in formulating the idea of “God’s entry into himself,” that is, a primeval, inward-­moving self-­development of the omnipresent God while still in the premundane stage, when God is entirely solitary with himself and when ­there is nothing ­else other than God’s still unconnected, undirected, undetermined, timeless being. In the “primordial cell” letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg, Rosenzweig explains: Just as ­there “exists” a God prior to all connection, with regard both to the world and to himself, and only this being of God, the entirely unhypothetical, is the germinal point of God’s real­ity, which Schelling calls [. . .] the “dark ground,” ­etc., meaning God’s entry into himself, which precedes not only his self-­externalization, but even his “self ” (which is, as far as I know, how the Lurjanic Kabbalah teaches it; I told you about it once). [. . .] The mere “inside” of God is still unfruitful; only God’s entry into himself [Verinnerung], only God’s descent into his own depth marks the “beginning.”14 In The Star of Redemption, written in 1918/1919 and published in 1921, Rosenzweig does not develop or think through the parallel between Luria and Schelling, which he only hints at h ­ ere in the “primordial cell.” Rosenzweig repeatedly refers to Schelling but refrains from mentioning Luria. The temporal dimensions from Schelling’s Weltalter philosophy, the primordial world or the eternal past, the perpetually renewed pre­sent, and the f­ uture that preexists in the pre­sent, appear in the temporal conceptions and dimensions as well as in the systematic structure of The Star of Redemption.15 The first of the three main sections of The Star is entitled “Die Elemente oder die immerwährende Vorwelt” (The Ele­ments or the Everlasting Primordial World)



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and discusses, among other ­things, the primordial being of God before creation. But ­here, zimzum, rendered as “God’s entry into himself,” in stark contrast to the “primordial cell” letter, ceases to play a role and receives no further mention. Rosenzweig no longer describes metaphysics, metalogic, and metaethics and their beginnings as “God’s entry into himself.” Instead, Rosenzweig develops, along the lines of Hermann Cohen’s integral method, the following: “a something arises from the infinitesimal nothingness of the integral.”16 God’s being is a “not-­nothing,” an affirmative liberation from nothingness, an initial, indeterminate, and preconceptual “something.”17 The knowledge of metalogic commences in the something of knowledge, which is a “not-­not-­k nowing”;18 the knowledge of man in metaethics is grounded in the “not” as negation, which is a primordial h ­ uman act of freedom.19 Thus, in The Star of Redemption, the beginning and origin of all ele­ments and all ­limited and finite beings is no longer an act of self-­limitation or even of God’s internalization (Verinnerung), but rather the negation of nothing, the primordial negation as the beginning of “something.” The Star of Redemption, unlike the “primordial cell,” no longer has anything even remotely to do with the Lurianic Kabbalah or zimzum. Instead, the book’s systematically decisive concepts owe their development to Rosenzweig’s critical engagement with Schelling, Hegel, and Cohen.

Gershom Scholem: The Utmost Zimzum Gershom Scholem is by all accounts the single most influential scholar in Wissenschaft des Judentums and Jewish studies in the twentieth ­century. His rediscovery and exploration of Jewish mysticism in all its primary and secondary trends has been one of the most astonishing scholarly achievements of the twentieth ­century, certainly in the field of Jewish studies and in the humanities.20 Scholem viewed the idea of zimzum as a significant “core concept” of all of Judaism, 21 not just a central doctrine of the Kabbalah. Unlike any other scholar of the twentieth ­century, he researched zimzum and its reception history and presented it to his readers. Starting around the ­middle of the 1930s, he worked intensively through the Lurianic Kabbalah and all its sources and in turn presented it in his works. ­These studies reaped their most substantial crop in the dense depiction of the Lurianic Kabbalah and zimzum that appears in his major work Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published in 1941. In this study, Scholem carefully

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analyzes zimzum, albeit briefly, as Luria’s vari­ous disciples have presented it.22 Scholem’s section on zimzum in his 1972 entry “Kabbalah” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, in which Scholem traces the history and variations of zimzum in the Kabbalah, though without specific citing sources, serves as a highly condensed doxographic text on the subject of zimzum.23 In addition to ­these concise doxographic accounts, Scholem’s most impor­tant text on the theological, religious, and philosophical significance of zimzum can be found in his lengthy Eranos lecture “Creation out of Nothing and Self-­ Entanglement of God” (Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes; 1956). In it, he further explains that zimzum represents a radical attempt to solve the prob­lem of creatio ex nihilo, the creation of the world out of nothing, which has plagued theologians and phi­los­o­phers of the three mono­the­istic religions for millennia. According to Scholem, this occurs in that the omnipresent God makes it pos­si­ble through the pro­cess of zimzum for the nothingness, this empty void, to form first within himself, before releasing the entire existence of the world into this vacuum. Scholem illustrates how zimzum breaks with the doctrine of God as an unmoved mover and first cause of the world, an impor­tant idea that has been in circulation since Aristotle’s metaphysics and fundamental for the philosophy of Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas in the ­Middle Ages. Zimzum, understood as God’s “withdrawal into himself,” requires an act of primordial self-­movement in God before the creation of the world, and afterward God’s movement and living development remain necessary for the permanent creation, conservation, and history of the world. The God of zimzum is not the unmoved mover of Aristotelianism; the Lurianic Kabbalah is only too familiar with a moving, living God, who is affected, moved, and changed by the creation and preservation of the world, by revelation and world history itself. In another famous Eranos lecture, “On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism,” Scholem identifies zimzum as an impor­tant kabbalistic “symbol.”24 He declares Luria’s visions to be “myth”25 but admits that symbol and myth engage in a strug­ gle with conceptual thinking in Jewish theology and philosophy, traces of which we find in the writings of Luria’s students, such as Chayyim Vital.26 With his many scholarly publications, Scholem made zimzum famous and downright popu­lar as an impor­tant core concept of Judaism, a kabbalistic symbol, and a major component of the Lurianic “myth.” Scholars and artists such as Hans Jonas, Jürgen Habermas, Harold Bloom, Jürgen Moltmann, and Anselm Kiefer freely admit that they came to know zimzum through Scholem’s publications, often without access to the original Hebrew



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texts. But in addition to ­these exoteric, historical, and religious studies portrayals of zimzum and the Lurianic Kabbalah, which have attracted considerable attention in scholarly circles and far beyond, Scholem, while he was still a very young scholar, also began to approach zimzum in a subjective and personal way. Starting around 1930, he divulged his personal conception of zimzum in private conversations, letters, and talks, whose content remained unpublished for many years, scarcely known to anyone outside of Scholem’s intimate acquaintance. But in t­ hese vari­ous utterances and writings, which have since come to light, we see how Scholem utilizes zimzum as a theological thought experiment to explain the absence of God and the lack of divine revelation in the secular modern world. Irving Wohlfarth comprehensively analyzes and compellingly illustrates Scholem’s subjective occupation with the zimzum motif, which took shape even before his intensive scholarly study of the Lurianic Kabbalah.27 Scholem’s fascination began with Max Weber’s observations regarding modern secularization and the “disenchantment of the world” in his university lecture “Science as a Vocation,” which he gave in January 1919 in Munich.28 In this lecture, Weber describes the modern scientist’s and scholar’s dilemma, which occupied Scholem as a scholar of the Kabbalah and university professor for de­cades. The modern scholar, especially a historian of religion like Scholem, lives and works in a profane modern world completely secularized by natu­ral science and technology, disenchanted from all religious powers. In the modern scientific and scholarly enterprise, ­there is no room for the scholar’s personal religious, po­liti­cal, and ideological convictions. Should this division between the academic and the private be transgressed, the scholar in question is in danger of becoming an academically dishonest “lectern prophet.” Such convictions and ideas are purely a private ­matter. Scientists and scholars in the scholarly public, such as a sociologist of religion like Weber or a historian of religion like Scholem, are obliged to approach their object of scholarly study in an ideologically neutral manner, as objectively and historically as pos­si­ble, even if an object fascinates them personally as much as zimzum fascinated Scholem. Scholem overcame this dilemma by treating the Kabbalah, and especially zimzum, in his public lectures and publications within purely historical par­ameters, revealing his own fascination with zimzum only in private letters or in his closest circle of friends. Within this small circle, the young Gershom Scholem presented his own personal theological interpretation of zimzum, which explains the modern disenchantment of the world and the absence of God and revelation in this

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world itself as the consequence of a second zimzum that God activates. In a funeral ser­v ice held to commemorate Franz Rosenzweig on his yom ha-­ shloshim (the traditional Jewish commemoration of the dead held on the thirtieth day ­after the person’s passing), Scholem delivered a eulogy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in January 1930, which was published only de­ cades ­later, ­after Scholem’s death in 1982. In this eulogy, Scholem does not analyze zimzum in critical, historical terms as he does in his l­ater scholarly work. Rather, he introduces zimzum in personal, identificatory terms, as a conceptual figure or thought experiment whose purpose is to explain the crisis of con­temporary theology. More than that, it is an attempt at responding to the crisis of religious thought at the beginning of the twentieth ­century. Scholem employs the concept of zimzum in the eulogy for Rosenzweig as a theologoumenon, a theological explanation of the severe con­ temporary crisis of Jewish and Christian theology in the aftermath of the First World War: The weakness of theology in our time, of which every­one is aware, undoubtedly has deep roots, but this is not the place to examine them at length. Theology became impoverished when in the last ­century it consented, equally among Jews and Christians, to position itself at philosophy’s furthest boundary, a kind of ornament bedecking the roofs of philosophy’s vast structures, rather than insisting on its own; so theology suffered the same dismal fate as philosophy, its most impor­tant issues abandoned by it. T ­ hese issues ­were to find refuge for themselves elsewhere, I ­will not say forever but certainly for a long time. In sociology and psy­chol­ogy, ­matters of divinity and of man, theology’s eternal subjects, assumed a secular form. What was left as theology’s legacy was what no one ­else wanted [. . .]. It is obvious, then, that in our time theological issues have vanished from sight, have become concealed—­lights that cast their light inward and are not seen from outside. The divinity, banished from man by psy­chol­ogy and from the world of sociology, no longer wanting to reside in the heavens, has handed over the throne of justice to dialectical materialism and the seat of mercy to psychoanalysis and has withdrawn to some hidden seat and does not disclose Himself. Is He truly undisclosed? Perhaps this last withdrawal [zimzum acheron] 29 is His revelation. Perhaps God’s removal to the point of nothingness was a higher need, and He ­will reveal



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His kingship only to a world that has been emptied, in the sense of “I gave access to them that asked not, I was found by ­those who sought me not.” That is the abandonment and the question from which The Star of Redemption appeared to Rosenzweig, and to him as a Jew it appeared in its Jewish form, as a Star of David.30 By formulating a dialectical figure-­g round pattern, Scholem explains the “disenchantment of the world” and the crisis in theology at the time as God’s “last withdrawal” or “utmost zimzum.” In other words, psy­chol­ogy and sociology replaced theology. Scholem is careful to explain this is not God’s zimzum, which preceded the creation of the world, accompanied it, and has maintained every­thing in our world since the beginning of time. Rather, the first cosmological zimzum is what makes the world and history pos­si­ble, the prerequisite that must be fulfilled for God’s revelation in this world, as Oetinger once noted. The second and utmost zimzum, the subject of Scholem’s 1930 speculation, is a zimzum not before but within history. It occurs in a par­tic­u­lar historical epoch, namely, in modernity, and is thus no longer a meta-­historical, cosmological zimzum, but a second, intra-­historical zimzum, whose purpose is to explain the disappearance of God and of divine revelation in modernity. Scholem calls it an “utmost zimzum” or “final zimzum” (zimzum acheron) ­because a further act of God’s withdrawal from the world and from world history would not be pos­si­ble. Franz Rosenzweig, Scholem explains, was already lamenting the disappearance and suppression of au­then­tic belief in revelation from modern theology in his early essay with the seemingly paradoxical title “Atheistic Theology” (1914). Rosenzweig called for an existential and religious “rethinking” in response to this disappearance, and he directed his major work The Star of Redemption (1921) against it. In his view, modern Christian and Jewish theology abandoned the field of scholarly inquiry to the empirical and historical sciences. Rosenzweig also contends that modern theology sacrificed the very revelation that the religious believer and devout person can acquire ­every day in the ­here and now, and witness and verify it by leading a deeply religious existence. Instead, Rosenzweig continues, his contemporaries regarded revelation only as a single, isolated occurrence that took place at Sinai in the distant past, without any current relevance. We therefore regard revelation as a historical, not a pre­sent spiritual or religious, event. Scholem takes up Rosenzweig’s criticism of the ultimately atheistic disappearance of au­then­tic belief in revelation and the topicality of biblical

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revelation in the liberal Christian and Jewish theology of his time ­here in his commemorative address when he speaks of the modern “disappearance of God to the point of nothingness,” at which God no longer reveals himself in the world. According to this view, psy­chol­ogy has driven God out of man, while sociology has driven God out of the world. ­A fter God vacates his throne, the highest authority of criticism and judgment is dialectical materialism, and the highest instance of love and mercy is psychoanalysis. Intellectually, a world from which God has dis­appeared pre­sents the con­ temporary observer with an image of the “wasteland” that reflects pure secularity and the mundane, a world without afterlife or transcendence, a world in which God, according to Nietz­sche, is dead. Scholem, like Nietz­sche, does not wish to accept the nihilism ushered in by God’s death, whose disappearance from the religiously disenchanted, modern world someone like Max Weber simply observes as fact or fatum. On the other hand, Scholem must be able to interpret theologically the undeniable “point of no return” of revelation, that is, the undeniable disenchantment and profanation of the modern world. This is what Scholem means to accomplish with his theologoumenon of a second, radical, “utmost zimzum.” Scholem rhetorically dresses his speculation in the garb of a question, as he is apparently aware of how daring and radical it is: “Is He truly undisclosed? Perhaps this last withdrawal is His revelation. Perhaps God’s removal to the point of nothingness was a higher need, and He ­will reveal His kingship only to a world that has been emptied [?]” Scholem’s interrogative use of “perhaps” introduces the concept of utmost zimzum as a speculative concept of a negative dialectical theology that must expose the absence of God in the modern world as a sham. He suggests, however, that God remains pre­sent in our world through his absence, through the absence of revelation, which, ­after all, like a trace of memory, serves to remind us that revelation once took place. In this way, we may conclude that God, in the utmost zimzum and through his intentional absence, retains presence. God, Scholem speculates, cannot be expelled. Instead, he withdraws himself from the world and from man, leaving them to their nihilism of pure profanity, to engender new revelation through his absent presence in this wasteland and emptiness, as Rosenzweig’s contemporaries found in his new philosophy of revelation in The Star of Redemption. The star of redemption is the Star of David, or the “Shield of David,” the literal translation of the Hebrew Magen David. In Rosenzweig’s view, namely, the six-­pointed Star of David consists of two interwoven, equiangular triangles. One represents the triad



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God-­world-­man, the other symbolizes the triad creation-­revelation­redemption. The dialectical volte-­face of Scholem’s negative theology is that Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption could only ever seem like a revelation and become the most impor­tant work of Jewish religious philosophy and theology of its day in a world of total divine refusal of revelation, in a world that God himself has completely emptied of theology and revelation by his utmost zimzum, in a world of total profanation, in which church and synagogue cease to serve as the governors or mediators of revelation. We ­shall consider Scholem’s zimzum-­theologoumenon to be historical and theological ­because the second, utmost zimzum occurs ­a fter the first, cosmological zimzum. God completes the second zimzum ­after creation and therefore within the bounds of history. Scholem’s theologoumenon explains the withdrawal and absence of God and eo ipso of revelation from the world of modernity as a historical phenomenon in a historical era. In this re­spect, the utmost zimzum is historically unique; it takes place only at a certain historical moment, the modern age, and Scholem implements the theologoumenon of the utmost zimzum as a means for interpreting the crisis of theology during this epoch. Letters and poems about Franz Kafka that Scholem sent to Walter Benjamin in 1934, only a few years ­later, attest to the fact that Scholem’s eulogy for Rosenzweig was not a mere whim, a young scholar’s one-­time, somewhat cryptic detour into theology.31 In their correspondence, as Benjamin’s essay on Kafka also illustrates, we see that Kafka is the writer who strikes at the heart of theology’s con­temporary prob­lems. In a letter dated 1934, Scholem sends Benjamin a poem that he composed, along with a copy of Kafka’s The Trial. Scholem’s poem thematizes God’s revelation and its absence from the modern world: Schier vollendet bis zum Dache ist der große Weltbetrug. Gib denn, Gott, daß der erwache, den dein Nichts durchschlug.

The ­great deceit of the world Is now consummated. Give then, Lord, that he may  wake Who was struck through by your nothingness

So allein strahlt Offenbarung in die Zeit, die dich verwarf.

Only so does Revelation Shine in the time that rejected you.

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Nur dein Nichts ist die Erfahrung, die sie von dir haben darf.

Only your nothingness is the  experience It is entitled to have of you.32

Though Scholem’s poem does not explic­itly reference zimzum, it other­wise follows the formulations of his Rosenzweig eulogy seamlessly. God’s nothingness is the only form of the experience of God that is currently still pos­ si­ble in the disenchanted world, a world that has rejected its God. And in a letter that Scholem wrote to Benjamin a short time ­later, he writes that “Kafka’s world is the world of revelation, admittedly through a view of the world that had led [us] back to its nothingness.”33 Benjamin’s interpretation of Kafka ­later goes in a completely dif­fer­ent direction than Scholem’s, in that Benjamin endeavors to illustrate that Kafka makes conscious connections to haggadic narrative traditions and no longer confronts the normative, halakhic tradition of Judaism that for him has lost all meaning. He reads Kafka’s short story “Before the Law” as a theological parable for a modern Jewish state of mind, in which man, despite the splendor that shines forth from the Law, no longer treads the gate’s threshold into the Law of religion and tradition. Even in his letters to Benjamin, Scholem’s negative theology remained a private ­matter. Scholem published them only de­cades ­after his friend’s death in 1940. Scholem’s negative theology remained unknown for years, just like his captivating, albeit biting, criticism of Zionism, which precipitated his withdrawal (pun intended!) from Zionist politics at the beginning of the 1930s. Scholem withdrew into inner exile, in which he led a purely scholarly existence at his home located at 28 Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem. Numerous guest professorships in Eu­rope and the United States also allowed him to flee the po­liti­cal predicament that he could not solve. As Irving Wohlfarth demonstrates, the analyses that Scholem formulated in his scholarly works can be seen in conversation with his then-­private assertions that God goes into exile in the Lurianic zimzum. Both represent reflexes of a scholar’s existence in internal exile, despairing of the real consequences of Zionism.34 ­After the 1930s, the term zimzum begins to dis­appear from the rec­ord of Scholem’s private utterances. However, the concept of zimzum, which Scholem pre­sents as a key concept of the Kabbalah, indeed as a “core concept of Judaism” in his scholarly works, had a tremendous impact on his readers ­after World War II, an influence that far exceeded the domain of Kabbalah scholars.



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Else Lasker-­Schüler: Das Hebräerland (The Land of the Hebrews) Only a few years ­after Scholem invoked the utmost zimzum as the cause of God’s absence in the disenchanted modern world in his oration dedicated to Rosenzweig, the poet Else Lasker-­Schüler set foot on Palestinian soil for the first time in the spring of 1934. She was immediately enchanted, extolling it as the “Land of the Hebrews” in a retrospective poetic travelogue written with hymnlike enthusiasm and in late expressionist prose. She published her short book Das Hebräerland (The Land of the Hebrews) in the spring of 1937 during her exile in Zu­rich from Nazi Germany (she had been attacked on the street in Berlin and had sustained serious injuries). The poet envisions the Land of the Hebrews as the “land of the Bible,”35 as sacred ground. She depicts its inhabitants, both Jews and Arabs, as ­brothers and rightful descendants of the ancient Orient. Every­thing in this land is in a state of awakening, construction, idealism, and si­mul­ta­neously a return to the spiritual sources, to the land and landscape of ancient Israel. Desert and sea, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, spirituality, naturalness, piety, and idealism, as well as poetry and joie de vivre, all complement each other in Hebräerland to form the ecstatically celebrated Oriental “Other,” who stands apart from materialistic Eu­rope devoted to mammon and threatened by fascism. Lasker-­Schüler’s Hebräerland is, as she herself described it,36 a poetic place in a liminal state between a poetic fantasy world and earthly real­ity, between Eu­rope and the Orient, between this world and the hereafter.37 Das Hebräerland depicts a journey that is at once real and spiritual. The poet is particularly smitten with the “holy city” of Jerusalem, where she rents a room in the ­Hotel Nordia on Jaffa Road. Jerusalem resembles a city out of this world: “As the forecourt of heaven, God chose our city Jerusalem.”38 ­Here, she encounters every­one who constitutes the Hebrew land in her eyes: the tanned, vigorous chalutzim (pioneers) who cultivate the farmland on the kibbutz; eminent rabbis, including Rav Kook, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of the Yishuv; poets, such as Agnon, and the scholars of Hebrew University. She encounters Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as palm trees, rocks, camel caravans, and especially ­children who serve as a source of inspiration. The authenticity, originality, and proximity to God and innocence of the holy place repeatedly remind her of her own happy memories of her childhood home in Wuppertal, her ­father, ­mother, and siblings, and her

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deceased son Paul. ­These passages are among the most beautiful and touching lines that Lasker-­Schüler ever wrote about her own childhood and upbringing. Orientalism and expressionism often come together in a disturbing way in Lasker-­Schüler’s Das Hebräerland, which is rife with romanticized memories. Among the intertwining Jewish and Christian themes, sumptuous portrayals of landscapes, religious poems, poetic musings on the doctrines of God, as well as utter po­liti­cal ignorance, we also find an encounter with the “youthful scholar” Scholem. She describes how she met Scholem, who was almost thirty years her ju­nior at the time, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia. This meeting stands out in a sobering and negative way, for Scholem is the only character in her book whom she portrays in a decidedly negative light. Following their initial encounter, the antipathy they felt for one another was clearly mutual. When the poet went to visit Hugo Bergmann, the friendly university librarian and childhood friend of Kafka, in Rehavia, she accidentally ends up at the entrance to his neighbor and friend Scholem’s home instead: Scholem, the respected kabbalistic scholar, immerses himself in the teachings of the Kabbalah in the twin nest of the second building. My erroneous visit—­through no fault of my own, I accidentally chose the wrong gate—­does not seem to please the kabbalist, as I am interrupting his reading. But I stay! Taking ample revenge for my perseverance, Adon Scholem tries to unveil to me the legends of Holy Israel with the poison of logic. Last but not least, he attempts to uproot the papyrus on which our ­people’s very first letters are written. “To marry the miracle,” I say, “to schoolmaster logic would result in a mésalliance.” Annoyed by him, I left. But our paths crossed again a­ fter some time. We w ­ ere both waiting at a bus stop for the bus to Jerusalem City. We sat down next to each other in the only seats that ­were still unoccupied [. . .] I gestured ­toward the grandiose landscape—to our right and to our left, and then I stretched up high to the vault of heaven and quoted to the youthful scholar who had shown up, straight out of the original heavenly book of nature that taught me about the prophets of our ­people.39 The poet objects to the young scholar Scholem and the erudition of his Kabbalah research, gesturing to the grandiose landscape as a “heavenly book of nature,” insisting that book learning is nothing compared to the revelation



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of the book of nature. The sacred landscape heralds the prophets of Israel. Revelation cannot be learned nor taught, Lasker-­Schüler writes elsewhere in her book.40 In Hebräerland, however, revelation appears in the form of man and nature. The “Land of the Hebrews” is the site of a revelation that you can only personally and sensually experience when you are ­there. In Diaspora, books provide sole access to this revelation. Lasker-­Schüler does not reveal how Scholem reacted to her remarks about the heavenly book of nature. Immediately following her description of this encounter, she relates the story of a trip that she took to Safed and Meron to visit the tomb of Shimon bar Yochai. In May 1934, she enthusiastically attended the festivities and bonfires of the devout Jewish pilgrims for the festival Lag ba’Omer, dedicated to the memory of the ­great rabbi and pseudepigraphic author of the Zohar. In Hebräerland, she does not explain ­whether she learned about Isaac Luria and the kabbalists of Safed right ­there on the spot from her travel companions, from books on Kabbalah, or even from Scholem, whom she clearly disliked. Her Hebrew was not sufficient for reading original texts, as she spoke only German and En­glish in Palestine. Her emphatic Jewish self-­identification, “I am a Hebrew,” 41 does not refer to the language. The Prince of Thebes, her poetic alter ego, speaks and writes German. But Lasker-­Schüler nevertheless explic­itly mentions Luria and zimzum twice in connection with poetological reflections: The artist inhabits two worlds at the same time, the terrestrial plane and the plane of fantasy. In Palestine, I lived in three worlds. I remained with gentle thoughts in the step-­world of Eu­rope, which had become dear to me, but my heart and soul resided in Palestine, which is not of this world; I have already brushed up against the celestial, the divine. What can the clearest rational logic prove when compared with the world of revelation! Revelation cannot be taught nor learned nor conjured. [. . .] The holy God did not become entangled in any corporeal spatiality. He spreads himself over all ­things without inhibition. Lurja says, “God contracted himself to make room for the world.” God is therefore also pre­sent outside his world. ­There is no endowed university chair for the study of revelation. But ­there is also no sofa for it. Zimzum is therefore not an appropriate topic for a se­nior professor of religion. As Lasker-­Schüler understands it, ­there is no academic position, much

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less an endowed professorship, in the subject of revelation. ­Here, she clearly, almost prophetically reformulates Scholem’s dilemma as a scholar of the Kabbalah. Scholars cannot learn, imitate, or invoke the mystical experience and the revelation of God in actu, as Luria experienced it. They can only analyze the texts that attest to it. But this is a scholar’s prob­lem. The poet can comprehend such revelation, as she experiences it in Hebräerland. ­These ruminations, however, are not at all a part of Else Lasker-­Schüler’s engagement with the concept of zimzum. Instead, she is interested in the idea that “God is therefore also pre­sent outside his world,” which follows from “God contracted himself to make room for the world.” We also see this in the second reference to Luria and zimzum in Das Hebräerland. God also exists outside of the world and beyond proof in the world. He does not need the world. In creating the world, he gave himself time, just as the poet affords time for creative endeavors.42 God has an endless amount of time. He is a resting God.43 Then he creates the world—as a paradise: “God created only paradise, which was darkened by the fading of love.” As ­human beings we are “in paradise [. . .] from birth, starting with the first day of our life,” the poet muses.44 ­There was never an original sin that expelled h ­ umans from paradise. They remain in paradise from birth, according to her religiously undogmatic reflection. It is only the diminishing of love that obfuscates this earthly paradise. For in the world, ­after the pro­cess of zimzum and ­after God has made room for the world, we ­humans always already live in God, which is to say, we reside inside “God’s atmosphere”: “God exists! Did the Lord not use creation and his ­people and his other creatures to prove his existence? ‘God exists!’ Even without the proof of the body of the worlds. Our ­great Lurja [sic] taught us: ‘God contracted within himself to make room for the world.’ He meant for the purpose of building the world. We therefore live in God’s atmosphere and are always breathing ‘Him.’ Grasping him humbly in a verse of poetry, the poet is allowed to touch God. Love God ­because he exists. Only in this way do you encounter the deepest love of God.” 45 Creation, ­humans, and the world are not necessary to prove that God exists. He also exists outside the world and before the world was simply ­there. For the poet, this is the core concept ­behind Luria’s doctrine of zimzum. But once the world is created in the space cleared by God in God, we are “always breathing ‘Him’ in.” We perceive God sensually through the corporeal function of breathing. Scholem writes about the Kabbalah: “To touch God, to feel the living presence of God, is the mystic’s deepest longing.” 46 The poet, or in Lasker-­Schüler’s case, the poetess, is permitted “to touch God, to grasp him



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most humbly in a verse of poetry.” Mysticism can touch God, and poetry can, too. In Else Lasker-­Schüler’s lyrical prose, the aesthetic experience of God is equal to the mystical experience of God. Erudition, even that of the caliber of someone like Scholem, can describe such ­things, but it cannot comprehend them. Else Lasker-­Schüler and Gershom Scholem crossed paths repeatedly in Jerusalem when the poet made a second trip to Palestine in 1937 and was not allowed to return to Switzerland from a third trip to Palestine in 1939. A friendship did not develop. Scholem prob­ably read Das Hebräerland, including the unflattering passages about him. Her exile in the “Land of the Hebrews” sobered her perspective.47 In January 1945, she died, an eccentric el­derly ­woman, impoverished and half-­starved in Jerusalem. She was buried in a cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

Yehuda Ashlag: Luria between Communism and Commerce In the same year that Lasker-­Schüler’s Hebräerland was released in Zu­rich, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Ashlag published a se­lection of excerpts from Chayyim Vital’s Ez Chayyim with detailed commentary and systematic explanations for beginners in a small print run in Jerusalem. The se­lection was entitled Sefer Talmud Eser ha-­Sefirot mi-­Ha’ARI (The Doctrine of the Ten Sefirot of Ha’ARI). In retrospect, we can see that this 1937 work was arguably the most influential attempt in the twentieth ­century to reactualize Luria’s Kabbalah for the pre­sent and shape it into the basis of a holistic, religious, spiritual, scientific, and po­liti­cal worldview. Ashlag, a rabbi who wore Chassidic clothing complete with a fur hat, was born in 1885 in the industrial city of Łódź, Poland. He grew up ­there and immigrated to Palestine in 1922. He presented Luria’s Kabbalah to the pious in the Yishuv, but also specifically to secular Zionists, as a kind of religious philosophy of life that also provided answers to capitalism and other social issues. Scholem prob­ably purchased Ashlag’s book immediately, as he did with all new publications on the Kabbalah, and added it to his collection. But he apparently avoided any personal contact with Ashlag, as he was prone to do with other kabbalists of his day. He never wrote about Ashlag,48 although we know that he owned copies of Ashlag’s works. Scholem and Ashlag lived for many years in the same city and in the same country. Ashlag was a rabbi since the time he emigrated to Palestine

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Figure 28. Kabbalah and communism. Rabbi Yehuda Leib Ashlag (1885–1954). Source of photo unknown.

in 1922 ­until his death in 1954, first in Givat Sha’ul just outside the gates of Jerusalem (now a neighborhood inside the city), and ­later in Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Both men are even buried in the same cemetery in Jerusalem. But the social revolutionary rabbi in the Chassidic caftan and the bourgeois scholar Scholem, who was always dressed in suit and tie, led markedly dif­fer­ent ways of life in the same city and Yishuv. Else Lasker-­Schüler could have also become acquainted with the ascetic rabbi in the “Land of the Hebrews,” ­because like Lasker-­Schüler, Ashlag also maintained contact with the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the Yishuv, Abraham Isaak Kook. And unlike the other predominantly anti-­Zionist Orthodox rabbis in the country, he shared a cautious sympathy for Zionism. What’s more, Ashlag saw in the Kabbalah a doctrine of living and a worldview for all Jews. He wanted to liberate it from the confines of esoteric rabbinical meditation and share it with the Jewish masses, the workers and the kibbutzniks. His work as a kabbalist and rabbi in secular Tel Aviv, far from the holy city of Jerusalem with its ultra-­orthodox, sometimes shtetl-­like residential neighborhoods, was programmatic. But in 1937, Ashlag was still a relatively unknown figure. It was not ­until the Kabbalah Centre of Philip S. Berg (1927–2013) pop­u­lar­ized the Lurianic Kabbalah that the name Ashlag became known to a wider audience.49 The Kabbalah Centre enlisted the internationally famous pop star Madonna as



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an avowed devotee of the Kabbalah and thus achieved world fame. On a kabbalistic pilgrimage to Israel in September 2004, Madonna visited Ashlag’s grave in the Har ha-­Menuchot cemetery below the Givat Sha’ul neighborhood in western Jerusalem, paying the requisite tribute to him as an impor­ tant Kabbalah teacher. Ashlag’s seminal Lurianic work, Talmud Eser ha-­Sefirot, which he published in 1937, was first translated into En­glish by Levi I. Krakovsky in 1969 and published at the Jerusalem yeshivah Kol Yehuda (The Voice of Yehuda) by his disciples. Since then, this translation has appeared ­under the En­glish title Kabbalah: A Study of the Ten Luminous Emanations; The Wisdom of the Kabbalah by Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag z”l as Revealed by the Writings of Rabbi Isaac Luria z”l. Philip S. Berg is listed as compiler, editor, and spiritus rector of the newer editions, which feature new, colorful covers printed by the Kabbalah Centre in 1972, 1973, 1985, 1991, 1994, and ­after, and distributed worldwide.50 Although Scholem essentially concludes his historical account the history of Kabbalah with eastern Eu­ro­pean Chassidism and does not include kabbalists like Ashlag or even twentieth-­century Chassidic movements such as Chabad, more recent research reveals that Yehuda Ashlag was the Lurianic Kabbalah’s most impor­tant thinker and innovator in the twentieth ­century. Born in 1885 into a Chassidic rabbinical ­family, Ashlag learned German in his youth. He not only read the Sefer Ez Chayyim in Hebrew but also Hegel, Marx, Nietz­sche, and Schopenhauer in the original German. The details of his life become enmeshed in his disciples’ innumerable anecdotes about him. He emigrated to the Yishuv in 1922. Po­liti­cally, he supported the Zionist workers’ movement, with which he was well acquainted from his native city of Łódź, and he supported the kibbutz movement. In 1933, the British Mandate banned a newspaper he edited ­because of its alleged closeness to Marxism. In fact, he propagated an “altruistic communism” based on Lurianic religious princi­ples.51 Ashlag saw an infinite divine “­will to bestow” at work in the universe, starting with zimzum and the emanation of the sefirot. In contrast, h ­ umans and all t­ hings created are characterized by a “desire to receive,” which manifests itself in man as egoism and a zeal for profit. If ­humans are to strive to imitate God, to engage in an imitatio Dei, however, we must behave altruistically, in the manner of the divine “­will to bestow,” to overcome our egoism and to or­ga­nize ­human society in terms of charity, social justice, and socialist equality. Ashlag builds a philosophical bridge between Luria and works like Schopenhauer’s The World as W ­ ill and Repre­sen­ta­tion and Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Kabbalah is united with communism.

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Ashlag, the most influential commentator and interpreter of the Lurianic Kabbalah in the twentieth ­century, was a modernist rabbi and revolutionary, not only ­because of his po­liti­cal views, but also ­because he wanted to pop­u­ lar­ize the Kabbalah as a spiritual and po­liti­cal philosophy of life. Entirely in keeping with his spirit, his brother-­in-­law and most impor­tant disciple R. Yehuda Zwi Brandwein (1904–1969), who served the Israeli trade ­u nion movement Histadrut as chief rabbi and edited a user-­fr iendly two-­volume edition of Vital’s Ez Chayyim in 1960, founded the Kabbalah Centre in 1965 to promote the study and popularization of the Kabbalah. ­A fter Brandwein’s death in 1969, his student Philip S. Berg took over sole leadership of the Kabbalah Centre. Berg lived in Israel with his wife Karen Berg from 1971 to 1981 and, ­after his attempts to introduce Kabbalah to secular Israelis failed, returned to the United States, where he expanded the Kabbalah Centre into a worldwide esoteric corporation that offers New Age spirituality to every­one, with over seventy branches, primarily in the United States and Eu­rope to date. The popularization and commercial success of this Kabbalah corporation, which has been completely Americanized since the early 1990s, ­were made pos­si­ble by the fact that the Kabbalah Centre has completely scrubbed Ashlag’s and Brandwein’s socialist po­liti­cal ideals from its scheme as consistently as it has erased halakhah and the Hebrew language. The Kabbalah Centre provides En­glish translations of Ashlag’s texts, as well as the foundational texts of Lurianic Kabbalah and the Zohar, which members read in the Kabbalah Centre’s training courses, and, more recently, access via the internet. Other changes and keys to worldwide success have been the opening of the Kabbalah Centre to non-­Jews and to ­women. ­After leaving the all-­male kabbalistic ghetto of esoteric rabbinical scholarship that Ashlag had already intended to abandon, the Kabbalah Centre ­today also renounces Jewish religious affiliation, gender distinctions, and the halakhic lifestyle of its followers and clientele. ­Under the leadership of its guru Berg, the Kabbalah Centre has coaxed the Kabbalah in the direction of universal spirituality. This move ­toward a generalized sense of spirituality thus transforms Kabbalah into an individualized, postmodern religiosity available on the sizable commercial market of esoteric offers where every­thing can be consumed. Madonna, both the mouthpiece and voluntary advertising medium of the Kabbalah corporation, can thus call herself a kabbalist, without being Jewish, without any knowledge of Hebrew, and without halakhah, to the Kabbalah Centre’s approval and g­ reat plea­sure.



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The Kabbalah Centre generates income not only through merchandising, course fees, the sale of blessed Kabbalah ­water, volumes of the Zohar, and all sorts of informational pamphlets, candles, books on astrology, but also through esoteric red ribbons, cosmetics, and even a Kabbalah energy drink! ­After Berg’s stroke in 2004, his second wife, Karen Berg, together with their sons Yehuda and Michael Berg, operates the Kabbalah Centre and its corporate version of esotericism, which, to no one’s surprise, now has its headquarters in California. Pecunia non olet. Since 1998, they have enjoyed the pecuniary benefits of a sharp increase in capital assets.52 The Kabbalah Centre is “McMysticism.” It is “Spirituality for Dummies.” It expunges Judaism from Kabbalah. ­These are only a few of the numerous negative reactions to the Kabbalah Centre and Philip S. Berg that have appeared in the Jewish press and media. But the devaluation of complexity has always promoted the success of religious movements. Luria’s disciples in Safed and Jerusalem w ­ ere religious virtuosos, but Luria’s message was always successful with the masses when it was simplified and pop­u­lar­ized: in Shabbateanism and Chassidism. The complete commercialization of the Lurianic Kabbalah in California at the beginning of the twenty-­first ­century, “Kabbalah on the beach,” so to speak, is, from a purely so­cio­log­i­cal point of view, the price of its universalization and de-­Judaization. It is almost of no consequence that the American translation of Yehuda Ashlag’s commentary on Vital’s Ez Chayyim from Talmud Eser Sefirot, entitled Ten Luminous Emanations and edited by Philip S. Berg, featuring Vital’s original Hebrew text next to an American adaptation of Ashlag’s detailed commentary on Vital’s description of zimzum, makes an explicit connection between Luria’s doctrine of zimzum and the big bang theory. Berg & Co. unceremoniously declare Luria’s zimzum to be the prehistory of the big bang. Madonna meets Kabbalah, zimzum meets the big bang. Ashlag’s commentary on Luria’s Kabbalah is advertised as the key to the secrets of creation. Berg pre­sents the Kabbalah not as an antithesis but as a mystical complement to scientific, modern theories of the origins of the world such as the big bang theory, which astrophysicists Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble first formulated in the 1920s. On the reverse cover of Ten Luminous Emanations (1994), written in the idiom of the New Age movement, one can read: “Now you ­will have to rethink every­thing you thought you knew about the nature of creation. [. . .] In TEN LUMINOUS EMANATIONS, the famous con­temporary kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag pre­sents a new way of looking at our universe. [. . .] Rabbi Ashlag explores the early universe which

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preceded the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. [. . .] This is a most challenging book for ­those who want to probe the mysteries of our universe and the way in which our universe came into being.”53 ­Under the far-­encompassing mantle of the label “spirituality,” one can simply impute that the ­great, holy Luria anticipated and would agree with the prevailing theory of con­temporary astrophysics. As such, it is not unusual to see other New Age sects such as Scientology declare religion and modern science, as well as the chiasmus Kabbalah and big bang to be compatible with one another. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Yehuda Ashlag is no longer in any position to defend himself against the tides of commercialism and appropriation—­ and neither is Luria.

Hans Jonas: God A ­ fter Auschwitz In 1935, Hans Jonas arrived in Jerusalem. He had emigrated from Germany to London in 1933. Scholem had helped him obtain a scholarship with letters of recommendation and soon accepted him into the circle of his academic friends and companions. A lifelong, sometimes contentious friendship developed.54 Jonas admired Scholem’s work on the Kabbalah, and Scholem commended Jonas’s dissertation Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity), a groundbreaking study in twentieth-­century research on gnosis, which influenced Scholem’s thinking on the influence of gnosis on the Kabbalah.55 Unlike Scholem, however, who had garnered a professorship in 1933, Jonas failed to establish an academic ­career at Hebrew University. Jonas volunteered to fight as a British soldier against Germany in World War II and in the Israeli War of In­de­pen­dence in the Haganah in 1948/1949, but he emigrated to Canada in 1949. He ­later forged a ­career path in the United States as a philosophy professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. Like Scholem, Jonas traveled back to West Germany in his ­later years, received numerous academic honors, and gave guest lectures. In one such guest lecture in Tübingen in 1984, entitled “Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz” (The Concept of God ­After Auschwitz), Jonas comments on both the Shoah and zimzum. Not dissimilar to Scholem’s proposed concept of an “utmost zimzum” as a hy­po­thet­i­cal historical interpretation of modernity as an epoch, Jonas’s lecture also adopts zimzum and establishes a connection between Luria’s concept and Auschwitz. This occasion marks the



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first time Jonas publicly addresses this topic as a phi­los­o­pher and someone intimately affected by the Holocaust. Jonas’s ­mother, Rosa Jonas, was deported in the Shoah and murdered in Auschwitz, and ­a fter de­cades of silence and a crisis in his friendship with Hannah Arendt ­a fter she had published Eichmann in Jerusalem with the thesis of the banality of evil,56 Jonas, who was an older man at this point, expresses his philosophical and theological thoughts and reactions about the Shoah for the first time, in public and in Germany. He defines his lecture as “a piece of frankly speculative theology,”57 which responds to the crisis of Jewish theology ­after Auschwitz. He argues that Auschwitz has called the Jewish concept of God itself into question in an unpre­ce­dented way: But to the Jew who sees in “this” world the locus of divine creation, justice and redemption, God is eminently the Lord of History, and in this re­spect “Auschwitz” calls, even for the believer, the ­whole traditional concept of God into question. It has indeed [. . .] added to the Jewish historical experience something unpre­ce­dented and of a nature no longer assimilable by the old theological categories. Accordingly, one who ­w ill not thereupon just give up the concept of God altogether—­and even the phi­los­o­pher has the right to such unwillingness—­must rethink it so that it still remains thinkable.58 Jonas figures zimzum as a key component of his reconceptualization of God. Already with the creation of the world, a philosophical “myth” that Jonas recounts at the beginning of his speech, God released something ­else, the world, out of himself and into freedom. He, who before the creation of the world was absolute and all-­powerful, has in this way disempowered himself. He no longer rules in this world, as he is no longer the sovereign of history and of world events. And that is why we cannot hold the disempowered God responsible for Auschwitz: It is the fact and success of deliberate evil rather than the inflictions of blind, natu­ral causality—­the use of the latter in the hands of responsible agents (Auschwitz rather than the earthquake of Lisbon)—­with which Jewish theology has to contend at this hour. Only with creation from nothing do we have the oneness of the divine princi­ple combined with that self-­limitation that then permits

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(gives room to) the existence and autonomy of a world. Creation was that act of absolute sovereignty with which it consented, for the sake of self-­determined finitude, to be absolute no more—an act, therefore, of divine self-­restriction. And ­here let us remember that Jewish tradition itself is ­really not quite so monolithic in the ­matter of divine sovereignty as official doctrine makes it appear. The mighty undercurrent of the Kabbalah, which Gershom Scholem in our days has brought to light anew, knows about a divine fate bound up with the coming-­to-be of a world. ­There we meet highly original, very unorthodox speculations in whose com­pany mine would not appear so wayward ­after all. Thus, for example, my myth at bottom only pushes further the idea of the tzimtzum, that cosmogonic center concept of the Lurianic Kabbalah. Tzimtzum means contraction, withdrawal, self-­ limitation. To make room for the world, the En-­Sof (Infinite; literally: No-­End) of the beginning had to contract himself so that, vacated by him, empty space could expand outside of him: the “Nothing” in which and from which God could then create the world. Without this retreat into himself, ­there could be no “other” outside God, and only his continued holding-­himself-in preserves the finite t­ hings from losing their separate being again into the divine “all in all.” My myth goes farther still. The contraction is total as far as power is concerned; as a ­whole has the Infinite ceded his power to the finite and thereby wholly delivered his cause into its hands.59 Jonas pre­sents ­here a new concept of God that became necessary ­after Auschwitz in pondering God’s total contraction. If God’s contraction is seen as total, then we can assume that he has completely surrendered his power to the finite. The attainment of autonomy in the finite world is brokered with God’s powerlessness. A powerless God, who has given up all his power to the world in the total zimzum, was helpless to prevent Auschwitz. As Jonas sees it, in total zimzum, God is impotent, not omnipotent. This is the main point of Jonas’s “Concept of God ­After Auschwitz.” ­After Auschwitz, we can only conceive of God if we agree that he has completely surrendered his dominion over history. Only this relieves him of the responsibility for the events of Auschwitz, where he did not intervene. If God’s zimzum is total, as well as his impotence, we may regard Auschwitz as the result of purely



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­ uman, deliberately evil actions and attitudes in an autonomous, self-­legislated h world that God has vacated. Jonas pre­sents a speculative theodicy of God, rendered impotent through his total zimzum. In Jonas’s speculative theological formulation of zimzum ­after Auschwitz, only a radicalized zimzum can still allow room for the theodicy of a powerless God.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, or “The Cabbala and Modern Man” Among the many documents and papers available to the archivally curious in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s estate, ­housed at the University of Texas, Austin, you can find a short, quasi-­autobiographical text. In this document, consisting of fourteen typewritten pages, using all capital letters, the researcher also finds Singer’s numerous handwritten additions, deletions, and emendations. Beneath the handwritten signature of “Isaac B. Singer,” the first sheet of the sheaf of typed pages bears the title “The Cabbala and Modern Man.” The lecture is not dated. The place, time, and occasion of the lecture cannot be determined from the fourteen pages of text alone, but Singer, the only Yiddish writer to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, composed this short text in En­glish presumably for an intellectually educated American Jewish (and perhaps also international) audience. Singer gave a lecture with the same title at the Panarion Conference in Los Angeles in 1976. However, we do not know for certain ­whether the typewritten document is the same as the lecture that he in fact presented. The “modern man,” Singer begins, no longer trusts in old texts, but is skeptical and seeks truth through scientific means. He himself is a “modern man” and therefore skeptical with re­spect to religious dogma and revelation, unlike his f­ather and grand­father, who w ­ ere both respected, strictly orthodox rabbis in Poland. For them, ­every word from the Bible and Talmud and rabbinical exegetic was the word of God. Singer himself had come to believe, long before he read Hume and Kant, that one cannot logically prove the existence of God, the soul, ­free ­will, or other religious truths. As a young man, he studied the Jewish classics of the ­Middle Ages, looking for answers to ­these questions. He studied Maimonides’s Moreh Nevukhim, Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, Emunot we-­De’ot by Saadia Gaon, and Bahya ibn Paquda’s Chobot ha-­Lebabot. In addition, he was si­mul­ta­neously working his way through Spinoza’s Ethics, Kant’s Prolegomena, and Hume’s Enquiry Concerning ­Human

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Understanding,60 before he began to read kabbalistic texts with a critical mind and without ­great expectations, driven only by the desire to understand the ­great mystery of the world around him. The starry sky above the balcony at 10 Krochmalna Street in Warsaw where Singer lived with his pious parents and siblings ­until 1917,61 the thousands of facets in the eyes of a common ­house­fly, the diversity of molecules, Darwin’s theory of evolution: Singer believed ­there had to be a plan, a purpose, a meaning ­behind all of this. With this perspective, Singer began to learn the confusing and complex Kabbalah of Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria,62 slowly and with patience. As a result, the Kabbalah revealed itself to him in its deep structure as a “pantheistic system,” or in the words of the famous Ba’al Shem, the founder of Chassidism: “God is the world, and the world is God.” Nevertheless, the pantheism of the Kabbalah is quite dif­fer­ent from that of Spinoza: when Spinoza says God, he means nature. Spinoza’s God has no freedom, for he is subject to his own laws. In Spinoza’s worldview, Genghis Khan, the Ba’al Shem, a tiger in the jungle, Gandhi, Hitler, and Stalin ­were all parts of one deity, necessary manifestations of the infinite substance. Seen refracted in the light of Spinoza’s philosophy, the Holocaust was as inevitable as a volcanic eruption. In the Kabbalah, however, every­thing begins with God, without any nature at all. Before the world was created, only God existed, the Ein-­Sof, the Infinite. And why did God commence with creation in the first place? Chayyim Vital’s answer in Ez Chayyim (Tree of Life) is that creation is one of God’s attributes. But how could God create the world when he himself filled infinity and no space existed for the world ­free from God? ­Here, Rabbi Isaac Luria provides the answer: God had to diminish himself, extinguish his light in a part of himself, and create a vacuum, a pro­cess that he calls “zimzum.” According to Singer, such ideas are clearly anthropomorphic, but they allow the reader to comprehend the prob­lem, ­because the Kabbalah had to make use of ­human ideas. The Kabbalah describes God as a light that fills infinite space. In the center of this space, t­ here appeared a dark area, which was a vacuum. God cast a ray of light into this vacuum, manifested his attributes, the ten sefirot, and created four world systems: the world of emanation, the world of creation, the world of form, and, lowest, the material world, our universe: God’s light transformed into ­matter. Our universe, like all worlds, is a part of the divinity, but as the lowest world, it is the farthest from God’s goodness, light, and warmth. Planet Earth is farther from God than any other world. We who live down ­here on earth are therefore all ex-



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iles subsisting in a kind of “cosmic Siberia.”63 We live in darkness and cold, fear and doubt. Only rarely does God’s grace reach us. But this world of darkness and evil is necessary for man to have the power of ­free choice and for his actions and thoughts to maintain the balance between right and wrong. It is precisely ­because of this condition of the world that God can show more creativity and grace ­here than in other worlds and spheres. This world is a stage for charlatans and villains who persecute the few good characters, while the good strug­gle and falter without end. This is a play with countless acts, ­theses and anti­theses, light and darkness. Unlike Spinoza’s pantheism, where God is an infinite machine in which neither revolution nor evolution take place ­because every­thing earthly is causally predestined, the God of the Kabbalah is creative.64 In this, he is in some sense dependent on his creatures. In a deeper sense, according to Kabbalah, creation is a divine experiment. Indeed, God has left freedom to man; without freedom, creation is impossible. God is not the one who builds ­houses, paints works of art, writes books, or engages in any kind of ­human activity. He grants freedom to humankind, which they may use for good or evil. Of course, the sinner then disappoints God and damages his experiment, but when a person succeeds, God’s experiment also succeeds. More than any idealistic philosophy, Kabbalah understands that a person cannot ignore his body, needs, and desires. The Kabbalah, Singer then summarizes, grants much to the modern skeptic, for it contains the best ele­ments of all philosophical systems and all religious and mystical teachings: The God of Kabbalah is spirit, but also ­matter. He is good but leaves room for evil. He is dynamic and creative. He is tragic ­because he can never be sure that ­humans ­will choose to be good. In an anthropomorphic gesture, Singer interprets and reinvents the God of the Kabbalah by inverting the age-­old concept of man created in God’s image: In real­ity, God is man enlarged to infinity, a God with h ­ uman desires, fantasies, and complexes. Nevertheless, the Kabbalah is not incompatible with modern science. The kabbalistic belief that the world is the emanation of God’s light is consistent with Einstein’s theory of relativity pertaining to the transformation of energy into mass. The Kabbalah’s emphasis on love and sex is consistent with Freud’s psychoanalysis. The belief that creative possibilities are greatest at the bottom of the abyss is consistent with artistic experience. For the Kabbalah, all of creation is a laboratory of happiness. It emphasizes again

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and again that we cannot understand higher t­ hings due to our natu­ral limitation and that all our words about God are nothing other than subjective utterances. According to the Kabbalah, the path to truth leads the believer through moral and aesthetic exertion and kenosis, through the correction of personal m ­ istakes, through prayer, charity, learning, and good deeds. At times, Singer concludes, he feels that the Kabbalah has not even been discovered yet. The image of Kabbalah that he paints in this lecture contains not only what he has learned, but also every­thing that he is, his personality, his ideas, his work. But e­ very soul sees the Kabbalah in a personal light: “In my sketch of the Cabala [sic] I have also portrayed my own soul, given form to my own philosophy.”65 Singer’s commitment to the Kabbalah and its significance for “modern man” sees the Kabbalah as a pantheistic religious system that is more compatible with the worldview of “modern man” than the holistic pantheism of nature found in Spinoza, for whom the Holocaust would constitute an event caused by natu­ral causation, no dif­fer­ent from a volcanic eruption. The pantheism of the Kabbalah leaves room for the freedom of God and man in the universe, a cosmic and ­human freedom to pursue good and evil, as well as space and possibility for artistic creativity. The ideas of the Kabbalah are, according to Singer, anthropomorphic, but that is precisely their truth: modern man sees himself reflected in the Kabbalah. God is not an extramundane motionless mover, but the true universal projection of the dynamic power, creativity, destructiveness of man in the cosmos. This God of the Kabbalah is created in the true image of man; he is universal vitality and creativity, but with freedom he must also allow and endure suffering as man’s destiny. Singer’s pantheism is tragic, ­because his praise of diversity and abundance, of freedom and creativity, includes the powerlessness of the ­human individual in the face of fate, natu­ral events, suffering, death, and crimes such as the Holocaust. In all this, zimzum is only the anthropomorphic fantasy that God has withdrawn and allowed the dynamic self-­development of cosmic forces to take its course. The concepts of tikkun olam and the coming of the Messiah, which are meant to be heralds of world redemption, are significantly absent from Singer’s account of the Kabbalah. As he sees it, zimzum releases the cosmos into its own momentum. In this re­spect, Singer’s worldview is tragic; it is a kind of Jewish-­pantheistic artist’s metaphysics, like what inspired Schopenhauer and Nietz­sche in the nineteenth ­century:66 The cosmos of pure immanence contains every­thing, good and evil, beauty and horror, happiness and suffering, scientific triumphs and unspeakable misery, suffering and



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crime, Eros and death. But in this cosmos, which Singer sees reflected in the ancient anthropomorphic fantasies of the Kabbalah since time immemorial, modern man is at the mercy of his own fate, but also ­free and creative. The cosmos generates both happiness and suffering, as well as creativity and fate. As Singer explains, this is the condition that makes lit­er­a­ture and art pos­si­ble.

Barnett Newman: Synagogue and Sculpture ­ oday, the painter and sculptor Barnett Newman (1905–1970) is recognized T as one of the leading representatives of abstract expressionism. But this distinction was bestowed upon Newman and his work only ­after experiencing many years of failure, disdain, and hostility from both art critics and the public, which culminated in indignant or disturbed museumgoers in Berlin and Amsterdam destroying several of his monumental yet minimalist, often monochrome paintings, slashing them with boxcutters or knives. Together with fellow artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, Newman formed the highly idiosyncratic North American school of abstract expressionist painting in his native New York. Abstract expressionism, with its anti-­figurative aesthetic and visual idiom that paradoxically combines emotional intensity and artistic restraint, was indebted to early twentieth-­century modern art movements such as expressionism and surrealism, while decidedly rejecting or deviating from the centuries-­long tradition of figurative repre­sen­ta­tion in Eu­ro­pean and North American visual art. In his large-­scale paintings, Newman took the reduction of color and form to an extreme, producing largely monochrome canvases that feature large, monotonous color fields, only occasionally and irregularly interspersed with contrasting lines. Newman’s works have often left many viewers perplexed, particularly in abstract expressionism’s still-­ nascent years. A prime example of Newman’s early large-­format paintings is Day Before One (335 × 128 cm) from 1951, now displayed in the Kunstmuseum Basel. This work consists of an almost monochrome deep-­blue canvas, bordered only at the top and bottom edges by somewhat lighter, narrow blue stripes. The title alludes to a kabbalistic motif and provides the viewer clues to a pos­si­ble interpretation: On the day before the first day of creation, the disparity and formlessness of Ein-­Sof still prevails, symbolized ­here by an almost monochrome blue surface.

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When asked in 1950, during his first solo exhibition in New York, which met with devastating reviews, what he could offer as an aesthetic guideline and interpretive aid to his hermetic paintings, Newman surprisingly gave a religious answer. He said at the time, according to his own recollection in 1967, that his entire aesthetic program was rooted in a blessing from the Passover Seder: “Blessed be thou, O Lord, who distinguishes between the holy and the non-­holy.”67 Known as the havdalah blessing (havdalah means “distinction,” “separation”), it praises God for creating the difference between the holy and the profane, kodesh ve-­chol in Hebrew. This blessing is also recited each week at the end of Shabbat (­after sundown on Saturday) when God is praised for creating a distinction between the holiness of Shabbat and the profane workdays of the week. But if, as Newman explains, Passover falls on a Shabbat, Jews find themselves in a dilemma, divided between the holiness of Passover and the holiness of Shabbat. During moments of this kind of overlap, ­there is an abundance of holiness but no way to distinguish the holy from the profane like in the weekly havdalah. Consequently, the blessing is changed and reads: “Blessed be thou, O Lord, who distinguishes between what is holy and what is holy.”68 Praise is given to God for creating difference, even this entirely untrivial difference between the holy and a dif­fer­ent holy. Newman concludes: “That’s the prob­lem, the artistic prob­lem, and I think the true spiritual dimension of my entire aesthetic.” Three years before his death in 1970, Newman ­here declares that distinction is the comprehensive princi­ple of his art. Distinction is the aesthetic key to Newman’s abstract expressionism and minimalism. The line that divides an other­wise monochrome surface separates and distinguishes two subareas in a painting such as Day Before One. Without this line of distinction, the canvas would appear to be uniformly the same color and thus aesthetically indistinguishable. This painting, unlike paintings of the Eu­ro­pean figurative tradition that prevailed up to the twentieth ­century, does not represent a figurative object from the empirical world, but confronts viewers with a fundamental ele­ment of their own perceptual capacity, namely, their ability to perceive difference by means of a ­simple line on an other­wise monochrome surface. Only this single line marks a difference and enables the viewer to observe a distinction, both epistemically and aesthetically, in an other­wise homogeneous color field. At the same time, the line invites viewers to reflect on distinction as an elementary act of perception.



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It is surprising, however, that Newman refers to a Hebrew blessing to illustrate his key aesthetic princi­ple of distinction. On the one hand, this underscores Newman’s familiarity with Jewish traditions, prayers, and rituals. On the other hand, it explic­itly refers to a spiritual dimension as a foundation for his artistic vision, analogous to the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko, who, like Newman, was the son of Rus­sian Jewish emigrants. Rothko studied rabbinical texts as a boy in the cheder, while Newman’s f­ather, typical of Rus­sian Jewish emigrants, sent him to Hebrew school in Brooklyn, where he learned Hebrew, religion, and Jewish history, as well as employing Jewish tutors to further his religious education.69 Both the aesthetics of distinction and the spiritual grounding in eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish traditions converge in Newman’s artworks that address the concept of zimzum. We can explic­itly observe this combination in his architectural design for a synagogue from 1963 and in two monumental steel sculptures entitled Zim Zum I (completed in 1969) and Zim Zum II (completed in 1985, ­a fter Newman’s death). Since Newman does not name his sources, it is not entirely clear how he became acquainted with the term and concept of zimzum. It is pos­si­ble that he read scholarly lit­er­a­ture on the Lurianic Kabbalah, or perhaps he knew ­actual Chassidic texts. His Hebrew certainly would have been strong enough for him to read such texts in the original. Annalee Newman, his wife of many years and executor of his estate, reports ­after her husband’s death that Newman owned a copy of and read Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. He may therefore have drawn his knowledge of Kabbalah from this seminal book. Annalee Newman, however, denies a deeper involvement with original texts and insists that Barnett Newman used the language of the Kabbalah ­because it was poetic and stimulated the imagination. “He used titles such as Zim Zum as meta­phors.”70 In 1963, Barnett Newman was invited to participate in the exhibition Recent American Synagogue Architecture in New York. For this exhibition, he created a small-­scale architectural model of a synagogue, as well as several floor plans and drawings depicting the design for the building’s interior. ­These plans and drawings include Newman’s handwritten explanations and notations that he added in En­glish and Hebrew. In addition, he included some handwritten programmatic texts that help elucidate the meaning of his synagogue design. This proj­ect, however, was never realized, and the synagogue remains unbuilt.

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The texts related to this synagogue design make it clear that for Newman the synagogue is not simply a ­house of prayer, but a makom, the sacred space where the individual, man or ­woman with equal rights, stands before God. Newman references the ­Temple in Jerusalem, citing the Hebrew term for “­temple”: hechal. Although w ­ omen in this synagogue design are still seated separately from men, as is common in Orthodox synagogues, Newman considers ­women to be equal to men in the makom of the synagogue. They stand, each with their entire spiritual and moral identity in the presence of the Torah and God’s holy name. “Know before whom you stand,” Newman quotes, in a handwritten entry in Hebrew on his drawings, a common inscription for the worshipper in the synagogue.71 In Newman’s design, the bimah for Torah reading consists of a circular elevation in the center of the quadrangular synagogue space, which is closed off on the windowless front side by a wall with a Torah cabinet in front. The rear of the space is also windowless. Along the sides and at the rear of the synagogue, rows of seats rise tribune-­like, enclosing the central bimah on three sides. On both side walls, a continuous fan-­shaped bank of win­dows, without supporting pillars, consisting of glass surfaces lined up almost at right ­angles, forms the boundary of the interior space, constituting nearly the entirety of the synagogue’s side walls. Rather than a uniformly flat surface all fitted together along the same a­ ngle, this massive bank of win­dows is made up of sheets of glass that are angularly broken and pushed together, contracted, like the slats on a monumental sliding glass door. Since ­there are no other win­dows, they provide the sole source of daylight for the synagogue’s interior. In the plan drawings, Newman repeatedly labels this accordion-­like bank of win­dows “Tzim Tzum.” The bank of win­dows appears as if mimicking a straight line that has withdrawn into itself and formed the shape of an angular zigzag line, several meters in height, reaching from the last and highest rows of synagogue seating up to the ceiling. Though Newman offers no additional explanation of the term that he uses in his drawing, we can make sense of this architectural feature in the larger context of zimzum’s reception history, for the light falls through the contracted, angled win­dow front into the dark interior of the synagogue, which Newman expressly calls makom. The dark central space of the synagogue thus resembles, which the photo of the scale model also attests (Figure 30), the empty, dark room and makom in Vital’s description of the zimzum pro­cess, into which the divine light of Ein-­Sof emanates. The synagogue’s makom, the dark interior, is illuminated



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Figure 29. The synagogue as a space of zimzum and the divine shekhinah (God’s indwelling). Barnett Newman, sketch for a synagogue design, 1963. © 2022 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

only by daylight that is restricted and channeled through the contracted win­ dow surfaces. Through this channeling, the light falls on the centrally located bimah, from which congregation members called up read the Torah during Shabbat ser­v ice. Standing before the Torah and God’s holy name, Newman elucidates: “­Here in this synagogue, each man sits [. . .] waiting to be called [. . .] to go up on the mound where, ­under the tension of the ‘Tzim Tzum’ that created light and the world, he can experience a total sense of his own personality before the Torah and His name.”72 The synagogue architecture with its zimzum win­dows and its incidence of light sensually represents and supports the believers’ experience and tension in the face of God’s zimzum, who created light and the world in zimzum and before whom believers stand with all their concentration and tension, with their spirituality and the full sense of their personality.

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Figure 30. Light falls into the dark synagogal space. Barnett Newman, scale model of a synagogue, 1963. © 2022 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Another and more well-­k nown example of Barnett Newman’s artistic preoccupation with zimzum is his monumental steel sculptures Zim Zum I and Zim Zum II. In 1969, Newman was invited to participate in a sculpture exhibition at the Hakone Museum in Tokyo, where he submitted plans for a colossal steel sculpture that ­today bears the title Zim Zum II. ­Because the sheer size of this sculpture made it too expensive and difficult to transport, Newman created a smaller version of it, Zim Zum I, located in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Zim Zum II was not completed in its originally specified size ­until ­1985, after Newman’s death. Zim Zum II stands ­today as a monument to Newman’s sculptural legacy, so to speak. At first glance, the nearly four-­meter-­high steel plates of Zim Zum II, welded together at right ­angles at the edges, bear a strong resemblance to the angularly broken bank of win­dows of the 1963 synagogue design. But ­these monumental, untreated, dark steel plates, in contrast to the glass win­ dows, are not transparent. In fact, they let no light through whatsoever. The steel plates also serve an entirely dif­fer­ent aesthetic function, as their jagged shape monumentally and impermeably limits and cuts through the viewer’s



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Figure 31. Barnett Newman, Zim Zum I, 1969. Steel sculpture, 244 × 184 × 457 cm. © 2022 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

gaze, the incidence of light, and the space as a ­whole. At the same time, ­these steel plates, placed parallel but staggered, create a contained, irregularly ­shaped space between the steeply rising plates that terminate at the same height at their top edge four meters above the ground. Viewers are invited to walk around and in between the steel plates of Zim Zum II. Indeed, the sculpture’s full spatial impression is only fully revealed when you walk on and through it. When viewers step in between the steel walls of the sculpture, they gain a sensory experience of both the limitation and the alignment of the surrounding space through ­these walls. When walking through the sculpture, viewers encounter two open ends, but their space of movement is strictly closed off at the sides; their gait is thus forced to become aligned with the structure. In its monumentality, the sculpture confronts viewers with their own limitedness and finiteness and at the same time blocks the view of what exists beyond the steel wall.

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Figure 32. Barnett Newman, Zim Zum II, 1985. Steel sculpture, 360 × 260 × 610 cm. © 2022 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

For the viewer engaging with the sculpture—­and ­here Newman’s aesthetic princi­ple of distinction comes into play again—­the space is both ­limited and divided by the jagged steel walls. The steel walls thus align to form both an interior space within and an exterior beyond the walls; a vis­i­ble space between and a space outside that one cannot see when standing between the steel panels. A liminal space is created between the steel walls, which would not exist without them, and which is distinguished from the space around the sculpture by the sheer presence of the two parallel walls. The steel walls structure the space by delimiting and aligning it. At the same time, however, the ­free space remains in princi­ple unenclosed. It is closed off between the steel walls only at the bottom by the ground and at the sides, but it is open at the ends, particularly upward, ­toward the sky.



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The sculpture Zim Zum II (as well as the smaller work Zim Zum I) affects perception in a paradoxical way. By delimiting it through the parallel, regularly angled steel surfaces, the sculpture, on the one hand, restricts the perception of space but, on the other, allows a perception of space as space, with directions, an in-­between, an interior and exterior, axes of vision, and visual barriers. In its angular, abstract form, reduced to geometry, the sculpture points the observer to borders and to what may lie beyond borders, to finiteness and infinity, amorphous and structured, ravine and expanse, direction and chaos. Zimzum is called the princi­ple of limitation, which confronts viewers with their own limits and the princi­ples of their personal perception. From a formal point of view, moreover, Zim Zum II expresses the princi­ ple of reduction—­zimzum—in symbolic terms. It is monumental sculpture that extremely reduces its formal language to the simplest geometric figures. Zimzum, understood as a reduction of formal language, is in general the supporting princi­ple of this sort of abstract art. In contrast to Newman’s synagogue design of 1963, the sculpture Zim Zum II is not a work of art with sacral connotations, but it does not preclude the possibility of a religious interpretation. Abstract art produced by artists from the New York School such as Newman, unlike Eu­ro­pean religious art prior to the twentieth ­century, does not explic­itly depict the sacred and the holy. Such works only hint at the transcendent in its irrepresentability, thus rendering a sense of anticipation or even foreboding. Working within the framework of a long tradition of Jewish art, Newman’s works offer a meditation on the prohibition of images found not only in Judaism but also in Islam. Nevertheless, abstract art such as Newman’s, incorporating religious terminology such as zimzum, sometimes in explicit ways, points us as viewers ­toward traces and dimensions of transcendence that can be felt in this world.

Harold Bloom: Zimzum as Trope of Limitation and Radical Meta­phor In the work of literary theorist and critic Harold Bloom, we encounter a literary and essayistic adoption of Kabbalah, and especially zimzum. His Kabbalah and Criticism, first published in 1975, is a collection of essays on literary criticism and poetology. In ­these essays, Bloom investigates the poetics and

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rhe­toric of kabbalistic narratives, concepts, and figures. In ­doing so, the Jewish American literary critic consciously anthropologizes kabbalistic topoi such as zimzum and analyzes them as rhetorical figures of kabbalistic authors, as expressions and phenomena of poetic creativity, rather than as theosophical visions and esoteric teachings. Bloom, as he freely admits, owes his knowledge of the Kabbalah not to reading original kabbalistic texts but to Gershom Scholem, especially the volume Kabbalah, which contains Scholem’s complete articles on the Kabbalah in the Encyclopaedia Judaica.73 Zimzum plays a particularly impor­tant role in Bloom’s book Kabbalah and Criticism. In it, Bloom analyzes zimzum as a literary trope and in terms of its extraordinary poetic expressiveness. First, he praises Isaac Luria as extraordinarily original, indeed he may have been the only visionary in the entire history of Kabbalah whose basic ideas ­were original, since the entire tradition from the Sefer Yezirah through Cordovero is fi­nally only an amalgam, however strangely ­shaped, of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. But Luria had the originality of certain g­ reat poets—­Dante, Milton, Blake—­though since the impor­ tant accounts of his visions are not written by him, but by rival and contrasting disciples, it is difficult to compare Luria’s powers of invention to ­those of other creators.74 Nevertheless, Bloom considers zimzum to be Luria’s original achievement. But he sees it not as an original theosophical, but rather as a rhetorical achievement. He analyzes Luria’s zimzum as a trope of limitation and exile: Kabbalah, if viewed as rhe­toric, centers upon two series of tropes: first, irony, metonymy, meta­phor, and then—­synecdoche, hyperbole, metalepsis. I am speaking of the Lurianic or regressive Kabbalah, but a full treatment of rhe­toric in the Zohar would uncover ­these same apotropaic litanies. Luria and his writing disciples, in their accounts of origins, rely upon two ­great composite tropes, zimzum and tikkun, and upon a connecting concept between ­these, shevirat ha-­kelim, which rhetorically considered is not a trope but a violent dramatization of the pro­cess by which one verbal figure is substituted for another. Zimzum is initially a rhetorical irony for the act



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of creation, in that it means the opposite of what it appears to “say.” It says, “withdrawal” and means “concentration.” God withdraws from a point only to concentrate Himself upon it. The image of His absence becomes one of the greatest images ever found for His presence, a presence which is intensified by the original meta­phor of mezamzem, His holding in of His breath.75 As this quotation illustrates, Bloom interprets zimzum as an ironic trope: God’s “withdrawal” in zimzum actually stands in for his “concentration,” and God’s absence from the empty space in his center while concentrating around that center is a very power­f ul image for his intense presence: the empty center created in zimzum, the absence, is at the same time the form of God’s concentrated presence surrounding that center. But zimzum is more than an ironic trope for concentrated divine presence in absence; it also serves as a precondition of God’s creative activity. Bloom contends that “creative contraction,” self-­limitation as a precondition of God’s creative activity: “If we move out of theosophy into poetry, what is the equivalent of this creative contraction? What does it mean to transform the Lurianic zimzum into a trope-­of-­limitation?”76 This question leads Bloom to a theory of poetics: “To begin with, it means a loss-­in-­meaning, even an achieved dearth-­of-­meaning.” Poetry must satisfy this desire to overcome emptiness, meaninglessness, and suffering. In other words, language and writing sublimate absence and limitation. Translated into psychological and even theosophic terms, zimzum is a trope of limitation. Bloom explains further: “In psychic terms, I would add that this means we are confronting a pro­cess of imagistic limitation that arouses a series of defenses-­of-­limitation: reaction-­formation, undoing, isolation, and regression, culminating in sublimation. Zimzum fi­nally then is God’s ­g reat sublimation of His own Presence, of His declaration ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‘I ­Will Be Pre­sent Wherever and Whenever I ­Will Be Pre­sent.’ ” 77 With a nod to Scholem’s speculation, Bloom determines that the Kabbalah is a doctrine of exile, in par­tic­u ­lar the Lurianic Kabbalah, which emerged in the wake of the murderous expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. Zimzum is this trope of limitation that explains the concentrated presence of God despite an apparently more glaring world of exile, an exile world for whose evils God takes no responsibility, ­because he withdrew from it at creation. But God did not allow this world to fall, for he embraces it. Bloom continues:

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We can say that Zimzum, as a composite trope of limitation, became the ultimate trope of Exile, or the ultimate psychic defense of exiled Jewry. Through Zimzum, God defended Himself from responsibility for unmerited evil, and for the sufferings of His ­people. Solomon Schechter said that the Kabbalists confronted “an awful alternative—­the dread of confusing the creature with his Creator, and the dread not less keenly felt of the horror vacui or a Godless world . . .” Zimzum, as a radical meta­phor, intervened between t­ hese alternatives, but at the price of deconstructing an over-­determined tradition. This destruction, unlike certain con­temporary ventures in that mode, was accomplished by considerable anxiety. Indeed, I am about to go against Kabbalistic tradition, by suggesting that Zimzum was God’s anxiety. God had breathing trou­ble, and this trou­ble created the world.78 It is not incumbent on us to share Bloom’s conjectures about zimzum as theodicy, and we ­w ill prob­ably recognize ­little of Luria or Chayyim Vital in such anthropomorphic conjectures about God’s breathing prob­lems. We can also problematize the arbitrariness of such interpretations, although we know now that zimzum has experienced many arbitrary interpretations through the centuries. In Bloom’s interpretations, zimzum is a polyvalent poetological figure, at times breathtaking. It encompasses a trope of limitation and exile, a meta­phor of exile, and a meta­phor of presence through absence and of God’s breathlessness. For his part, we can be sure that Harold Bloom would at any time and eloquently defend his interpretations of zimzum as a “creative misreading,” an idea that forms an integral component of his rhe­toric and poetics. In his famous essay “The Necessity of Misreading,” which appears at the end of Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom claims that all reading is misreading, for ­there is no correct kind of reading. Reading the Kabbalah means “misreading” the Kabbalah. The main ­thing is that the misreading must be creative. Bloom has no patience for fear of the arbitrary.

Ulla Berkéwicz: The Void Ulla Berkéwicz’s 1997 story Zimzum provides an example of a literary implementation of the concept of zimzum. In this story, six friends, including the



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nameless narrator, three men, and three middle-­aged ­women, professionally established and with no familial attachments, spend a vacation together on a Spanish island. They smoke, eat, drink, screw, sigh, and slur their words. They are plagued by emptiness, meaninglessness in the prosperity of their upscale existences, without ­children, without commitments, without real hardships, but also without goals, with only aging, illness, and death as a distant horizon. Boredom, insomnia, drunkenness, and despair are their companions at night, while obscenity, libidinousness, and cynicism are their companions during the day. The feeling of bleakness and emptiness envelops them with its omnipresence. The narrator relates: The third friend returns to the subject of boredom. [Boredom] is the preliminary stage of emptiness, the one friend continues. [. . .] Emptiness, says one friend, full and fat. Emptiness full of empty particles, says the other friend and pulls his red-­haired girl back to her chair by her short skirt, ghost particles, clouds of quarks and antiquarks, three hundred photons per cubic centimeter, eight hundred neutrinos, electrons, positrons, muons, gluons, femions, leptons, mesons, nucleons, bosons, hardrons. The emptiness devours, the redhead screams and jumps up again, the ­great devouring, ­here! she screams and beats her chest. Sit down, says the friend, yanking his redhead by the skirt. Emptiness, he says, is boundless—. The emptiness was ­there in God himself from ever and ever, says the one friend with her head in her hands— —­and contains without limit all that exists, which arises and passes away without limit, says the friend, drinking and grabbing his redhead by the knee. —­Not apart from him and not caused by him, says the friend, holding her head in her hands. Creation is the manifestation of emptiness, says the friend, pushing his hand between the redhead’s thighs, the nothing in nothing, he says and takes his glass with the other hand and drinks. [. . .] Every­thing distracts from emptiness, slurs the girlfriend, lifting her head from the ­table, she holds it steady and drinks. Drinking, she slurs, eating, wishing, wanting. Jerking off, the girlfriend cries, sitting on the edge of the chair, bobbing up and down.79

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The group of friends passes their days, eve­nings, and nights with conversations such as this about emptiness and nothingness. In between ­these conversations, when she is alone, the narrator repeatedly recalls her Jewish grand­mother who survived Theresienstadt, a toothless old ­woman she grew up with. The grand­mother had told her about zimzum, not long before her death: “Sit down,” she said, lifting the crooked index fin­ger. “I’ll explain something to you,” she said. “He,” she had said, lifting the crooked index fin­ger above her head, “made all ­things out of nothing, and that same nothing is himself, and where He himself is no more, ­because He has withdrawn himself into himself, is where we are. “He,” she said, “made zimzum, He contracted himself within himself to make space for us, empty space. But when He withdrew, a ­little of his gold dust got stuck within our four walls, Hallelujah! And now,” she said, her index fin­ger had sunk into her bedspread, “now, my kinderlekh [­little c­ hildren], now it’s a ­matter of blowing into the dust so that it spreads around, the rest is shmontses [nonsense], Amen.”80 In Berkéwicz’s narrative, however, all that remains of the grand­mother and a sense of Jewishness in the barren pre­sent are fragments of memory, a bit of Theresienstadt. The only remnant of zimzum is the emptiness, all that is left of the gold dust to which the grand­mother refers is the saturated senselessness ­under the Spanish sun. God withdrew into nothingness and cleared space for the world. What remains of the act of creation, within the narrative at least, is eating and drinking, base desires, and the emptiness: I’m hungry, says the girlfriend, her head in her hands. With hunger and thirst and sexual desire, the good Lord inoculated man against emptiness, and afterward he washed his hands and irrefutably pissed himself, says the doctor friend and scratches himself all over.81 ­ umans are left only with the vague happiness in the quick satisfaction of H their drives and the eternal repetition of this fleeting satisfaction, with boredom and the weariness of prosperity, which the narrative unfurls before the reader in ever-­changing variations. The book ends abruptly with the com-



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pletely gratuitous stoning of an el­derly prostitute as beer ­bottles are thrown at her in a public square during happy hour in the bright neon light. It appears to be the result of an excess of sheer boredom for anything to happen at all. And the six friends sit back and idly watch while this ­woman is killed. Happy hour in an infinite loop. With Zimzum, Ulla Berkéwicz holds up a mirror, striking and drastic, to the world of affluence devoid of meaning. The evacuation of meaning is the leitmotif of her story of six middle-­aged affluent German friends on holiday. The reader finds the story intends nothing more, nor do the nameless characters reveal anything more. Luria’s zimzum, like the Jewish grand­ mother who survived Theresienstadt, is only a reminiscence of times gone by, when ­people surely had prob­lems other than the emptiness of meaning. The word zimzum appears only in the story’s title and in the grand­mother’s words. Other­wise, this world of emptiness is godforsaken.

Christoph Loos: ZimZum (Aspen Wood, Steel Frame, Gauze, Light) In the 1990s, the works of the sculptor, painter, and object artist Christoph Loos (b. 1959) demonstrate a par­tic­u ­lar fondness for wood as a medium. Wood is nature. At the same time, in ­human hands, wood is a common companion in building and the shaping of the ­human world. Wood can be ­shaped in many ways. The tree trunks and types of wood that Loos works with each have their own grain and structure, brittleness and rigidity, color, and smell. Wood can absorb ­water, and when it encounters ­water and ice, its consistency and color changes. In times of ecological and environmental awareness such as our own, wood plays an impor­tant role and reminds us of external nature, just as ­water does. Even in the soft, pliable aspen wood that frequently appears in his installations, Loos situates wood and its connection to and reflection of the natu­ral world in visual confrontation with glass, neon light, gauze, and metal, all products of ­human ingenuity. For example, we see ­these ele­ments all come together in his installation ZimZum.82 The installation ZimZum consists of a steel frame four meters high, two and a half meters wide, and two and a half meters deep, with smooth whitish gauze stretched between the high steel corner posts on the sides and the back from the base to the ceiling. The front remains open to the viewer’s gaze. The square top of the steel framework is filled with untreated aspen

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Figure 33. Christoph Loos, ZimZum (2000). Aspen wood, steel framework, gauze, light, 400 × 250 × 250 cm.

wood boards that are joined together without gaps. A few centimeters from this ceiling and invisibly attached to it hang three large, hollow, funnel-­or goblet-­shaped vessels made of aspen wood. Distributed unevenly within the installation’s ceiling, t­ hese vessels appear to float just below the surface. ­These thin-­walled, round vessels, ­shaped like chalices without a base, are not several pieces of wood joined together as one might initially expect, but have been sawed, hollowed, planed, and sanded all in one piece from the same aspen trunk. None of the three hollowed aspen goblets looks quite the same as the ­others. Upon investigation, we see that each vessel has its own individual shape. Each inhabits a dif­fer­ent place ­under the square ceiling of aspen boards, at unequal distances to the side bound­a ries of the installation’s ceiling. What the three goblets have in common is that they are intact and unbroken vessels with no holes or cracks. In all the goblets, invisible to the viewer who can only see the installation at an ­angle from below due to its height, a neon tube shines intensely



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from the inside of the goblet to the ceiling of the installation. As a result of the distance of only a few centimeters between the circular upper edge of the goblets and the ceiling, the viewer only sees light falling from below in the shape of a halo from the space in between. The neon light inside the goblets creates an intense, bright circle of light on the ceiling, but also diffuses subdued indirect light onto the gauze walls and the interior of the installation, which has a warm, yellowish tone ­because of the natu­ral color of the aspen wood it reflects. The installation has no other source of light and gains no illumination from the outside. Only the intense brightness of the circles of light that emerges from in between the ceiling and the round upper openings of the goblets allows a somewhat dampened light to shine down into the semi-­dark space. The space of the installation between the gauze panels is only diffusely illuminated by the residual light that falls from the minute interstitial space between the ceiling and the wooden vessels. At the same time, this intense light, which penetrates between the wood of the goblets and the ceiling, is immaterial, in contrast to the wood. As an intense glow and immaterial substance between the goblets and the ceiling, it visually fills the scarce space between the two and optically connects the goblets and the ceiling through this light. At the same time, however, this immaterial light also reveals a material distinction between the wood of the goblets and the wood of the ceiling. The wooden vessels and surface of the ceiling are optically connected by the glow of light, but also remain separated by the light, so that the goblets, connected only by the light, seem to float ­under the ceiling in the space of the installation. The light, whose source the viewer cannot see from below, as it is not pos­si­ble to determine ­whether it shines from the vessels or from the ceiling, connects the three chalices with the ceiling, above with below. At the same time, the halo of light also marks a distance, a crucial difference between above and below. Optically, the space and the space below are connected by light, though also remain separate and distinct. The installation ZimZum was first shown as part of an exhibition of Christoph Loos’s work entitled ZimZum in Reutlingen, Marburg, Iserlohn, and Siegburg from 2000 to 2002. In the exhibition cata­log, Wendelin Küpers interprets the installation’s diffusely illuminated space within the gauze-­steel framework as a “place of the world’s coming into being,” to which the mythical, mystical title ZimZum refers, a conscious connection to the Lurianic Kabbalah. For Küpers, the space of the installation symbolizes the dark, empty Lurianic primordial space of tehiru, as Gershom Scholem describes

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it. Sparks of the emanating divine light fall into the dark space of tehiru. In the cosmogonic pro­cess following zimzum, light emanates from God, which first forms vessels (Hebrew: kelim) into which the divine light pours and fills them up. At some point, however, the vessels can no longer contain the intensity of God’s light. They break, and the shattering of the vessels (Hebrew: shevirat ha-­kelim) upsets the good divine order in a cosmic catastrophe. The forces of evil and wickedness are released into the cosmic primordial space before our earthly world is even created. The cosmic rupture of the vessels thus enables evil to be realized and emerge as the source of ­human suffering ­after the creation of our earthly world. Only tikkun olam, the healing of this rupture of the vessels and cosmic chaos, can at some point in the ­f uture overcome evil and redeem the world.83 Christoph Loos himself does not comment on the meaning of ZimZum, but he is presumably familiar with the ideas of zimzum of the breaking of the vessels from Scholem’s works, as he selected Küpers’s interpretation as the authoritative guide in his exhibition cata­log. If Küpers’s very plausible interpretation is correct, and we are to interpret the wooden goblets of ZimZum as vessels that catch the emanating divine light, Loos’s installation captures a certain moment of zimzum and Lurianic cosmogony, a detail that Küpers does not mention. This is the moment between the primordial act of zimzum, where tehiru, primordial emptiness, and the dark space in God, as well as the vessels for receiving the divine light, already exist and the breaking of the vessels that ushers in cosmic disorder and the inception of all evil. In Loos’s sculpture, the wooden goblets are intact and undamaged. They appear thin and fragile, but they are still intact and filled to the brim with divine light. This is the zimzum before the ­g reat rupture and catastrophe: the intact cosmic order between the first contraction of Ein-­Sof and catastrophe, a mythical and mystical space before the creation of our world, in which divine light still mysteriously and promisingly shines.

Anselm Kiefer: The Breaking of the Vessels—­Without Eschatology More than any other prominent con­temporary artist, Anselm Kiefer has made the Kabbalah a central point of departure in his body of work. Since the late 1980s, he has incorporated motifs from the Lurianic Kabbalah in



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paintings and sculptures of sometimes overwhelming size and material tactility. Inspired by the depiction of Jewish mysticism in Gershom Scholem, whose books he had studied intensively since the early 1980s, making countless annotations,84 Kiefer created numerous paintings, sculptures, and even concrete structures inspired by kabbalistic concepts completed in his longtime workshop in Barjac, France. Kiefer’s works draw on ideas from Merkabah mysticism (“chariot mysticism”) of late antiquity, including the “heavenly palaces” through which the mystic ascends to the throne of God. They also visualize themes such as emanation, the ten sefirot from the Zohar, and the “tree” of sefirot that can be found in illustrations in the works of Christian kabbalists such as Robert Fludd. The ­actual focus, however, is on motifs from the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, such as zimzum and the breaking of the vessels, which Kiefer’s works repeatedly reflect, meditate upon, vary, and visualize. “Gershom Scholem. I was in Israel in the early 1980s, I was in Jerusalem several times. I was very involved with Scholem, and in Scholem’s work Luria appears very strongly,” Kiefer explained in a 2009 interview, when asked who had introduced him to Isaac Luria’s world of ideas.85 The accumulation of kabbalistic and especially Lurianic motifs in Kiefer’s work since the late 1980s, initiated by Scholem, is even more astonishing ­because the kabbalistic tradition’s own iconography and visualizations ­were hardly known ­until Yossi Chajes began collecting and analyzing prints and paintings of sefirotic “trees” and other kabbalistic diagrams (Ilanot) in his ongoing “Ilanot Proj­ect” since the 2010s.86 Anselm Kiefer, apart from a few illustrations of the “Tree of Life,” creates his own imagery of kabbalistic ideas without recourse to any kind of kabbalistic iconographic template. Harold Bloom therefore pays tribute to Kiefer, who left the Catholic Church ­after a strictly Catholic upbringing, as an original “kabbalistic iconographer” all his own.87 Luria’s cosmogony has fascinated Anselm Kiefer for more than two de­ cades. He is well acquainted with the three-­step arc of creation and redemption that begins with zimzum and shevirat ha-­kelim, the breaking of the vessels, culminating in tikkun. However, he has no religious belief in tikkun or even in a coming of the Messiah. Kiefer denies a pos­si­ble ­f uture redemption of the world from chaos, evil, and suffering that was initially caused by the breaking of the vessels. “For me ­there is no eschatology.”88 In his works, ­there is no indication or occasion for the optimism of pro­gress in the existing, arguably imperfect world. Instead, emanation, cosmogony, the flow of becoming, and the breaking of the vessels continue unstoppably,

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imperfectly, and senselessly. Kiefer’s art reflects in many broken ways how the artist stands witness to and is an inhabitant of a world characterized by senselessness, absurdity, and unredeemedness. God is no longer involved in this fate of the world, nor does he bear any responsibility for it. As Kiefer interprets Isaac Luria, God has withdrawn into himself through zimzum, leaving ­behind a nothingness and an empty space. He thus enabled the rupture of the vessels and allowed evil to come into the world, but he is not its cause: “Isaac Luria has an easier time justifying theodicy ­because, according to him, God did not create the world, but only allowed it. [. . .] Evil is ­there where God has withdrawn. Isaac Luria’s system is ingenious in that it admits evil in itself. Evil does not dwell in God, but outside of God. Evil comes into being only through his withdrawal; it was not ­there before. Isaac Luria’s cosmogony becomes a dualistic concept, but originally it was nothingness. In Isaac Luria’s depiction, it begins with a nothingness, i.e., with an empty space.”89 Like Hans Jonas, Kiefer maintains that ­after zimzum takes place, the course of the world finds itself without further divine intervention. God no longer intervenes in world events and world history in the wake of his act of zimzum. Theodicy succeeds ­because God cannot be held responsible as creator for the evils in the world. But Kiefer goes a step further than Jonas. In zimzum, God steps back from his role as creator and quite passively makes way for a self-­creating world: “Luria has a completely dif­fer­ent conception of the origin of the world. With Luria, unlike all other phi­los­o­ phers and theologians, ­there is no God, Gaya or other being that creates the world. The world creates itself, and God allows this, withdraws himself, so that the world can create itself.”90 Zimzum and the autopoiesis referred to as creation, including self-­ creation and self-­activity of the extrasensory and sensory world, relieve God of responsibility for the world’s evils. The precondition of God’s exoneration is his withdrawal in zimzum and subsequent inactivity, his nonintervention in the further course of the world, his absence from cosmogony and history. In this way, Kiefer implicitly exonerates God, as we saw in the case of Hans Jonas, from the responsibility for the historical disaster of the Shoah, a subject that occupied Kiefer intensively throughout his artistic ­career, particularly in his early work, and in his references to Paul Celan’s poetry in many of his paintings. The evils of the world—­w ickedness, suffering, and the vio­lence in history—­a re made pos­si­ble by the breaking of the vessels created by zimzum. God also does not bear any responsibility for the breaking of the ves-



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Figure 34. Anselm Kiefer, Breaking of the Vessels, 1990. Lead, iron, glass, copper wire, charcoal, 380 × 350 × 150 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. © Anselm Kiefer.

sels in the empty space ­after zimzum. In Kiefer’s view, God only pours out his pure grace on the ten sefirot created in the empty space. As vessels, however, the sefirot are no match for the excess of divine grace: “In Isaac Luria’s conception of this pro­cess, God pours his grace into the sefirot, into his creation, half of which cannot stand it and breaks in a moment; it is created in such a way that it cannot hold up. [. . .] ­There is no correlation between the grace that God emits and the vessel that is to receive it. The vessel breaks.”91 In Kiefer’s works, fallen shards, broken glass, and splintering lead illustrate what is broken ­after the vessels break.

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Alongside numerous works thematizing the sefirot, the motif of shevirat ha-­kelim appears to fascinate Anselm Kiefer the most. He incorporated this concept into several paintings and sculptures, all mediations on the same theme. Breaking of the Vessels, a monumental sculpture mea­sur­ing 380 × 350 × 150 cm and weighing over seven tons, comprises a monumental bookcase filled with approximately thirty patinaed metal folios stacked next to each other on rows of shelves one on top of the other. Large shards of glass are tucked between the metal “book” pages of ­these folios, and a sizable amount of broken glass is strewn on the floor in front of the sculpture. The bookcase is crowned by a semicircular, unbroken pane of glass attached to the top of the metal shelf, bearing the inscription “Ain Soph” written several times in black paint. On both sides of the shelf, three almost planar pieces of metal protrude from the shelflike signs, which display the Hebrew names of the sefirot, rendered in Latin letters. Completed in 1990, this impressive sculpture uses broken glass to symbolize the breaking of the vessels and the metal shelf to symbolize the Tree of Life, whose branches are formed by the ten sefirot. Ten years ­later, in the fall of 2000, an exhibition of six of Kiefer’s enormous 9 × 5 m paintings, titled Chevirat Ha-­Kelim, was held at the Chapelle de la Salpêtrière in Paris ­under the French title Le Bris des Vases. The title of the exhibit was in clear reference to the kabbalistic rupture of the vessels and again dealt with Luria’s depiction of creation, which Kiefer interpreted in an interview on this exhibition: Creation is explained as the result of a paradoxical condition, meaning that God does not need creation at all. Christian scholasticism and philosophy have never been able to explain why God created something as flawed as our world, which ­really is grotesquely imperfect. The creation legend that the Kabbalah describes, which I take up, tells us, on the other hand, that the world did not come into being out of nothing, but that God withdrew from creation so that it could develop freely. Creation is therefore not active, but passive; it does not take place in the light, but rather in the darkness.92 This exhibition, only a single example of Kiefer’s sustained interest in ­these themes, documented how the Lurianic themes of zimzum and shevirat ha-­ kelim have significantly advanced Kiefer’s artistic output since about 1990 and have been a component of the cosmos of his work since then.93 Kiefer, like



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Scholem, his guide and source of inspiration, understands and refers to zimzum and shevirat ha-­kelim as images and symbols.94 Also like Scholem, he treats the concepts of the Lurianic Kabbalah as creation myths and “Jewish my­thol­ogy.”95 Kiefer understands ­these pro­cesses as a real, physical event. In complete contrast to what we have seen throughout this study in the kabbalistic ruminations of Chayyim Vital, a literal interpretation remains completely out of Kiefer’s purview, ­because he does not regard the Lurianic Kabbalah as ecstatic, visionary, divinely inspired knowledge of the cosmic pro­cess of creation. Instead, Kiefer views it as a mythological origin story and a Jewish myth, as opposed to mystical vision and revelation. His paintings and sculptures visualize and materialize zimzum and shevirat ha-­ kelim as invisible, original cosmic pro­cesses that cannot be represented, ­because they are images and symbols of an event that we can only grasp in myth and art. Kiefer adapts Lurianic motifs as symbols and myths that complement other myths and symbolic worlds that appear in his work. While Kiefer’s work was initially characterized by an examination of Germanic my­thol­ogy and its abuse in the hands of National Socialism, and many critics to this day often view his output only in terms of Kiefer working through the myths and vio­lence of Nazi ideology and the Shoah,96 biblical figures and symbols have increasingly appeared in his paintings since the mid-1980s. But in addition to the Edda, the Bible, and the Kabbalah, themes from Greek my­thol­ ogy, the Epic of Gilgamesh, alchemical traditions, and Egyptian my­thol­ogy have also appeared in his oeuvre since about 1990. Myths as narratives of origin, cosmic myths of creation and the origins of the world have made up an impor­tant leitmotif in Kiefer’s work of the past three de­cades.97 ­These myths represent the connection between the earthly and divine worlds. At the same time, they illustrate how we can identify catastrophes and imbalances of the divine order throughout earthly history as chaos and vio­lence. The shattering of the vessels is a quin­tes­sen­tial example of the transformation of the original order into vio­lence and chaos. Shevirat ha-­kelim explains the evil and vio­lence of the earthly world, the shards symbolize the breaking of the original divine systems. Kiefer’s painting-­sculpture Shevirat Ha Kelim, exhibited in London in 2009 and mea­sur­ing a monumental 330 × 760 × 1300  cm, made of terracotta, acrylic, oil, and shellac, depicts in the foreground the corner of a flat pyramid, painted in perspective. The pyramid’s stone steps and cuboids break open at this corner. In front of this breaking point in the m ­ iddle of the

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Figure 35. Anselm Kiefer, Shevirath Ha Kelim, 2009. Terra cotta, acrylic, oil and shellac, 330 × 760 × 1300 cm. © Anselm Kiefer.

painting, large shards of broken clay vessels lie scattered in the exhibition space, as if they had been blasted out of the painting, marking a transition from the two-­dimensionality of the painting to the three-­dimensionality of the sculpture. Kiefer explains that his painting-­sculpture looks “as if an explosion had occurred. This corresponds to Isaac Luria’s conception: ­There is too much grace, it is overflowing and therefore explodes the w ­ hole. The shards are hurled into the space [of the gallery].”98 Kiefer’s best-­k nown depiction of zimzum is his 1990 painting Zim-­Zum, now in the possession of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The painting mea­sures 380 × 560 cm, with a relief-­like structure that gives it a tactile, almost three-­dimensional character. On a ground of horizontally joined rectangular lead plates, which are tinted in certain spots in dif­fer­ent shades of gray and brown, Kiefer works with shellac, oil, acrylic, ash, chalk, and canvas. In the center of the lower half of the painting that is twice the height of two average ­people, located at eye level, an almost smooth, shiny surface of lead protrudes like an almost semicircular hump from the other­ wise flat ground of horizontally layered lead panels. This shiny protuberance pierces a roughly rectangular area of canvas on which slightly jagged and irregular grooves or furrows, colored grayish white by ash and chalk, radiate from the edge ­toward the center of the upper edge of the rectangle. ­These



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Figure 36. Anselm Kiefer, Zim-­Zum, 1990. Acrylic, emulsion, chalk, shellac, ash, and canvas on lead, 380 × 560 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © Anselm Kiefer.

grayish-­whitish furrows, which from a distance are reminiscent of the snow-­ covered furrows of tilled land in Kiefer’s Siegfried vergißt Brünhilde (Siegfried Forgets Brünhilde, 1975), are pierced in the ­middle by the shiny round hump and seem to be pushed aside by it, giving the impression that the hump in the ­middle has pushed the radiating furrows away through its elevation in the ­middle of the piece. However, the viewer can also construe the furrowed, grayish-­white surface in retreat from the hump all around, making room for it, leaving its shiny silvery surface ­free and thus vis­i­ble to the viewer. In any case, the two-­dimensionality of the painting gives way to three-­dimensionality through the tactility of the relief-­like surfaces of lead plates and canvas and through the curvature of the hump, thus acquiring the dynamics of a pro­ cess of movement that is comparable to a sculpture. Above the protrusion at a height of about three meters, Kiefer has carved the name of the painting Zim-­Zum in large cursive letters on a layer of lead. This inscription gives direction to the painting’s interpretation but does not in any way detract from its enigmatic character: the enormous 3.8 m × 5.6 m under­ground and background surfaces composed of differently tinted areas and layers of lead may symbolize an undefined gray-­blue sky, the surface of an undulating, gray-­blue sea, or even fissured layers of the earth’s interior. ­There is something indeterminate about them; they are a background that

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moves within itself. In the foreground, we find a flowing dynamic between the silvery rounded protrusion, which we might associate with the belly of a pregnant ­woman or a phallus, and the gray-­white furrowed structure of ash, chalk, and shellac on canvas, where ash symbolizes the material and the transient and lead is a symbol and ele­ment of the liquid and mobile. The viewer cannot resolve the enigmatic character of this painting into a certain sense or in any direction. This is presumably also not intentional, since according to Kiefer’s understanding, zimzum is only a symbol for a mysterious intra-­divine event that has always eluded ­human observation. In this re­spect, the painting Zim-­Zum confronts the viewer with the paradox of artistically sensualizing an esoteric yet cosmic event that has always been invisible, making it almost tactilely perceptible h ­ ere and now. Only the dynamics are clear. In this painting, we can observe something happening, something is in motion, something is emerging. Zim-­Zum. It is larger than life, aesthetically overwhelming the viewer. In 2005, Anselm Kiefer summed up what fascinates him about zimzum: “I have been preoccupied with Isaac Luria’s zimzum for twenty years. It is a very abstract pro­cess, an intellectually stimulating and intense pro­cess: the idea of withdrawal from which something emerges.”99 We can certainly identify an intensive pro­cess taking place in the painting Zim-­Zum. And we can perhaps elucidate the dynamic between the shiny protuberance and the furrowed structure in pondering what for Kiefer constitutes the fascination, the quintessence, the idea of zimzum: zimzum is the withdrawal from which something emerges. Zimzum fascinates Kiefer not only as a cosmic pro­cess and but also as an object of artistic repre­sen­ta­tion. Kiefer is interested in how we explain and interpret a work of art and its creation. Once again, he makes a connection to Luria’s zimzum. By analogy, microcosmically so to speak, we can apply the idea of withdrawal, from which something new emerges, to the paint­er’s creative output. In the speech he delivered when he received the Wolf Prize in Israel in May 1990, Kiefer compares the emergence of a painting with the pro­cess of zimzum: “The emergence of the image, as I understand it, is analogous with Isaac Luria’s tsim-­tsum [. . .] the space vacated by Ain-­Soph, in which the world unfolds as a materially unfinished, on-­going pro­cess. In its failure (and it always fails), the image allows the greatness of what it cannot achieve to shine forth.”100 According to Kiefer’s aesthetic, the work of art itself is that very space that the divine abandons, in which the unfinished and the preliminary are able to materialize. In its permanent state



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of failure, art, in its action and material results in all their preliminarity and imperfection, has a referential character. Art, always provisional and transitional, allows something to emerge and be illuminated precisely in its failure, an emergence that art cannot represent ­under the conditions of earthly limitation and imperfection. The work of art, like every­thing earthly, is the result of a withdrawal from which something emerges. Art is and points to the trace of contraction without attaining the magnitude, nevertheless creative, b­ ecause something new always arises from this withdrawal.

Conclusion

The Anthropology of Zimzum

Actualizing the Kabbalah In the twentieth c­ entury, many of the configurations, permutations, and uses of the concept of zimzum, especially ­those we have seen in the world of visual art, illustrate a tendency to translate zimzum from the divine into the ­human sphere, from a mystical, theological context into an anthropological one. Given this trend, we might best consider this phenomenon in terms of a humanization, even an anthropologization, of zimzum. It is not only God who withdraws into himself to make room for the world, to bring forth creation, and to allow ­things to take their course. ­Human beings can also retreat, limit, and concentrate themselves to create new ­things, to leave space for other individuals, or, in ecological terms, to afford nature an opportunity to thrive without ­human interference. ­Human beings, created in God’s image, require a ­human version of zimzum. They need concentration, withdrawal, and tranquility so that they may actualize their creativity, assist ­others in tapping into their creative energies, or retreat to make more leeway for the natu­ral world. The divine act and pro­cess of zimzum has always been a model of creativity. God, who is an infinite being at the origins of the world, becomes a creative creator by withdrawing and concentrating himself within himself. By withdrawing and concentrating himself in this primordial act, he engenders a space where the nondivine, the finite, the other, the new, the strange, the diverse, and the manifold can take shape. In short, his contraction forms a space in which the world can exist. Diversity emerges from the pro­cess of zimzum that the infinite Absolute One initiates. God’s zimzum and the creation of the world also offer a model for earthly creativity. Kabbalistic ideas related to the interplay between zimzum and emanation outline a model of



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God’s creativity that we can apply to ­human artistic creativity. In this way, we see creativity as the interaction between the tension and the relaxation of ­human abilities in body, mind, and spirit. The pro­cess of a ­human version of zimzum can unfold in space, in time, or even in the ­human mind. In terms of space, ­human zimzum can designate a withdrawal from the frenetic buzz, the hustle and bustle of the city, into the countryside, into peace, meditation, and retreat from the outside world. In terms of temporality, zimzum can refer to moments in life that are characterized by silence and stillness, which ideally alternate with periods filled with fierce, hectic productivity. In ­mental or psychological terms, we can personally experience zimzum in the everyday interweaving of minutes and hours of contemplation with workday productivity. Not just writers but also man­ag­ers and competitive athletes need both contraction and release, both tension and relaxation, if they are to engage successfully in the constant creation of something new, overcome new hurdles in the long run, and remain efficient in the pro­cess. For an athlete, unchecked tension and stress lead to cramping and injury; for a man­ag­er or business leader, relentless activity without reflection can lead to a heart attack or other stress-­related health prob­lems; and for an artist, this kind of imbalance results in repetitive motion that drains creative energy and innovation. It comes as no surprise that the kabbalists also conceived of zimzum as a pro­cess of creatio continua, the preservation of the world through permanent re-­creation. If we anthropologize this model, we find that we can only maintain ­human creativity in the long run through the interplay between concentration and letting go, self-­limitation and self-­ transcendence, through contemplation and productive output. If we take this model of ­human zimzum seriously, we ­will find that we ­ought to abandon the conception of creativity and productivity that seeks endless, permanent increase in per­for­mance, effort, work, and output at the expense of deceleration and reflection, downtime, holidays, and vacation. Sheer and uninterrupted increase, purely infinite productivity without breaks and without zimzum, ends in burnout and in the sterility of ideas that are mere repetition without innovation. In contrast to the culture of the workaholic, where quantity is worshipped at the expense of quality, confusing purely quantitative productivity for creativity, the divine pro­cess of zimzum, when viewed through an anthropomorphic lens, offers a welcome alternative, an alternate model of ­human creativity. It is the idea of retreat and inward-­looking disconnection from outside distractions out of which something new emerges, as Anselm Kiefer has illustrated.

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At the same time, anthropologizing zimzum by transferring it from God to man is by no means a religiously illegitimate enterprise. When literary scholar Harold Bloom suggests that we read and understand zimzum as a “trope of limitation,” this perspective implies that in their writings the kabbalists anthropomorphically attribute a ­human conception and linguistic framework to the zimzum of God, or, to quote Ludwig Feuerbach, they proj­ ect it onto God. To speak and write of divine zimzum necessarily entails writing about zimzum in the expressive par­ameters and figures of ­human language. We also speak and write about the zimzum of God within the limits of h ­ uman imagination. Living speech is always anthropomorphic. The kabbalists themselves ­were well acquainted with this pitfall in all ­human speech about God. ­There are good reasons why Sarug, Herrera, Ergas, and even the phi­los­o­pher Hans Jonas doubt that ­humans as finite beings can conceive of what happened before the creation of the world and fully comprehend the possibility that zimzum literally and realistically took place. They therefore regard zimzum and its description as necessarily anthropomorphic, speculative, and all-­too-­human figures of speech in relation to a numinous event marking the origins of the world. They describe zimzum as a ­human way of speaking (Sarug), as meta­phor (Herrera), as myth (Jonas), as trope (Bloom), or as a symbol, as we see in the case of the Kabbalah scholar Scholem. The language of finite beings—­such as we ­humans—­has its limits. In this re­spect, ever since the first generation of Luria’s disciples, ­there has been a recognition of the prob­lem of the figurative aspect of all ­human speech, as well as a discussion of the anthropomorphic character of all speech related to God and zimzum. ­After all, the anthropomorphism of all speech about God had always been a topic in rabbinical Judaism, repeatedly attacked by Jewish phi­los­o­phers such as the ­great Maimonides. According to Maimonides, in the tradition of the negative theology of the Christian scholastics and the Arab phi­los­o­phers of the ­Middle Ages, ­human beings cannot access positive knowledge of God. They know only that he is, not what he is. They know that he exists, and they know that ­because of his transcendence and otherworldliness, he cannot resemble the earthly and finite being of man. When the Bible portrays God with ­human attributes and passions, that is, anthropomorphically, this is only for the sake of ­simple and ignorant believers. Phi­los­o­phers and scholars, however, know that even the Bible describes God anthropomorphically. Maimonides devotes the entire first section of his principal philosophical work The Guide for the Per-



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plexed (1190) to the distinction between the anthropomorphism of biblical discourse of God and philosophical knowledge of God. Frum Jews, however, have no difficulties at all with this anthropomorphism. It is not God who has h ­ uman features, but h ­ umans who have divine features, since God created man in his image. Many kabbalists consider imitatio Dei to be the noblest task that the pious can undertake. It is ­humans who are imperfect, capable only of an imperfect emulation of their divine model and his commandments. It therefore comes as no surprise that the modern anthropologization of zimzum gains real steam in the devotional movement of Chassidism. Dov Ber of Mezritch used to urge the most pious Chassidim to withdraw ascetically from the materiality of the earthly world. According to his view, abstinence from the world, which entails withdrawal into fasting and prayer, is the only means for arriving at devekut, the ­human soul’s rapturous contact with and mystical “attachment” to God. In retreating from the material world, the Chassidic believer becomes so much like God that his soul can ascend to him. This parallel between divine and ­human withdrawal, divine and ­human zimzum, remains a feature of rabbinical Judaism even in the twentieth ­century, and not only in isolated Chassidic circles. The French rabbi and phi­ los­o­pher Marc-­Alain Ouaknin, who made a name for himself not only as an interpreter of the Bible and rabbinical texts but also as a critical reader of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, pursues this anthropologization of zimzum in an almost paradigmatic way, with deep knowledge of the Lurianic Kabbalah. Ouaknin invokes it in his 1992 book Tsimtsoum: Introduction à la méditation hébraïque, where he discusses Chassidism with a focus on Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: “It is Chassidism, and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in par­tic­u­lar, who transferred the concept of zimzum from a cosmogonic to an ontological-­existential dimension,”1 Ouaknin writes. Even in Isaac Luria’s portrayal, he argues, zimzum on the cosmogonic level was the princi­ple of a “being in motion” that left ­behind the princi­ple of identity to make room for the otherness of ­others and the otherness of oneself: “An image. God withdraws from Himself into Himself to leave room for the Other, for creation and the creature.”2 Through his withdrawal in zimzum, God creates a space of “in-­between,” a distance and separation between creator and created, thus enabling a correlation between the “down-­here-­below” and transcendence. Zimzum enables alterity and thus a separation (havdalah) between God and the world, “I” and the Other, as well as “I” and “I,” which makes any totality impossible. Ouaknin brings Luria and Levinas, specifically his

338 Conclusion

1961 Totality and Infinity, into conversation: Zimzum transcends any totality, for in zimzum God loses his own totality and becomes transcendence. “Le Tsimtsoum, c’est l’impossibilité de toute totalité.”3 Between the error of nirvana, that is, the total inclusion of ­human existence in divine being, and the error of pantheism, that is, the annulment of the divine in the total immanence of the earthly or nature, zimzum allows the difference between the terrestrial world and transcendence to remain insurmountably open. Zimzum, however—­and ­here Ouaknin invokes the anthropologization of zimzum in Chassidism—­not only maintains the difference between God and the world, but also the difference between the self and its other, its environment, and even its inherited religious tradition. According to the humanization of zimzum in Chassidism, Ouaknin argues, we must understand zimzum si­mul­ta­neously as an ontological, existential, anthropological, and so­cio­log­i­cal princi­ple: “Le Tsimtsoum est donc à la fois ontologique, existentiel, anthropologique et sociologique.” 4 ­After his book’s introductory passages, Ouaknin arrives at his primary concern, which is already clear from its title: The humanized zimzum of Chassidism enables “Hebrew meditation.” This Hebrew meditation, an idea that Ouaknin developed and introduces ­here, is a daring mixture of unorthodox Chassidism and French deconstructivism that was fash­ion­able in 1992 when the book appeared. It consists of an associative, daring rereading and reflection of the sacred writings of Judaism—­the Bible, the Talmud, Midrash, the Zohar—­freed from learned traditions and compulsive study. This meditative rereading is based on the intimate and inextricable combination of rabbinical learning and associative meditation. The peculiarity of this meditative learning, in fact, relies on Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in its desire to break ­free from the framework of old, outdated, and regimented rabbinical learning and its overly determined interpretive traditions. According to Ouaknin, zimzum plays a key role in this, for Rabbi Nachman calls upon the pious to discover ever new layers of meaning in the sacred texts beyond the rabbinical traditions and to give them new meaning in the perpetual pro­ cess of rereading. Given the im­mense corpus of rabbinical scholarship of past generations and the extent of its exegetical lit­er­a­ture, this is a presumptuous undertaking and only succeeds if the pious individual ceases learning and repeating the accumulated learned knowledge of past centuries, ­either reducing or ignoring it altogether. For this purpose, Ouaknin cites one (and only one) passage from Rabbi Nachman’s Sichot Charan (§ 266f.), which he refers to as Nachman’s “manifesto”: “If someone wants to give new meaning



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to words, he must make a zimzum in his mind, i.e., create emptiness, and not rush to long known preliminaries, which only cloud his mind and are not necessary for renewal. He must act as one who knows nothing, and only then can he progressively introduce new interpretations. The one who wants to introduce new interpretations of the Torah may renew and interpret what­ ever he wants, what­ever he can renew through his spirit, on the condition that he does not introduce new commandments.”5 Ouaknin uses this single passage from Rabbi Nachman’s Sichot Charan as the starting point of his reflections, and he uses it to legitimize a “deconstructionist practice” of associative and unorthodox rereading and meditation on traditional Jewish texts. He calls for innovation through zimzum, renewal and discovery of new layers of meaning in ancient texts through reduction of learning and the radical restriction of consideration of preexisting traditional rabbinical interpretations. This is a legitimate course of action, Ouaknin maintains, if the reader-­interpreter remains halakhically observant and the practice does not affect the immutable mitzvot of the Torah. Ouaknin propagates a new reading of the ancient texts that is innovative precisely ­because it limits the preoccupation with time-­honored patterns and practices of interpretation. This new, innovative reading and meditation of the ancient texts takes place in the original Hebrew, which is why Ouaknin calls it “Hebrew,” rather than “Jewish” meditation. In ­doing so, Ouaknin also proposes a completely ­free use of texts, words, even the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the holy names of God in the Torah, whose forms he describes associatively in alphabetical order.6 By deliberately and intentionally reducing the textual tradition and the repetition that is traditionally such an impor­tant component, the reader is ­free to assign the Holy Scriptures continuously new significance and associate them with fresh, self-­determined meaning. Ouaknin thereby characterizes Hebrew meditation with the help of the sort of untranslatable puns so popu­lar in French deconstructivism: this meditation offers a method of joyful, laughing, uninhibited reading to the point of delirium (“lire aux éclats” in allusion to “rire aux éclats”). Reading and delirium (“lire” and “délire” is the French pun) are merry ­sisters in a meditation that seeks to induce the sacred language to dance in its signifiers, keeping it permanently in motion, so that the reader partakes in the unending generation of meaning (“signification”). In the pro­cess, this generation of meaning makes almost arbitrary use of the possibilities of the Hebrew language: the arbitrary rearrangement of words and letters and the numerical values of letters generates new significance, as do the new and

340 Conclusion

in­ven­ted etymologies or the magical evocation of individual letters in the Hebrew names of God. Ouaknin even claims that this Chassidic-­inspired, si­mul­ta­neously joyful, pious (the reading of the sacred texts is required), and freely associative form of meditation has a therapeutic dimension: Hebrew meditation is “bibliothérapie,”7 therapy through the reading of the Bible and other texts, continued meaning-­making for the fragile modern Jewish existence following Chassidism. At the same time, Hebrew meditation is liberating, unfinished, quotidian, and unhampered by tradition. It is also the inspired, not definitive but infinitive (“infinitif ”), unfinished, nontotalitarian reflection and renewal of modern Jewish existence by means that prac­ti­tion­ers themselves derive from the tradition of the ­People of the Book: ever new forms of reading, learning, and the creation of meaning as a specific mode of Jewish existence. Zimzum, which Ouaknin understands existentially and anthropologically, ignites all this, making it pos­si­ble in the first place. We also find praise for a ­human incarnation of zimzum beyond the specific methodology that the postmodern rabbi Ouaknin advocates. In 1974, the well-­k nown North American Reform rabbi Eugene Borowitz, in what was at the time a sensational essay entitled “Tzimtzum: A Mystic Model for Con­temporary Leadership,” called for rabbis and other religious leaders to limit their power and spiritual dominance in religious communities, analogous to the divine zimzum, for the purpose of making room for the initiative and spirituality of ordinary congregants.8 Leadership should not be given up completely, but should be withdrawn on a case-­by-­case basis, so that, for example, individual congregation members can bring their own prob­lems (which are not the rabbi’s) as well as their own spirituality into congregational life and ser­vices without being overwhelmed by the rabbi’s claim to leadership, power, ideas, and organ­ization. The idea ­here being that less leadership and spiritual dominance can produce a richer, more humane spiritual experience in congregational life. In short, this is an example of a Reform rabbi who anthropologizes zimzum with the best of religious intentions. Translated into po­liti­cal terms, Borowitz’s message is that relinquishing the exercise of power enables and encourages ­others to pursue their own creative potential. We see just how current this endeavor has become in liberal Judaism in the January 2010 issue of the North American liberal Jewish monthly Sh’ma, devoted entirely to the subject of zimzum. In this issue, the contributors not only recall and reinterpret Borowitz’s classic essay, but they also explore the



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significance of the zimzum model in other areas of ­human life. Professor of psychiatry Doreen Seidler-­Feller reminds us that the therapeutic setting of Freud’s classical psychoanalysis requires zimzum, the almost total verbal and gestural restraint on the part of the analyst, which allows only the patient to express his uncensored and unhindered thoughts, feelings, associations, and dreams, and even to transfer them to the analyst. But even in less “orthodox” forms of psychotherapy, such as c­ ouples or f­amily therapy, Seidler-­ Feller asserts, zimzum is an effective and necessary therapeutic stance: the therapist’s intentional reticence allows ­couples and parents to express and reflect on their fears, compulsions, and obsessions, rather than being overwhelmed, dominated, and infantilized by the therapist’s behavioristic advice and instructions for actions that simply cover up such negative experiences. Parents, Seidler-­Feller argues, must learn to exercise a kind of zimzum ­toward their ­children. As indispensable as parental commitment is in the upbringing of growing ­children, it is equally impor­tant that parents at some point step back from their commitment and overcommitment and practice restraint, which enables ­children to form their own differentiated identity that their parents recognize. Zimzum ­here means learning to let go and to sense the difference between letting go and dropping. In zimzum, God releases the world without dropping it. He is still pre­sent, responsive, and attentive, but he lets go. Ideally, this is what parents should do with their ­children and what therapists should do with their patients.9 ­Children and patients can always return, if necessary, but the act of relinquishing in the pro­cess of zimzum constitutes a necessary step in child-­rearing and psychoanalysis. Letting go is not abandoning but rather allowing a child or patient the space to attain full self-­actualization. Another essay in the same issue of Sh’ma, titled “Tzimtzum and Executive Leadership,” by Israeli entrepreneur Yosef Abramowitz, describes the importance of zimzum as a form of self-­retraction in Abramowitz’s personal experiences as an entrepreneur and chief executive officer (CEO). Abramowitz emphasizes the importance of a CEO’s self-­restraint, which allows employees the space to develop proactively and execute their own proj­ects in­de­pen­dently. In his portrayal, the CEO thus withdraws to the role of facilitator and adviser. This empowerment of employees’ own initiative, according to Abramowitz’s account of his experience in the business world, was successful whenever his team was willing to learn, be responsible, and develop creativity.10 It is in­ter­est­ing to note ­here that, as Borowitz’s case illustrates, divine zimzum only provides the theological model and the foil for a

342 Conclusion

novel, quite earthly conception of leadership and ­human resource management. The executive man­ag­er holds back to allow the team more room for creativity and self-­initiative. The permanent, power­f ul omnipresence of the rabbi leads to a culture of passive consumption in the community, while the permanent presence and authority of the boss and his ideas devolve team members into passive recipients who carry out ­orders and stifle their own initiative and creativity. For example, the U.S. economist Adam Grant has shown in recent empirical studies that companies that demand particularly high levels of initiative from their employees operate most profitably when man­ag­ers cultivate a reserved, somewhat introverted management style. The more self-­restraint that the boss exercises, the better employees can develop their ideas and the more profitably the com­pany ultimately operates, when its employees can defuse conflicts and engage in complex problem-­solving, provided, of course, that employees ultimately exercise their freedom wisely and develop according to their own sense of initiative. However, restraint on the part of the boss is contraindicative if employees are not intrinsically motivated and only work when ordered to do so.11 The management model whereby the man­ag­er acts with restraint, however, can also function perfectly well even when the boss or employees know nothing about zimzum. Adam Grant had never heard of it ­either. The same is true of successful psychotherapy or participatory community leadership through leadership restraint. Thus capitalism, according to Max Weber, also functions according to its own rules and regulations, even when t­ here is no Protestant work ethic driving market participants to accumulate capital instead of squandering profits, as was the case, for example, in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Dutch mercantilism. ­Here on earth, conditions and ­people operate according to their own laws. But obviously God’s zimzum, when known and understood as a model of earthly action, can motivate ­people to imitate it and imbue their actions with higher meaning and purpose. Above all, however, even p­ eople without religious conviction can benefit from zimzum as a kind of thought experiment or configuration that is even more plausible when viewed as the cumulation of the life experiences and worldly wisdom of centuries of mystical, theosophical, and philosophical speculative thought and spiritual emotion. Or zimzum can serve as a thought-­provoking impulse for a pos­si­ble understanding of God and the world.



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The examples from psychotherapy and management that I discussed above refer to a fundamental aspect of social ontology that Michael Theunissen has often pointed out: The self-­retraction of the ego makes it pos­si­ble for the Other to unfold.12 In this context, the ego’s self-­retraction as an act of ­human freedom first opens a new space of freedom for the ego itself. Its freedom is not an endlessly expansive movement forward, nor the overpowering and progressive enslavement of the world, its resources, and other ­people for one’s own purposes, nor is it the freedom of consumerism or “­free citizens demand ­free travel.” Rather, freedom is realized in social-­ontological zimzum by the fact that the “I” initially holds back, keeps open ­free spaces and options from which it may choose. The “I” in zimzum withdraws from the imperatives of “higher, faster, further,” from the dictates of perpetual activism or the leisure industry. In its reclusiveness, it draws enjoyment and meaning not from more but from the concentration and intensity of less. Zimzum of the ego creates space and time for the Other, the contingent, not controlled or caused by the ego, for moments of passivity, rest, concentration, for vita speculativa instead of the permanent vita activa. In his speculative reflections on the contraction of the indifferent Absolute as the condition of becoming and development, space and time, nature and world, Schelling already pointed out in his day and age that the contraction of the Absolute not only allows the emergence of something other than the Absolute but also affects and changes the Absolute itself: The indifferent Absolute becomes the living God only through zimzum. Translated from Schelling’s speculative metaphysics into the social-­ontological, the self-­retraction of the “I” changes and expands the space, freedom, and development of the Other, but it also changes the “I”: it does not have to overwhelm and dominate the Other, but instead opens itself to recognition of and dialogue with the Other. In this re­spect, that ­free space opened to the Other by the self-­retraction of the “I” is the forum for a culture and philosophy of dialogicity, as Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923) once prominently presented it. Fi­nally, tolerance and willingness to compromise presuppose the ability and the ­will to retract the self, its interests, and worldview. This is the social and po­liti­cal side of a zimzum of the “I.” As Manfred Voigts has demonstrated, compromise and the culture of compromise fell into disrepute in the twentieth ­century, the ­century of global civil wars and the anti-­liberal ideological division of the world into us versus them, friend versus foe, which was, for figures such as Carl Schmitt, the essence

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of politics.13 Compromise, however, is the po­liti­cal gesture that makes it pos­si­ble for vari­ous interests or parties to weigh out conflicts of interest, differences of opinion, competition for ­limited resources, and the search for solutions, all in a peaceful manner through mutual concession. In such a pro­ cess, individuals must balance their interests with ­those of ­others. Compromise is just as inconceivable without limiting, restricting, and withdrawing one’s own interests and claims as it is without recognizing o­ thers, their interests, needs, opinions, and claims. If we conceive of zimzum as a withdrawal out of which something new arises, then in po­liti­cal terms, compromise can function as something positive that arises from an act of restraint or contraction. A real compromise is never a losing proposition for all parties involved, but a peaceable, constructive resolution of real antagonisms and conflicts. If love of peace can be the driving force ­behind compromise as a form of conflict solution, this would hardly be the worst justification for the self-­restraint of zimzum. Avishai Margalit has emphasized that the ability to arrive at a compromise through self-­restraint and the pos­si­ble renunciation of power does not, unfortunately, protect us from “rotten” compromises, which we would be wise to avoid. Rotten compromises are arguably a pos­si­ble risk of moral and po­liti­cal judgment. Margalit nevertheless argues for the importance of compromise for the sake of peace, even if that peace comes at the expense of justice.14 If zimzum, the withdrawal of one’s own claims to justice, makes peace pos­si­ble, then the renunciation of conflict resolution through sheer physical force and vio­lence is also pos­si­ble. The mystics, be they Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, in their asceticism and unworldliness, ­were always among the ­silent and peaceful ones, for they knew all too well that war is a sin, the death of spirituality, the end of ­every vita speculativa and of the meditative ascent of the soul into the heavenly spheres. ­After all, restraint and reservation prevail over both earthly and celestial forces. Let us not forget the strand of the Lurianic Kabbalah that regards God’s zimzum as a voluntary act of limitation of divine omnipotence. Vital and Sarug and generations of kabbalists ­after them warn that an excess of divine light and energy destroys finite creatures. An excess of divine light and power leads to the destruction of the vessels, shevirat ha-­kelim, to a cosmic catastrophe, the gateway through which evil, calamity, and devastation passed into the created worlds. Following this line of thought, the Chassid Shneur Zalman of Lyady developed his theory of gradations of zimzumim (in the plural), each of which reduces the outflow of divine energy



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into the earthly world in such a way that the world is not destroyed by the impact of divine omnipotence on finite earthly vessels and creatures. The view of zimzum as a reduction of divine omnipotence usually entails the conviction that even divine omnipotence is destructive and dangerous to the fragile finite world. Not to mention earthly po­liti­cal or military omnipotence. The Lurianic Kabbalah and Chassidism are not alone in their skepticism of God’s absolute power. We also encounter this idea in Christian theology. In a parallel to kabbalistic thought, phi­los­o­pher John Duns Scotus outlines a distinction between God’s potentia absoluta and his potentia ordinata, wherein God must retract his original, absolute, arbitrary freedom, his potentia absoluta, during the creation of the world so that he may arbitrarily create this or any other world. He must limit and introduce order to his potentia absoluta through his potentia ordinata that he may rein in the vast, but also potentially destructive potentia absoluta. God thus limits his omnipotence and subjects it to a peacekeeping power that binds itself to the order of the world. In ­doing so, God limits his destructive omnipotence to a loving, responsible power that provides organ­ization to the universe. Within the historical context of National Socialism, which had at the time only recently been vanquished, Karl Barth emphasizes in his 1947 Dogmatik im Grundriß (Dogmatics in Outline) that God is not power unto itself, that is, he is not potentia. Power in and of itself is evil, Barth declares, quoting Jacob Burckhardt. Rather, we should comprehend “the Almighty God” of the Christian creed as potestas, legitimate power founded in law.15 Like Duns Scotus, Barth does not believe in the limitless, arbitrary omnipotence of God and maintains that power, without being restricted, governed, and bound to law, is the root of evil. In the Lurianic Kabbalah of Joseph Ergas and the Chassidism of Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the potential danger of God’s omnipotence and the resulting necessity for limiting it through zimzum are wholly justified, even if only in terms of physics. The creature, God’s creation in its finiteness and fragility, cannot withstand the absolute vio­lence and energy of divine omnipotence and would be destroyed by it without zimzum. Therefore, the reduction of divine omnipotence in zimzum is sine qua non. As Karl Barth understands it, the reduction of divine omnipotence has a moral foundation. What is common ­here is the conviction that omnipotence is inherently destructive. If we ­were to take this idea from theology and apply it to the po­ liti­cal realm, the concept of zimzum has ­g reat critical potential. Po­liti­cal

346 Conclusion

power, such as a superpower with an omnipotence that is not subject to a ­legal body larger than itself, is destructive and therefore particularly dangerous. In this case, international law and the international community must take responsibility for reducing or hindering a state’s omnipotence by binding it to the ­legal system. In ­legal terms, po­liti­cal theology affirms that not only God’s omnipotence but also the state that aims at po­liti­cal supremacy wields destructive power and must therefore be curtailed by international law. Jürgen Moltmann critically takes up Barth’s distinction, turning his attention specifically to ecol­ogy. In his primary systematic theological work Gott in der Schöpfung. Ökologische Schöpfungslehre (En­glish translation: God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God), published in 1985, Moltmann makes repeated, overt reference to the kabbalistic concept of zimzum. Even God’s decision to become a creator prior to the ­actual creation of the world is, according to Moltmann, a form of “self-­limitation” in that God makes this specific choice, pursuing this decision among innumerable possibilities.16 In making this choice, God first makes himself creator through zimzum. Citing Barth overtly and Duns Scotus implicitly, Moltmann asserts that the self-­limiting act of God’s ­will in his choice to become creator is an act of potentia dei absoluta, but in turn limits it eo ipso: God ­wills himself as creator in an act of self-­restraint, thereby committing himself to one out of infinite possibilities. The step of divine freedom from possibility to real­ity, God’s choice within himself to be creator, is itself an act of self-­ restraint. Only ­after making this choice does God become essentially the creator of the universe. To create the world, Moltmann continues, an act of zimzum is necessary, but in this instance, it is another zimzum. For without zimzum, God’s externality in his eternal omnipresence, an outside that exists outside of God, is inconceivable. This (second) zimzum is, according to Moltmann with reference to Scholem, a “retreat” (Einkehr) within God,17 who through this zimzum creates a godless space within himself, in which not only creation, but also sin and death become pos­si­ble. As Moltmann understands it, God regains this space eschatologically through the combined powers of the Trinity, in other words, through the creative functions of the Holy Spirit and the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son.18 Moltmann’s recourse to such unusual Protestant theology of creation, clearly inspired by the Kabbalah, is motivated by the environmental crisis, which the buzzword “environmental pollution” cannot even begin to sum-



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marize. Moltmann’s central concern is an apocalyptic crisis for all life on the planet through progressive exploitation and the irreversible destruction of nature and humanity. Moltmann bases his diagnosis on the Club of Rome’s alarming report entitled The Limits of Growth (1972) and The Global 2000 Report to the President (1980).19 He denounces what he sees as a practiced nihilism in dealing with nature and asserts that the near ­f uture ­will see a strug­gle in creation between life and death. The task and course of action of an “ecological doctrine of creation,” the German subtitle of Moltmann’s book, must entail a reconceptualization of the ecological crisis that threatens the planet and all of humankind. As Moltmann argues, we can no longer afford to conceive of “nature,” as the modern natu­ral sciences have successfully suggested and accomplished, as an aggregate of resources that exist solely for our scientific and technical exploration, which can be dominated and exploited without limits. The violent, unending exploitation of nature ­will spell destruction for our planet, as we fail to see or disregard limits to expansion. The alarmed, threatened population of the world must once again cultivate the concept of “nature” as ­limited “creation” that we must learn to re­spect. Planet Earth is not simply “nature,” this nature is God’s creation. God is pre­sent within this creation and intrinsic to it. God exists in the world, and the world post-­zimzum exists in him. The thrust of Moltmann’s argument is to dismantle an old theological preconception: humankind is not the crown of creation. The world was not created expressly for ­humans; rather, ­humans ­were created within it. Creation is and remains God’s domain, on “loan” to ­humans only for a certain amount of time.20 ­Humans therefore have no right to exploit it and destroy it beyond all mea­sure. We might be tempted to dismiss Moltmann’s plea for enacting limitations on the exploitation and destruction of the natu­ral world as apocalyptic eco-­alarmism of the 1980s, but in the last forty years, we have observed the Club of Rome’s warnings about the limits and dangers of expansive growth confirmed before our very eyes. The looming climate catastrophe precipitated by global warming, which w ­ ill lead to forced migration, poverty, misery, and death for millions of ­people, is already an evident consequence of the destruction of nature and the practiced nihilism in dealing with it. Blind faith in the ideology of economic growth, the neoliberal delusion of the self-­ healing powers of the market, and the ruinous competition for profit-­driven world marketability at the cost of social standards can no longer even rhetorically conceal the progressive destruction of the planet and humankind

348 Conclusion

by globalized capitalism. Never has the vio­lence of the exploitation and destruction of the planet, of natu­ral resources such as air, soil, and ­water, on a global scale been more excessive than ­today. Never have the ecological and ­human consequences of the fantasy of omnipotence to subjugate the earth with the assistance of the natu­ral sciences, technology, and the economy been a graver threat. In this re­spect, Moltmann’s cautious theological plea for an ecological conception of creation, which points to the finitude of all ­things created and the necessity for ecological self-­restraint, has lost none of its relevance. Zimzum, ­human self-­restraint in response to the use and abuse of natu­ ral resources, is an ecological imperative ­today, theological overtones aside. Hans Jonas’s “ecological imperative” that stipulates that we should “act so that the effects of [our] action are compatible with the permanence of genuine ­human life”21 is not pos­si­ble without ­humans exercising reasonable self-­ restraint with the earth’s natu­ral ele­ments and resources. But imperatives are instructions intended to guide action. Zimzum equates to inactivity and quietism neither in the celestial world of Ein-­Sof, nor in the terrestrial world of ­humans. Ecologically responsible self-­restraint as one of the options for action is not the renunciation of action, but rather the responsible, active, productive choice of a dif­fer­ent course of action, one that allows new ­things to continue to emerge and makes it pos­si­ble for the ­people on this planet to live in health, freedom, and dignity. Even God, as kabbalists, artists, theologians, and phi­los­o­phers imagine him, does not always use all his power and possibilities. He remains creative and ­free for this very reason. Zimzum is a figure of cosmic restraint. When intensified and refracted through an anthropological lens, zimzum is also relevant as a pro­cess that could inspire ­human activity, particularly in politics and ecol­ogy. As Robert and Edward Skidelsky have recently done in their book How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life (2012), we ­humans have ­every reason to eschew the fetish of uninterrupted, destructive growth in industrial socie­ties. Or as Harald Welzer paves the way in Selbst denken (Think for Yourself  ), we could advocate a new type of maturity and responsibility in consumer be­hav­ior that voluntarily renounces the nonsense of con­temporary consumerism.22 None of this, however, necessarily requires zimzum as a spiritual or intellectual superstructure or master narrative. Zimzum as a conception of both cosmic and ­human restraint, creative retreat, and concentration on the essentials, can, but n ­ eedn’t, culminate in the organic grocery store.



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In fact, by investigating more than four hundred years of reception history and analyzing ever new, productive permutations in Jewish and Christian intellectual history and culture, this study illustrates that zimzum is, at its core, a figure of change and transformation. Restraint, self-­limitation, withdrawal, and concentration of the One establish the conditions necessary for the Other to emerge. An Other that is not determined in its otherness by the One, but rather emitted, released, and relinquished into the freedom of Otherness. I would like to conclude this book with the following gesture: I withdraw and leave it to my readers to arrive at new, dif­fer­ent interpretations and ways of understanding zimzum, God, and the origins of the world. My telling of the story of zimzum ends ­here, and I invite readers to conceive and reconceive anew this fascinating concept of a productive and creative transformation in spirit and ­matter through the conscious, intentional retraction of the self that creates space for the new and the other.

Appendix A

Sources on Zimzum: Texts, Art, and M ­ usic chapter 1 Chayyim Vital (1542–1620): Sefer Ez Chayyim (MSS, from 1572ff.; first print, Korets, 1782); Sefer ha-­Derushim (MS, 1620; print, Jerusalem, 1996) Joseph Ibn Tabūl (ca. 1545–­?): Drush Chefzi Bah (MS, ­a fter 1576; print, Jerusalem, 1921) Moses Yonah (second half of the sixteenth ­century): Sefer Kanfei Yonah (Lemberg, 1884) Israel Sarug (?–­a fter 1606): Limmudei Azilut (MS, ca. 1590–1600; print, Munkacz, 1897)

chapter 2 Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­w itz (1566–1619): Shefa Tal (Hanau, 1612) Menachem Asariah Fano (1548–1620): Yonat Elem (MS, before 1600; Amsterdam, 1648) Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591–1655): Sefer Novelot Chokhmah (Basel, 1631) Naphtali Bacharach (first half of the seventeenth ­century): Emek ha-­Melekh (Amsterdam, 1648) Abraham Cohen de Herrera (1564–1635): Puerta del Cielo (three MSS; abridged print, Madrid, 1987; full print, Vicenza, 2010) Isaac Aboab de Fonseca (1605–1693): Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim (Amsterdam, 1655; reprint, Warsaw, 1864)

chapter 3 Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689): Kabbala Denudata (Sulzbach, 1677 and 1678; Frankfurt am Main, 1684) Henry More (1614–1687): Opera omnia (London, 1674–1679; reprint, Hildesheim, 1966) Anne Conway (1631–1679): The Princi­ples of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy Concerning God, Christ and the Creatures (London, 1692; Cambridge, 1996) Joseph Raphson (?–ca. 1713): De spatio reali (London, 1697) Johann Georg Wachter (1673–1757): Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (Amsterdam, 1699; reprint, Stuttgart, 1994) Johann Franz Budde (1667–1729): Introductio ad Historiam Philosophiae Ebraeorum (Halle, 1702; reprint, Hildesheim, 2004)

352

Appendix A

Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770): Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 2, (Leipzig, 1742; reprint, Hildesheim, 1975) Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782): Genealogie der reellen Gedancken eines Gottes-­ Gelehrten (MS; print, Leipzig, 2010); Öffentliches Denckmal der Lehrtafel einer weyl. Wirttembergischen Prinzessin Antonia (Tübingen, 1763; reprint, Berlin, 1977); Theologia ex idea vitae deducta (Herrenberg, 1765; reprint, Berlin, 1979) Clemens Brentano (1778–1842): Romanzen vom Rosenkranz (MS, ­a fter 1802; print, Frankfurt am Main, 1852; reprint, Darmstadt, 1968)

chapter 4 Nechemiah Chayon (ca. 1665–ca. 1730): Oz le-­Elohim (Berlin, 1713) Joseph Ergas (1685–1730): Shomer Emunim (Amsterdam, 1736) Immanuel Chai Ricchi (1688–1743): Yosher Levav (Amsterdam, 1737; reprint, Krakow, 1879) Moses Chayyim Luzzatto (1707–1746): KL’Ch Pitchei Chokhmah (MS n.d.; Warsaw, 1888)

chapter 5 Dov Ber of Mezritch (1704–1772): Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov (Korets, 1781; reprint, Jerusalem, 1976) Schneur Zalman of Lyady (1745–1812): Likkutei Amarim. Tanya (Slavita, 1796; reprint, Vienna, 2000/2008) Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1810): Likkutei MoHaRaN (ca. 1805/1806; Warsaw, 1923; Bnei Brak, 1964)

chapter 6 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819): Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza (Breslau, 1785) Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854): Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (1810); Die Weltalter (1811–1815) Franz Joseph Molitor (1779–1860): Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1827); vols. 2–4 (Münster, 1834–1854) Franz von Baader (1765–1841): Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1851–1860) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831): Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (ca. 1820; Leipzig, 1971)

chapter 7 Salomon Maimon (1754–1800): Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte (2 vols., Berlin, 1792/1793; reprint, Hildesheim, 2000) Peter Beer (1758–1838): Geschichte, Lehren und Meinungen, 2 vols. (Prague, 1822–1823) Adolphe Franck (1809–1893): La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des hébreux (Paris, 1843)



Texts, Art, and Music

353

Isaac Misses (1802–1883): Zafnat Paneach. Darstellung und kritische Beleuchtung der jüdischen Geheimlehre, 2 vols. (Krakow, 1862–1863) Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891): Geschichte der Juden von den Anfängen bis auf die Gegenwart, vol. 9 (Leipzig, 1866) Mordechai Teitelbaum: HaRav MiLadi UMifleget ChaBaD, 2 vols., (Warsaw, 1910–1913)

chapter 8 Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929): “Urzelle” zum Stern der Erlösung (MS, 1917; print, Kleinere Schriften, Berlin, 1937) Else Lasker-­Schüler (1869–1945): Das Hebräerland (Zu­rich, 1937) Yehuda Ashlag (1885–1954): Sefer Talmud Eser ha-­Sefirot mi-­Ha’ARI (Jerusalem, 1937) Hans Jonas (1903–1993): Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main, 1987) Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1993): “The Cabbala and Modern Man” (MS, ca. 1976) Barnett Newman (1905–1970): Synagogue design (1963) and two sculptures entitled Zimzum I and Zimzum II (1969 and 1985) Harold Bloom (1930–2019): Kabbalah and Criticism (New York, 1975) Jürgen Moltmann (b. 1926): Gott in der Schöpfung. Ökologische Schöpfungslehre (Gütersloh, 1985) Ulla Berkéwicz (b. 1948): Zimzum (Frankfurt am Main, 1997) Christoph Loos (b. 1959): Sculpture ZimZum (1999/2000; cata­log edited by Karin Stempel, ZimZum. Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Holzschnitte, Cologne, 2000) Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945): Painting/sculpture Zim-­Zum (1990, Washington, D.C.); Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter. Anselm Kiefer im Gespräch mit Klaus Dermutz (Berlin, 2010) Steffen Krebber (b. 1976): ­Music piece entitled “zimzum” (debuted in Cologne and Amsterdam in 2010 and is performed by a computer-­controlled microtonal organ; https://­w ww​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­Ff YsMG​-­HucI)

Appendix B

Four Hundred and Fifty Years of Zimzum Diffusion Key: Each box contains an author’s (or artist’s) name and, if exactly known, the year their Zimzum publication/art appeared. Jewish authors are indicated by boxes with square corners. Christian authors are indicated by boxes with rounded corners. Each arrow connects, if known, an author/source to the authors (or artists) it inspired. Design: Etty Lassman and Elisabeth Schulte 2010/2014 and Christoph Schulte 2022

1900

1800

1700

Newton

1600

More

Brucker 1742

Rosenzweig 1917

Molitor 1834

Vital 1572–1620

Bloom 1975

Newman 1963/69

Ashlag 1937

Ouaknin 1992

I. B. Singer 1976

Graetz 1866

Misses 1862/63

Nachman Bratslav 1805/06

Shneur Zalman Lyady 1796

Teitelbaum 1913

Jonas 1984

Ibn Tabūl ca. 1576

Dov Ber Mezritch 1781

Luzzatto 1732

Chayon 1713

Franck 1843

Ricchi 1737

Ergas 1715–36

Bacharach 1648

Delmedigo 1631

Beer 1822/23

Kiefer 1990–2010

Scholem 1916–82

Loos 1999

Schelling 1810–15

Maimon 1792/93

Oetinger 1763/65

Leibniz

Moltmann 1985 Berkéwicz 1997

Habermas 1971

Fano 1600–1620

Luria

Knorr v. Rosenroth 1677-84

Horowitz 1612

Jacobi 1785

Wachter 1699

Budde 1702

Conway

Aboab 1655

Herrera

Sarug 1590–1606

C. Brentano 1852

Lasker-Schüler 1937

Baader ca. 1835

Hegel 1820–30

Goethe

Raphson 1697

Spinoza

Yonah

Notes

introduction 1. ​Even Yosef Avivi, who, in an overwhelmingly comprehensive three-­volume work, endeavors to reconstruct, arrange, and or­g a­nize the beginnings of the Lurianic Kabbalah, its texts and its teachings, chronologically and according to its publication history, based on all existing manuscripts and prints by Luria and his pupils between 1570 and 1770, to advance the ipsissima verba of Luria and the au­then­tic core of his doctrine, must, in the absence of Luria’s own handwritten manuscripts (extant manuscripts that Luria actually penned contain only commentaries on the Zohar and the meaning of the prayers), admit that his reconstruction rests on the rec­ords of Luria’s pupils; see Yosef Avivi, Kabbalat Ha’ARI. Kabbala Luriana, vol. 1 (The Lurianic Writings U ­ ntil 1620 [in Hebrew]) (Jerusalem, 2008), v–­viii and 77. 2. ​Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York, 1975), esp. “Kabbalah and Criticism,” 51–92. 3. ​Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, 1989), esp. 280–285. 4. ​Ronit Meroz describes the conflict between loyal faithfulness to the original in the rec­ords of Lurianic transmissions and kabbalistic innovation among Luria’s direct pupils; see Ronit Meroz, “Faithful Transmission Versus Innovation: Luria and His Disciples,” in Gershom Scholem’s “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism”: 50 Years ­After, ed. Peter Schäfer and Joseph Dan (Tübingen, 1993), 257–274. Yosef Avivi, in his three-­volume work, Kabbalat Ha’ARI (Jerusalem, 2008), convincingly traces ­these disputes in the seventeenth ­century through the heterogeneous editorial history of the Lurianic text corpora. 5. ​In the following, I vary and expand upon a differentiated classification scheme that I used in 1994 to describe the reception history of the Kabbalah in German Romanticism, which has dif­fer­ent patterns and structures; see Christoph Schulte, “Kabbala in der deutschen Romantik. Zur Einleitung,” in Kabbala und Romantik, ed. Eveline Goodman-­Thau, Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tübingen, 1994), 1–19. 6. ​Günter Oesterle, “Juden, Philister und romantische Intellektuelle. Überlegungen zum Antisemitismus in der Romantik,” Athenäum. Jahrbuch für Romantik 2 (1992): 55–89. 7. ​Gerschom Scholem, “Kabbalah and Myth,” in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1965), 87–117; on zimzum, 110–112. 8. ​Ibid., 109–110. 9. ​Ibid., esp. 96–97. 10. ​G ershom Scholem, “Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes,” in Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 53–89, esp. 85f.

358

Notes to Pages 11–16

11. ​Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 260–264. 12. ​Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford, CA, 2003), chap. 4, “Lurianic Myth,” 124–149, on zimzum, esp. 128–134. 13. ​Yeshayahu Tishby, Torat Ha­Ra WeHaKlippa BeKabbalat Ha’ARI [The Doctrine of Evil and the “Kelippah” in Lurianic Kabbalah] (1942; Jerusalem, 1984), 43. 14. ​K arl E. Grönziger, Jüdisches Denken. Theologie—­Philosophie—­Mystik, vol. 2, Von der mittelalterlichen Kabbala zum Hasidismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 623f. and 627. 15. ​Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979). Translated as Work on Myth by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 16. ​­Here, only zimzum is mentioned. ­W hether and how fruitfully dif­fer­ent ideas of the Lurianic Kabbalah can be analyzed as a myth can be ­imagined. 17. ​Ronit Meroz, “Ge’ula BeTorat Ha’ARI” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1988); Meroz, “Contrasting Opinions Among the Found­ers of R. Israel Saruq’s School,” in Expérience et écriture mystiques dans les religions du livre, ed. Paul Fenton and Roland Goetschel (Leiden, 2000), 191–202. 18. ​Shaul Magid, who made the radical proposal to read the ­whole of the Lurianic Kabbalah as a literary subject in From Metaphysics to Midrash (Bloomington, IN, 2008), esp. 3–7, acting on a suggestion from Harold Bloom, interprets zimzum from the outset as a trope, that is, as a literary and rhetorical figure of speech (Magid, “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning: Zimzum as a Trope of Reading in Post-­Lurianic Kabbala,” in Beginning/ Again: ­Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts, ed. Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid [New York, 2002], 163–214). Magid rightly refers to Herrera and Luzzatto, but passes over all positions that, like Vital, Poppers, and Ricchi, among ­others, describe zimzum as a real event and defend this position. 19. ​Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Meta­phorologie (Bonn, 1960), 11; cf. Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), 72–75. 20. ​In this re­spect, the pre­sent study pursues entirely dif­fer­ent premises and purposes than Yosef Avivi did in his three-­volume documentary Kabbalat Ha’ARI (Jerusalem, 2008), where he endeavors to distill something akin to an au­then­tic doctrine of Luria through the synthesis of the dif­fer­ent writings of Luria’s pupils (1: v–­viii); ­here, Avivi’s undertaking is not unlike ­those of the New Testament scholars who sought to find the ipsissima verba of Jesus in the dif­fer­ent Gospels and the Epistles of Paul in spite of all differences in content and presentation—­w ith equally questionable results that disregard the self-­interest and the authors’ intention of the respective texts. 21. ​The Chassidic scholar Mordechai Teitelbaum has hitherto been the only scholar to offer anything close to a thorough analy­sis of this debate regarding the correct interpretation of zimzum from Vital to Chassidism; see M. Teitelbaum, HaRav MiLadi UMifleget ChaBaD [The Rav of Lyady: His Life, Works, and System, and the History of the Chabad Sect], vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1913), 43–61. 22. ​Scholem, Major Trends, 261. 23. ​Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 113. 24. ​See Moshe Idel’s critique of Scholem’s thesis of exile: Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT, 1988), 264–266. Cf. Fine, Physician of the Soul, 394f., and n. 29, which follows Idel’s criticism and points to the lack of the idea of exile in the Lurianic texts.



Notes to Pages 16–24

359

25. ​Scholem, Major Trends, 286. Irving Wohlfarth explains Scholem’s interest and identification with zimzum, psychologically through the inner exile of Scholem as a historically and philologically minded Kabbalah professor in Jerusalem who witnessed his utopian Zionist ideals from youth betrayed by the official Zionist policy in the Yishuv and in the state of Israel and as a result retreated disappointedly from Zionism into scholarly research; see Irving Wohlfarth, “ ‘Haarscharf auf der Grenze zwischen Religion und Nihilismus.’ Zum Motiv des Zimzum bei Gershom Scholem,” in Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 176–256. 26. ​Magid, “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning,” 187–194.

chapter 1 1. ​See David Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Prince­ton, NJ, 2010). 2. ​H iltrud Wallenborn, Bekehrungseifer, Judenangst und Handelsinteresse. Amsterdam, Hamburg und London als Ziele sefardischer Migration im 17. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, 2003). 3. ​Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (Stanford, CA, 2003), 47f. 4. ​Moritz Steinschneider and David Cassel, “Jüdische Typographie und jüdischer Buchhandel,” in Wissenschaften und Künste in alphabetischer Folge von genannten Schriftstellern bearbeitet und herausgegeben von J. S. Ersch und J. G. Gruber. Mit Kupfern und Charten. 2nd section. H-­N. Published by A. G. Hoffmann. 28th part (Leipzig, 1851; reprint Jerusalem, 1938). 5. ​With re­spect to terminology, it has become customary in more recent scholarship to differentiate methodically between Kabbalah as a tradition made up of diverse, theosophical doctrines and systems of teaching consisting of a diverse array of authors and works, and (Jewish) mysticism as a theory and practice of the ecstatic search for God, the quest for the sensory experience of divinity. ­There is Jewish mysticism and ­there are Jewish mystics entirely removed from the kabbalistic tradition, and by far not all kabbalistic teachings are an expression of mysticism or the mystical search for God. Kabbalah and mysticism are not mutually interchangeable terms. See Karl E. Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken. Theologie—­Philosophie—­ Mystik, vol. 2, Von der mittelalterlichen Kabbala zum Hasidismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 24–28. Luria’s doctrines are kabbalistic and renew a kabbalistic tradition of teachings that can be traced back to the Zohar and Cordovero. Luria’s way of life is that of a mystic, whose kabbalistic doctrines, combined with the life of an ascetic, supported his followers to achieve a more intensive experience of God and thus contribute to the redemption of the world. 6. ​The few extant manuscripts known to be penned by Luria can be found documented in Josef Avivi, Kabbalat Ha’ARI. Kabbala Luriana, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 2008), 31–97. 7. ​Fine, Physician of the Soul, 322–326. 8. ​The best, most comprehensive monograph on Luria, his short life, and his kabbalistic teachings is Lawrence Fine’s 2003 Physician of the Soul. The seminal biographical work on Luria prior to Fine’s book was Gershom Scholem’s encyclopedia entry “Luria, Isaac,” which appeared in the 1972 Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem). It was reprinted in Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1988), 420–428. The entry also appears in the new digital version of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, available on CD-­ROM (Jerusalem, 1997; Gießen, 2004). See also Gerold Necker, Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), for additional information on Luria’s biography, teachings, as well as his followers and their writings.

360

Notes to Pages 26–34

9. ​For more on ­these details from Luria’s biography, see Fine, Physician of the Soul, 19– 40 and 78–123; Necker, Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala, 32–38. 10. ​Scholem, Kabbalah, 424–426. 11. ​Fine, Physician of the Soul, 57–60 and 160ff. 12. ​Midrash Shemot Rabbah, Parasha 24 on Exod. 25:10, Sefer Midrash Raba (Vilnius, 1896). 13. ​Pesikta WeHi Iggeret Erez Jisrael—­Pesikta, die älteste Hagada, redigirt in Palästina von Rab Kahana, ed. Salomon Buber (Lyck, 1868), fol. 20a. 14. ​Moshe Idel emphatically referred to this passage in Nachmanides, and we cannot exclude the possibility that Luria was familiar with his commentary on Sefer Yezirah. See Moshe Idel, “Al Toldot Mussag Ha’Zimzum’ BeKabbala uveMechkar” [About the History of the Notion of Zimzum in the Kabbalah and in Research], which appeared in Kabbalat Ha’ARI. Mechkarey Yerushalayim BeMachshevet Yisrael, ed. Rachel Elior and Yehuda Liebes, vol. 10 (Jerusalem, 1992), 59–112, and esp. 65–68. 15. ​Print version: Moshe Yonah, Sefer Kanfei Yonah (Lemberg, 1884), fol. A. In Scholem’s personal copy of Kanfei Yonah, ­housed in the Scholem Reading Room at the National Library in Jerusalem, you can find (in the margins at the top of folio A) a comment that Scholem himself jotted down in the text in pencil: “reference to zimzum!” 16. ​Masud David HaCohen Elhadad, ed., Sefer Simchat Cohen (Jerusalem, 1921). 17. ​See Gerold Necker’s review of scholarly lit­er­a­t ure on Vital’s biography and the complicated history of his writings in Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala, 38–59. 18. ​See Gershom Scholem, “Setar HaHitkashrut Shel Talmidei Ha’ARI” [A Document of Solidarity of the Disciples of Ha’ARI], Zion 5 (1940): 133–160. In Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala, Necker provides a German translation of this document, 41f. 19. ​First, Philipp Bloch attempted in 1905 to reconstruct this publication history in a scholarly manner, despite a lack of appreciation for the Lurianic Kabbalah. See Bloch, “Die Kabbalah auf ihrem Höhepunkt und ihre Meister,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 49 (1905): 129–152, esp. 145–152. Following Bloch, Gershom Scholem, a­ fter intensive research in the 1930s, articulated a new characterization of the body of source material over the course of several essays. One can find ­these essays in Lurianic Kabbalah: Collected Studies by Gershom Scholem (Los Angeles, 2008), a new edition edited by Daniel Abrams. In her Hebrew dissertation, titled “Ge’ula BeTorat Ha’ARI,” Ronit Meroz offers a pathbreaking attempt at surveying, rethinking, and dating the publication history of the vari­ ous schools of Lurianic thought and their writings (Jerusalem, 1988). Karl Grözinger provides a brief overview of the genesis and publication history of Vital’s works in Jüdisches Denken, 2:619–622. Most recently, Gerold Necker traces the tangled publication history of Vital’s works for a German-­speaking readership in Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala. 20. ​Sefer ha-­Derushim, ed. Yaakov Moshe Hillel from the manuscript by Rabbi Ephraim Fanjiri, in Hebrew (Jerusalem, 1996). 21. ​Ibid., 9. 22. ​See Gershom Scholem’s articles “Isaac Luria” and “Hayyim Vital” in Kabbalah, 420– 428 and 443–448. Cf. Ronit Meroz, “Faithful Transmission Versus Innovation: Luria and His Disciples,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: 50 Years ­A fter ed. Peter Schäfer and Joseph Dan (Tübingen, 1993), 257–274. 23. ​See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Zwi. Der mystische Messias (Frankfurt am Main, 1992). 24. ​See Yoram Jacobson, MiKabbalat HaAri ad LaChassidut (Tel Aviv, 1988).



Notes to Pages 34–45

361

25. ​Karl Christian Eberhard Ehmann, ed., Friedrich Christoph Oetingers Leben und Briefe (Stuttgart, 1859), 58ff. 26. ​See Christoph Schulte, “Zimzum bei Schelling,” in Kabbala und Romantik, ed. Eveline Goodman-­T hau, Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tübingen, 1994), 97–118. 27. ​Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 2 (Sulzbach, 1677), on zimzum, pp. 32–34. Cf. also Christoph Schulte, “Zimzum in der Kabbala Denudata,” Morgen-­ Glantz 7 (1997): 127–140. 28. ​Johann Georg Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (Amsterdam, 1699); reprint, ed. Winfried Schröder (Stuttgart, 1994), 84f. 29. ​For the first complete German translation, see Christoph Schulte, “Nichts vor der Zeit. Auslegungen und Überlegungen zur kabbalistischen Lehre vom Zimzum in Chajim Vitals Werk Ez Chajim,” in Der Sinn der Zeit, ed. Emil Angehrn et al. (Weilerswist, 2002), 252–265; the translation, 254–257. The excerpts that follow make up a factually corrected and expanded version of my article in this volume that is dedicated to Michael Theunissen and his research on time. My 2002 translation is cited in the novel Zimzum by Hermine Moser-­Rohrer (Gösing: Edition Weinviertel, 2006), 168f. The En­glish translation of this passage was printed in Chayyim ben Joseph Vital, The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria—­The Palace of Adam Kadmon, trans. and intro. Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padeh (Northvale, NJ/Jerusalem, 1999). 30. ​This translation quotes and emends the En­glish translation of Vital’s work by Menzi and Padeh, The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. Adjustments to the En­glish translation have been made to reflect more accurately Christoph Schulte’s first German translation of the first print edition of Vital’s text, published in Korets in 1782. The En­glish translation by Menzi and Padeh includes two pictorial renderings of the zimzum pro­cess. This graphic is omitted ­here, as it cannot be found in the 1782 print edition (though it appears in the ­later edition of Sefer Ez Chayyim, ed. Menachem Heilperin, published in Warsaw in 1890). 31. ​Gerhard May, Schöpfung aus dem Nichts. Die Entstehung der Lehre von der Creatio ex nihilo (Berlin, 1978). 32. ​See Eveline Goodman-­T hau and Christoph Schulte, eds., Das Buch Jezira—­Sefer Jezira (German and Hebrew) (Berlin, 1993). 33. ​See Gershom Scholem, “Das Ringen zwischen dem biblischen Gott und dem Gott Plotins in der alten Kabbala,” in Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 9–52. 34. ​Moreh Nevukhim, I 58 and I 60; see Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. and ed. Shlomo Pines, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1963), 134–137 and 143–147. 35. ​F. W. J. Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, in Schriften von 1806–1813 (Darmstadt, 1983), 372f. 36. ​Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­w itz, Shefa Tal (Hanau, 1612), fol. 29a; Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 3 (Sulzbach, 1678), 70f.: “contraxerit [. . .] se a se ipso in se ipsum.” 37. ​In Jüdisches Denken, Karl E. Grözinger discusses a “Hohlkugel” [empty sphere] and correctly refers to the scientific, i.e., geometric terminology of this description (2:626f.). 38. ​In Physician of the Soul, Lawrence Fine eloquently translates asiyyah as “actualization,” in the sense of a passage from the potentiality of the upper worlds into the act of finalizing and realizing the factual earthly (terrestrial) world (141).

362

Notes to Pages 45–57

39. ​Adam Kadmon, a figure that appears in the Zohar, is often interpreted in Christian Kabbalah as Christ and the second person of the Trinity. This interpretation begins with Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522). Vital’s depiction of Adam Kadmon, whose origin precedes the emanation of the world and through whose body the worlds emanate, also allowed for a dogmatic Christian interpretation that saw Adam Kadmon as Christ. The Nicene Creed describes Christ as “light from light, true God from the true God, begotten not made, one in being with the ­Father. Through him all ­things ­were made.” For Christian kabbalists, Adam Kadmon was in complete accordance with ­these characteristics of Christ found in ancient and esoteric Jewish sources. 40. ​In Theologia ex idea vitae deducta, F. Ch. Oetinger explains: “Nulla enim neque creatio neque manifestatio fieri potest sine attractione, quod Hebraeis est Zimzum” (Herrenberg, 1765), 216. The Latin citation is taken from the critical edition by Konrad Ohly (Berlin, 1979), part 1, p. 151, line 18f. The German translation of Oetinger’s book is Die Theologie aus der Idee des Lebens abgeleitet, trans. Julius Hamberger (Stuttgart, 1852), 268. 41. ​Bara, yazar, and assa are biblical terms (Isa. 43:1–7) and are therefore authoritative, if not synonymous, verbs for creation. The verb he’ezil is a postbiblical coinage referring to the Hellenistic and ­later kabbalistic thoughts on emanation. 42. ​Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 2:627. 43. ​Grözinger convincingly works this out in his detailed depiction of Vital’s system. See ibid., 623–681. 44. ​Cf. Scholem, Kabbalah, 135–144; Fine, Physician of the Soul, 128–144; Necker, Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala, 53–58. 45. ​Yeshayahu Tishby, Torat Ha­Ra WeHaKlippa BeKabbalat Ha’ARI (Jerusalem, 1984), 39–43. 46. ​Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 2:650ff. 47. ​Reliable information on Joseph Ibn Tabūl’s biography is so scant that even the Encyclopaedia Judaica does not have an entry on him. For information on his role in Safed and in the Lurianic Kabbalah, as well as the works he wrote, see Scholem, Kabbalah, 76, 129–130. See also Necker, Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala, 40–41, 59–64. 48. ​In Kabbalat Ha’ARI (1:146–193), Yosef Avivi compiles a bibliography of all Ibn Tabūl’s known writings and text fragments. We do not have any of Ibn Tabūl’s manuscripts, only the transcripts and postscripts that his students wrote down. The texts are for the most part drushim (explanations) of Luria’s conception of emanation and tikkun and his comments on the Zohar. To a lesser extent, ­these texts include addenda and commentary on Vital’s writings, as well as comments on the prayers and the books of the Torah. 49. ​Joseph Ibn Tabūl, Drush Chefzi Bah (Jerusalem, 1921), fol. 1, col. 1; translation: Christoph Schulte 50. ​See Scholem, Kabbalah, 130. 51. ​In Kabbalah, Scholem concludes that Ibn Tabūl, in his depiction of zimzum, approximates Luria more than Vital does, while Vital simplifies it: lectio difficilior probabilior (129). However, Scholem does not cite additional information for this argument. 52. ​Ibn Ṭabūl, Drush Chefzi Bah, fol. 2, col. 1. 53. ​Ronit Meroz, “Contrasting Opinions Among the Found­ers of R. Israel Sarug’s School,” in Expérience et écriture dans les religions du livre, ed. Paul Fenton and Roland Goetschel (Leiden, 2000), 191–202, cit. 192. 54. ​G ershom Scholem, “Israel Sarug—­Talmid Ha’ARI?,” Zion 5 (1940): 214–243; reprinted in Kabbalat Ha’ARI. Osef Ma’amarim mi’et Gershom Scholem, ed. Daniel Abrams (Los



Notes to Pages 58–63

363

Angeles, 2008), 295–329. This essay also forms the basis for Scholem’s entry on Israel Sarug that appeared in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972). 55. ​Yosef Avivi follows Scholem’s example and does not count Sarug among Luria’s immediate group of students, such as Vital, Yonah, and Ibn Tabūl. He views Sarug as a student who followed in Luria’s footsteps and succeeded him without ever personally studying with him. See Avivi, Kabbalat Ha’ARI, 1:224. 56. ​Meroz, “Contrasting Opinions,” 192. 57. ​See Gershom Scholem, “Abraham Cohen Herrera—­Leben, Werk und Wirkung,” in Abraham Cohen Herrera, Das Buch Scha’ar HaSchamajim oder Pforte des Himmels, trans. and ed. Friedrich Häußermann (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 14f. 58. ​See Meroz, “Contrasting Opinions,” 193ff., where she also analyzes varying text groups, arguing that they could have originated among Sarug’s pupils in Palestine or from an ­earlier phase in the transcription pro­cess. Sharron Shatil critiques Meroz’s hypothesis regarding Sarug’s students in Palestine. She points out that all known texts and text fragments penned by Sarug ­were written down by students of his in Eu­rope. She argues that ­there is no evidence that ­there ­were disciples of Sarug in Palestine. See Sharron Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-­Cordoverian Encounter,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011): 158–187, h ­ ere 160. 59. ​Limmudei Azilut (Munkacz, 1897), 22b. 60. ​The depiction of this pro­cess ­here follows the related excerpt from Limmudei Azilut, 21b–22d. Scholem’s description in Kabbalah (132f.) differs from this excerpt in the sequence of its explanation. 61. ​The concept of Ein-­Sof ’s inner delight, appears as a prominent feature before Sarug in the writings of Cordovero. See Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug,” 164–170. 62. ​Limmudei Azilut, 21d. 63. ​Ibid. Chakikah literally means “inscription” or “engraving.” The root of this word is chakak, meaning “to inscribe,” a verb used when Moses inscribed both Tablets of the Law. The reference to the Torah is thus already evident on a semantic level ­here. It is characteristic for the tradition of rabbinical writing that the inner movements and markings in Ein-­Sof are semantically equated with the act of writing, rather than with physics, craftsmanship, or technology. 64. ​See Goodman-­Thau and Schulte, Das Buch Jezira—­Sefer Jezira. 65. ​Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug,” 184. 66. ​Limmudei Azilut, 22a. 67. ​Cordovero also discusses the concept of the malbush. See Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug,” 174–184. The picturesque descriptions of malbush with which Sarug, Naphtali Bacharach, and other kabbalists from the Lurianic Kabbalah treat the subject in their works could readily be the subject of a separate, full-­length study, perhaps something along the lines of Annemarie Schimmel’s book dedicated to the vari­ous conceptions of God’s garment in Islam. See Annemarie Schimmel, Gewänder Gottes (Tübingen, 1993). 68. ​Limmudei Azilut, 22a–­b. 69. ​Ibid., 22d.

364

Notes to Pages 66–83

chapter 2 1. ​Bracha Sack, “Torat HaZimzum shel R. Moshe Cordovero,” Tarbiz 58 (1989): 207–237. 2. ​Ibid., 216–222. 3. ​Ibid., 235. 4. ​Shabbetai Sheftel Horo­w itz, Shefa Tal (Hanau, 1612), 29a. 5. ​Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1988), 134. 6. ​Scholem provides a brief summary of this pro­cess in Kabbalah, 133f. See also Sack, “Torat HaZimzum,” 235. 7. ​Shefa Tal, 29b. 8. ​Ibid., 29b–­c. 9. ​Ronit Meroz, “Contrasting Opinions Among the Found­ers of R. Israel Saruq’s School,” in Expérience et écriture mystiques dans les religions du livre, ed. Paul Fenton and Roland Goetschel (Leiden, 2000), 191–202, esp. 192, comment 5. 10. ​The first of the three sections of Moreh Nevukhim (Guide for the Perplexed, 1190), Maimonides’s principal work, are dedicated almost exclusively to the topic of the anthropomorphic attributes of God in the Torah and their allegorical interpretation. 11. ​Menachem Asariah Fano, Jonat Elem (Amsterdam, 1648), chap. 2, fol. 3a. This short text was first printed in 1648, but was prob­ably written sometime before 1600. 12. ​Isaac Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo: His Life, Work and Times (Leiden, 1974). 13. ​David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Eu­rope (New Haven, CT, 1995), 100–117. 14. ​Ibid., 118–152. 15. ​Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964). 16. ​Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 136. 17. ​Joseph Delmedigo, Sefer Novelot Chokhmah (Basel, 1631), 2a. 18. ​Ibid. 19. ​Gershom Scholem, “Bacharach, Naphtali,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. 2, col. 49f. 20. ​In Hebrew, melekh. A reference to the work’s title, Emek ha-­Melekh. 21. ​Naphtali Bacharach, Emek ha-­Melekh (Amsterdam, 1648), fol. 1a. 22. ​Ibid., 1c. 23. ​Puerta del Cielo. Y lus para entrar en la capacidad y inteligencia de la Cabala. Cuyos misterios y contemplación son llegados al entendimiento humano; see Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Puerta del Cielo, ed. Kenneth Krabbenhoft (Madrid, 1987), 95. Three manuscripts of the Spanish original of this text are extant; the unfortunately incomplete edition of Puerta del Cielo by Krabbenhoft, which I cite ­here, is based on the manuscript held at the Royal Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. See Gerold Necker, “Research on Abraham Cohen de Herrera: Recent Publications,” EAJS Newsletter 14 (2003/2004): 28–33. In 2010, Giuseppa Saccaro del Buffa published a complete print edition of the manuscript in The Hague, in Italian translation. See Abraham Cohen de Herrera, La Porta del Cielo: Prima edizione italiana con testo spagnolo in appendice, ed. Giuseppa Saccaro del Buffa (Vicenza, 2010). ­Here, I quote both editions of the original text, respectively. 24. ​See Wilhelm Schmidt-­Biggemann, Philosophia perennis. Historische Umrisse abendländischer Spiritualität in Antike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1998).



Notes to Pages 83–90

365

25. ​Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones sive ­theses DCCCC Romae anno 1486 publice disputandae, sed non admissae, ed. Bohdan Kieszkowski (Geneva, 1973); on Kabbalah, see 83–90. 26. ​Gershom Scholem was the first to research Herrera’s familial background and biography. He published this research in the introduction to the German portion of the partial translation of Puerta del Cielo in 1974. See Gershom Scholem, “Abraham Cohen Herrera—­Leben, Werk und Wirkung,” in Abraham Cohen Herrera, Das Buch Scha’ar Ha­ Schamajim oder Pforte des Himmels, trans. Friedrich Häußermann (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 7–67. For more recent scholarly lit­er­a­t ure on Herrera and his biography, see Gerold Necker, “Circle, Point and Line: A Lurianic Myth in the Puerta del Cielo,” in Creation and Re-­creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan, ed. Rachel Elior and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen, 2005), 194–197; and Gerold Necker, Humanistische Kabbala im Barock. Leben und Werk des Abraham Cohen de Herrera (Berlin, 2011), 9–27. 27. ​Necker, Humanistische Kabbala, 24. 28. ​Alexander Altmann wrote a pathbreaking interpretation of Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo in the context of Neoplatonism in Re­nais­sance philosophy in Italy. See Altmann, “Lurianic Kabbala in a Platonic Key: Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo,” in Von der mittelalterlichen zur modernen Aufklärung. Studien zur jüdischen Geistesgeschichte (Tübingen, 1987), 172– 205; on Herrera’s philosophical sources, see esp. 185–187. 29. ​Necker, Humanistische Kabbala, 22 (and elsewhere). 30. ​“ Tradisión vocal y sucesiva vino de Mosseh nuestro preceptor y maestro a los ancianos, a los profetas y sapientes del pueblo israelitico.” Puerta del Cielo I 1, ed. Krabbenhoft, 99; ed. Saccaro, 521 (in Saccaro’s edition the orthography and capitalization vary: “succesiva,” “Profetas,” “Sapientes,” “Pueblo”; ­there are stark philological differences between the two editions of the same manuscript). 31. ​Puerta del Cielo I 1, ed. Krabbenhoft, 99; ed. Saccaro, 521. 32. ​In “Lurianic Kabbala” (183), Altmann points out the parallels between the three types of infinities articulated in Marsilio Ficino’s Theologia platonica (II 4–6). 33. ​Puerta del Cielo IV 2 and 3, ed. Krabbenhoft, 160–163; ed. Saccaro, 596–601. 34. ​Puerta del Cielo II 3 and VIII; Krabbenhoft’s edition of the book is significantly abridged. 35. ​A ltmann, “Lurianic Kabbala,” 189–193. 36. ​Ibid., 192f. 37. ​“Encogiendo en sí su infinidad por el metafórico zimzum o encogimiento produxo Ensof la inlimitada cauza primera finitos y limitados efectos en finitos lugares y tiempos.” Puerta del Cielo II 2, in Krabbenhoft’s edition, 144; in Saccaro’s edition, 562. 38. ​“Hablando metafóricamente y conforme a la capacidad de nuestra razón.” Puerta del Cielo II 2, ed. Krabbenhoft, 144; ed. Saccaro, 562. 39. ​“Se communicava lo hinchó de lumbre y acto y produxo al primero y más excelente efecto y que si contiene y fuera de sí esplica a todos los demás, llamado Adam Kadmon u hombre procedente y antiguo que enpeçando del canal sutil que diximos penetra en el vazío o lugar que resultó del encogimiento de la infinita cauza primera y se llama aver kadmon.” Puerta del Cielo II 2, in the Krabbenhoft edition, 144f; in the Saccaro edition, 562. 40. ​Puerta del Cielo V 7; see II 2. 41. ​“Y este se zimzum o encogimiento y el sihur o medida que también llama sihashua, movimiento o deleitable alteración que el Rab con translación y corporal metáfora considera

366

Notes to Pages 90–100

en la cauza primera para dar razón de la productíon de sus finitos efectos.” Puerta del Cielo VII 10, in the Krabbenhoft edition, 196; in the Saccaro edition, 725. 42. ​A ltmann, “Lurianic Kabbala,” 201. 43. ​Puerta del Cielo VII 13, in the Krabbenhoft edition, 196f; in the Saccaro edition, 736f. Altmann provides a comprehensive discussion of all ten of ­these observations as well as the entire seventh book, in “Lurianic Kabbala,” 202–205. 44. ​Puerta del Cielo VII 9, in the Krabbenhoft edition, 194; in the Saccaro edition, 724. 45. ​On Aboab and his translation, see Scholem, “Abraham Cohen Herrera—­Leben, Werk und Wirkung,” 26–28. 46. ​See Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989). 47. ​For more on Spinoza’s excommunication, Isaac Aboab, and the early history of the Amsterdam Jewish community, see Theun de Vries, Spinoza (Reinbek, 1970), 8–43. The text of Spinoza’s excommunication decree (cherem) can be found on 40f. 48. ​Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750 (Oxford, 2001), 275–294. 49. ​For information on this old dispute, see Scholem, “Abraham Cohen Herrera,” 41– 47. Yitzak Y. Melamed generously shared with me an unpublished typescript of his article “Spinoza and the Kabbalah: From the Gates of Heaven to the ‘Fields of Holy Apples’ ” (2008), in which he sheds new light on this old debate. 50. ​See Andreas Kilcher, “Kabbala in der Maske der Philosophie. Zu einer Interpretationsfigur in der Spinoza-­Literatur,” in Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte, ed. Hanna Delf, Julius H. Schoeps, and Manfred Walther (Berlin, 1994), 193–242. 51. ​Puerta del Cielo VII 8, in the Krabbenhoft edition, 192; in the Saccaro edition, 721. 52. ​Sha’ar ha-­Shamayyim, ed. Israel Jaffe (Warsaw, 1864), V 8, fol. 42b. 53. ​Ibid., 44a–46a. 54. ​Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 3 (Sulzbach, 1678), 100. 55. ​Ibid., 106. 56. ​Ibid., 107.

chapter 3 1. ​Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata consists of several dif­fer­ent parts. In the common facsimile reprint of the version released by the Georg Olms publishing ­house (Hildesheim/New York, 1974), t­ hese parts are bound in two exceedingly thick, unwieldy volumes that comprise approximately 2,400 pages. ­These two volumes both contain numerous parts and subsections, which in turn encompass several sets of pagination. Volume I contains three sets of pagination and two dates of publication, which appeared in Sulzbach in 1677 and 1678. ­Here, I refer to Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 1 and vol. I 2 when discussing the 1677 Sulzbach publication and vol. I 3 when I discuss the 1678 Sulzbach publication. Volume 2 of Kabbala Denudata in the Olms edition contains two parts and two sets of pagination, both published in 1684 in Frankfurt am Main. They are cited ­here as vol. II 1 and vol. II 2. Astonishingly and quite unfortunately, Olms published the 1974 reprint as part of the series “Ethnographic Sources” (Volkskundliche Quellen), subseries 2, “Superstition” (“II Aberglaube”), ed. Will-­Erich Peuckert and Kurt Ranke. Kabbala Denudata has nothing to do with “ethnography,” and it certainly has nothing to do with “superstition.” The choice to relegate this work to this par­tic­u­lar series is therefore both factually incorrect and in stark



Notes to Pages 100–110

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contradiction to Knorr von Rosenroth’s original intent. In fact, categorizing Kabbalah, as well as other texts central to Jewish mysticism, as “superstition” perpetuates an ancient anti-­ Jewish ste­reo­t ype that should have been dismantled well before the publication of the reprint in the twentieth c­ entury. 2. ​For more on the significance and impact of Kabbala Denudata and its author, see Gershom Scholem, “Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972); Scholem, “Die Erforschung der Kabbala von Reuchlin bis zur Gegenwart,” Judaica 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 247–263, esp. 257f.; Ernst Benz, Die christliche Kabbala. Ein Stief­ kind der Theologie (Zu­rich, 1958), 18–25. Despite the author’s lack of sufficient knowledge of Kabbalah, see also Kurt Salecker, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (Leipzig, 1931). Scholem had already read Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata in 1915 while studying in Berlin. See Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher, 1913–1917 (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 189. My short article “Zimzum in der Kabbala Denudata,” Morgen-­Glantz 7 (1997): 127–140, serves as the point of departure for this chapter. My analy­sis ­here thoroughly revises and expands upon my ­earlier essay. 3. ​See Wilhelm Schmidt-­Biggemann, ed., Christliche Kabbala (Ostfildern, 2003). 4. ​Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones sive ­theses DCCCC Romae anno 1486 publice disputandae, sed non admissae, ed. Bohdan Kieszkowski (Geneva, 1973), 50–53: “Conclusiones numero XLVII. Secundum doctrinam sapientum hebraeorum Cabalistarum, quorum memoria sit semper in bonum.” 5. ​Wilhelm Schmidt-­Biggemann, Philosophia perennis (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), esp. 148ff. 6. ​See Arno Herzig, Julius H. Schoeps, and Saskia Rohde, eds., Reuchlin und die Juden (Sigmaringen, 1993). 7. ​Volker Roelcke, “Contraction and Expansion: The Religious Origins of a Central Concept in the Work of Robert Fludd (1574–1634),” in Systèmes de pensée précartésiens, ed. Ilana Zinguer and Heinz Schott (Paris, 1998), 243–260. Fludd employs the concept of the contraction and expansion of God, but he does not cite a Lurianic author; it is pos­si­ble that ­because the Lurianic texts in circulation at the time ­were only available in Hebrew manuscripts, Fludd neither had access to them in ­England during his lifetime nor could he have understood them. 8. ​Sefer Jezirah, trans. Guillaume Postel; I cite ­here the reprint of the 1552 Paris edition, ed. Wolf Peter Klein (Stuttgart–­Bad Cannstatt, 1994). 9. ​Adolphe Franck, La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux (Paris, 1843), 21. 10. ​See Rosmarie Zeller’s analy­sis of the copper plate frontispiece in “Der Paratext der Kabbala Denudata. Die Vermittlung von jüdischer und christlicher Weisheit,” Morgen-­Glantz 7 (1997), 141–169, esp. 145ff. 11. ​See Brian P. Copenhaver, “Jewish Theologies of Space in the Scientific Revolution: Henry More, Joseph Raphson, Isaac Newton and Their Pre­de­ces­sors,” Annals of Science 37 (1980): 489–548, specifically on Newton, 545f. 12. ​Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-­Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 38 (Leipzig, 1743), s.v. “Sohar,” col. 361. 13. ​See Andreas Kilcher, “Lexikographische Konstruktion der Kabbala. Die Loci communes kabbalistici der Kabbala Denudata,” Morgen-­Glantz 7 (1997): 67–125. 14. ​Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 1 (Loci communes) (Sulzbach, 1677), 665f. 15. ​This reference to Ez Chayyim and Ozzerot Chayyim allows us to assume that Knorr also possessed a manuscript containing Chayyim Vital’s writings in the anthology assembled by Meir Poppers. 16. ​Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 1 (Sulzbach, 1677), 347f.

368

Notes to Pages 111–122

17. ​Ibid., vol. I 3, Scha’ar HaSchamajim seu Porta Coelorum (Sulzbach, 1678), 70f. 18. ​Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 2 (Sulzbach, 1677), 32. 19. ​Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Puerta del Cielo, ed. Kenneth Krabbenhoft (Madrid, 1987). 20. ​Johann Jakob Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1742; reprint, Hildesheim, 1975), esp. 996–998. 21. ​Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Gerd Irrlitz (Leipzig, 1971), 478f. 22. ​See Abraham Cohen Herrera, Das Buch Scha’ar HaSchamajim oder Pforte des Himmels, trans. Friedrich Häußermann (Frankfurt am Main, 1974). Gershom Scholem’s indispensable and comprehensive introduction, “Abraham Cohen Herrera—­Leben, Werk und Wirkung,” can also be found in Häußermann’s German translation of Rosenroth’s Herrera compilation, 7–67. Häußermann’s translation of Herrera is the only section from the entire Kabbala Denudata that has been translated into German to date. 23. ​Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 3 (Sulzbach, 1678), 106. 24. ​Ibid., 227–229. 25. ​Copenhaver, “Jewish Theologies,” 489–548. 26. ​See ibid., 519–521. 27. ​Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 2 (Sulzbach, 1677), 32f; see above. 28. ​The En­glish translation ­here is based on More’s Latin text in Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 2 (Sulzbach, 1677), 65; also printed in Henry More, Opera omnia (London, 1674–1679; reprint, Hildesheim, 1966), vol. 2.1, p. 448. 29. ​Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 2 (Sulzbach, 1677), 89. 30. ​Ibid., 199–201. 31. ​A nne Conway, The Princi­ples of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy Concerning God, Christ and the Creatures (London, 1692), 6f.; see also Anne Conway, The Princi­ples of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, trans. and ed. Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse (Cambridge, 1996), 10. 32. ​Joseph Raphson, De spatio reali (London, 1697), 23, cited in Copenhaver, “Jewish Theologies,” 536. 33. ​See Copenhaver, “Jewish Theologies,” 536–540. 34. ​Ibid., 540–546; on Newton’s knowledge of Kabbala Denudata, see 545. 35. ​See Winfried Schröder, Spinoza in der deutschen Frühaufklärung (Würzburg, 1987). 36. ​On Johann Peter Spaeth/Moses Germanus, see Hans-­Joachim Schoeps, Philosemitismus im Barock (Tübingen, 1952), 67–81. 37. ​Johann Georg Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (Amsterdam, 1699), unaltered reprint, ed. Winfried Schröder (Stuttgart, 1994), 92 et passim. 38. ​Ibid., 245. 39. ​Ibid., 255. 40. ​Ibid., 65. 41. ​Ibid., 72. 42. ​Ibid. 43. ​Ibid., preface, without pagination [13]. 44. ​Ibid. [13f]. 45. ​See Karl Heinrich Rengstorf and Siegfried von Kortzfleisch, eds., Kirche und Synagoge. Handbuch zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1968); Heinz Schreck-



Notes to Pages 122–134

369

enberg, Die christlichen Adversus-­Judaeos-­Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1982–1994). 46. ​See Schröder’s introduction, in Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (Stuttgart, 1994), 26–28. 47. ​“I have also read, and personally know, some ­people who dabble in Cabbalism; the stupidity of whom is beyond belief.” Baruch Spinoza, Theological-­Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge, UK, 2007), 137. Isaac Aboab de Fonseca was the most prominent kabbalist whom Spinoza knew personally. 48. ​See Horst Folkers, “Das immanente Ensoph. Der kabbalistische Kern des Spinozismus bei Jacobi, Herder und Schelling,” in Kabbala und Romantik, ed. Eveline Goodman-­ Thau, Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tübingen, 1994), 71–95; Jan-­Hendrik Wulf, Spinoza in der jüdischen Aufklärung. Baruch Spinoza als diskursive Grenzfigur des Jüdischen und Nichtjüdischen in den Texten der Haskala von Moses Mendelssohn bis Salomon Rubin und in frühen zionistischen Zeugnissen (Berlin, 2012). 49. ​Wachter, Spinozismus, 80. 50. ​Ibid., 4f. 51. ​Ibid., 21. 52. ​Ibid., 84f. 53. ​Ibid., 86f. 54. ​In the description under­neath the illustration, Wachter, like Jacob Böhme, refers to the ten sefirot as “source spirits” (Kwellgeister). 55. ​Wachter, Spinozismus, 88. 56. ​Schröder, Spinoza in der deutschen Frühaufklärung, 88f. 57. ​“ Veram Cabalam cum Spinozismo nihil habere commune.” Wachter, Elucidarius Cabalisticus, sive Reconditae Hebraeorum Philosophiae Brevis & Succincta Recensio (Rome [Halle or Rostock], 1706), 66. 58. ​Ibid., 68f. 59. ​Schröder, Spinoza in der deutschen Frühaufklärung, 92. 60. ​Johann Franz Budde, Introductio ad Historiam Philosophiae Ebraeorum (Halle, 1702), reprint, ed. Walter Sparn (Hildesheim, 2004), 316–318. 61. ​Ibid., 318f. 62. ​K norr von Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, vol. I 2 (Sulzbach, 1677), 62–72 (“Quaestiones & Considerationes paucae brevesque in Tractatum primum Libri Druschim”). 63. ​Kabbala Denudata, vol. II 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1684), 244. 64. ​Budde, Introductio ad Historiam Philosophiae Hebraeorum, 330. 65. ​See Wilhelm Schmidt-­Biggemann and Theo Stamm, eds., Jakob Brucker (1696–1770). Philosoph und Historiker der europäischen Aufklärung (Berlin, 1998). 66. ​Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 2, pp. 916–924. 67. ​Ibid., 916–1069. 68. ​Ibid., 861–915. 69. ​Julius Guttmann, Die Philosophie des Judentums (Munich, 1933; reprint, Wiesbaden, 1985). 70. ​Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 2, p. 996. 71. ​Ibid., 997f. To explain the term zimzum, Brucker refers to the Loci communes, the lexicon of the Kabbalah in Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata (vol. I 1, p. 665), with its nominal definition of zimzum. 72. ​Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 2, p. 999.

370

Notes to Pages 135–142

73. ​Ibid., 1001. 74. ​Wachter, Elucidarius Cabalisticus, ch. 3 § 11, p. 35. 75. ​Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 2, p. 1002. 76. ​Ibid., 1068. 77. ​Ibid., 1002–1022. 78. ​Ibid., 1022–1030. 79. ​Ibid., 1030–1038. 80. ​Ibid., 1058ff. 81. ​Ibid., 1064. 82. ​Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Genealogie der reellen Gedancken eines Gottes-­Gelehrten, ed. Dieter Ising (Leipzig, 2010), 56. The chronology detailing Oetinger’s most impor­tant biographical dates that Ising provides at the beginning is particularly helpful. 83. ​Ibid., 86f. 84. ​Ibid., 90. 85. ​Ibid., 92. 86. ​Ibid., 92f. 87. ​Ibid., 104. 88. ​See ibid., 104. 89. ​Ibid., 125–127. 90. ​Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Öffentliches Denckmal der Lehrtafel einer weyl. Wirttembergischen Prinzessin Antonia (Tübingen, 1763), 127f., cited in the critical edition Die Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia, ed. Reinhard Breymayer and Friedrich Häussermann (Berlin, 1977), vol. 1, p. 133. 91. ​“Nulla enim neque creatio neque manifestatio fieri potest sine attractione, quod Hebraeis est Zimzum.” Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Theologia ex idea vitae deducta (Herrenberg, 1765), § 122, p. 216, cited in the critical edition by Konrad Ohly (Berlin, 1979), part 1, p. 151, line 18f. The German citations can be found in Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Die Theologie aus der Idee des Lebens abgeleitet, trans. Julius Hamberger (Stuttgart, 1852), § 122, p. 268. 92. ​This contradicts Rainer Piepmeier’s thesis that Oetinger did not make zimzum a central motif. See Rainer Piepmeier, Aporien des Lebensbegriffs seit Oetinger (Freiburg, 1978), 160 n. 153. 93. ​See Christoph Schulte, “Franz Joseph Molitors Philosophie des Judentums,” Menora. Jahrbuch für deutsch-­jüdische Geschichte 6 (1995): 47–64. 94. ​See Gunnar Och, “Gewisse Zauberbilder der jüdischen Kabbala. Zur Aneignung kabbalistischer Stoffe bei Achim von Arnim und Clemens Brentano,” in Kabbala und die Literatur der Romantik. Zwischen Magie und Trope, ed. Eveline Goodman-­Thau, Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tübingen, 1999), 179–195; see also G. Och, Imago judaica. Juden und Judentum im Spiegel der deutschen Literatur, 1750–1812 (Würzburg, 1995), 273ff. 95. ​Günter Oesterle, “Juden, Philister und romantische Intellektuelle. Überlegungen zum Antisemitismus in der Romantik,” Athenäum. Jahrbuch für Romantik 2 (1992): 55–89. 96. ​Translation by Corey Twitchell; for the German original, see Clemens Brentano, Romanzen vom Rosenkranz, in Werke, vol. 1, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald, Bernhard Gajek, and Friedhelm Kemp (Darmstadt, 1968), 775f.



Notes to Pages 143–155

371

chapter 4 1. ​Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Prince­ ton, NJ, 1992). 2. ​Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750 (Oxford, 2001). 3. ​Jan-­Hendrik Wulf, Spinoza in der jüdischen Aufklärung. Baruch Spinoza als diskursive Grenzfigur des Jüdischen und Nichtjüdischen in den Texten der Haskala von Moses Mendelssohn bis Salomon Rubin und in frühen zionistischen Zeugnissen (Berlin, 2012). 4. ​Daniel B. Schwartz, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Prince­ ton, NJ, 2012). 5. ​Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Prince­ton, NJ, 1973). Scholem originally wrote this biography in Hebrew in 1957. The work has been pathbreaking for many reasons, not least of all ­because it contains an extremely rich font of source material pertaining to Shabbetai Zevi and Shabbateanism. The edition that I quote ­here is Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626– 1676, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, with a new introduction by Yaacob Dweck (Prince­ton, NJ, 2016). 6. ​Gershom Scholem assembled and transcribed some of ­these texts in his book Be-­ Ikvot Mashiach [In the Traces of the Messiah] (Jerusalem, 1944), published in a modest print run. 7. ​Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi, 520. 8. ​Ibid., 531. 9. ​The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, trans. Marvin Lowenthal, intro. Robert S. Rosen (New York, 1977), 46–47. 10. ​Ibid., 45. 11. ​See Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversy (New York, 1990), 90. 12. ​Gershom Scholem, “Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham Cardosos” (1928), in Judaica (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 119–146, quotation on p. 139. 13. ​See Christoph Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung. Philosophie Religion Geschichte (Munich, 2002), 43–47 and 119–137. 14. ​See Moritz Steinschneider, “Hebräische Drucke in Deutschland (Berlin 1762–1800),” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 5 (1892), 154–186. 15. ​Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 86f. and 96f. 16. ​Yehuda Liebes has convincingly argued that the author of Meheimanuta de-­Khula was not actually Shabbetai Zevi, but rather most likely the Shabbatean Abraham Miguel Cardozo, who falsely claimed that Zevi had written it. See Yehuda Liebes, “Michael Cardoso—­ Author of the Book Raza de Mehemnuta Which Had Been Attributed to Sabbatai Zwi” [in Hebrew], Kiryat Sefer 55 (1980): 603–616. 17. ​Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 93. 18. ​Carlebach extensively describes this theogony in The Pursuit of Heresy, 102f. 19. ​See Scholem, “Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham Cardosos,” esp. 129–131. 20. ​The first quarter of Jacob Emden’s autobiography Megillat Sefer contains a biographical description of his ­father, Zevi Hirsch Ashkenazi, which extensively portrays his anti-­ Shabbatean activities and invectives, along with the long strug­gle against Chayon. See Jacob

372

Notes to Pages 156–172

Emden, Megillat Sefer (Warsaw, 1896), 1–53. See also the French translation Mémoires de Jacob Emden, ou l’anti-­Sabbataï Zewi, trans. Maurice-­Ruben Hayoun (Paris, 1992), 61–146. For more on this famous autobiography, see Christoph Schulte, “Kindheit statt Vorsehung. Vom Verschwinden Gottes in der Biographik des Haskala: Jakob Emden, Isaak Euchel, Sabbatia Wolff,” in Preußens Himmel breitet Sterne . . . ​, ed. Willi Jasper and Joachim  H. Knoll (Hildesheim, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 259–272. 21. ​See Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 118–121. 22. ​Francesca Trivellato, “The Port Jews of Livorno and Their Global Networks of Trade in the Early Modern Period,” in Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism, ed. David Cesarani and Gemma Romain (London, 2006), 31–48. See also Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, “The ‘Jewish Nation’ of Livorno: A Port Jewry on the Road to Emancipation,” in Jews and Port Cities, 157–170. On the topic of port Jews in general, see David Cesarani, ed., Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950 (London, 2002). 23. ​Isaac Euchel, Vom Nutzen der Aufklärung, ed. and trans. Andreas Kennecke (Düsseldorf, 2001), 87–118; and in the original Hebrew, 177–196. For more on Euchel, see Andreas Kennecke, Isaac Euchel. Architekt der Haskala (Göttingen, 2007). 24. ​See Ingrid Lohmann, “Euchels Bildungsrezeption. Interkulturelle Koexistenz, Reichtumskritik und Einbruch der Wirklichkeit in eine Erzählung,” in Isaac Euchel. Der Kulturrevolutionär der Haskala, ed. Marion Aptroot, Andreas Kennecke, and Christoph Schulte (Hannover, 2010), 167–195. 25. ​See also Roland Goetschel’s precise reconstruction in “La notion de simsum dans le ‘Somer Emunim’ de Joseph Ergaz,” in Hommage à Georges Vajda. Études d’histoire et de pensée juives, ed. Gérard Nahon and Charles Touati (Louvain, 1980), 385–396. 26. ​Goetschel lists the individual sources in “La notion de simsum,” 387–391. 27. ​­These passages can be found in the edition printed in Warsaw in 1864, fols. 42a–­b, 44a–46a. 28. ​Goetschel, “La notion de simsum,” 395. 29. ​Ibid.; Goetschel, however, in his reconstruction of Ergas’s zimzum discussion, does not make it clear that the passages related to zimzum in Shomer Emunim do not actually explic­itly name a Shabbatean text or context. 30. ​See Gershom Scholem, “Das Ringen zwischen dem biblischen Gott und dem Gott Plotins in der alten Kabbala,” in Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 9–52. On the significance of the meta­phor of light for the history of philosophy, see Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Meta­phorologie (1960; Frankfurt am Main, 1997). 31. ​Immanuel Chai Ricchi, Yosher Levav (Amsterdam, 1737; reprint, Krakow, 1879), 1. 32. ​See Roland Goetschel’s interpretation of this depiction in “L’interprétation du simsum dans le Yoser Lebab d’Emmanuel Hay Ricchi,” in Dutch Jewish History, ed. Jozeph Michman and Tirtsah Levie (Jerusalem, 1984), 87–110, ­here 88–90. 33. ​R icchi, Yosher Levav, 1. 34. ​Ibid., I 1, sec. 7, 11f. 35. ​See Gerhard May, Schöpfung aus dem Nichts. Die Entstehung der Lehre von der creatio ex nihilo (Berlin,New York, 1978). 36. ​R icchi, Yosher Levav, I 1, sec. 7, 12. 37. ​Ibid., sec. 13, 15f.



Notes to Pages 172–184

373

38. ​Chayyim Vital, Ez Chayyim, Sha’ar ha-­Hakdamot, I 4b and I 4c. 39. ​The reference to Baruch of Kosov can be found in Goetschel, “La notion de simsum,” 396. 40. ​Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 195–230; on Luzzatto and Ergas specifically, 210–212. 41. ​For all details, see Simon Ginzburg’s seminal biography of Luzzatto, The Life and Works of Moses Hayim Luzzatto (Philadelphia, 1931). In this biography, Ginzburg compiled a complete bibliography of Luzzatto’s writings and letters. The letters and other documents ­were reproduced in Simon Ginzburg, R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto u-­Venei Doro [R. Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto and His Contemporaries] (Tel Aviv, 1937). Joseph Dan’s article, “Luzzatto, Moses Hayyim,” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972), is also instructive. 42. ​See Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 232–246. 43. ​See Gershom Scholem, “Mizwa haba’ah ba-­awera” [Redemption Through Sin], Knesset (5697/1937): 347–392. 44. ​Moses Hayim Luzzatto, KL’Ch Pitchei Chokhmah [138 Openings of Wisdom] (1732; reprint, Warsaw, 1888; and Jerusalem, 1965), Patach 18, p. 29. 45. ​Ibid., Patach 24, p. 31. 46. ​Shaul Magid offers a clear and legible explanation of this in his highly readable Luzzatto interpretation; see Shaul Magid, “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning: Zimzum as a Trope of Reading in Post-­Lurianic Kabbala,” in Beginning/Again: ­Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts (New York, 2002), ed. Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid, 163–214, but specifically on Luzzatto, 182–187. 47. ​Luzzatto, KL’Ch Pitchei Chokhmah, Patach 30, p. 42.

chapter 5 1. ​T he Autobiography of Solomon Maimon: The Complete Translation, ed. Yitzhak  Y. Melamed and Abraham P. Socher, trans. Paul Reitter (Prince­ton, NJ, 2018), 86; see also 87, 92, 94, 95n(d), 107. For the German original, see Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, ed. Karl Philipp Moritz (Berlin, 1792). One may also consult the reprint in Salomon Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Valerio Verra (Hildesheim, 2000). 2. ​Published in ­those two languages in synoptic order and with a German translation in Karl E. Grözinger, Die Geschichten vom Ba’al Schem Tov, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1997). The introduction offers a summary of the most recent research on the life and deeds of the Ba’al Shem Tov in Chassidism. 3. ​K arl E. Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken. Theologie—­Philosophie—­Mystik, vol. 2, Von der mittelalterlichen Kabbala zum Hasidismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 809–811. For older scholarship on the topic, see Simon Dubnow, Geschichte des Chassidismus (Berlin, 1931; reprint, Jerusalem, 1969), vol. 1, p. 136f.; for an En­glish translation from the German, see Dubnow, A History of Hasidism, trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati, OH, 1970). For hagiographic writing, see J. Immanuel Schochet, The G ­ reat Maggid: The Life and Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritch, 2 vols. (Brooklyn, NY, 1978). 4. ​The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, 96–97. 5. ​See Christoph Schulte, “Kabbala in Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte,” in Kabbala und die Literatur der Romantik. Zwischen Magie und Trope, ed. Eveline Goodman-­Thau,

374

Notes to Pages 184–200

Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tübingen, 1999), 33–66; Christoph Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung. Philosophie, Religion, Geschichte (Munich, 2002), 138–156. 6. ​See Sabbatia Joseph Wolff, Maimoniana oder Rhapsodien zur Charakteristik Salomon Maimons (Berlin, 1813), new ed., ed. Martin L. Davies and Christoph Schulte (Berlin, 2003). 7. ​Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 2:809. 8. ​Heinrich Graetz, “Wesselys Gegner,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 20 (1871): 465–469. 9. ​For a modern, philological-­critical edition, see Rivka Schatz-­Uffenheimer, ed., Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov le-­Maggid Dov Ber mi-­Mezhirech (Jerusalem, 1976). 10. ​Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 131f. 11. ​Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 2:811. 12. ​Maggid Devarav le-­Ya’akov, ed. Schatz-­Uffenheimer, §1, p. 9. Schatz-­Uffenheimer interprets (as Grözinger does in Jüdisches Denken, vol. 2, p. 817f.) in her commentary on the Maggid’s text ad locum this zimzum as the zimzum into the sefira Chokhmah (wisdom), which corresponds to the highest sefira, Keter (crown), interpreted in the older Kabbalah also as nothingness (Ein). Zimzum thus correlates to wisdom in creation ex nihilo. 13. ​Maggid Devarav, § 154, p. 254; in Grözinger’s translation, 817. 14. ​Maggid Devarav, § 62, p. 99; in Grözinger’s translation, 814. 15. ​Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 2:826–852. 16. ​Ibid., 850; see also Dubnow, Geschichte des Chassidismus, 1:151–154. 17. ​I am grateful to Karl Grözinger for this piece of philological information. 18. ​Maggid Devarav, § 66, p. 109. 19. ​Maggid Devarav, § 66, p. 109. 20. ​Ibid., § 132, p. 230. 21. ​Ibid., § 56, p. 85. 22. ​Ibid., § 24, p. 38f. 23. ​The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, 91–92. 24. ​Likkutei Amarim: Tanya, Hebrew-­English ed., trans. and intro. Nissan Mindel (London, 1998), ch. 38, p. 184. 25. ​Max Weber, “Types of Rule,” in Economy and Society: A New Translation, ed. and trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 335–447; on charismatic rule, see 336–337, 374– 389; on “hereditary charisma,” see 381. 26. ​See David Berger, The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference (London, 2001). 27. ​Likkutei Amarim: Tanya, ch. 21, p. 88. 28. ​Ibid. 29. ​Ibid., 89f. 30. ​Ibid. 31. ​A thorough and something of a theological-­technical description of the relation between creation ex nihilo, zimzum, and the doctrine of emanation can be found in Likkutei Amarim: Tanya, part 2, Sha’ar ha-­Yichud ve-­ha-­Emunah (Gate of Oneness and Faith), ch. 7, pp. 308–322. In this passage, Shneur Zalman disputes interpretations of Luria’s zimzum like Vital’s, arguing against the idea that zimzum should be understood literally as a categorical separation between creator and created (see p. 314). Sha’ar ha-­Yichud ve-­ha-­Emunah in Tanya is Zalman’s own treatise on zimzum as a numinous pro­cess of a permanent creation of the world from nothingness through God’s word and name: a pro­cess that likewise escapes rational ­human understanding, a pro­cess in which the created never leaves the infinite unity of



Notes to Pages 201–211

375

the creator. In this brief treatise, Zalman does not discuss other Lurianic ele­ments of the creation pro­cess, such as the breaking of the vessels and tikkun. 32. ​Eliezer Berkovits, Faith ­After the Holocaust (New York, 1973), 106–109. See also Christoph Münz, Der Welt ein Gedächtnis geben. Geschichtstheologisches Denken im Judentum nach Auschwitz (Gütersloh, 1995), 306–328. 33. ​Likkutei Amarim: Tanya, ch. 21, p. 89f. 34. ​The most detailed and precise illustration of the doctrine of zimzum of Shneur Zalman of Lyady can be found in Mordechai Teitelbaum, HaRav MiLadi UMifleget ChaBaD [The Rav of Lyady: His Life, Works, and System, and the History of the Chabad Sect], vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1913), 62–94. 35. ​Likkutei Amarim: Tanya, ch. 48, pp. 252–256. 36. ​Sha’ar ha-­Yichud ve-­ha-­Emuna, ch. 4, p. 299f. 37. ​Likkutei Amarim: Tanya, ch. 49, p. 257f. 38. ​For more information about this journey, see Martin Cunz, Die Fahrt des Rabbi Nachman von Bratzlaw ins Land Israel (1798–1799). Geschichte, Hermeneutik, Texte (Tübingen, 1997). 39. ​A rthur Green, Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1979; reprint, Woodstock, VT, 1992), 63–94, esp. 84–86. 40. ​In Tormented Master, Arthur Green documents this report in translation, 275–282. 41. ​Dirk Sadowski convincingly and broadly analyzes and documents the connection between the Haskalah and the comprehensive school reforms in Galicia in Haskala und Lebenswelt. Herz Homberg und die jüdischen deutschen Schulen in Galizien 1782–1806 (Göttingen, 2010). 42. ​Martin Buber, Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman [The Tales of Rabbi Nachman] (Frankfurt am Main, 1906). However, Buber offers literary retellings of the stories of Rabbi Nachman; a precise German translation of the stories from the original has only been available since 1985; see Michael Brocke, ed., Die Erzählungen des Rabbi Nachman von Bratzlaw, trans. from Yiddish and Hebrew, annotated, with afterword (Munich, 1985). 43. ​Green, Tormented Master, 295. 44. ​Ibid., 290–296. 45. ​Ibid., 299–302. 46. ​Ibid., 306–308. 47. ​See Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 138–156. 48. ​Green (Tormented Master, 311) agrees with Grözinger ( Jüdisches Denken, 2:899n2818, where the lit­er­a­t ure on the subject is quoted ad locum). 49. ​Sefer Likkutei MoHaRaN, reprint (Bnei Brak, 1964), § 64, p. 78b. The En­glish translation of the passage quoted ­here can be found in Green, Tormented Master, 311. For a comparison, see the German translation in Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 2:899f. 50. ​See Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 2:900. 51. ​Both Green and Grözinger translate epikorsit as “heresy.” As one can see in the text itself, however, Nachman does not mean ­here “heresy” in the sense of a heterodox deviation from the right, orthodox doctrine of faith, but Nachman instead refers to godlessness, even atheism. The noun epikorsit comes from the Hebrew loanword Epikoros, the Epicurean. Epicurus and the Epicurean (Aramaic: apikoros) ­were already regarded by the rabbis in the Talmud as the epitome of the God denier and atheist in ancient philosophy; see BT Sanhedrin 38b et passim.

376

Notes to Pages 212–223

52. ​Sefer Likkutei MoHaRaN, reprint (Bnei Brak, 1964), § 64, p. 78bc. ­Here, I quote Green’s translation in Tormented Master, 312f. 53. ​Sefer Likkutei MoHaRaN, reprint (Bnei Brak, 1964), § 64, p. 78cd. Quoted ­here is Green’s translation, 314. 54. ​The translation of the last two sentences from the Hebrew by Christoph Schulte. 55. ​See Green, Tormented Master, 319f.

chapter 6 1. ​Hermann Timm, Gott und die Freiheit. Studien zur Religionsphilosophie der Goethezeit, vol. 1, Die Spinoza-­Renaissance (Frankfurt am Main, 1974). 2. ​Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Breslau, 1785; Brussels, 1968). The pagination given ­here refers to the 1785 edition. 3. ​Ibid., 169–172, and elsewhere. 4. ​Ibid., 170. 5. ​Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes (Berlin, 1785), chs. 13–15, pp. 213–285. 6. ​Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, 12f, 18–23, and elsewhere. 7. ​See Horst Folkers, “Das immanente Ensoph. Der kabbalistische Kern des Spinozismus bei Jacobi, Herder und Schelling,” in Kabbala und Romantik, ed. Eveline Goodman-­Thau, Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tübingen, 1994), 71–95. 8. ​Benedicti de Spinoza opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. H. E. G. Paulus (Jena, 1802). 9. ​Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, 171. In the footnote on p.  171, Jacobi cites Wachter. 10. ​Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, 14. 11. ​Ibid., 14. 12. ​Ibid., 44. 13. ​Ibid., 14. 14. ​Ibid., 16f. 15. ​Ibid., 21. 16. ​Ibid., 22. 17. ​Ibid., 35f. 18. ​Ibid., 33. 19. ​T his section represents a revised and abridged version of my essay “Zimzum bei Schelling,” in Kabbala und Romantik, 97–118. An ­earlier En­glish version was published ­under the title “Zimzum in the Works of Schelling,” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 41 (January 1992): 21–40. 20. ​Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1855–1861), vols. VII and VIII. As is customary in the lit­er­a­t ure on Schelling, citations ­w ill be given with the volume in Roman numerals and the page number in Arabic numerals. 21. ​Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter. Fragmente, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich, 1946); hereafter cited as WA with the corresponding Weltalter draft indicated in Roman numbers, and page numbers. Lastly, well ­a fter the edition by Schröter was published, seven further Weltalter fragments from the Schelling estate in the Berlin-­



Notes to Pages 223–224

377

Brandenburgische Akadamie der Wissenschaften ­were carefully edited and published in two volumes by Klaus Grotsch; see Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Weltalter-­Fragmente, Schellingiana 13.1 and 13.2, ed. Klaus Grotsch, intro. Wilhelm Schmidt-­Biggemann (Stuttgart–­ Bad Cannstatt, 2002). In ­these seven even briefer and less systematic fragments, only in fragment NL 84 do we find a few lines devoted to the theme of contraction (a likely reference to zimzum) with thoughts ­toward originary “attraction” and “infinite emptiness” (see vol. 13.1, pp. 279–283). 22. ​Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, ed. Edith Rosenzweig (Berlin, 1937), 360; see Stéphane Mosès, System und Offenbarung (Munich, 1985), 36–43. 23. ​Ernst Benz, “Schellings theologische Geistesahnen,” Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur (Mainz, 1955), 231–307; Benz, Schelling. Werden und Wirken seines Denkens (Zu­rich, 1955); Benz, Die christliche Kabbala (Zu­rich, 1958). 24. ​Wilhelm August Schulze, “Schelling und die Kabbala,” Judaica 13 (1957): 65–99, 143– 170, 210–232. 25. ​G ershom Scholem, “Die Stellung der Kabbala in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte,” in Gershom Scholem: Judaica 4, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 7–18; on Schelling, see 17f. 26. ​See Gustav Leopold Plitt, Aus Schellings Leben. In Briefen, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1869– 1870), vol. 1, pp. 245 and 247. In 1802, Schelling asked A. W. Schlegel to procure him a quarto issue of Böhme’s work in Berlin, ­because his octavo edition had become “unwelcome”; see Plitt, 1:376; see also Wilhelm August Schulze, “Jakob Böhme und die Kabbala,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 9 (1955): 477f. 27. ​Letter from 8 July 1802 to his ­father, in Plitt, Aus Schellings Leben, 1:373. 28. ​Friedrich Christoph Oetingers Leben und Briefe, ed. Karl Christian Eberhard Ehmann (Stuttgart, 1859), 58ff. 29. ​On Molitor, see Carl Frankenstein, “Franz Joseph Molitors metaphysische Geschichtsphilosophie” (Ph.D. diss., Berlin, 1928). Nineteen letters from Molitor to Schelling can be found in Hans-­Jörg Sandkühler, Freiheit und Wirklichkeit. Zur Dialektik von Politik und Philosophie bei Schelling (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), 249–277. 30. ​In the comments to his lecture Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrake (1815), Schelling cites Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (Endecktes Judenthum, 2 vols. [Königsberg, 1711], 2:401) on the figure of the Metatron; Johann Buxtorf (Lexicon chaldaicum, talmudicum et rabbinicum [Basel, 1639]) on Arikh Anpin; and letters from Bentley to Mill, without specification, “aniles Cabbalistarum fa­bulas”; see Schelling, Werke VIII 394, 402f., 416. 31. ​In F. W. J. Schelling, Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Horst Fuhrmans (Bonn, 1962), 40– 47, one can find Schelling’s exceptional academic transcripts. Plitt (Aus Schellings Leben, 1:30) reports that Schelling had been called a “Hebrew” in Tübingen by ­those who mocked him; Schelling’s teachers originally expected him to become an “Orientalist.” 32. ​See a Latin poem from 1790 (Plitt, Aus Schellings Leben, 1:19f.), as well as the lectures from 1815 (VIII 351) or from the 1830s (XII 453f.); see Schulze, “Schelling und die Kabbala,” 217–220. 33. ​See the editorial reports in F. W. J. Schelling, Historisch-­Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Hans Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, et al., series 1, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1976). 34. ​Library borrowing rec­ords that provide information on this topic can be found in the Bavarian State Library in Munich ­under the call numbers Cbm. Cat. 96 b (including valuable Hebrew codices), Cbm. Cat. 213 b and 213 c (valuable writings), and A-­Reg. D 11 (general lending). ­These rec­ords show no evidence that Schelling borrowed Hebrew or Ara-

378

Notes to Pages 225–226

maic texts, although he was other­w ise an avid user of the library. For more information on the Hebraica collection in Munich, its history and significance, see Hans Streidl, “Geschichte der Hebraica-­Sammlung der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek,” in Orientalisches aus Münchener Bibliotheken und Sammlungen, ed. Herbert Franke (Wiesbaden, 1957), 1–38. For more information about Schelling’s lending habits, including his borrowing of handwritten and printed works from the Royal Library in general, see Christoph Schulte, “F. W. J. Schellings Ausleihe von Hand-­ und Druckschriften aus der Königlichen Hof-­ und Staatsbibliothek zu München,” Zeitschrift für Religions-­und Geistesgeschichte 45 (1993): 267–277. 35. ​Entry in the lending guide Cbm. Cat. 96 from the Bavarian State Library in Munich dating 31 July 1833. Molitor returned the last of the codices first in 1837 ­a fter reminders had been sent (see user rec­ords Schelling, call number A-­Reg. B VIII); Molitor’s letters to Schelling from this time give a lively impression of the entire situation and of Molitor’s studies (Sandkühler, Freiheit und Wirklichkeit, 261–272). For information on the significance of the borrowed codices (Codd. hebr. 238, 319, 331, and 333), see Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Handschriften der k. Hof-­und Staatsbibliothek in München (Munich, 1895). 36. ​Letter from 29 January 1828 to Schelling (Sandkühler, Freiheit und Wirklichkeit, 257). 37. ​Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition in dem alten Bunde und ihre Beziehung zu der Kirches des neuen Bundes. Mit vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf die Kabbalah, vol. 2 (Münster, 1834), 240–265, 148–163. Scholem’s handwritten notes can be found in his edition of Molitor (vol. 2, on the front portion of the dust jacket), which is held ­today in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem (Scholem Reading Room, Sign. 8922). “Zimzum” is written t­ here in Hebrew. 38. ​Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-­Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 38 (Leipzig, 1743), s.v. “Sohar,” col. 361. The claim that the Kabbalah was “Jewish philosophy” is associated with Israel Sarug, himself a well-­k nown Kabbalist; see Friedrich Niewöhner, “Philosophie, jüdische,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 7, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel, 1989), 901. 39. ​Johann Georg Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb / Oder / die von dem heutigen Jüdenthumb / und dessen Geheimen Kabbala Vergötterte Welt (Amsterdam, 1699); Wachter, Elucidarius Cabalisticus sive Reconditae Hebraeorum Philosophiae Brevis & Succincta Recensio (Rome, 1706). 40. ​Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, 171: “Die Cabalistische Philosophie, so viel davon der Untersuchung offen liegt [. . .] ist, als Philosophie, nicht anderes als unentwickelter, oder neu verworrener Spinozismus” (The kabbalistic philosophy, as far as is revealed in the investigation of it, is, as a philosophy, nothing more than an undeveloped or newly confused Spinozism). 41. ​See Folkers, “Das immanente Ein Sof,” 71–95. 42. ​Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, 22, 33–35. 43. ​Even the uneducated mystic Michael Hahn, whom Schelling still listened to when he was a child, was familiar with this conception; see Schulze, “Schelling und die Kabbala,” 155. 44. ​Schelling’s son made two autographs available for Ehmann from Schelling’s estate; see Ehmann, Friedrich Christoph Oetingers Leben und Briefe, introduction. 45. ​Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Öffentliches Denckmal der Lehrtafel einer weyl. Wirttembergischen Prinzessin Antonia (Tübingen, 1763), 127f., cited from the critical edition Die Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia, ed. Reinhard Breymayer and Friedrich Häussermann (Berlin, 1977), vol. 1, p. 133.



Notes to Pages 226–229

379

46. ​Understandably, Julius Hamberger already in 1852, without knowledge of the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen or Die Weltalter, considers Oetinger to be an inspirational source for Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, and he investigates them and their differences; see his introduction to the German edition of Oetinger’s Theologia ex idea vitae deducta, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Die Theologie aus der Idee des Lebens abgeleitet, trans. Julius Hamberger (Stuttgart, 1852), 20–25. 47. ​Horst Fuhrmans, Schellings Philosophie der Weltalter (Düsseldorf, 1954), 5f; as an overview also useful is Kuno Fischer, Schellings Leben, Werke und Lehre (Heidelberg, 1899). 48. ​Schulze, “Jakob Böhme und die Kabbala,” 447f.; Will-­Erich Peuckert, “Das Leben Jacob Böhmes,” in Jacob Böhme. Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 10, ed. Will-­Erich Peuckert (Stuttgart, 1961), 1–240, 136–143, and 235; Fritz Lieb, Franz Baaders Jugendgeschichte (Munich, 1926). 49. ​In the Freiheitsschrift, VII 266f. and 376f. On the influence of Baader and Böhme on Schelling, see David Baumgardt, Franz von Baader und die philosophische Romantik (Halle, 1927); Hinrich Knittermeyer, Schelling und die romantische Schule (Munich, 1929); Kurt Leese, Von Jakob Böhme zu Schelling (Erfurt, 1927); Xavier Tilliette, Schelling, une philosophie en devenir (Paris, 1970), vol. 1. 50. ​The only very brief passage in Böhme (Dreifach Leben I, 35) that Schulze (“Schelling und die Kabbala,” 158n) found as evidence for the appearance of zimzum in Böhme’s works, discusses the “enclosure” and “attraction” of God for the purpose of revelation, but not for creation. In Alexandre Koyré, La philosophie de Jacob Boehme (Paris, 1929), 415–450, ­there is also no evidence of any reference to zimzum in combination with creation. Böhme (1575–1624) never met any of Luria’s students; his knowledge of Hebrew was also dubious. Moreover, few Lurianic manuscripts and hardly any printed works circulated at this early time in central and eastern Eu­rope. In short, ­there is no historical connection mentionned in the scholarly lit­er­a­t ure on Böhme between Böhme and the Lurianic Kabbalah. 51. ​In only a single instance in his work, Baader claims that “the oldest Jewish theologians thought that the dissemination of the glory and power of God only came to be and existed through the mediation of a pulling together (Zim-­zum)”; see Franz von Baader, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Franz Hoffmann et al. (Leipzig, 1851–1860), vol. 9, p. 176. Schelling would have read this quote by Baader, if he ever did, only ­a fter writing the Weltalter drafts. 52. ​Christian Hermann Weisse, Philosophische Dogmatik oder Philosophie des Christenthums, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1855), 696, who knew the conception of “Zümzum” from Oetinger, names passages from Albertus Magnus and Cusanus that discuss the contraction of ­matter, but not of God. 53. ​See Lieb, Franz Baaders Jugendgeschichte, 143–188; E. Benz, “Theologie der Elektrizität,” Abhandlung der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1970 (Wiesbaden, 1971), 685–782. 54. ​Jürgen Habermas, “Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History,” trans. Nick Midgley and Judith Norman, in The New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (London, 2004), 43–89. 55. ​On this prob­lem, see Jürgen Habermas, “Das Absolute und die Geschichte” (Ph.D. diss., University of Bonn, 1954). 56. ​Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (1786), ch. 2, “Dynamik,” in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, Akademieausgabe, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1911), 496–535; for Kant’s influence on the Romantic natu­ral sciences and natu­ral philosophy, as well as on the

380

Notes to Pages 229–232

young Schelling, see Rudolf Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen (Frankfurt am Main, 1984). 57. ​Contraction and expansion ­were still identified with natura naturans in the twenty-­ fifth sentence of Schelling’s Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie from 1806 (VII 202), in a truly pantheistic sense as the first forces of a nature that originates in itself, which is God, and which is not dif­fer­ent from God: Spinoza’s pantheistic natura sive deus. This equation is first taken apart in the Freiheitsschrift, the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen then are the first to recognize the original contraction/expansion of God, which as fundamental forces move every­thing in nature that is not God. In addition to vari­ous other similarly valued attributes of God, we also find the pairing of the terms contraction and expansion in Oetinger (see Die Theologie aus der Idee des Lebens abgeleitet, ed. Hamberger, 69). As Schelling is aware, contraction plays an impor­tant role in Giordano Bruno’s pantheistic version. Schelling was acquainted with this from the paraphrased translation in the second edition of Jacobi’s Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza from 1789 and from the original reading in 1808. See G. Bruno, Von der Ursache, dem Prinzip und dem Einen, ed. Paul Richard Blum, intro. Werner Beierwaltes (Hamburg, 1977), esp. 84f; on Schelling, see Beierwaltes’s intro., xxxiv–­x xxv. The possibility that Schelling, like Giordano Bruno, knew of Nicolaus Cusanus’s teaching of maximum contractum (De docta ignorantia, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Hans Gerhard Senger, 3 vols. [Hamburg, 1977], esp. book 2, ch. 4, and book 3, chs. 1–2) and was thus familiar with the ­g reat Christian source of the concept of a contraction of God has not been substantiated and seems unlikely given Schelling’s ­limited knowledge of medieval philosophy. 58. ​Schelling’s pantheism of “nature in God” is considered theological heterodoxy from the standpoint of an advocate of Schelling’s frequently maligned doctrines regarding creatio ex nihilo; see Helmut Groos, Der Idealismus und das Christentum (Munich, 1927), 84–108. 59. ​Manfred Frank downplays the significance of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes for Schelling’s philosophical ­career in ­favor of his explicit opposition to Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (published ­later in 1812), which was not even chronologically relevant to the development of the Weltalter drafts. See Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), 67–75. Kurt Leese, on the other hand, falls into the other extreme (Von Jakob Böhme zu Schelling, 13f.), dating the influence of theosophy on Schelling to ­a fter the publication of Hegel’s Phänomenologie; however, this must have taken place e­ arlier than Leese notes. 60. ​Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), 9. 61. ​See Gertrud Brunecker, “Das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit bei Schelling und sein ideengeschichtlicher Zusammenhang mit Jakob Böhmes Lehre vom Ungrund,” Archiv für Philosophie 8 (1958): 101–115, esp. 110. 62. ​Habermas, “Dialectical Idealism,” 61. 63. ​Jacobi’s Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza (1785) serves in ­these years as the foil of this pantheism accusation. Friedrich Schlegel also repeats this in opposition to Fichte and Schelling in a collection review in the Heidelbergische Jahrbücher der Literatur from 1808 (F. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Munich/Paderborn, 1975), 63–85. Schelling explic­itly rebuts Schlegel’s and Reinhold’s accusations in the Freiheitsschrift, see VII 342f., 348f., 352f. 64. ​Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A632/B660; for an En­glish translation, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood Cambridge, UK, 1998), 584.



Notes to Pages 232–239

381

65. ​Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), ed. Hildegard Feick (Tübingen, 1971), 117 and elsewhere; regarding evil in Schelling, see Christoph Schulte, radikal böse. Die Karriere des Bösen von Kant bis Nietz­sche (Munich, 1988), 195–246. 66. ​“Wie ist Gott wegen des Bösen zu rechtfertigen?” (VII 394; How can we justify God when ­there is evil?). 67. ​Habermas, “Dialectical Idealism,” 52–57. 68. ​We may reasonably assume that for Böhme the “unground” (Ungrund), a term that he used since 1620, is identical to the kabbalistic Ein-­Sof, which shares its characteristic unity, undifferentiation, and limitlessness. Böhme knew the term and ­matter possibly from Paracelsus or from the tales of the widely traveled doctor Balthasar Walter. Franz von Baader interprets Böhme’s “Ungrund” in 1833 as Ein-­Sof (Werke, 13:172); Schelling, on the other hand, does not do this anywhere in his writings. Gertrud Brunecker (“Das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,” 101–115) indicates more of a connection to medieval Christian mysticism. 69. ​In his 1813 letter to Eschenmayer in which he explained his Freiheitsschrift (VIII 165), Schelling himself differentiated God as the “Absolute” from himself as revealed and existing; the “Absolute” of the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen and of the Weltalter is the “unground” (Ungrund) and the “original primordial being” (Urwesen) of the Freiheitsschrift, Schelling merely refers to them by dif­fer­ent names. Brunecker (110) briefly suggests that the “Ungrund,” as an unseparated, indifferent Absolute, had become subject to Hegel’s critique of the undifferentiation in the Absolute in the Phänomenologie. However, she does not mention the dubiousness of the separation of the “Ungrund,” which she considers to be Böhme’s legacy, much like the ­later concept of God’s contraction. 70. ​Wolfgang Wieland, Schellings Lehre von der Zeit. Grundlagen und Voraussetzungen der Weltalterphilosophie (Heidelberg, 1956). 71. ​Habermas’s interpretation that the ­actual theme of the Weltalter is the construction of the alter deus, of Adam Kadmon or the first man (“Dialectical Idealism,” 57), goes completely astray in its materialistic impetus. The “Son” or the “Word” that Schelling discusses (which Habermas also quotes) is very likely a kind of alter deus, but not the prototype of mankind, rather the second person of the Trinity. And the Geist (spirit) does not refer to the ­human spirit but rather refers to the Holy Spirit. Schelling never uses the word man (“­human”) when he refers to the “Son.” 72. ​For more on the analogies between Schelling’s philosophy and Freud’s psychoanalysis, see Odo Marquard, “Über einige Beziehungen zwischen Ästhetik und Therapeutik in der Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), 85–106. 73. ​Oetinger, Öffentliches Denckmal der Lehrtafel, 128 (critical ed., Die Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia, ed. Breymayer and Häussermann, 133). 74. ​Adolf Allwohn, Der Mythos bei Schelling, Kant-­Studien Ergänzungsheft 61 (Charlottenburg, 1927). 75. ​Isaac Bernays (1792–1849) was a student of Schelling in Munich. He ­later became rabbi in Hamburg and the rabbbincal teacher of Samson Raphael Hirsch, founder of German Neo-­Orthodoxy. 76. ​See Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein; Habermas, “Dialectical Idealism,” 70–81. 77. ​Jean-­Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris, 1946). 78. ​F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 98f. On the connection and proximity between Schelling and Kierkegaard’s

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Notes to Pages 239–250

approach, see Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Stuttgart, 1955), 272 and 279f. 79. ​The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard: A Se­lection, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (London, 1938), 102. 80. ​Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition, vol. 2, p. 148n1. 81. ​A ndreas Kilcher, “Franz Joseph Molitors Kabbala-­Projekt vor dem Hintergrund seiner intellektuellen Biographie,” Zeitschrift für Religions-­ und Geistesgeschichte 55 (2003): 138–166. 82. ​See Katharina Koch, Franz Joseph Molitor und die jüdische Tradition. Studien zu den kabbalistischen Quellen der “Philosophie der Geschichte” (Berlin, 2006), 91–256. 83. ​Koch offers the best researched and most comprehensive biography of Molitor to date, including Molitor’s correspondence, as well as the scholarly lit­er­a­ture and archival sources (ibid., 19–66). 84. ​Ibid., 19. 85. ​Gershom Scholem, Briefe, vol. 1, 1914–1947, ed. Itta Shedletzky (Munich, 1994), 471; on the relationship between Scholem and Molitor, see Christoph Schulte, “ ‘Die Buchstaben haben . . . ​ihre Wurzeln oben.’ Scholem und Molitor,” in Kabbala und Romantik, 143–164. 86. ​See Karl Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen (Stuttgart, 1953), where he analyzes how the historical victory of Chris­tian­ity over Judaism has been codified in the epochal thought of Christian historical theology since the time of Augustine and how the secularization of this historical theology carries forward ­these historical-­theological premises into the modern historical philosophy of the eigh­teenth ­century. 87. ​See Christoph Schulte, “Franz Joseph Molitors Philosophie des Judentums,” Menora 6 (1995): 47–64. 88. ​Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition, vol. 2, pp. 156–158. From ­here on, I cite this volume of Molitor’s work in the text as “vol. II” and indicate page numbers using Arabic numbers, e.g., II 156–158. 89. ​See Schulte, “F. W. J. Schellings Ausleihe von Hand-­ und Druckschriften aus der königlichen Hof-­und Staatsbibliothek zu München,” 267–277, esp. 275. Molitor first returned the manuscripts to the library in Munich in 1837 at Schelling’s behest. 90. ​The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Scholem Reading Room, call number *8922; zimzum in Hebrew letters. 91. ​G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (1812), ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg, 1975), bk. 1, §1, ch. 2, “Bestimmung, Beschaffenheit und Grenze,” pp. 110–116. For an En­glish translation, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK, 2010). 92. ​Molitor indicates at another point (§ 251, II 154) that his theory of the negation of the divine qualities of ­w ill, in the change from potentiality into actuality, strongly resemble the sefirot in the Lurianic Kabbalah, which are pre­sent potentially and undeveloped before zimzum as powers in the Ein-­Sof; ­a fter zimzum, they emerge as emanations from Ein-­Sof; as finite emanations and vessels, they become real, and they transmit the powers and energies concentrated in creation. 93. ​In the formulation of the Council of Nicaea from the year 325: “Deum ex Deo, lumen ex lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero, natum, non factum, unius substantiae cum Patre, per quem Omnia facta sunt.” 94. ​Molitor mentions and quotes zivvug (“upper copulation”) in the divine itself; see II 257f.



Notes to Pages 250–259

383

95. ​On the pairing of the sefirot and the workings of the zivvugim in the Lurianic Kabbalah, see Karl E. Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken. Theologie—­Philosophie—­Mystik, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 676–680.

chapter 7 1. ​See Marcin Wodziński, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland: A History of Conflict (Oxford, 2005). 2. ​Dirk Sadowski, Haskala und Lebenswelt. Herz Homberg und die jüdischen deutschen Schulen in Galizien 1782–1806 (Göttingen, 2010). 3. ​See Christoph Schulte, “Haskala und Kabbala. Haltungen und Strategien der jüdischen Aufklärer beim Umgang mit der Kabbala,” Aufklärung und Esoterik, ed. Monika Neugebauer-­Wölk (Hamburg, 1999), 335–354. 4. ​Information regarding Jewish book printing in Berlin can be found in Moritz Steinschneider, “Hebräische Drucke in Deutschland (Berlin 1762–1800),” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 5 (1892): 154–186. 5. ​Moshe Pelli, The Age of the Haskalah: Studies in Hebrew Lit­er­a­ture of the Enlightenment in Germany (Leiden, 1979); on Satanow, see 151–170. 6. ​See Nehama Rezler-­Bersohn, “Isaac Satanow: The Man and His Work; A Study in Berlin Haskalah” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York, 1975); Rezler-­Bersohn, “Isaac Satanow: An Epitome of an Era,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (1980): 81–99. 7. ​Gershom Scholem, “Die letzten Kabbalisten in Deutschland,” in Judaica 3. Studien zur jüdischen Mystik (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 218–246; on p. 219, Scholem lists 1784 as the publication date; however, Gerold Necker proved that the first printing took place in 1782, based on the Hebrew publication year indicated on the book’s title page; see Gerold Necker, Einführung in die lurianische Kabbala (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 31, 170, 175. 8. ​For example, Mendelssohn casually mentions Luria in his seminal work Jerusalem of 1783, and may have owned a copy of Satanow’s edition, but a more in-­depth analy­sis or intellectual interest in the Lurianic Kabbalah does not show up in his work. 9. ​Christoph Schulte, “Kabbala in Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte,” in Kabbala und die Literatur der Romantik, ed. Eveline Goodman-­Thau, Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tübingen, 1999), 33–66. 10. ​Sabbatia Joseph Wolff, Maimon’s con­temporary and biographer, confirms this. See Sabbatia Joseph Wolff, Maimoniana oder Rhapsodien zur Charakteristik Salomon Maimons, ed. Martin L. Davies and Christoph Schulte (Berlin, 2003). 11. ​Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte (Berlin, 1792; reprint, Hildesheim, 2000), 128. Cited ­here is the excellent En­glish translation: The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon: The Complete Translation, ed. Yitzkah Y. Melamed and Abraham P. Socher, trans. Paul Reitter (Prince­ton, NJ, 2018), 52. 12. ​Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, 52–53. 13. ​Ibid., 53. 14. ​Ibid., 57. 15. ​Ibid. 16. ​Ibid., 58. 17. ​Ibid., 57–58. 18. ​See Andreas Kennecke, Isaac Euchel. Architekt der Haskala (Göttingen, 2007).

384

Notes to Pages 259–266

19. ​Christoph Schulte, “Euchel und Mendelssohn anhand einer hebräischen Biographie,” in Isaac Euchel. Der Kulturrevolutionär der jüdischen Aufklärung, ed. Marion Aptroot, Andreas Kennecke, and Christoph Schulte (Hanover, 2010), 239–260. 20. ​Isaac Euchel, Toldot Rabbenu HeChacham Moshe ben Menachem [History of Our Teacher Moses, Son of Menachem] (Berlin, 1788), 99n**. 21. ​Peter Beer, Geschichte, Lehren und Meinungen aller bestandenen und noch bestehenden religiösen Sekten der Juden und der Geheimlehre der Kabbalah, vol. 2 (Brünn, 1823), 65n. 22. ​See Roland Goetschel, “Peter Beers Blick auf die Kabbala,” in Kabbala und Romantik, ed. Eveline Goodman-­Thau, Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tübingen, 1994), 293–306. 23. ​Beer, Geschichte, vol. 2, pp. xi–­x ii. 24. ​See Christoph Schulte, “Religion in der Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Revue des études juives 161 (2002): 411–429. 25. ​See Louise Hecht, Ein jüdischer Aufklärer in Böhmen. Der Pädagoge und Reformer Peter Beer (1758–1838) (Cologne, 2008), 25. 26. ​Ibid., 308. In 1819, David Friedländer released a book titled Ueber die Verbesserung der Israeliten im Königreich Pohlen (On the Improvement of the Israelites in the Kingdom of Poland), in which he vehemently opposes what he sees as the deleterious influence of Chassidism on the civil improvement of Jews in Poland. But, unlike Beer, Friedländer fails to provide any evidence of knowledge of the source material. 27. ​Beer, Geschichte, vol. 2, p. 201f. 28. ​Ibid., 57n71. 29. ​Ibid., 188–196. 30. ​Gershom Scholem demonstrates that the entire body of research devoted to Kabbalah, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, was entirely undertaken by Christian authors. Only with the emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums did Jewish scholars begin to pursue historical-­critical research of the Kabbalah. Peter Beer is not mentioned at all in Scholem’s overview. Cf. Gershom Scholem, “Die Erforschung der Kabbala von Reuchlin bis zur Gegenwart,” in Judaica 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 247–263. 31. ​Beer, Geschichte, vol. 2, p. 59. 32. ​­Here, Beer’s reference in a footnote ad locum, ibid., 61n: “Welches sie Zimzum nennen” (Which they call zimzum). 33. ​Ibid., 61. 34. ​Ibid., 63. 35. ​Ibid., 70n. 36. ​See Adolphe Franck. Philosophe juif, spiritualiste et libéral dans la France du XIXe siècle, ed. Jean-­Pierre Rothschild and Jérôme Grondeux (Turnhout, 2012). 37. ​Adolphe Franck, La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux (Paris, 1843). The German translation of Franck’s book was completed by Adolf Jellinek. See Die Kabbala oder die Religionsphilosophie der Hebräer, translated from the French, expanded, and revised by A. Gelinek [Adolf Jellinek] (Leipzig, 1844; reprint, Amsterdam, 1990). For an En­glish translation, one can consult Adolphe Franck, The Kabbalah: The Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews, translated from the French (New York, 1940), but it is not based on Jellinek’s German translation, which not only translates but also expands and revises the French original. For this reason, Jellinek’s German translation is cited ­here and in the following. 38. ​Franck, Die Kabbala, 1–22. 39. ​Ibid., 26f.



Notes to Pages 266–276

385

40. ​Ibid., 27. 41. ​Franck was familiar with this thesis from Johann Friedrich Kleuker, Über die Natur und den Ursprung der Emanationslehre bei den Kabbalisten (Riga, 1786). 42. ​Franck, Die Kabbala, 3. 43. ​­These articles are condensed and reprinted in Adolf Jellinek, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte der Kabbala (Hildesheim, 1988). 44. ​Isaac Misses, Zafnat Paneach. Darstellung und kritische Beleuchtung der jüdischen Geheimlehre, 2 vols. (Krakow, 1862–1863); Gershom Scholem mentions Misses in his Hauptströmungen der jüdischen Mystik (1957) only in a footnote on p. 443; Heinrich Graetz refers to him favorably as a “cherished friend” and calls attention to his “Werkchen” (“­little works,” or “pamphlets”); see Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 9 (Leipzig, 1866), 438n1. 45. ​Misses, Zafnat Paneach, 1:70. 46. ​Ibid., 61. 47. ​­Because Misses never edited ­these documents, and ­because he conceals the name of the recipient of Eybeschütz’s letters, the accuracy of his account cannot be verified since ­these letters are not, as far as we know, documented elsewhere. 48. ​Misses, Zafnat Paneach, 1:15. 49. ​Ibid., 32 and 34. 50. ​Ibid., 43 and 67. 51. ​Ibid., 87f. 52. ​Ibid., 2:8. 53. ​Ibid., 47–49. 54. ​Ibid., 35–37. 55. ​Ibid., 45; zimzum rishon is written in Hebrew. 56. ​A ll Hebrew terms are rendered in the text using the original Hebrew letters and they match up exactly with Vital’s Hebrew terminology. 57. ​Misses, Zafnat Paneach, 2:46f. 58. ​Ibid., 48–50. 59. ​Ibid., 63. 60. ​Ibid., 78. 61. ​Mordechai Teitelbaum, HaRav MiLadi UMifleget ChaBaD, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1913), 36–39. 62. ​Erich Bischoff, Die Kabbalah. Einführung in die jüdische Mystik und Geheimwissenschaft (Leipzig, 1903), 28. 63. ​Die jüdische Literatur seit Abschluss des Kanons. Eine prosaische und poetische Anthologie mit biographischen und literaturgeschichtlichen Einleitungen, ed. Jakob Winter and August Wünsche, 3 vols. (Trier, 1894–1896; reprint, Hildesheim, 1965). ­Here I cite vol. 3 (Trier, 1896), 283. 64. ​Teitelbaum, HaRav, 40–42. 65. ​Beer, Geschichte, vol. 2, p. 59n; Philipp Bloch, “Die Kabbalah auf ihrem Höhepunkt und ihre Meister,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 49 (1905): 129–166, on zimzum, 156. 66. ​Teitelbaum, HaRav, 49f. 67. ​In Teitelbaum’s account, it remains vague and unspoken as to ­whether the Chassidim ­were acquainted with sources such as ­those penned by Ergas or Ricchi, or ­whether they drew and developed their doctrines on zimzum in­de­pen­dently and directly from, for example, Vital’s texts, without knowing the history of zimzum and its controversies. But even research that has appeared more recently offers no clear answers to this question, ­because the

386

Notes to Pages 276–281

Chassidim, unlike Teitelbaum, who quotes all his sources in a strict, scholarly manner, do not mention their sources in their talks or books. 68. ​Teitelbaum, HaRav, 54.

chapter 8 1. ​Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 10 (Leipzig, 1868), 124f. For an En­glish translation of Graetz’s most impor­tant work, see History of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1891–1898). 2. ​Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 9 (Leipzig, 1866), 436. 3. ​Ibid., 450n2. 4. ​Ibid., 438n1. 5. ​Ibid., 451. On Graetz’s historiography, preferences, and its consequences, see Michael Brenner, Propheten des Vergangenen. Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2006), 84–115; on mysticism, 98–104. 6. ​Isaac Bernays, Samson Raphael Hirsch’s teacher, had, at the beginning of the nineteenth ­century, studied at several kabbalistic yeshivot, but Hirsch does not mention this at all in his work. See Christoph Schulte, “Aufklärung ohne Haskala. Orthodoxe Rabbiner in Franken im frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Judentum und Aufklärung in Franken, ed. A. Kluxen, J. Krieger, and D. Goltz (Würzburg, 2011), 211–231. 7. ​See Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988). 8. ​Mordechai Breuer, Jüdische Orthodoxie im Deutschen Reich, 1871–1918. Sozialgeschichte einer Minderheit (Frankfurt am Main, 1986). For more on the education, orientation, and intellectual horizons of rabbis in Germany in the nineteenth ­century, where mysticism was almost entirely absent, see Carsten Wilke, “Den Talmud und den Kant.” Rabbinerausbildung an der Schwelle zur Moderne (Hildesheim, 2003). 9. ​See Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1986); Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus. Die Geschichte einer philosophischen Schulgemeinschaft (Würzburg, 1994). 10. ​Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher, 1913–1917 (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 126, 407, and elsewhere. Scholem carefully compiled lists of books that he acquired in the years 1915–1917, which are preserved in the Scholem estate at the National Library in Jerusalem. ­These lists provide information about the bargain prices and the astonishing extent of Scholem’s acquisitions of printed kabbalistic works during ­these years. For an En­glish translation of Scholem’s diaries from this period, see Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem 1913–1919, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 11. ​Martin Buber, Werke. Dritter Band. Schriften zum Chassidismus (Munich, 1963), 854–­ 860, quote on 854. 12. ​F. W. J. Schelling, Die Weltalter, ed. and intro. Ludwig Kahlenberg (Leipzig, 1913); see Stéphane Mosès, System und Offenbarung (Munich, 1985), 36. 13. ​“Auf ‘Kabbalah’ bin ich ja nicht neugierig” (I am not the least bit curious about the “Kabbalah”), he writes in a letter to Margrit Rosenstock, dated 23 August 1919; see Franz Rosenzweig, Die “Gritli”-­Briefe. Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-­Huessy, ed. I. Rühle and R. Mayer (Tübingen, 2002), 398, also 129, 253, 338, and 664. The name Luria is never mentioned in ­these more than one thousand letters.



Notes to Pages 282–290

387

14. ​Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, ed. E. Rosenzweig (Berlin, 1937), 360, 362. God’s entry into himself, his “Verinnerung,” is a neologism that Rosenzweig invents. In the letter, Rosenzweig emphasizes the German ending -­ung, presumably to highlight the pro­ cess of “God’s descent into his own depths.” 15. ​Mosès, System und Offenbarung, 40–43. 16. ​In the more recent scholarship on Rosenzweig, Robert Gibbs made this point early on; see Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Prince­ton, NJ, 1992). 17. ​Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (1921; reprint, Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 26. For an En­glish translation, see Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame, IN, 1985), 23–24. 18. ​Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, 45f.; The Star of Redemption, 41–42. 19. ​Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, 71; The Star of Redemption, 62–­63. 20. ​On the history of scholarly lit­er­a­t ure on Scholem, which has in the meantime become nearly incalculably massive, see Elisabeth Hamacher, Gershom Scholem und die allgemeine Religionsgeschichte (Berlin, 1999), 11–48. 21. ​G ershom Scholem, “Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes,” in Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 53–89. 22. ​Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, foreword by Robert Alter (New York, 1995), 260–264. 23. ​Gershom Scholem, “Kabbalah,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. 10, cols. 588–593. 24. ​Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1965; reprint, 1996), 96 and elsewhere. 25. ​Ibid., 109–111. 26. ​Ibid., 94–100. 27. ​Irving Wohlfarth, “ ‘Haarscharf an der Grenze zwischen Religion und Nihilismus.’ Zum Motiv des Zimzum bei Gershom Scholem,” in Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 176–256. The most comprehensive study of the young Scholem’s diverse activities, sketches, and reflections in his search for a Jewish and Zionist identity can be found in Daniel Weidner, Gershom Scholem. Politisches, esoterisches und historiographisches Schreiben (Munich, 2003). 28. ​A mong ­those who ­were pre­sent for this lecture was Karl Löwith. See Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933. Ein Bericht (Stuttgart, 1986), 16. For the historical context ­here, see Paul Mendes-­Flohr, “ ‘ The Stronger and the Better Jews’: Jewish Theological Responses to Po­liti­cal Messianism in the Weimar Republic,” in Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Meta­phor and Meaning, ed. Jonathan Frankel, Studies in Con­ temporary Jewry 7 (New York, 1991), 159–185, esp. 173f. 29. ​Zimzum acheron in the original Hebrew; the adjective acheron translates to En­glish as “utmost,” or “last.” 30. ​Gershom Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book The Star of Redemption,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-­Flohr (Hanover, NH, 1988), 20–41; ­here, 26–28. 31. ​Benjamin über Kafka. Texte, Briefzeugnisse, Aufzeichnungen, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 73. 32. ​The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1933–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andy Lefevere (New York, 1989), 123–125. 33. ​Benjamin über Kafka, 74.

388

Notes to Pages 290–304

34. ​Wohlfarth, “Haarscharf an der Grenze,” 199–208. 35. ​Else Lasker-­Schüler, Das Hebräerland (Munich, 1986), 120. A published En­g lish translation of Lasker-­Schüler’s Das Hebräerland does not yet exist. 36. ​Ibid., 142. 37. ​See Dörte Bischoff, Ausgesetzte Schöpfung. Figuren der Souveränität und Ethik der Differenze in der Prosa Else Lasker-­Schülers (Tübingen, 2002), 482f. 38. ​Lasker-­Schüler, Das Hebräerland, 149. 39. ​Ibid., 22f. 40. ​Ibid., 142. 41. ​Ibid., 153. 42. ​Ibid., 99f. and 119. 43. ​Ibid., 183. 44. ​Ibid., 110f. 45. ​Ibid., 148. 46. ​Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 4f. 47. ​See Adolf Wagner’s description of Lasker-­Schüler in his letter to Karl Wolfskehl, Jerusalem, 14 May 1945, in Karl Wolfskehl, Briefwechsel aus Neuseeland 1938–1948, ed. Cornelia Blasberg, vol. 2 (Darmstadt, 1988), 673f. I am grateful to Justus Fetscher for drawing my attention to Wagner’s letter. 48. ​See Bibliographia shel Kitvei Gershom Schalom / Bibliography of the Writings of Gershom G. Scholem (Jerusalem, 1977). 49. ​Boaz Huss, “Madonna, die 72 Namen Gottes und eine postmoderne Kabbala,” in 10 + 5 = Gott. Die Macht der Zeichen, ed. Daniel Tyradellis and Michal Friedlander (Berlin, 2004), 279–294. Also contains biographical information on Ashlag. 50. ​­Here I cite the complete title of the book as it appears in the 1994 edition, the titles of other editions show slight variations. 51. ​See Boaz Huss, “ ‘Kommunism altruisti:’ HaKabbala HaModernistit shel HaRav Ashlag” [“Altruistic Communism”: The Modernist Kabbalah of Rav Ashlag], Iyyunim Bitkumat Israel 16 (2006): 109–130. 52. ​Jody Myers, Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in Amer­i­ca (New York, 2007). I thank Johannes Saal for bringing Myers’s si­mul­ta­neously objective and critical analy­sis to my attention. See Johannes Saal’s bachelor’s thesis, “Die Transformation der Kabbala im Kontext postmoderner Religiosität. Das Kabbalah Centre Philip Bergs” (Potsdam, 2012). 53. ​A Study of the Ten Luminous Emanations: The Wisdom of the Kabbalah by Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag z”l as Revealed by the Writings of Rabbi Isaac Luria z”l, vol. 1, ed. Philip S. Berg (New York, 1994), back cover of the softcover edition. 54. ​Christian Wiese, Hans Jonas. “Zusammen Philosoph und Jude” (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), 63–95. 55. ​See Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York, 1965). 56. ​See Wiese, Hans Jonas, 95–114. 57. ​Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God ­After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” Journal of Religion 67, no. 1 (January 1987): 1–13, h ­ ere 1. 58. ​Ibid., 3. 59. ​Ibid., 11–12. 60. ​In Singer’s original typescript, p. 2, he refers to Spinoza, Kant and “Hume’s Treatise of ­Human Understanding”. See Isaac B. Singer, “The Cabbala and Modern Man,” type-



Notes to Pages 304–325

389

script, Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, 14 pages. I would like to thank Daniel B. Schwartz for bringing this typescript to my attention. 61. ​Singer immortalized his youth growing up in Warsaw in the autobiographical stories that comprise the collection A Day of Plea­sure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (New York, 1963). 62. ​Singer in the typescript repeatedly refers to “Lurie.” 63. ​Singer edits out the phrase “cosmic Siberia” in his handwritten emendations in the typescript, p. 5. 64. ​The Kabbalah, Singer explains in the typescript, transformed the divine into a dynamic force and in a certain way attributed ­human qualities to it: emotions, love, compassion, sex, grace, beauty, even masculine and feminine aspects such as the shekhinah. Some kabbalistic texts are full of tales and fables about divine eroticism. On earth, however, love can never be pure, as it is clouded by jealousy, cruelty, betrayal, falsehood. Opponents of the Kabbalah such as Rabbi Arie de Modena and Rabbi Jacob Emden therefore accused it of obscenity and pornography. 65. ​Last handwritten sentence contained in the typescript, p. 14. 66. ​See Christoph Schulte, “Über die ästhetische Rechtfertigung der Übel in der Welt,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 34, no. 1 (1989): 5–27. 67. ​Barnett Newman, “Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Matthews,” in Revolution, Place and Symbol: Journal of the First International Congress on Religion, Architecture, and the Visual Arts, New York City and Montreal, August 26 Through September 4, 1967, ed. Rolfe Lanier Hunt (New York, 1969), 129–134. 68. ​Ibid., 134. 69. ​See Georg Syamken, “Mark Rothko und Barnett Newman. Ihr Verhältnis zu 2. Moses 20,4,” in Messianismus zwischen Mythos und Macht, ed. Eveline Goodman-­Thau and Wolfdietrich Schmied-­Kowarzik (Berlin, 1994), 253–262. 70. ​Annalee Newman, “Barnett Newman and the Kabbalah,” American Art 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 117. I would like to thank Eva-­Maria Wutke for bringing this article to my attention. 71. ​Barnett Newman, Zim Zum II, Gagosian Gallery (New York, 1992), n.p. [20f.]. 72. ​Ibid. [21]. 73. ​Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York, 1975), 17. 74. ​Ibid., 39. 75. ​Ibid., 73–74. 76. ​Ibid., 74. 77. ​Ibid., 76. 78. ​Ibid., 83. 79. ​Ulla Berkéwicz, Zimzum (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 14–17. 80. ​Ibid., 104. 81. ​Ibid., 119. 82. ​Christoph Loos: ZimZum. Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Holzschnitte, exhibition cata­log, ed. Karin Stempel (Cologne, 2000), 8–15. 83. ​Wendelin Küpers, “ZimZum—­das unsichtbare ‘Zwischen’ der Welt-­ und Mensch­ werdung. Betrachtungen zu einer Skulptur von Christoph Loos,” in Christoph Loos: ZimZum, exhibition cata­log, 9–11. 84. ​See Harriet Häußler, Anselm Kiefer: Die Himmelspaläste. Der Künstler als Suchender zwischen Mythos und Mystik (Berlin, 2004), 37. Häußler was granted access to Kiefer’s library in Höpfingen.

390

Notes to Pages 325–342

85. ​A nselm Kiefer, Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter. Anselm Kiefer im Gespräch mit Klaus Dermutz (Berlin, 2010), 236f. 86. ​Ilanot: Maps of God, http://­ilanot​.­haifa​.­ac​.­il. 87. ​Harold Bloom, “Anselm Bloom: Troping Without End,” in Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba, ed. Ealan Wingate, Gagosian Gallery (New York, 2002), 25f. 88. ​K iefer, Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter, 16; see also 151. 89. ​Ibid., 238. 90. ​Ibid., 237. 91. ​Ibid., 162f. 92. ​Interview with Heinz Peter Schwerfel, Art 7 (2001): 14–29. 93. ​See Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer (Paris, 2007), 205. 94. ​See Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1996), 96– 99, 110–117. 95. ​K iefer, Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter, 16. 96. ​Häußler, Anselm Kiefer: Die Himmelspaläste, overview of scholarly lit­er­a­t ure, 7–17. 97. ​A rasse, Anselm Kiefer, 190. Arasse’s illustrated book brilliantly documents and analyzes this shift in Kiefer’s works. 98. ​K iefer, Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter, 238. 99. ​Ibid., 16. 100. ​A nselm Kiefer, Mohn und Gedächtnis, ed. Verein der Freunde des Israel-­Museums, Edition Heiner Bastian (Berlin, 1990).

conclusion 1. ​Marc-­A lain Ouaknin, Tsimtsoum: Introduction à la méditation hébraïque (Paris, 1992), 15. 2. ​Ibid. 3. ​Ibid., 16. 4. ​Ibid., 15. 5. ​Ibid., 80f. 6. ​See ibid., 203–217. 7. ​Ibid., 13. 8. ​Eugene Borowitz, “Tzimtzum: A Mystic Model for Con­temporary Leadership,” Religious Education 69 (November–­December 1974); reprinted in Eugene B. Borowitz, Exploring Jewish Ethics: Papers on Covenant Responsibility (Detroit, 1990), 320–331. 9. ​Doreen Seidler-­Feller, “Parents, ­Children, and Therapists,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, January 2010/Tevet 5770, 7f. Years ago, I had a similar conversation with the psychoanalyst Josef Ludin about zimzum and psychotherapy. 10. ​Yosef  I. Abramowitz, “Tzimtzum and Executive Leadership,” Sh’ma, January 2010, 10f. 11. ​Adam M. Grant, Francesca Gino, and David A. Hofmann, “Reversing the Extraverted Leadership Advantage: The Role of Employee Proactivity,” Acad­emy of Management Journal 54, no. 3 (2011): 528–550; Grant, Gino, and Hofmann, “The Hidden Advantages of Quiet Bosses,” Harvard Business Review, December 2010, 28; Grant, Gino, and Hofmann, “Stop Stealing the Spotlight: The Perils of Extraverted Leadership,” Eu­ro­pean Business Review, May–­ June 2011, 29–31.



Notes to Pages 343–348

391

12. ​See Michael Theunissen, Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1965). 13. ​Manfred Voigts, “Der Kompromiß. Plädoyer für einen umstrittenen Begriff,” Zeitschrift für Religions-­und Geistesgeschichte 46 (1994): 193–210. 14. ​Avishai Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Prince­ton, NJ, 2009). 15. ​K arl Barth, Dogmatik im Grundriß (Zu­rich, 1947; reprint, 1979), 54f. For an En­glish translation, see Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York, 1959). 16. ​Jürgen Moltmann, Gott in der Schöpfung. Ökologische Schöpfungslehre, 5th ed. (Gütersloh, 2002), 92. For an En­glish translation, see Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, 1993). 17. ​Moltmann, Gott in der Schöpfung, 99. 18. ​Ibid., 103. 19. ​Ibid., 36f. n1. 20. ​Ibid., 45. 21. ​Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 36. 22. ​Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life (New York, 2012); Harald Welzer, Selbst denken. Eine Anleitung zum Widerstand (Frankfurt am Main, 2013).

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Schulze, Wilhelm August. “Jakob Böhme und die Kabbala.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 9 (1955): 477–491. —­—­—. “Schelling und die Kabbala.” Judaica 13 (1957): 65–99, 143–170, 210–232. Schwartz, Daniel B. The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012. Sefer Jezirah. Translated by Guillaume Postel. Reprint of the 1552 Paris edition, edited by Wolf Peter Klein. Stuttgart–­Bad Cannstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 1994. Sefer Midrash Raba. Vilnius, 1896. Seidler-­Feller, Doreen. “Parents, ­Children, and Therapists.” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, January 2010/Tevet 5770, 7f. Shatil, Sharron. “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-­Cordoverian Encounter.” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011): 158–187. Sieg, Ulrich. Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus. Die Geschichte einer philosophischen Schulgemeinschaft. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. A Day of Plea­sure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963. Skidelsky, Robert, and Edward Skidelsky. How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life. New York: Other Press, 2012. Steinschneider, Moritz. “Hebräische Drucke in Deutschland (Berlin 1762–1800).” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 5 (1892): 154–186. —­—­—. Die hebräischen Handschriften der k. Hof-­ und Staatsbibliothek in München. Munich: Palm’sche Hof buchhandlung, 1895. Steinschneider, Moritz, and David Cassel. Jüdische Typographie und jüdischer Buchhandel. Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrmann Verlag, 1938. Stempel, Karin, ed. Christoph Loos: ZimZum. Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Holzschnitte. Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2000. Exhibition cata­log. Stichweh, Rudolf. Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984. Striedl, Hans. “Geschichte der Hebraica-­Sammlung der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek.” In Orientalisches aus Münchener Bibliotheken und Sammlungen, edited by Herbert Franke, 1–38. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1957. Syamken, Georg. “Marc Rothko und Barnett Newman. Ihr Verhältnis zu 2. Moses 20,4.” In Messianismus zwischen Mythos und Macht, edited by Eveline Goodman-­T hau and Wolfdietrich Schmied-­Kowarzik, 253–262. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994. Theunissen, Michael. Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart. Berlin: De Gruyter Verlag, 1965. Tilliette, Xavier. Schelling, une philosophie en devenir. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1970. Timm, Hermann. Gott und die Freiheit. Studien zur Religionsphilosophie der Goethezeit. Vol. 1, Die Spinoza-­Renaissance. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974. Tishby, Yeshayahu. Torat Ha­Ra WeHaKlippa BeKabbalat Ha’ARI. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984. Trivellato, Francesca. “The Port Jews of Livorno and Their Global Networks of Trade in the Early Modern Period.” In Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism, edited by David Cesarani and Gemma Romain, 31–48. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006. Voigts, Manfred. “Der Kompromiß. Plädoyer für einen umstrittenen Begriff.” Zeitschrift für Religions-­und Geistesgeschichte 46 (1994): 193–210.



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Index

Abrabanel, Isaac, 137 Abramowitz, Yosef, 341 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, 291 R. Akiba, 130 Albo, Josef, 130, 137 Alexander I, Czar of Rus­sia, 207 Alkabez, Shlomo Halevi, 22 Almansur, Mulai Achmed, 122 Alshekh, Moshe, 25, 31 Altmann, Alexander, 88, 90 Antonia, Princess of Württemberg, 139 Arendt, Hannah, 301 Aristotle, 39, 84, 114, 170, 234, 268, 284 Aron of Karlin, 184 Aschkenazi, Zwi, 211 Ashkenazi, Bezalel, 24 Ashlag, Yehuda, 295–300 Auerbach, Berthold, 143 Averroes, 84, 90 Avicenna, 84, 88 Baader, Franz von, 140, 218, 223, 226, 242, 279 Ba’al Shem Tov, Israel ben Eliezer (BeShT), 180, 182, 184, 196, 204–206, 276, 304 Bacharach, Naphtali ben Jacob Elchanan, 79–82, 108, 116, 117, 119, 243, 250 Bahya ibn Paquda, 137, 303 Barth, Karl, 345, 346 Baruch, Baruch Ben, 57 Baruch of Kosov (Kosover), 173 Bassan, Isaiah, 174 Beer, Peter, 259–264, 266, 270, 276 Bendavid, Lazarus, 261 Ben-­Gurion, David, 143 Benjamin, Walter, vii, 289, 290 Benz, Ernst, 223 Berg, Karen, 299 Berg, Michael, 299

Berg, Philip S., 17, 296–299 Berg, Yehuda, 299 Bergmann, Shmuel Hugo, 292 Berkéwicz, Ulla, 318–321 Berkovitz, Eliezer, 201 Bernays, Isaak, 238 Bielik-­Robson, Agatha, vii Bischoff, Erich, 275 Blake, William, 326 Bloch, Moses, 105, 107 Bloch, Philipp, 276 Bloom, Harold, 4, 15, 17, 284, 315–318, 336 Blumenberg, Hans, 13, 14 Böhme, Jacob, 137, 223, 227, 233 Bomberg, Daniel, 21 Borowitz, Eugene, 340, 341 Brandwein, Yehuda Zwi, 298 Brentano, Clemens von, 8, 9, 140–142 Brucker, Johann Jakob, 8, 10, 15, 107, 113, 131–136, 139, 141, 223, 224, 227 Bruno, Giordano, 75, 76, 132 Buber, Martin, 207, 280, 343 Buchbinder, Baruch, 150 Budde, Johann Franz, 129–131, 133, 135, 139, 141 Buhle, Johann Gottlieb, 274 Burckhardt, Jacob, 345 Callenberg, Johann Heinrich, 138 Cardoso, Abraham Miguel, 149, 150, 155, 176 Celan, Paul, 326 Chagiz, Mosche, 156, 173, 174 Chajes, Yossi, 325 Chayon, Nechemiah, 150–156, 158, 174, 176 Chmielnicki, Bohdan, 145 Christian August, Duke of Pfalz-­Sulzbach, 105 Cohen, Hermann, 279, 281, 283 Cohen, Shimon, 57

406

Index

Conway, Anne, 8, 115–118 Copenhaver, Brian P., 115, 120 Copernicus, Nicholas, 132 Cordovero, Moses, 21, 22, 25, 28, 31, 57, 58, 66, 67, 72, 84, 87, 107, 161, 163, 178, 194, 256, 262, 267, 270, 274, 275, 304 Crescas, Hasdai, 130 Dante Alighieri, 425 Darwin, Charles, 304 Delmedigo, Joseph, 15, 73–79, 81, 99, 165, 243, 276 Derrida, Jacques, vii Descartes, René, 115, 132, 221, 268 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 85 Dov Ber Friedmann of Mezritch (Maggid of Mezritch), 8, 17, 181–194, 196, 208, 256, 276, 277, 280, 337 Dovber Shneuri, 195 Dresnitz, Salomon Schlomel, 40 Dschingis Khan, 410 Dubnow, Simon, 262 Duns Scotus, 345, 346 Durandus of Saint-­Pourçain, 84 Ebreo, Leone, 88 Ehrenberg, Rudolf, 223, 281, 282 Eilenburg, Issachar Beer, 57 Einstein, Albert, 143, 305 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, 122, 123 Elimelech von Lyzhansk, 184, 191 Elizabeth I, Queen of E ­ ngland, 85 Emden, Jakob, 155, 262, 269, 276 Ergas, Joseph, 15, 73, 98, 156–169, 171–174, 176, 276, 336, 345 Euchel, Isaac, 157, 218, 259 Eybeschütz, Jonathan, 150, 269, 270, 276 Fanjiri, Ephraim, 33 Fano, Esra, 57 Fano, Menachem Asariah, 56–58, 71–73, 79, 99, 164, 165, 276 Fende, Christian, 137 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 16, 336 Fez, Samuel, 156 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 218, 231, 232, 242 Ficino, Marsilio, 84, 88 Fine, Lawrence, 12, 13 Fludd, Robert, 101, 325 Fonseca, Isaac Aboab de, 85, 93–99, 108, 112, 119, 147, 165, 278

Fraenckel, Avinoam, viii Franck, Adolphe, 102, 141, 265–268 Franses, Mordechai, 24 Frederick William II., King of Prus­sia, 152 Freud, Sigmund, 305 Friedländer, David, 253, 261 Ibn Gabirol, Solomon, 40, 133 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 6 Galilei, Galileo, 74 Gandhi, Mahatma, 304 Geiger, Abraham, 279 Gikatilla, Josef, 101, 130, 262 Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, 293 Glückel of Hameln, 148, 149 Görres, Joseph, 242 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 104, 218 Goetschel, Roland, 167 Gottlieb, Adolph, 307 Graetz, Heinrich, 8, 268, 270, 275, 278, 279 Grant, Adam, 342 Green, Arthur, 205, 207, 209 Grözinger, Karl Erich, 12, 190 Guttmann, Julius, 133 Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 227, 284 Hacohen, Jehuda, 57 Halevi, Benjamin, 33, 111 Halevi, Jehuda, 133, 303 Hamann, Johann Georg, 218 Häußermann, Friedrich, 113 Hecht, Koppel, 8, 137, 138 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 34, 113, 132, 140, 204, 205, 207, 218, 223, 230, 231, 238, 242, 244, 249, 268, 279, 281, 283, 297 Heidegger, Martin, vii, 132, 232, 234 Heilperin, Menachem, 42, 280 Heine, Heinrich, 22, 143 van Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius, 104, 116 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 123, 218 Herrera, Abraham Cohen, 15, 57, 58, 73, 75, 79, 83–93, 95, 96, 98, 106–108, 112, 113, 119, 124, 126, 128, 131, 165, 178, 276, 278, 336 Herrera, David Cohen de, 84 Hesiod, 12 Hess, Michael, 240 Hess, Moses, 143 Hildesheimer, Esriel, 279 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 279 Hirschfeld, Ephraim Joseph, 240



Index

Hitler, Adolf, 304 Hobbes, Thomas, 132 Homer, 12 Horkheimer, Max, vii Horo­w itz, Pinchas Ha-­Levi, 184 Horo­w itz, Shabbetai Sheftel, 5, 10, 43, 65–71, 79, 163, 243, 250, 276 Hubble, Edwin, 299 Hume, David, 303 Hurwitz, Pinchas Halevi, 57 Irira. See Herrera, Abraham Cohen de Itzig, Daniel, 253 Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, 191 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 8, 15, 107, 113, 123, 140, 173, 215–222, 226, 227, 258, 259, 272 Jehiel Michael of Złoczów (Zolochev), 184 Jehoschua ben Nun, 53 Jellinek, Adolf, 241, 265–268 Jesus of Nazareth, 335 Joel, David, 274 Joel, Manuel, 274 Jonas, Hans, 6, 15, 284, 300–303, 326, 336, 348 Jonas, Rosa, 301 Joseph of Alexandria, 75 Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 206 Kafka, Franz, 289, 290, 292 Kahn, Samuel, 280 Kant, Immanuel, 212, 218, 221, 229, 232, 256, 268, 303 Karo, Josef, 21, 22, 194, 274 Katz, Alexander, 57 Katzenellenbogen, Ezekiel, 174 Kiefer, Anselm, 6, 9, 10, 15, 52, 284, 324–333, 335 Kierkegaard, Søren, 239 Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian, 4, 7, 8, 15, 33, 36, 43, 79, 97–120, 123, 124, 126–128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137, 139, 225, 240, 262 ha-­Kohen, Benjamin, 157 ha-­Kohen, Jacob, 174 Bar Kokhba, Shimon, 22 Kolusker, Abraham, 184 Kook, Abraham Isaak, 291, 296 Krabbenhoft, Kenneth, 112 Krakovsky, Levi I., 297 Krasner, Lee, 307

407

Krebber, Steffen, 10 Küpers, Wendelin, 323, 324 Lasker-­Schüler, Else, 291–295 Lee, Ang, 7 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 87, 106, 132, 137, 177, 218, 220, 268 Lemaître, Georges, 299 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 173, 216–222, 242 Levi Isaac of Berdichev, 148, 277 Lévinas, Emmanuel, vii, 337 Lichtenthaler, Abraham, 105 Linton, Timothy Michael, 7 Lish, Gordon, 7 Lombard, Peter, 84 Loos, Christoph, 7, 10, 321–324 Luria, Isaac, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10–14, 16, 20, 22–58, 66, 67, 70, 83, 86, 107, 111, 112, 124, 127, 162, 164–167, 171, 172, 174, 186, 194, 204, 226, 254, 256, 267, 269, 270, 274–276, 278, 284, 293, 294, 297, 300, 302, 304, 316–318, 325–330, 332, 337 Luria, Salomon, 24 Luzzatto, Moses Chayyim, 173–179 Lyady, Shneur Zalman, 15 Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone), 18, 296, 297, 299 Magid, Shaul, viii, 17 Maimon, Salomon, 7, 180, 183, 184, 190, 193, 194, 218, 253, 255–259, 262, 272 Maimonides, 21, 39–41, 72, 75, 77, 84, 87, 90, 130, 133, 208, 256, 269, 270, 284, 303, 336 Malebranche, Nicolas, 137 Al-­Mansur, Ahmed Mulay, 85 Marchena, Juan de, 85 Margalit, Avishai, 344 Martel, Yann, 7 Marx, Karl, 297 Medici, Cosimo de, 84 Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, 184, 277 Menasseh ben Israel, 73, 85 Mendel, David Sacharja, 57 Mendel of Vitebsk, 184 Mendelssohn, Moses, 120, 173, 216–222, 258, 259 Meroz, Ronit, 13, 58 Mezritch, s. Dov Ber Friedmann of Mezritch

408

Index

Milton, John, 425 Misses, Isaac, 268–273, 280 Modena, Aharon Berachia, 57 Modena, Jehuda Arie, 57 Modena, Leone da, 58, 74, Molitor, Franz Joseph, 4, 9, 141, 218, 223, 225, 238–251, 266, 273, 279 Moltmann, Jürgen, 6, 284, 346–348 More, Henry, 8, 15, 106, 108, 115–120, 130, 131, 135 Morlok, Elke, viii Morpurgo, Samson, 174, Morteira, Saul, 85, 94, 95 Moses ben Shem-­Tov de Leon, 267 Nachman of Bratslav, 15, 191, 204–215, 277, 337–339 Nachmanides, 28, 163 Napoleon Bonaparte, 207, 240 Nathan of Gaza, 145–147, 155, 175, 176 Neander, August, 274 Necker, Gerold, 13 Newman, Annalee, 309 Newman, Barnett, 6, 7, 9, 10, 307–315 Newton, Isaac, 8, 75, 106, 115, 118–120, 132 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 206, 288, 297 Ben Nun, Jehoshua, 32 Och, Gunnar, 194 Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 8, 15, 34, 46, 114, 137–140, 223, 224, 226, 227, 237, 238, 287 Ohev, Shlomo, 57 Ottolenghi, Nathan, 57 Ouaknin, Marc-­A lain, 337–340 Ozer, Samuel, viii Paul, 58 Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, 292 Pfefferkorn, Johannes, 101 Philo of Alexandria, 133, 267, 274 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 83, 88, 101, 130, 135, 262, 265 Plato, 12, 84, 88, 266, 268, 274 Plotinus, 39, 84, 88, 167, 168 Pollock, Jackson, 307 Poppers, Meir, 34, 53, 186 Porphyrios, 84, 88 Postel, Guillaume, 101 Pythagoras, 88

Radziwiłł, Christoph, Prince of, 75 Raphson, Joseph, 15, 115, 118–120 Reimarus, Elise, 290 Reinhold, Carl Leonhard, 232 Reuchlin, Johannes, 101, 130, 135, 246, 262, 265 Ricchi, Immanuel Chai, 15, 168–173, 276 Riccio, Paulo, 101 Rocholl, Rudolf, 251 Rosenzweig, Franz, 4, 8, 133, 223, 234, 281–283, 286–290 Rothko, Mark, 307, 309 Ruderman, David, 75 Saadia Gaon, 130, 137, 303 Sack, Bracha, 99 Sartorius, Johann Christoph, 102 Sarug, Israel, 14, 15, 26, 29, 30, 33, 56–65, 70–73, 79–81, 83–85, 87–91, 113, 114, 165, 249, 263, 276, 278, 280, 336, 344 Sasportas, Jakob, 148, 149 Satanow, Isaac, viii, 34, 35, 186, 253–255, 259 Schechter, Solomon, 316 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 4, 7–9, 34, 41, 114, 123, 140, 173, 204, 205, 218, 222–240, 243, 244, 246, 279, 281–283, 343 Schelling, Karl Friedrich August, 223 Schlegel, August, 218 Schlegel, Friedrich, 218, 232, 242 Schmitt, Carl, 343 Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, 197, 198 Schneurson, Dov Baer, 17 Schocken, Salman, 241 Scholem, Gershom, vii, 4, 5, 11–13, 15–17, 26, 54, 57, 79, 100, 108, 113, 133, 223, 225, 241, 244, 251, 265, 267, 273, 280, 283–297, 300, 302, 309, 316, 317, 323–325, 329, 336, 346 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 297 Schreiber, Simon, 269 Schröder, Winfried, 122 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich, 140 Schulze, Wilhelm August, 223 Schütz, Maria Catherina, 137 Seidler-­Feller, Doreen, 341 Shemarja, David, 57 Shimon bar Yochai, 22, 130, 174, 204, 262, 266, 293 Shlomo of Luck, 277 Shneur Zalman of Lyady (Alter Rebbe), 184, 194–204, 259, 274, 275, 277, 344, 345

Index Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 17, 303–307 Skidelski, Edward, 348 Skidelski, Robert, 348 Sophie Dorothea, Queen of Prus­sia, 151 Spaeth, Johann Peter (Moses Germanus), 120, 121 Sparr, Thomas, viii Speusippus, 88 Spinoza, Baruch, 9, 36, 85, 94, 95, 113, 115, 121–124, 129, 130, 139, 143, 144, 173, 176, 216–222, 226, 258, 259, 268, 272, 303–306 Stalin, Josef, 304 Suarez, Francisco, 84 Ibn Tabūl, Joseph, 1, 10, 26, 29–31, 33, 52–58, 60 Teitelbaum, Mordechai, 273–277, 280 Theunissen, Michael, 458 Thomas Aquinas, 84, 87, 90, 284 Thomasius, Christian, 132 Tieck, Ludwig, 223 Tiedemann, Dietrich, 141 Tishby, Yeshayahu, 12, 50, 267 Trivellato, Francesca, viii, 372 Twitchell, Corey, iii, viii Vega, Manuel Rodriguez, 93 Vestali, Elisha, 33, 111 Vilna Gaon, Elija ben Salomon Salman, 79 Vital, Benjamin Hacohen, 156 Vital, Chayyim, 1, 6, 7, 10–12, 14, 15, 26, 29–53, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 70, 73, 79–82, 85–87, 89–91, 110, 111, 113, 114, 124, 138, 139, 160, 161, 164, 171, 172, 186, 188, 199, 200, 203, 210, 225, 227, 233, 243, 250, 254–257,

409

262, 263, 267, 270–272, 275, 276, 278, 280, 284, 295, 298, 299, 304, 318, 329, 344 Vital, Joseph, 31 Vital, Mosche, 32 Vital, Samuel, 34, 53 Voigts, Manfred, 45, 343 Volozhin, R. Chaim, viii Wachter, Johann Christoph, 7–9, 15, 36, 107, 113, 118, 120–131, 134–136, 139, 172, 218–220, 226, 258, 262, 263, 272 Wagner, Richard, 170 Waldman, Isaac Haver, 17 Weber, Max, 197, 285, 342 Weiss, Daniel H., vii Weitzman, Steven, viii Welzer, Harald, 348 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 218 Winter, Jakob, 275 Wohlfarth, Irving, 290 Wolff, Christian, 132, 137, 218 Wünsche, August, 275 Württemberg, Antonia von, 192 Yates, Frances, 75 Yonah, Moses, 26, 29, 33, 57, 60 Zadoff, Noam, viii Zedler, Johann Heinrich, 107 Zemach, Jacob, 34, 53, 164 Zevi Hirsch Ashkenazi, 155, 156 Ibn Zimra, David, 24, 163 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig von, 138, 139 Zunz, Leopold, 370 Zwi, Shabbetai, 143–156, 175

A c k n o w l­e d g m e n t s

When you have worked on a book like this one, with extended periods of interruption, as I have, ­there are many scholars, teachers, friends, and colleagues to thank, all of whom have contributed to its success through insightful comments and suggestions, assistance, and in some cases material support. First, I would like to thank the late Stéphane Mosès who generously answered my questions at this proj­ect’s inception in 1990. He shared Scholem’s and my own fascination with zimzum. He was the first to draw my attention to the relationship between hester panim and zimzum, and he pointed out that a vivid, concise symbol for zimzum is the asimon. Asimonim ­were the metal telephone tokens that the Israeli telephone com­pany Besek used to issue, in the era before telephone cards and mobile phones. ­These coins, with their easily recognizable hollow center, used to be as commonplace as the public rotary telephones for which they w ­ ere designed. In addition, the ten numbers that appear on the reverse side of the asimon can represent the ten sefirot. In 1996, the late Michael Theunissen not only supported my application for a Heisenberg Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG) with a letter attesting to my proj­ect’s merit, but also alerted me to the unique form of freedom that zimzum symbolizes. The freedom in zimzum does not draw its strength from striking out on one’s own, from forward movement, expansion, growth, and the progressive domination of the world; rather, it is a freedom that, through withdrawal and self-­restraint, opens new pathways for encountering the self, the natu­ral world, and the Other. In contrast to the narrowly self-­imposed delineations that one frequently finds in the field of philosophy, the late Karlfried Gründer has always insisted that Kabbalah and Christian Kabbalah both belong to the philosophical canon. He helped foster my interest in this subject ever since my student days. In the early 1990s, he encouraged me to write an entry on zimzum, which appeared ­under the letter Z in the final volume of the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Historical Dictionary of Philosophy),

412

Acknowl­edgments

­ nder his editorial supervision. Roland Goetschel, the author of salient esu says on eighteenth-­century zimzum reception, has been a helpful guide as I have explored the contours of the central controversy in the Jewish reception of zimzum—­namely, the question ­whether zimzum was an ­actual pro­ cess or simply the highly speculative idea of an unfathomable, numinous occurrence that takes place in God. Daniel Abrams, with his bibliophilia and highly detailed knowledge, has always lent a helping hand when I sought to track down Lurianic texts in Jerusalem. Moshe Idel has been acquainted with my proj­ect since the beginning and generously provided me copies of unprinted texts from his personal library, at an early stage in its development. He also warned me, as is his way, not to overestimate Scholem and zimzum. Gerold Necker provided critical feedback on a rough draft of this book. He kindly pointed out factual details in need of correction and brought additional scholarship to my attention. Eva-­Maria Thimme expertly edited the entire manuscript. Thank you. I also owe thanks to Dörte Bischoff and Justus Fetscher for bringing Else Lasker-­Schüler’s references to zimzum to my attention, to Daniel Schwartz for productive discussions about Spinoza and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and to Johann E. Hafner for convincing me of the role that zimzum plays in Jürgen Moltmann’s ecological theory of creation. Volker Roelcke brought Robert Fludd and the Cambridge Platonists to my attention. I have enjoyed his friendship since our school days. The international study and exhibition Shrinking Cities (2004–2006), spearheaded by Philipp Oswalt, proved especially stimulating for my thinking about the real-­time significance of zimzum’s core concept that withdrawal and concentration always provide opportunity for new creative endeavors. The exhibit illustrated how shrinking postindustrial and post-­socialist urban spaces, such as Detroit, Manchester, Ivanovo, and Halle, provide significant opportunities for renewal in terms of urban planning, in that this form of retreat creates new spaces for art, urban social proj­ects, and ecological urban development. The German Research Foundation also generously supported my study of zimzum with a Heisenberg Fellowship. The culmination of my fellowship in 1997–1999 was not the current study, as originally planned, but rather a dif­fer­ent, though not entirely unrelated proj­ect, my 2002 book Die jüdische Aufklärung (The Jewish Enlightenment). I owe the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, with the yearlong research stay I received as a fellow in 2009–2010, a ­great debt of gratitude for providing me the opportunity to resume my work on zimzum, a­ fter almost twenty years of preliminary preparation. This fellowship allowed me valuable time and



Acknowl­edgments

413

space to complete impor­tant chapters of the book. I am grateful to David Ruderman, the then director of the Katz Center, for stimulating dialogue and friendly support, as well as the librarians Arthur Kiron and Joe Gulka for their kindness and willingness to provide me access to original prints of kabbalistic texts as well as an abundant supply of digital copies. Their assistance has been crucial, as many of ­these texts can no longer be found in German libraries ­after they ­were banned and removed during arguably the darkest period in German history. Together with Etty Lassman of the Katz Center and my ­daughter Elisabeth, I was able to assem­ble a graphic repre­ sen­ta­tion of 450 years of Jewish and Christian reception history of zimzum, included ­here. The Scholem Reading Room of the National Library in Jerusalem, with its excellent Kabbalah collection, served as an impor­tant workspace at vari­ous critical junctures. I have returned ­there many times over the past twenty-­five years to diversify and strengthen further my collection of sources and specialized lit­er­a­ture on Lurianic and Christian Kabbalah. The librarian Etty Liebes provided generous assistance for many years. Fi­nally, my students at the University of Potsdam also contributed decisively to this book’s completion. I presented portions of the proj­ect as lectures during the 2010 summer semester and the 2010–2011 winter semester, and their feedback and questions helped me identify where I needed to make revisions or supply additional clarification. Despite the absurd burdens that the so-­called Bologna reforms have imposed on Eu­ro­pean higher education in recent years, it remains a privilege and a joy of my professional life to engage in intellectually stimulating work with curious, devoted, and talented young ­people. As is the case with so many other t­ hings, I owe Eva Lezzi and her keen eye as a literary scholar for inspiring me to pay fresh methodological attention to the specific mediality of philosophical and kabbalistic writings and the material circumstances in which they ­were created. Many aspects of this proj­ect reflect her insight and wisdom. I dedicate this book to our ­children, Elisabeth, Nicolas, and Jonas, and the blessed memory of our son Benjamin.