Kabbalah Research in the Wissenschaft des Judentums (1820–1880): The Foundation of an Academic Discipline 9783110623963, 9783110620375

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George Y. Kohler Kabbalah Research in the Wissenschaft des Judentums (1820–1880)

Europäisch-jüdische Studien Beiträge

Herausgegeben vom Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien, Potsdam Redaktion: Werner Treß

Band 47

George Y. Kohler

Kabbalah Research in the Wissenschaft des Judentums (1820–1880) The Foundation of an Academic Discipline

ISBN 978-3-11-062037-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-062396-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-062042-9 ISSN 2192-9602 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019932238 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements The research for this book was funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation – within the context of a collaborative German-Israeli research project of the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main (Christian Wiese and Amir Engel) and the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva (Boaz Huss and George Y. Kohler). The project was devoted to the topic ‘The Academic Study of Jewish Mysticism in the Modern Period (1830 – 1941)’. Generously supported by the Thyssen Foundation, it aimed to revisit the neglected role of Kabbalah and the research of Jewish mysticism in pre-Scholem European culture. Personally I would like to thank my partners in this project Christian Wiese and Amir Engel for all their help and encouragement, but especially Boaz Huss for reading and commenting on the manuscript. Not being a kabbalah scholar myself, this was decisive for the academic quality of the book. Nevertheless, all remaining errors are still my own. In addition I am grateful to all the people who helped to produce the manuscript: Dr. Julie Chajes, my old friend Robert Klein, and Sara Tropper from Soaring Sentences Ltd. A special thanks goes to Julia Brauch and Werner Treß who immediately understood that this book has the potential to change some conceptions still predominant for the field of the history of kabbalah research, and to the entire team at de Gruyter, who it is such a pleasure to work with. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for their patience and above all my wife, Dr. Noa Sophie Kohler, for simply everything.

Contents Introduction

1

Lazarus Ben David, Peter Beer and Isaak Markus Jost (1822 – 1832) Leopold Zunz and Moritz Freystadt (1818 – 1832) The Young Abraham Geiger (1840)

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47 60

Meier Hirsch Landauer and Abraham Adler (1838 – 1845) Michael Sachs and David Joel [1845 – 1849]

79

94

Moritz Steinschneider (1850) Adolf Jellinek (1851 – 1852)

100

First Reactions to Jellinek

116

Adolf Jellinek [1853 – 1854]

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125

The Mature Abraham Geiger (1853 – 1856)

130 139

Ignaz Stern’s Study on the Composition of the Zohar (1858) Isaak Markus Jost’s last Discussion of Kabbalah (1859)

148

Heinrich Graetz’s Study of Early Mystical Literature (1859)

156

The Seventh Volume of Graetz’s History of the Jews (1863)

160

Leopold Loew’s Review of Graetz’s Discussion of the Zohar (1863) Graetz’s Account of Kabbalah during the 15th to the 18th century 190 (1864 – 68) Abraham Geiger’s Last Word on Kabbalah (1871)

212

177

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Ludwig Philippson and Leopold Stein (1864 – 1877) Kabbalah in Jewish Textbooks

236

Epilog – the Years 1894 – 1907

255

223

264 Bibliography Selected Primary Sources (in chronological order) 266 Research Literature (in alphabetical order) Index

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Introduction In 1877, George Eliot sent a desperate letter to her German bookseller, Nicholas Trübner, asking him “When will another Lieferung of Hamburger come out?”¹ What the British author was waiting for was the next installment of the German language Realencyclopädie für Bibel und Talmud, the first ever explicitly Jewish encyclopedia, an eminent work by the scholar and Landesrabbiner of Mecklenburg, Jacob Hamburger (1826 – 1911). Hamburger established the tradition of writing Jewish reference books – culminating in several editions of the better-known Encyclopaedia Judaica – single-handedly in the 1860s with the publication of a first volume on the Hebrew Bible (with more than 1,000 entries.) The second part of his encyclopedia, on Talmud and Midrash, followed in several installments during the 1870s, until these various parts were finally published all together in one volume in 1883.² When George Eliot wrote her famous novel Daniel Deronda, she based much of the mystical knowledge she put into the mouth of one of the work’s main protagonists, Ezra Mordecai Cohen, a kabbalist and proto-Zionist, on what she had studied in the first two sections of Volume II of Hamburger’s encyclopedia, available at the time of the publication of the novel. When the second volume of the Realencyclopädie appeared in 1883, the first entry under the letter “K” was on “Kabbala”, stretching over a full forty-five pages and reproducing all the knowledge on this stream of Jewish mysticism available at the time of Hamburger’s writing the article. That such an impressive encyclopedic entry became possible already in the 1880s was the result of the concentrated effort of the scholars of the German Jewish movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums to research the origins, texts, and main figures of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Almost from the very beginnings of the Wissenschaft movement in the 1820s until Heinrich Graetz’s major essays on the subject of mysticism in the 1860s, German Jewish scholars produced results that were repeatedly revalidated far into the 20th century. Pioneering figures of manuscript study like Meir Hirsch Landauer and Adolf Jellinek worked on this ambitious project closely together with historians like Isaak Markus Jost and bibliographers like Moritz Steinschneider. Moreover, theologians like Abraham Geiger, Leopold Loew, and Leopold Stein also made interesting contributions to the Kabbalah research of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, placing Jewish mysticism within the wider intellectual tradition of Judaism by working out the relation of Kabbalah

 George Eliot, Letters IX, p. 193.  Jakob Hamburger, Realencyclopädie für Bibel und Talmud, Wörterbuch für Gemeinde, Schule und Haus, Abtheilung II, Strelitz 1883. Both volumes together appeared only in 1896. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-001

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Introduction

to what they perceived as the theological “essence” (Wesen) of Judaism – an endeavor that was very typical for the religious discourse of the nineteenth century in Western Europe. It is to these developments, scholars and scholarly works that the present study is devoted. It will follow the discourse on Kabbalah within the Wissenschaft des Judentums chronologically, through several decades of work. The story of modern Kabbalah research arguably began in 1838, when the young Jewish scholar Meir Hirsch Landauer decided that there was no better place to begin his kabbalistic manuscript studies than the Court Library in Munich. There he read hundreds of manuscripts concerning Jewish mysticism, and soon a new world opened up for him. Fascinated by what he had read, he developed several highly original theories about the history and essence of Kabbalah. In the fall of 1842, another young man interested in Kabbalah came to the city of Leipzig, then the stronghold of German orientalism, and soon this scholar would turn into a worthy successor of Landauer, for whom he had great respect. During the almost fifteen years of his stay in Leipzig, Adolf Jellinek (1820 – 1889) became the leading and most industrious German-Jewish scholar of kabbalistic thought of his time, probably even of the entire nineteenth century. Indeed, in just the first half of the 1850s alone, Jellinek published no less than five books on Kabbalah in which he corrected most of Landauer’s theories. It should also be noted that still in the 1850s, another scholar, Moritz Steinschneider, catalogued all known kabbalistic works in a ten-page list included in his famous essay “Jewish Literature” (1857). In parallel to this development, several young Jewish theologians produced detailed and sophisticated theories of the emergence of kabbalistic thought, with which they all seem to have been well-acquainted, at least concerning its main works, like the Sefer Yezirah and the Sefer haZohar. Even earlier, in 1840, Abraham Geiger had already published a philosophical analysis of the emergence of Kabbalah within Judaism, claiming it was a direct result of the theological confrontation between the talmudic and philosophical schools in the history of the Jewish religion. In 1846, the young Heinrich Graetz made the connection between gnosis and Kabbalah, analyzing in depth the Sefer Yezirah, while in 1849 Rabbi David Joel wrote an ambitious book on the more intellectual aspects of the Sefer haZohar. A lengthy and groundbreaking philological study of the same work was published in 1858 by Ignatz Stern, re-opening the question of its authorship, a question that Adolf Jellinek had presumably already settled with his establishing the Spanish kabbalist Moses de Leon (1250 – 1305) as the main originator of the Zohar. Stern showed that this subject was far more complex: he was convinced that the Zohar is essentially a patchwork of at least three

Introduction

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layers of text, from different periods of time, transitioning one into the other – a claim that is essentially valid until today. The 1860s belonged to Heinrich Graetz’s grandiose History of the Jews, a work that would eventually span eleven volumes and which fundamentally changed German Jewish identity during the nineteenth century. Of special interest is the seventh volume from 1863, in which Graetz devoted two full chapters and two essay-long endnotes to the Kabbalah, demonstrating the surprising amount of manuscript study he had undertaken to produce his research results. Graetz re-established Moses de Leon as the author of the Zohar, but provided a much more detailed fundament for modern Kabbalah research by referring to several minor figures of kabbalistic thought until the eighteenth century. In addition, Graetz discussed at length the great Christian kabbalists of the Renaissance period, and in particular, Johannes Reuchlin and his appropriation of Kabbalah for the proof of the truth of Christianity. Later, in the 1880s, lengthy accounts of Kabbalah found entrance even into textbooks for use by Jewish school teachers, published by Wissenschaft scholars like David Cassel and Gustav Karpeles, and eventually also into Jacob Hamburger’s first Jewish encyclopedia. The present book will place German Jewish Kabbalah scholarship in its nineteenth-century historical context, when the new ideal of scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit) had replaced the Bildungs ideal of the Enlightenment, when the critical, empirical, and inductive method of research had replaced the great metaphysical ideas that were the beginning of all historical thought, and the specialized, university-trained expert had replaced the aristocratic polymath. The nineteenth century was the century in which Wilhelm von Humboldt demanded that the historian must extract the great underlying idea from the historical events collected by empirical research, a concept literally transferred into Graetz’s essay on the “Structure of Jewish History” from 1846.³ It was the century in which Friedrich Carl von Savigny demanded that historical sources of the law must be purified from the ‘slag of history’ (Schlacken), that is, from erroneous additions compiled over the course of the centuries, in order to rediscover the original ideas – a concept applied consistently by the likes of Abraham Geiger,

 Heinrich Graetz, “Die Construction der jüdischen Geschichte”, first in: Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judenthums (1846): 81– 97, 121– 32, 361– 81, and 413 – 21, here 83 – 84. New German edition by Nils Roemer, Düsseldorf 2000. English translation: “The Structure of Jewish History” in: Heinrich Graetz, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, ed. Ismar Schorsch, New York 1975. See for Humboldt’s famous lecture “Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers” from 1822, in: Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Werke, vol. I, Berlin 1841, p. 1– 25. (English: “On the Historian’s Task”, in: History and Theory 6, no. 1, 1967, p. 57– 71.)

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Introduction

but many others as well, to all the texts of the Jewish literary tradition, including those of a more mystical nature.⁴ It was the century in which Leopold Ranke declared academic historiography to be a new religious enterprise that had to reveal not metaphysical truth, but the very cultural properties of the nations – an idea that was adopted into Judaism by the Wissenschaft movement as a new and effective means of understanding the Jewish national “essence” of religious thought.⁵ In all those and more respects, Jewish scholars soon became part of the general intellectual trends of the nineteenth century, such that their works and ideas cannot be properly understood if not placed into the context of their own time. Concerning their Kabbalah research specifically, anachronistic readings seem to be a major source of twentieth-century misunderstandings of their efforts, if not deliberate misinterpretations, as will be discussed below. All these pathbreaking changes in the intellectual world were initiated and came to full force in Germany, where such activity reached a level unmatched elsewhere in Europe, and all this during precisely the period of time under discussion in this study. It will be shown here that those changes had an enormous influence also on the Jewish scholars engaged in Kabbalah research. These scholars who subscribed to the ideals of Wissenschaft belonged to the first generation of Jewish intellectuals who supplemented their traditional Jewish education in the classical texts of Judaism with the critical method of the university. Many of them were practicing rabbis, though admittedly only because after graduating from German universities they could not continue an academic career without accepting baptism. Nevertheless, this first generation of Doktor-Rabbiner was in constant contact not only with other Jews interested in Wissenschaft, but also with Gentile scholars, publishing new discoveries regularly in non-Jewish academic journals. All this is true for the Jewish Wissenschaft project in general, and for Wissenschaft’s approach to the field of Jewish mysticism specifically. At the same time, the ideal of Wissenschaftlichkeit was contingent upon the teeming national pride that flourished in the nineteenth century, both in terms of German identity and Jewish identity. When a group of nineteenth-century German historians began collecting the famous “Monumenta Germaniae Historica”, which contains a vast number of original sources spanning medieval German history, published in many volumes over several decades, they established that every single volume would carry the motto Sanctus amor patriae dat ani Cf. John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin, Cambridge 2004.  For Ranke’s influence, see: Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell (eds.), Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse N.Y., 1989.

Introduction

5

mum (“Sacred love of country inspires the mind”) – an expression of the close link those scholars saw between such a ‘technical’ activity as source-collecting and the deepest patriotic sentiments of the soul. Similarly, in the Jewish realm, Graetz’s History of the Jews and many other innovative projects of the Wissenschaft movement served the same purpose for the German Jews. That purpose was the very opposite of cultural and social assimilation: When Jewish identity eroded significantly in the wake of the implementation of the first steps of political emancipation during the Enlightenment, many modern Western Jews found a new identity in the scientific exploration of the Jewish past. The actual goal of Wissenschaft des Judentums, according to Max Wiener, writing in 1933, was to “instill new pride” in the inherited intellectual possessions of Judaism, so that those Jews who were willing to still adhere to their old religion in the modern era “could look with hope and confidence to the future.”⁶ With the old, intuitively followed Jewish lifestyle subservient to talmudic law now being mostly if not entirely defunct, Jewish identity had to be rebuilt along new lines: Practical law observance, as the traditional Jewish identity marker, was to be replaced by a rational, theological foundation of Judaism deriving its legitimacy from the very ‘usefulness’ of Judaism in the modern era. Judaism’s vast contributions to human culture, must have been established – and for the achievement of this lofty goal there appeared no other way open to those young Jewish intellectuals than the path of Wissenschaft. It is thus my intention to show that while many of the early Jewish Kabbalah scholars rejected the theological importance of mysticism, this fact had little if any dampening effect on their motivation to research and discuss Kabbalah. In this light, Kabbalah scholarship turns out to be an illuminating test-case for the understanding of the Wissenschaft movement itself in terms of its methodological and cultural foundations – said understanding being the sole underlying incentive of this book. The Wissenschaft movement’s Kabbalah research seems to be an ideal standard for the examination of nineteenth-century Jewish intellectual and religious agendas, especially with regard to its uniting of apparent opposites: the emphasis on the rational method as the fundament of all science, but applied to mysticism, an essentially non-rational subject. If here harmony is to be reached, this would mean that, in addition to its impartial research results, the Wissenschaft des Judentums was indeed first and foremost an inner Jewish attempt at identity-building in the modern era. While it is true that history as Wissenschaft became the new religion, at least for the non-orthodox modern Jew, a religion it was still – it created for its believers a spiritual and at the same

 Max Wiener, Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation, Berlin 1933, p. 176.

6

Introduction

time intellectual connection to Judaism within a historical totality. No part of this history could remain unstudied, so believed the first Wissenschaft scholars, if this new religious connection of a rich Jewish past and an outstanding Jewish Geist was to be achieved. Nevertheless, at least here in this introduction, I will have to refer to a striking phenomenon that is connected with the subject of this study. While indeed breadth and depth of Kabbalah research within the Wissenschaft movement are impressive – modern, twentieth- and twenty-first century scholarship has taken hardly any notice of this fact. To the contrary, the widespread and constantly repeated opinion concerning the relationship of nineteenth-century German Jewish scholars to Jewish mysticism is that this field was neglected, if not entirely ignored in their work. Nineteenth-century Jewish thinkers despised kabbalistic theories and movements in Judaism out of contempt for mystical thought, today’s overwhelming opinion has it, and therefore the research of those important parts of Jewish intellectual and popular history was deliberately and systematically neglected by the Wissenschaft movement. For proof, modern authors often quote examples of the derogatory language indeed regularly used in the nineteenth century by Jewish scholars when evaluating the “worth” of Kabbalah for monotheistic Jewish theology, for the morals of the community, and for the aesthetic beauty of religious texts. Indeed, the abovementioned Kabbalah studies between 1820 and 1880 are often overflowing with those strong expressions of disdain. With ease one can locate formulations that call Kabbalah a “treacherous fabrication” (Steinschneider), an “absurdity” (Geiger), “superstition and the service of spirits” (Zunz), a “weird brainchild of the Middle Ages, shaped by petty quipping” (Stern), “degeneracy of Judaism” (Jost), and many such more.⁷ The most striking example brought in this regard is Heinrich Graetz, who truly excelled in this kind of “hate speech” in his famed History of the Jews, writing frequently that Kabbalah was a pseudo-science [Afterlehre], “based on deception, at best on self-deception of its initiators”⁸ and that it has surrounded the refined core of prophetic Judaism with “an ugly crust from a fungoid fabric.”⁹ Given all this, it is informative to compare the negative majority opinion of modern scholarship to contemporary nineteenth-century reactions to Jewish Kabbalah research. “No one has prosecuted with more thoroughness, learning, and impartiality the doctrines, origins, and developments of this esoteric system

 All these quotes will be discussed in the body of this book in their contexts.  Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 7, second edition, Leipzig 1873, p. 77.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, Leipzig 1868, p. 124.

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[the Kabbalah]”, wrote for example the British scholar Christian D. Ginsburg in 1863, “than the historian Dr. Graetz.”¹⁰ In the same year, the then well-known Hungarian scholar and rabbi Leopold Loew published a review essay of the seventh volume of Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden, complaining over at least one and a half pages of his lengthy review about the fact that Graetz had in this volume dedicated much more space to an historical account of the medieval Kabbalah than to other intellectual developments in the Jewish Middle Ages. But then again, Loew continues to grumble, this over-emphasis on kabbalistic studies was after all only a very characteristic phenomenon in the then-current trends of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany, and therefore quite understandable on the side of the Jewish historian.¹¹ It might be helpful, in an attempt to explain this odd discrepancy between contemporary and modern evaluations of the relation to Kabbalah by the Wissenschaft movement, to refer to the reason usually given today for the supposed outright rejection, and thus neglect, of mysticism by the nineteenth-century scholars. David Biale, for example, wrote that the Wissenschaft scholars rejected irrationalism in order to prove to their gentile surroundings “that the Jews deserved full emancipation. The Jews, they [the Wissenschaft scholars] argued, were culturally prepared for emancipation since their culture was not fundamentally primitive or alien in relation to Western culture.” To be granted full civil rights, Biale claims here, “required an emphasis on those elements Jews shared with non-Jews, and therefore naturally tended to rationalism.”¹² Michael L. Satlow, in a similar manner, explained that “the Zohar was no help to those Jews who wished to respond to the charge that Judaism was irrational and primitive […] So, in attacking the Zohar as aberrant, Graetz was building a positive case for Judaism whose ‘essence’ was ‘high-minded’ and rational, and thus for the civic rights of German Jews.”¹³ Michael Brenner puts it more bluntly: Graetz made his “denunciatory comments” on Kabbalah, “because he believed that emancipation could be achieved only by presenting a rationalized Judaism.”¹⁴ In short, the motive behind the rejection of Kabbalah by Graetz and others Wissenschaft scholars is that Judaism must per force be rationalized so that it fits the gentile preconditions for emancipation, and therefore the awkward, irrational

 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines, Development and Literature, London 1865, p. 148.  See Leopold Loew, “Die neueste Geschichte der Kabbalah”, reprinted in his Gesammelte Schriften (ed. I. Loew), vol. II, Szegedin 1890, p. 1 f.  David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Cambridge 1979, p. 18.  Michael L. Satlow, Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice, New York 2006, p. 250 f.  Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, Princeton 2010, p. 70.

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Kabbalah must be ignored, or better yet, concealed, in order to procure civil rights and social acceptance. In other words – or so the argument of many a modern scholar goes – if the Jews wanted entrance into the wider gentile society, the toll was intentional suppression of the mystical side of Judaism – a price that the Jewish Wissenschaft was understandably all too willing to pay.¹⁵ This is a serious claim and should be founded on reliable source material. For if true, and considering that the Wissenschaft scholars, described as purposely producing research results that would promote emancipation, are, after all, nineteenth-century German Jews themselves, it amounts to the accusation of obtaining a personal advantage by fraud. But in fact, no such supporting sources can and have been produced, and the allegation remains largely unfounded, at least from a historical perspective.¹⁶ But such overwhelming conformity between modern scholars, and especially when in regard to such a doubtful theory as this, usually points to a common source for the oft-parroted argument – in our case: That Kabbalah-hatred was caused by a certain political corruptibility on the side of the involved scholars, and that their disdain consequently led them to neglect Kabbalah scholarship altogether. Here, this source of the claim is easily identified, of course: It is the same towering figure of Kabbalah research of the twentieth century, who, for a theological reason of his own, aspired to be seen as the one and only founding father of this discipline – the academic treatment of Jewish mysticism. Gershom Scholem (1897– 1982), it must be said, indeed achieved sweeping success in pushing this agenda. In his 1941 classic Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, he (in)famously wrote what would soon become the mani-

 One of the very few scholars who proposed a different motive for Graetz’s rejection of Jewish mysticism is Peter Schäfer, who seems to be closer to a true understanding of Graetz’s thought. Schäfer claims that (instead of begging for emancipation), Graetz’s aversion towards Kabbalah was part of his equally vehement rejection of Christianity. (Peter Schäfer, “‘Adversus cabbalam’ oder: Heinrich Graetz und die jüdische Mystik”, in: Reuchlin und seine Erben, ed. P. Schäfer & I. Wandrey, Ostfildern 2005, p. 189 – 210). For a more balanced view see also Boaz Huss, “Admiration and Disgust: The Ambivalent Re-Canonization of the Zohar in the Modern Period” in: Howard Kreisel (ed.) Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, Beer Sheva 2006, p. 203 – 238.  See for example the passage in Michael Brenner’s Prophets of the Past, quoted above. Three claims are made here: a) Graetz was not friend of Kabbalah – true, and supported by a source in a footnote, b) Graetz suppressed mysticism on purpose, contentiously – no source provided, and c) Graetz rejected mysticism as contrary to core Judaism – true, source provided by Brenner in a footnote. In order to support b) hardly any source could possibly be found.

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festo of most twentieth-century Kabbalah scholars in view of Scholem’s predecessors:¹⁷ The great Jewish scholars of the past century whose conception of Jewish history is still dominant in our days, men like Graetz, Zunz, Geiger, Luzzatto and Steinschneider, had little sympathy – to put it mildly – for the Kabbalah. At once strange and repellent, it epitomized everything that was opposed to their own ideas and to the outlook which they hoped to make predominant in modern Judaism. Darkly it stood in their path, the ally of forces and tendencies in whose rejection pride was taken by a Jewry which, in Steinschneider’s words, regarded it as its chief task to make a decent exit from the world.¹⁸

Even apart from the mythical, denunciatory reference to Steinschneider,¹⁹ little of this broadside can pass the test of a scrutinizing study of nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship of Kabbalah – as this book attempts to provide.²⁰ But nevertheless, following this bold claim, until today, Scholem is widely referred to as the courageous savior of Kabbalah from the exterminatory onslaught of hatred and rejection by the Wissenschaft movement, a purported attack on Kabbalah that Scholem himself had largely invented, together with the ‘motives’ driving it. A close reading of Scholem’s own writings reveals the fact that Scholem himself still knew very well that the nineteenth-century German Jewish Kabbalah scholars achieved many interesting and far-reaching research results, especially in light of the dearth of kabbalistic manuscripts available to them. Scholem himself reluctantly relied on those results for his own scholarship, the most famous of many such examples of this unwanted indebtedness of Scholem to the Wissenschaft des Judentums being the oft-discussed problem of the authorship of the Book of Zohar – one of the main kabbalistic works that attributed itself to

 It took modern Kabbalah scholarship until 2004 to produce at least one short article dedicated to the achievements of Adolf Jellinek in the field. See Moshe Idel, “On Aharon Jellinek and the Kabbalah” (Hebrew) in Pe’amim 100, 2004, p. 16 – 21.  Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York 1941, p. 13 – 14. Scholem held this opinion during his entire life. As late as 1970 he is quoted saying: “Jewish Studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums) had evolved from a bitter controversy with traditional Judaism, whose opponents showed evident signs of wanting to put an end to Jewish existence.” (See: Perspectives of German-Jewish History in the 19th and 20th Century, ed. Meir Gilon, Jerusalem 1971, p. 41.)  The alleged Steinschneider quote has ultimately been shown by Charles Manekin to be baseless, “Steinschneider’s ‘Decent Burial’: A Reassessment”, in: Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, Vol. I., ed., Howard Kreisel, Jerusalem 2006, 239 – 251.  Scholars of such caliber as Wouter Hanegraaff claim today explicitly that Scholem successfully integrated “back into Judaism what had been excluded from it by the Wissenschaft des Judentums…”, namely the Kabbalah, see: Hanegraaff, “The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah”, in: (Huss ed.) Kabbalah and Modernity, p. 109 – 110.

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the talmudic sage Rabbi Simon bar Yochai. After decades of relentless efforts to prove the Wissenschaft scholars wrong on this point, Scholem finally had to admit that they were justified in dating the Zohar to the thirteenth century, and that Moses de Leon (1250 – 1305) played at least a major role it its composition, as Adolf Jellinek had shown already in 1851.²¹ That is probably why Scholem himself largely refrains from the claim of neglect of Kabbalah research within the Wissenschaft movement and emphasized instead the accusation of a contempt-driven rejection of Kabbalah. Scholem usually asserted ambiguously that Kabbalah was “thrown out as un-Jewish or, at the least, half-pagan” by the Wissenschaft des Judentums, subtly suggesting negligence, but not naming it.²² Rather directly though, Scholem insinuated corruptibility on the part of the Wissenschaft scholars, who allegedly traded the academic suppression of Jewish mysticism for their own emancipation. Being probably more aware than his disciples of the moral implications of such a claim, he constructed a secret, almost kabbalistic relation between the Wissenschaft scholars’ academic honesty, which he first seems to concede, and the political effect of their methods of research – the effect of fostering social and legal acceptance of the Jews into educated Germany by having falsely created a thoroughly rationalist Jewish past. The following passage, written by Scholem in 1944, reads like the revelation of ‘secret knowledge’ by a true initiate who is far beyond the need to prove his esoteric claim that there is an inner contradiction… …between the repeated declarations of being a pure and objective science, which is no more than a branch of academic studies in general and which has no purpose outside of itself – and the striking fact of the political function which the discipline was intended to fulfill, sought to fulfill and was accepted by public opinion in order to fulfill. How strange the image of those scholars, all of whose work indicated that they sought to create an effective tool in the struggle for the Jews for equal rights […] and yet nevertheless closed their eyes so as not to see this primary goal too clearly, declaring repeatedly that they seek nothing but pure knowledge for its own sake.²³

 See his Major Trends, 191 f. For Jellinek’s detailed proof, itself based on earlier arguments, see Adolf Jellinek, Moses ben Shem-tob de Leon und sein Verhältnis zum Sohar, Leipzig 1851, to be discussed in this book below.  See his “The Science of Judaism – Then and Now”, in: The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York 1974, p. 309  Gershom Scholem, “Reflections on Modern Jewish Studies” (the infamous 1944 lecture), in: On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, ed. A Shapira, Philadelphia 1997, p. 54.

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In short, the Wissenschaft scholars are accused here of self-deceit at best, but actually of paying “mere lip service” to scientific objectivity,²⁴ while in truth their scholarship was apologetically pursuing a selfish, assimilationist agenda of political emancipation in Germany. They refused to admit to that, of course, but that obfuscation makes their conspiracy against Kabbalah even deeper for Scholem. More than a decade later, in a lecture from 1959, Scholem still spoke about the “inability” of the Wissenschaft scholars “to present spiritual phenomena outside the realm of a refined theology, capable of also pleasing rationally inclined Gentiles”.²⁵ Finally, also concerning this point, as we saw, the careful distinction between the ‘hidden truth’ of their actual apologetic intention and their openly declared unbiasedness was dropped, probably unconsciously again, by most of Scholem’s successors, and what remained was the odoriferous idea that nineteenth-century German Jewish scholars intentionally manipulated their research results in order to improve their social standing in gentile German society.²⁶ The only voice known to me who categorically rejected this theory is that of Susannah Heschel, who openly called it a “denunciation of the Wissenschaft des Judentums”. According to Heschel, Scholem’s “vituperative attack” on the fathers of his own discipline is “striking for its lack of differentiation and contextualization”.²⁷ Scholem’s conspiracy theory hardly holds water, as the present study implies. Not only were Jewish scholars actively networking with their non-Jewish contemporaries, not only were they constantly and successfully approached by gentile colleagues, who were thirsty for new inside knowledge of Jewish mystical texts that they did not understand – virtually no one within the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement would have seriously believed that suppressing the Zohar could curry them favor or make them new friends in German academic circles. Exactly the opposite was the case: In the age of Wissenschaftlichkeit (scientificity), an ideal held to be almost holy during the nineteenth century, it was precisely the scientific study of the Zohar, including its emergence and authorship,  Ibid.  Gershom Scholem, “The Science of Judaism – Then and Now”, in: The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York 1974, p. 309.  A recent example is Noam Zadoff, who believed Scholem that the Wissenschaft movement had an apologetic goal, “which was intended to justify Judaism to German Christian society of the nineteenth century and to adapt Judaism to that society so as to facilitate the acceptance and assimilation of Jews within it.” Noam Zadoff, Gershon Scholem. From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back, Jeffrey Green (trans.), Waltham 2018, p. 85.  Susannah Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy”, in: New German Critique 77, 1999, p. 61– 85, here p. 67.

12

Introduction

that gained the Jewish scholars entrance into the larger academic world. Of course, Christian tradition knew of an even stronger mystical influence, but for nineteenth-century Jews as well as for Christian scholars of the same period, the way to cope with unwanted irrationalities in the field of religion was to rationally analyze these irrationalities, and not to conceal them. The history of Judaism, for the Wissenschaft historians, obviously cannot be changed, subsequently modified, or cleansed of unpleasant elements. Those who fully rejected Kabbalah held that religious mysticism never belonged to the ‘core’ Jewish tradition of the Bible and Talmud in the first place, while those who were more sympathetic to the idea of an original, pristine Kabbalah as a rule only demurred at what they posited was a constant intellectual and moral decline in Kabbalah as it developed from its ancient roots into medieval Jewish mysticism, and eventually a further ‘degeneration’ from Lurianic to practical Kabbalah. Only if theologically understood and philologically and historically dissected could mystical thought be reasonably rejected as unethical and unfit for a modern concept of religion. Thus, it is exactly the research of Kabbalah that was in itself nothing less than the inevitable consequence of all coherent nineteenth-century criticism of mysticism and mystical traditions within religion. Where ‘scientificity’ rules, the truth must be openly told; it must always be rationally reproducible, and not be accessible only to the initiated few – and this even more so when it comes to the discussion of religion. The decisive feature of science is the reproducibility of its results. Philosophy as the abstraction of all science, is elitist and elusive only in an empirical sense, but is open to all thinkers being able to follow its arguments. Kabbalah and mysticism, contrary to that, are elusive by definition, that is, in a very essential way: their arguments are intuitive and thus not in need of justification; they are open and acceptable only for those who are ready to agree. Such an arbitrary elitism is, of course, the very opposite of the nineteenth century’s scientific ethos and its humanistic underpinnings – that is why Kabbalah was rejected. However, in the same spirit of that scientific ethos, Wissenschaft never sought to suppress the study of any form of Kabbalah, as that would have prevented the very scientific clarity the movement sought to achieve in all branches of Judaism. Ironically, there is also a certain logic in the upholding of this conspiracy theory by the proponents of the theological worth of mysticism. But in dry fact, the abrupt transition from rejection of Kabbalah to its scholarly suppression is hardly comprehensible – simply because a conscious rejection will presuppose scholarly discussion of the subject, which is, of course, the very opposite of suppression. Nonetheless, the narrative of suppression remained strong following Scholem’s establishing of it. For example, in 1957, even a scholar like Alexander Altmann said in a public lecture about nineteenth-century Wissenschaft: “Jewish

Introduction

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mysticism was rejected as an aberration from the true path, if not as outright stupidity and superstition. Only by suppressing the mystical tendencies in Jewish history was one able to uphold the image of a purely rational Judaism.”²⁸ Suppression, however, is not a logical consequence of rejection, at least not in cases where the rejection itself is rationally founded. In this sense, nineteenthcentury Wissenschaft scholars themselves seem to have preferred to uphold purely rational Judaism by increasing their academic research into kabbalistic texts rather than by ignoring them on purpose. Sometimes, however, it was not even an assumed conspiracy that led to a complete misunderstanding of Wissenschaft’s relation to Kabbalah – but simple translation errors. There is no better example of this than the word ‘embarrassment’, supposedly used by Graetz in connection with Kabbalah, a use that would fit all too well with the aforementioned theory of Jewish discomfiture with their own mystical tradition.²⁹ The error already occurred in the first English translation of Graetz’s History, published in London in 1891, and was repeated over and again in modern scholarship.³⁰ Graetz, however, used a German word that is more flexible than ‘embarrassment’ in English: Verlegenheit. This word indeed normally translates to ‘embarrassment’, but in the relevant original text of Graetz’s, what was meant was rather ‘a dilemma’ – as in the German Verlegenheitslösung. ³¹ Other examples will be discussed in the present study, such as the Zohar being called “a book of lies” (German: Lügenbuch, referring not to the content but to its pseudo-epigraphy) and the very confusing German notion of Afterlehre (pseudo-science) in connection with Kabbalah. If not because of ‘embarrassment’, there are still many different and complex reasons for the rejection of the value of Kabbalah for what Jewish scholars in the nineteenth century believed was the “essence”, the “fundamental idea” [Grundidee] of Judaism.³² Also here, it might be informative to briefly look at the reasons for the equally unbiased, strong appreciation of Kabbalah by the

 Alexander Altmann, Jewish Studies: Their Scope and Meaning Today, London 1958, p. 6. My italics.  There are many examples. See recently: Jonathan Dauber, Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah, Leiden 2012, p. 6.  The edition published in Philadelphia in 1956 (vol. 3, p. 549) still has “embarrassment”.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, second edition, Leipzig 1873, p. 69. The subject will be discussed at length on p. 164– 165.  This is what Graetz proposed to find as early as 1846, long before Leo Baeck wrote his wellknown “The Essence of Judaism” in 1905 as the upshot of this long, 19th-century development. See Graetz, Construction, p. 83.

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Scholem school. As several scholars have demonstrated unambiguously, what interested Scholem in mystical literature was its perceived ‘vitality’ – a vitality created by Kabbalah containing a “sinful”, nihilistic, and often antinomian element. For Scholem, the redemption of the Jewish people had to come through sin, and not through moral betterment. The absoluteness of ethical values, the authority of ethical law, based theologically and logically on strict ‘Jewish’ monotheism – a robust tradition of thought running from Maimonides to Hermann Cohen – was plainly rejected and replaced by a Nietzschean value-relativism in the twentieth century, purportedly in order to make room for the survival of Judaism after acculturation and the withering effects of rational thought.³³ The vast majority of German Jewish thinkers during the nineteenth century held exactly the opposite opinion concerning the relation of Judaism and ethics, understood in the Kantian sense as based on apriori law. “Still untouched by the ‘crisis of historicism’, caused later on by such value-relativism,” wrote Graetz’s biographer Markus Pyka, “Graetz could assume an understanding of morality (Sittlichkeit) as an eternal truth, without being different in this respect from his contemporaries. Also, his always-present fundamental prerequisite – that Judaism was the very substrate of Sittlichkeit itself, and that Judaism therefore had a missionary task – was essentially no peculiarity of his thought.”³⁴ To the contrary, already by the 1840’s, Jewish theologians had developed, out of messianic considerations, the notion of Judaism’s unique mission to universal human culture, countering then still-widespread Christian supersessionism: The strict monotheism of the Jewish religion was the original and decisive contribution Judaism had to offer to the progress of world civilization.³⁵ It is against this universalist view of Judaism as ‘ethical monotheism’ that Scholem, Rosenzweig, Buber, and Walter Benjamin rebelled after the First World War³⁶ – but in order to understand the salient rejection of mysticism by those thinkers still holding this universalist view, ‘ethical monotheism’ must be reconsidered.

 See for example Amir Engel, “Gershom Scholems ‘Kabbala und Mythos’ jenseits deutsch-jüdischer Romantik”, in: Gershom Scholem in Deutschland (ed. G. Necker et al.) Tübingen 2015, p. 203 – 218, or Boaz Huss, “The Theologies of Kabbalah Research”, Modern Judaism 34:1 (2014), p. 3 – 26.  Marcus Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz, Göttingen 2008, p. 260 (my translation).  See here Cf. Max Wiener “The Concept of Mission in Traditional and Modern Judaism”, in: YIVO Annual 47/48, p. 9 – 24. Siehe auch David Novak, Jewish Social Ethics, New York 1992, p. 225 – 228.  Walter Benjamin famously wrote in his Zur Kritik der Gewalt from 1921 that the dogma of the sacredness of life was “the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost in cosmological impenetrability.” (Benjamin, Reflections, New York 1986, p. 297.)

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For Geiger and Graetz, kabbalistic literature, with its “absurdities” and its appeal to the senses instead of reason, made its readers eventually “unable to tell right from wrong.”³⁷ But this very ability of moral discernment was one of the basic purposes of religion in the universal history of humanity for the nineteenth century, and probably also one of the reasons for many Jewish scholars to cling to practical Judaism, as they did, notwithstanding their academic approach to Jewish history, theology, and ultimately even to the Biblical text itself. But the nineteenth century’s objection to Kabbalah is not simply based on an over-emphasis on rationality in its conception of religion. Both Geiger and Graetz frequently leveled massive criticism against the philosophy of Maimonides for precisely this reason of dry rationalism – while they themselves prefer a spiritual Judaism that elevates its followers rather than provides reasonable explanations for its own tradition.³⁸ It is thus not that they reject inwardness per se, and would permit only rational thought when it comes to a description of the essence of Judaism. But inwardness, the emotional, empirical side of religion, is a purely ethical, interhuman category for them, not an individualistic, elitist one. It must find expression in the selfless love of God, and through God in the love of our fellow human beings – and not in an exuberant searching for “deeper” spiritual meanings in texts or symbols, as in kabbalistic thought. Moreover, religious inwardness must yield concrete moral results in real life – and not exhaust itself in mystical speculations and playful allegories. This moral demand, therefore, seems to be the true motive behind the adamant rejection of Kabbalah: It did not promote the modern Judaism that nineteenth-century German Jews wished to see, a Judaism that is a viable, ethical alternative to traditional religion – a Judaism that is capable of survival in the modern age. On a more technical level, much of the Wissenschaft movement’s criticism was also directed against the phenomenon of pseudo-epigraphy, typical for medieval kabbalistic literature. Here, too, the nineteenth-century arguments are not easily rejected by a twentieth-century view. Graetz, David Biale claimed bluntly, “could not understand the religious motive behind pseudo-epigraphy.”³⁹ But given the spiritual relation between historiography and Judaism, described above, Graetz understood the motive for pseudo-epigraphy well, and he consciously rejected it for his own religious reasons: If history was the “religion

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, second edition, Leipzig 1873, p. 232– 233.  Cf. here George Y. Kohler, Reading Maimonides’ Philosophy in 19th Century Germany, Dordrecht 2012.  Biale, Scholem, p. 23.

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Introduction

of the modern Jew”, deliberate falsification amounted to idolatry.⁴⁰ The secretiveness of Kabbalah was the exact counter-image of the intellectual honesty of Wissenschaft, as the nineteenth century generally saw it. Even for the rather unbiased bibliographer Steinschneider, the connection of pseudo-epigraphy to the theological realm was obvious. ⁴¹ “Deceit [Betrug]”, he wrote in the introduction to an entire monograph dedicated to the pseudo-epigraphic literature of the Jewish Middle Ages, is the “natural companion” of “superstition and enthusiasm [Aberglauben und Schwärmerei]”, the combination of which was Steinschneider’s usual characterization of Kabbalah.⁴² Strong language and judgmental assessments in themselves, however, are very poor proof for emotional disdain, it turns out, in the context of the nineteenth century. Leopold Ranke himself, the great role model for Heinrich Graetz, often applied distinct moral judgments in his many works, but he is still famous, and today often critiqued, for his revolutionary attempt at historical objectivity. Apparently, nineteenth-century readers knew well to distinguish between fact and evaluation, and the great achievement of Ranke’s and Graetz’s historicism was rather to have begun their research with the facts, with the empirical, and not with great ideas. This is the only sense in which their ‘objectivity’ should be understood, i. e. as an inductive science. Ranke’s innovation of including in academic source-criticism the perceived character traits, circumstances of life, interests, and intentions of historical authors was only faithfully adopted by Graetz in his own critical account of Moses de Leon.⁴³ In consequence, the disagreement about Kabbalah between nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars of Judaism is just another expression of two wider, interrelated debates about Jewish theology and politics in the modern age. First, the Kabbalah controversy is part of the more general argument concerning the combined effort of the Wissenschaft and the Reform movement of Judaism (with often identical protagonists) in nineteenth-century Germany: Did this effort aim apologetically at fighting anti-Semitism and proving Jewish acculturation  Yosef Yerushalmi even called history the ‘faith of the fallen Jews’, but Yerushalmi’s underlying notion of the Jewish religion seems to be contrary to that of Graetz. (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor, Seattle 1996, p. 86).  For Steinschneider, pseudo-epigraphy was either a rather technical outrage, ‘a capital offence in the realm of bibliography’, or egoistic, ‘immoral behavior’, as Giulio Busi called it (See: Busi, ‘Steinschneider and the Irrational’, p. 221.)  Moritz Steinschneider, Zur pseudoepigraphischen Literatur inbesondere der geheimen Wissenschaften des Mittelalters, Berlin 1862, p. 3.  For a detailed attempt to rehabilitate Graetz concerning his relation to mysticism, see: George Y. Kohler, “Heinrich Graetz and the Kabbalah, in: Kabbalah-Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 40, 2018, p. 107– 130.

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successful, with the aim of the Jews being granted civil emancipation? Or was the goal of Wissenschaft and Reform rather to give modern day Jewry a new identity after the traditional lifestyle had completely broken down? The results of the present study indicate that the former was rather a (welcome) side-effect of the latter, precisely because the Jewish Kabbalah scholars were not willing to phrase their research results in an unbiased, or even appreciative language. This is indicative of a strong, internal purpose associated with researching the mystical tradition of Judaism: The purpose of rejecting them as not being part of the “essence” of the Jewish religion that was to be preserved even under the completely changed conditions of modernity. Jewish scholars in the nineteenth century did not pursue Wissenschaft for the sake of emancipation, but for the sake of Wissenschaft, which in itself was seen as redemptive. However, emancipation in the form of being granted full civil rights was thought of as a self-evident modern liberal value by those scholars, and not as a reason to compromise any part or tradition of Judaism, not even Kabbalah. Second, in a more theological sense, but based on the first point: the Kabbalah controversy is part of the more general argument concerning the possibility of a ‘rational religion’. Can there be a middle way between tradition-bound orthodoxy and outright atheism? Has rationalism only “crept in as a dogma” (Biale) into the debate around mysticism,⁴⁴ or is there indeed room for the dual assumption that philosophy is itself a religious obligation and that, as such, philosophical thinking is an expression of religiosity, as the great Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages believed? While for the Scholem school this assumption seems to be far-fetched, if not altogether foreign to “authentic” Judaism, Graetz at times seems to be personally offended in his very religiosity by the mystical literature of Judaism, most certainly in cases when the kabbalists “replaced the refined belief in God with idolatrous phantasms [gotteslästerliche Wahngebilde]”, as he wrote.⁴⁵ The concept of God especially must not remain arbitrary or intuitive for Jewish Wissenschaft theologians, nor can it be subject to allegories and metaphors at the will of the kabbalist, indulging in his private fantasies. God must be rationally defined to be worthy of being called this name. This definition, however, can only be achieved along ethical lines, or, in Jewish terms, by finding the ethical meaning of the purpose of divine legislation. But for ethics to be universal, God had to be One. Thus, monotheism becomes the very benchmark of this supposed religio-philosophical middle ground between upholding tradition for tradition’s sake and the outright rejection of all

 Biale, Scholem, p. 18.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 206.

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Introduction

transcendent truth – with both of these apparently contradictory extremes being actually of the same theological consequence: they can do without a monotheistic deity. Probably here we find the theological reason for Scholem’s open rejection of both Maimonides and Hermann Cohen, Maimonides’ modern disciple. While the medieval philosopher was ready to pay any price for the strict upholding of monotheism, and even went as far as calling the belief in tradition only – without a proper, rational concept of God – a belief that borders on idolatry (Guide III, 51), Scholem held that the Guide for the Perplexed was “in almost every respect the antithesis to the Zohar”⁴⁶ and that Maimonides’ monotheistic rationalization of God had caused “a spiritual disaster”, for which the author of the Guide “will yet be held accountable”.⁴⁷ While Hermann Cohen (1842– 1918) founded his entire neo-Kantian philosophy, including his later religious thought, on the very notion of Wissenschaft, and thus developed a most sophisticated version of the intrinsic connection of monotheism and ethics, Scholem saw all the value of Jewish mysticism in the possibility of using it to prove Cohen wrong on this point, as he explicitly wrote in the introduction to Major Trends. ⁴⁸ David Biale saw Scholem as even “attacking the centrality of belief in a transcendent monotheistic God,” rightly identifying monotheism as the main subject of contention here for Scholem.⁴⁹ For nineteenth-century German-Jewish thought, of which Cohen is the culmination, rationality is not a dogma, effectively and ironically to be accepted against rational conviction, but rather a mitzvah, a divine imperative inherent within ethical monotheism. Non-rational, non-monotheistic, even personal concepts of the deity would thus be considered idolatrous and consequently immoral for the vast majority of nineteenth-century German-Jewish thinkers – which is the fundamental theological reason for their rejection of Kabbalah. Expressed in more practical terms, it is religious reform that stands between orthodoxy and atheism: Reform is the attempt to transform Judaism along rational lines of reinterpretation of classical Jewish sources and concepts. All of the nineteenth-century opponents of the value of Jewish mysticism can be count-

 Gershom Scholem, Zohar: The Book of Splendor, Introduction, p. vii. In a private letter to Salman Schocken from 1937, Scholem admitted that Maimonides had always “appalled” him. For a larger context, see the introduction by Yaacob Dweck to the Princeton Classics Edition of Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah. Princeton 2016, p. xxxv – xxxvii.  Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, in The Messianic Idea of Judaism, p. 105 – 106.  Scholem, Major Trends, p. 38. Scholem’s claim that for Cohen “evil is non-existent” (Major Trends, p. 36) merits a separate, detailed discussion, since existence corresponds to different categories in Scholem’s and Cohen’s thought.  Biale, Scholem, p. 22 (On Cohen, see also p. 51 and 74).

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ed in the Reform camp of Judaism, in various ways and degrees. Now, if Kabbalah is not perceived as an embarrassment for Judaism in the eyes of the gentiles, as we saw above, but rather as unfit for a modern form of Judaism for the Jews in the eyes of the Wissenschaft scholars – at least part of the reason is that Kabbalah opposes, actually circumvents and thus prevents reform, the adapting of Judaism to modernity. In addition to its immorality, it was Abraham Geiger who discovered what he saw as yet another very harmful effect of mysticism, given his own ideal of a perpetual reform of Judaism according to the historically changing social and cultural circumstances: “As soon as the healthy mind, or the learned progress of thought, comes to contradict positive tradition, mysticism intrudes in order to refute this contradiction and to obliterate it by secret wisdom,” Geiger argued. This perceived opposition of Kabbalah to all religious reform must certainly have been felt as an outright hostility, as a direct resistance to all that was important about Judaism. ⁵⁰ Here again it is in fact deep religiosity that provides the background for the rejection of Kabbalah: While secular scholars could take (secret) pleasure in Kabbalah’s supposed nihilistic antinomianism, for Geiger’s reform project of Judaism – aimed, as it was, to preserve and not to destroy – this attempt of Kabbalah to hinder religious development (in the legal realm) by obliterating contradictions between the rational and the outdated, made Jewish mysticism the archenemy. While the Jewish Reformers deeply respected and therefore reformed talmudic Judaism, they quickly detected and deplored the fact that Kabbalah, while outwardly upholding talmudic law, in their eyes arrogantly ridiculed the Talmud. Many of the first generation of Reform rabbis still justified their legal changes with talmudic dictums, and in general saw their reform project in fact as still part of talmudic Judaism, which itself represented arguably an even greater reform of Judaism vis a vis the biblical religion of the Temple.⁵¹ Kabbalah, however, came not to reform, but to utterly replace the talmudic approach, the reformers argued, as Kabbalah claimed for itself very different, secret, essentially “higher” truths. This caused a deep rift, a

 Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 66.  Twentieth-century Jewish theologians have often rejected the claim of the first reformers that their legal changes were not innovations but restorations. Abandoning the legal fiction of the divinity of the law, as they did, was in fact a theological revolution in Judaism, creating a point of no return to orthodoxy – thus argued for example Julius Guttmann in “Die Normierung des Glaubensinhalts im Judentum”, in: Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 5 (1927), p. 241– 255.

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Introduction

split within Judaism, they complained, while their own reforms were perceived by them to be a continuation, a re-forming, of the original talmudic essence.⁵² Those and others are the deeper reasons for the rejection of the religious worth of Kabbalah by the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums, which were based on their Jewish theology and religious convictions far more than on politics of emancipation or desires of assimilation into German society and culture. Nevertheless, none of those reasons caused them to suppress or to neglect the research of Kabbalah. When only very few of them indeed specialized in this field, and devoted themselves to intense kabbalistic manuscript study, the reason was rather the complexity of the issue, the inaccessibility of the mystical texts for the non-expert, the obstacles of pseudo-epigraphy – but above all, the fact that Jewish Wissenschaft was only at its very beginnings, and consequently many other fields were still in urgent need of being treated for the first time with critical, academic methods: history, liturgy, theology, homiletics, exegesis and talmudic law. While those disciplines were, in the nineteenth century, certainly not considered more valuable than the research of Jewish mysticism, they still had to compete for the time devoted to them by the Wissenschaft scholars, who, as we saw, were in many cases practicing community rabbis and only able to do research during their leisure hours. While within the German-Jewish movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums no negative correlation can be established between the theological rejection of Kabbalah and the amount of research invested in this subject, arguably quite the opposite is true: The more a scholar was interested in showing the “harmfulness” of Kabbalah, the more space he reserved for the description of its doctrine, while this description, of course, had to answer all criteria of the scholarly ethos of the nineteenth century in order to indeed serve the educational purpose to warn against the ‘dangers’ of kabbalistic thought. Not surprisingly, still the most intense engagement of modern scholarly literature with nineteenth-century kabbalistic research is found in the works of Gershom Scholem himself, beginning from his Major Trends (1941). Despite his abovequoted broadside in the introduction to the book against all previous Kabbalah scholarship, and not mentioning the achievements of Adolf Jellinek and others at all throughout the introduction, Jellinek then appears in the body of the book in (at least) twelve different places, referred to approvingly as “one of the small  Interestingly, here Scholem agreed, albeit tacitly. It is one of the major points of criticism of Scholem, brought forward by Moshe Idel, for example, that “there is no need to divorce halakhah from myth in a fundamental way nor to presuppose basic tensions between them,” as both the protagonists of this book and Gershom Scholem held. (See Idel, New Perspectives, p. 156 – 57.)

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band of nineteenth-century Jewish scholars who probed deeper into the problem of Jewish mysticism.”⁵³ Scholem’s 1962 classic Ursprünge und Anfänge der Kabbala can be read as one long argument with his predecessors, particularly Heinrich Graetz and David Neumark (1866 – 1924), regarding the question of the origin of Kabbalah.⁵⁴ The views of both thinkers are emphatically rejected by Scholem (“must be judged a total failure”) in a language often reminiscent of the rejection of Kabbalah by Graetz himself. But although “Graetz and Neumark fell victim to the nineteenth-century illusion of an enlightened conception of religion”,⁵⁵ Scholem engaged Graetz in an expert debate throughout the book, taking him seriously, sometimes even admitting that he was right concerning a certain detail, and often correcting Graetz’s views only on the basis of manuscript material to which Graetz had no access. In the end, however, Scholem reminds his reader that Graetz “seems to have smelled” mystics everywhere, who “immediately aroused his animus”,⁵⁶ falling back on judging scholarship according to the attitude of the scholar towards his research subject. Of Scholem’s students, Moshe Idel and Isaiah Tishby mentioned nineteenthcentury Kabbalah research only occasionally, and in very short introductory passages. Idel asserted, in a statement not further elaborated, that Landauer and Graetz were the two “founders of the academic study of Kabbalah” in the nineteenth century. Graetz, according to Idel, “performed the first major historical survey of kabbalistic literature…” – but in the same text Idel classified all thinkers he deals with according to their “sympathy” towards Kabbalah.⁵⁷ Tishby wrote specifically about Graetz’s approach to Kabbalah that “in a special section of his work he explained and clarified the various arguments, added arguments and views of his own, and summarized the whole problem by formulating his

 Scholem, Major Trends, p. 124.  Cf. the English edition: Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, (transl A. Arkush), New York 1990, p. 7– 11, 16, 46 – 47, 51– 52, 130, 212– 213, 231, 266, 270, 363, 370, 411 and more. Neumark came in 1892 from the Ukraine to Berlin and studied there philosophy. From 1904 till 1907 he held a rabbinical post in Bohemia, and then moved on to Cincinnati, where he held the chair in philosophy at the Hebrew Union College until his death. His major work was the initial two volumes of an unfinished History of Jewish Philosophy. Neumark only published the first volume upon his departure from Germany, and the first half of the second volume later in Cincinnati (1910). The second half of the second volume, which ends with a discussion of Ibn Gabriol, was actually published only in 1928 by Reuben Brainin, a full four years after Neumark’s death. For his view on the origin of Kabbalah, see David Neumark, Geschichte der jüdischen Philosophie des Mittelalters, Berlin 1907, p. 179 – 223.  Scholem, Origins, p. 10.  Scholem, Origins, p. 231.  Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, New Haven 1988, p. 8 – 11.

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critical conclusions with the utmost clarity and precision.” And although Tishby believed it is no use to look for balanced objectivity in Graetz’s approach to mysticism, “we should bear in mind that Graetz’s hostility to the Zohar was not entirely unproductive. It led Zohar research into several important new areas.”⁵⁸ The most detailed and at the same time perhaps the most interesting discussion of the “Nineteenth-Century Legacy” of Wissenschaft des Judentums concerning mysticism is the eponymous chapter dedicated to this subject by David Biale in his 1979 book on Scholem, already referred to at length in this introduction.⁵⁹ In addition, no less a scholar than Peter Schäfer devoted two full-length articles to what he calls Graetz’s “Adversus cabbalam” (intentionally associating the Jewish historian with the kind of hatred found in the literary antisemitism of the “Adversus Judaeos” genre), yet did not see fit to devote any space to Graetz’s influential Kabbalah research as found in the two long endnotes to the seventh volume of his History. ⁶⁰ Many newer studies on specifically kabbalistic subjects do at least mention Graetz in their introductions, but close to never do these same short accounts of Graetz seem to be based on an actual reading of his works, let alone the German original, and even less so regarding other nineteenth-century Jewish scholars of mysticism.⁶¹ Only in 2018, Kabbalah – Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts published a special volume (edited by Christian Wiese and myself) devoted to preScholemian Kabbalah research. This pioneering volume includes thirteen essays dealing with several intellectual approaches to Jewish mysticism during the 19th and early 20th centuries in Germany, England, Eastern Europe and the United States and must thus be seen as the first more complex attempt to write a history of the field of Kabbalah research – with some of the contributions directly discussing the subject of the present book: The Wissenschaft des Judentums. ⁶² Much has been written by eminent Scholem-scholars on the reasons for Scholem’s remarkable rejection of his nineteenth-century predecessors, but these books and articles hardly ever discuss the literature itself that Scholem la Isaiah Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, vol. I, Oxford 1989, p. 44– 45.  Biale, Scholem, p. 13 – 32.  Peter Schäfer, ‘Adversus cabbalam’, and Peter Schäfer, ‘Ex oriente lux? Heinrich Graetz und Gershom Scholem über den Ursprung der Kabbala‘, in: Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs 2003, p. 69 – 90.  I have found only two examples of a more sophisticated understanding of the nineteenthcentury Kabbalah researchers in the current literature on the subject: Yaakov Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah, Princeton 2011; and Jonathan Dauber, Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah, Leiden 2012.  Cf. Kabbalah – Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts, ed. by Daniel Abrams, volume 40, Los Angeles 2018, guest editors of the volume Christian Wiese and George Y. Kohler.

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beled “a total failure”.⁶³ While Scholem himself was obviously still well-read in earlier Kabbalah research, the analysis of his thought often attempts to make do without any true reference to the discourse on Kabbalah in the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Finally, in a recent meritorious and ground-breaking article on the relation of philosophy and Kabbalah in nineteenth-century German Jewish thought, David Myers asked us to “Rethink the Narrative of Neglect”, yet himself still writes of “venomous disdain for Kabbalah and the Zohar” within the Wissenschaft movement. Again, Graetz is singled out as “intensely hostile” to both Kabbalah and Moses de Leon, though allowing that he “could not and did not ignore” either the Zohar or the Kabbalah in his writings.⁶⁴ Interestingly, except for Scholem himself, none of the authors mentioned above ever doubted the validity of a great deal of the research results found by Jewish Kabbalah scholars during the nineteenth century. Even Peter Schäfer in both his articles on Graetz and Kabbalah is forced to concede on every other page that Graetz was right “as regards content” [inhaltlich], and that it is only his language that was disturbing.⁶⁵ Gulio Busi, writing in 2011, wondered about a “striking contradiction” in Moritz Steinschneider “between a quite negative attitude toward mysticism and a careful study of mystical literature,”⁶⁶ while for Lawrence Fine it is “a matter of rich irony” that despite their “vigorous denunciation of Kabbalah”, Graetz and Steinschneider, as opponents of Jewish mysticism, “actually made valuable contributions to the study of its historical development.”⁶⁷ I hope to have shown in the present study that this phenomenon is

 See here for a short selection: Noam Zadoff, Gershon Scholem. From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back, p. 83 – 92; Amir Engel, Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography, Chicago 2017, p. 91– 92; Andreas Kilcher, “Kabbala und Moderne. Gershom Scholems Geschichte und Metaphysik des Judentums” in: Jüdische Traditionen in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Darmstadt 2000, p. 86 – 99; Nils Roemer, “Breaching the ‘Walls of Captivity’: Gershom Scholem’s Studies of Jewish Mysticism, in: The Germanic Review 1997, p. 23 – 41; Klaus Herrmann, “Gershom Scholems Weg zur Kabbala”, in: Gershom Scholem in Deutschland (ed. G. Necker et al.) Tübingen 2015, and Daniel Weidner, “Gershom Scholem, Die Wissenschaft des Judentums und der Ort des Historikers”, in: Aschkenas 2, 2001, p. 435 – 464, Boaz Huss, “Ask No Questions: Gershom Scholem and The Study of Contemporary Jewish Mysticism.” Modern Judaism, vol. 25 no. 2, 2005, p. 141– 158.  David Myers, “Philosophy and Kabbalah in Wissenschaft des Judentums: Rethinking the Narrative of Neglect” Studia Judaica 16 (2008), p. 56 – 71, here p. 69.  See for example Schäfer, Adversus, who used im Kern (at the core, in nuce right), p. 197.  See Busi, “Steinschneider and the Irrational”, in: Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (ed. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal), Leiden 2011, p. 214.  Lawrence Fine (ed.) Essential Papers on Kabbalah, New York 1995, p. 19, note 3.

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Introduction

much less contradictory or ironic than it seems to be from a Scholemian perspective. In this very sense, it must be clearly stated that this study is not a book about Kabbalah, but about the German-Jewish movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums, its motivations and its theological and methodological background. The present study does not intend to contribute to Kabbalah research. It will not evaluate the truth or substance of the arguments brought forward about Jewish mysticism by the many thinkers discussed in the following pages. – but rather, this book will attempt to contextualize their views on Kabbalah within the wider scope of their epoch and thought. The one exception to this rule will be regarding the debate about the authorship of the Zohar, because I believe this debate has many implications for the questions that truly interest me. It relates to the nature of pseudo-epigraphy, where ideological differences between the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century views are probably the widest, but it also is one of the major points where Scholem eventually agreed with Jellinek and Graetz – which seems to prove my major thesis with this book: Ideological differences do not necessarily have a decisive influence on research results. This study deals with the heyday of Wissenschaft des Judentums, from the 1820s to the 1870s, the active period of the first generation of its scholars, a time when the groundwork was laid for everything that would eventually develop from this pioneering academic enterprise, including the many forms and places of Jewish Studies today. To be sure, Kabbalah research continued after the 1870s – but now it took on new forms and different tendencies, new scholars from Eastern Europe came to Germany to join its ranks, with the consequence that new philosophies shaped its underlying theological assumptions. Kabbalah scholarship as it manifested itself at the turn of the century should be subject to a separate survey, even if much of Scholem’s criticism was also directed against his near-contemporaries, figures like David Neumark and Philipp Bloch.⁶⁸ In addition, the present study will be limited to the German-speaking world, notably leaving Italy and Eastern Europe out of the picture. This, again, is motivated by the exclusive intention of this study to clarify ideologies and methods of the Ger-

 Rabbi and scholar Philipp Bloch (1841– 1923) is the subject of one of Scholem’s most famous anecdotes. Bloch’s alleged refusal to read the many kabbalistic manuscripts that he himself possessed became one of the “great moments” in Scholem’s biography. (Cf. Gershom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, Frankfurt 1977, p. 189 – 90.) Bloch, however, was the author of Geschichte der Entwickelung der Kabbala und jüdischen Religionsphilosophie kurz zusammengefasst, Trier 1894, and other works on Kabbalah, as Scholem well knew. One could generously say that Bloch was being purely facetious with his, “What! Am I supposed to read this rubbish, too?” – if he made this statement at all.

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man Wissenschaft movement itself, and not to examine the state of the field of Kabbalah research in the nineteenth century from the point of view of an expert in mysticism. Thus, I hope that the merit of this book will be first and foremost to clarify a great number of persistent misunderstandings about the relation of the Wissenschaft movement to Kabbalah during the period under discussion here, thereby making room for more and refined knowledge about great nineteenth century Jewish scholarship – from which we can all profit until this very day.

Lazarus Ben David, Peter Beer and Isaak Markus Jost (1822 – 1832) Already the second issue of the famous flagship journal of the nascent Wissenschaft movement, the short-lived Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, carried a lengthy text that displayed the author’s considerable knowledge of central kabbalistic ideas and motives.¹ In this essay, published in 1822, Lazarus Ben David (1762– 1832) tried to prove that Jewish messianism is a mystical idea and that it was through kabbalistic influence that it had developed into what it had become by the time of Ben David’s writing. He begins by mentioning the rationalistic, political concept of the Messiah in Judaism, centered around the interpretation of Maimonides, calling this rationalist messianism the minority opinion (which nevertheless met with enthusiastic approval in modern Jewish thought). The remaining twenty-five pages of the text Ben David devotes to a discussion of what he saw as the view of the kabbalists on the Jewish Messiah.² This view, which for Ben David is very close to the Christian interpretation of messianism and its irrational, sometimes imaginary elements, serve the author to put forward his main point: That the doctrine of the Messiah is of human origin and thus not an essential part of revealed Judaism. Still, Ben David’s command of kabbalistic motives and concepts is striking, especially in light of the fact that he was a classical proponent of Haskalah and one of the earliest followers of Kantian Criticism. After receiving traditional training in Talmud and Jewish law in Berlin, Ben David studied mathematics and philosophy in Halle and later taught in Vienna, where he popularized the new ideas of Immanuel Kant. Throughout his life denied an academic position for being Jewish, Ben David was at once the youngest secular disciple of Moses Mendelssohn and the oldest associate of Leopold Zunz, who edited the journal in which his essay on the Messiah appeared.³

 Lazarus Bendavid, Über den Glauben der Juden an einen künftigen Messias, Berlin 1823.  For Maimonides’ reading of Jewish Messianism, see Menachem Kellner, Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People, Albany 1991, and in connection with other streams of Jewish Messianism: Kenneth Seeskin, Jewish Messianic Thoughts in an Age of Despair, Cambridge 2012.  His main achievement was to have saved David Friedlander’s Berlin Jewish Free-School from demise, taking over the directorship in 1806 (without salary). He allowed, for the first time, Christian children to attend. Critical of Jewish orthodoxy, Ben David remained a lifelong Kantian, reacting to the German Idealism of Fichte and Hegel with silent grievance. See, for more, the biography by Ludwig Geiger, in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB), vol. 2, Leipzig 1875, p. 318 – 320, and online. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-002

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Ben David’s rough outline of the historical development of Kabbalah from 1822 soon became something of a paradigm for several more sophisticated theories about the origin of kabbalistic thought in Judaism that followed him during the nineteenth century. The detailed instructions for mystical secrecy and concealment, as found in the talmudic tractate of Chagigah, point to the existence of an ‘older group’ of kabbalists who probably developed several of the basic cosmogonic doctrines now known as the essentials of kabbalistic thought, Ben David wrote, but they never laid them down in writing and transmitted them only orally to their favorite students. Still, argues Ben David, because of this tight chain of tradition, we can refer to what the ‘newer kabbalists’ hold as their mystical teachings as fragments, or at least as “valuable remnants” of antiquity.⁴ In parallel, there is a second development in the origin of Kabbalah: the older mystics tried to reconcile certain philosophemes of foreign origin with Judaism – by way of forced interpretation of biblical passages, which were now no longer read according to their literal meaning but to which a new secret meaning was attached that served the intended purpose.⁵ This method, claimed Ben David, later became the axiomatic proof for every student of Kabbalah that its mystical doctrines are already to be found in the Pentateuch and the biblical Prophets.⁶ In his essay, Ben David cites not a single source for his detailed paraphrases of kabbalistic doctrine, which clearly positions the text in a pre-Wissenschaft, late- Enlightenment category of polemic writing for the purpose of political or theological argument. Ben David’s publication more or less coincided with two other print accounts of the historical development of Kabbalah, and in those studies we find the beginning of a more scientific approach to the subject. There is Peter Beer’s Geschichte, Lehren und Meinungen aller bestandenen und noch bestehenden religiösen Sekten der Juden und der Geheimlehre oder Cabbalah, which contains several hundred pages on the history and the doctrines of Kabbalah – and the third volume of Isaak Markus Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten, which also presents a theory of the origin of Kabbalah, although a much terser one. These works probably mark the inception of systematic Kabbalah research within the fledgling Wissenschaft des Judentums. While Ben David was still a typical representative of the radical secular Enlightenment of the generation after Mendelssohn, Peter Beer (1758 – 1838), the

 Bendavid, Glauben, p. 211.  Bendavid, Glauben, p. 212.  Bendavid, Glauben., p. 213.

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Lazarus Ben David, Peter Beer and Isaak Markus Jost (1822 – 1832)

Austrian maskil and educationalist was a transitional figure.⁷ When Beer published in 1822 his intellectual history of what he called “all former and contemporary Jewish sects”, boldly putting on par the Sadducees, Essenes, Karaites, and ‘Rabbinism’ – he added only the remark that contemporary Judaism is based on the ‘latter sect’. In so denying talmudic law any further authority, Beer was not just another mascilic thinker who called for a return to ‘pure Mosaism’ (i. e. the assumed essence of Judaism before the split into sects); in fact, Beer was calling for no less than a liberation from the past by knowledge of the past. ⁸ Beer’s history book features extensive source material, but we do not yet find critical analysis of these texts. Ismar Schorsch called Beer’s idea of an historian “that of a facilitator, an assembler of scattered and inaccessible sources for convenient perusal.” Beer, Schorsch claimed, would “read history ‘attentively’, for guidance and edification and not to establish the meaning and veracity of ancient texts.”⁹ While this assessment is certainly accurate, the implied criticism seems to be much weaker when it comes to Beer’s account of Kabbalah and its origin. Here, as opposed to social and political history, for example, assembling and summarizing the texts and thus providing the basis for further academic study of Kabbalah was of greater importance for a Jewish Wissenschaft, even if Beer failed to analyze his sources according to modern standards. He did, however, present his findings in an unbiased and non-judgmental manner – although at times he would not hide his own, exceedingly negative, opinion of kabbalistic mysticism. In addition, Beer compared main aspects of Kabbalah with both the mystical and philosophical traditions of other cultures, providing lengthy analyses of perceived similarities and differences. His account of the history of Kabbalah reaches from the origin of Jewish mysticism (according to Beer) in Egypt and Babylonia down to a description of the Emden-Eibeschütz controversy (in the 1750s) and includes an extensive exposition on the theological theories of the Frankist movement.¹⁰  On Beer, see Lebensgeschichte des Peter Beer, ed. by Moritz Herrmann, Prag 1839 and Louise Hecht Ein jüdischer Aufklärer in Böhmen: Der Pädagoge und Reformer Peter Beer, Böhlau 2008. Excerpts from Beer’s book were translated into English as early as 1846 and published in the journal The Voice of Israel by messianic Jews. See Huss, Kabbalah and Modernity, p. 181.  As late as 1834, at over 70, he still published first full-length Reform-orientated monograph on Maimonides; see, for discussion, Kohler, Reading Maimonides, p. 45 – 48.  Ismar Schorsch, “Scholarship in the Service of Reform”, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35 (1990), p. 73 – 101, on Beer 73 f.  A detailed German paraphrase of Beer’s text can be found in Roland Goetschel “Peter Beers Blick auf die Kabbala”, in: Kabbala und Romantik, ed. Eveline Goodmann-Thau et al., Tübingen 1994, p. 293 – 306. See also the extensive discussion in Hecht, Aufklärer, p. 294 ff.

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Beer’s account of Kabbalah extended over almost 400 pages of the second volume of his history work. He begins the discussion with a definition of the main theological idea in kabbalistic thought, which he identified in the belief that the literal meaning of the Bible is nothing more than an empty shell for a deeper secret meaning, divinely revealed only to a select few. The letters of Scripture correspond to gradually different emanations of the godhead and thus represent the sensorial expression of the actual virtue of the deity.¹¹ This formula is then filled with ideas that, for Beer, are mainly imported: the Kabbalah adopted ancient Egyptian mysteries, later Chaldean magic and Zoroastrian wisdom, and still later neo-Platonic philosophy. It is this unsystematic conglomeration of influences that characterizes Jewish mysticism, in Beer’s view, and which opened the gates for the wildest speculations, attributing secret meaning even to the clearest passages of the Bible. Thus, for Beer, Kabbalah is a “fabric web of conclusions, though designed with an enormous effort of wit and acumen, but still not based on secure grounds; a not even remotely comprehensible chaos, within which everybody can assemble the atoms at will – a building erected to immeasurable height but made of bubbles”.¹² Nearly the entire range of Jewish Kabbalah scholars of nineteenth- century Germany would later on agree on this portrayal. Proceeding with his kabbalistic history, Beer arrives at the Middle Ages. At this point, he offers, in accordance with his general approach, a neutral position on the authorship of the book of Zohar – a question that will vex German Jewish Kabbalah research from then on for at least the next 150 years, as we will see. Beer, however, presents both those voices that believe the Zohar to be ancient and those that attribute it to the Spanish kabbalist Moses de Leon (1250 – 1305), among the latter group Rabbi Jacob Emden, whose argumentation Beer quotes at length.¹³ Following a twenty-page discussion of Lurianic Kabbalah, Beer interrupts his historical account with a fascinating section that he calls “Fundamental Principles of kabbalistic Philosophy.” There, he proposes to present Kabbalah’s “basic cosmogonic doctrines” and to compare them in depth with classical Greek philosophy and its teachings on the same subjects.¹⁴ The presentation demonstrates not only Beer’s extensive knowledge of both fields but also that his own position towards what he sees as the philosophical aspects of mys-

 Peter Beer, Geschichte, Lehren und Meinungen aller bestandenen und noch bestehenden religiösen Sekten der Juden und der Geheimlehre oder Cabbalah, 2 vols, Brünn 1822 and 1823, here vol. 2, p. 7.  Beer, vol. 2, p. 18.  Beer, vol. 2, p. 30 – 32, quoting Emden with his claim that Moses wrote the Zohar for monetary profit-seeking.  Beer, vol. 2, p. p. 53 – 80.

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ticism is that of a Kabbalah scholar who understood this subject matter as a serious intellectual challenge. The same comparatist method is then repeated for the angelology, demonology and psychology of the Kabbalah and the concepts of Hell and Paradise in Jewish mysticism and surrounding cultures. Beer resumes his historical survey with a discussion of Hasidism and Sabbateanism until he reaches the middle of the 18th century, where his description of kabbalistic thought in Judaism draws to a close. Beer makes no secret of his view that most kabbalistic motifs are mere legends and ‘fairy tales.’ This does not stop him from expounding, in utmost seriousness and great detail, his comprehensive knowledge of Kabbalah and its main literary works and proponents. In the preface to his volume, he announced that he would neither violate the dignity of the kabbalists nor deny them good intentions – and even less portray them as willful swindlers and imposters, because “this they have never been.”¹⁵ But the very subject of Kabbalah, because it is far beyond human ken, necessitates that those who deal with it stray off into fiction. Beer compares the kabbalists with the Greek myth of Icarus: the wish to come close to the heavens finally causes one’s downfall. Those “who are not content with what Holy Scripture tells them” and those who are not content to see the laws of nature as a means of God’s will – as Beer describes the kabbalists, will always assume a direct involvement of the deity, “or, what is even more perverse, they will see mediating spirits everywhere that are supposed to be direct emanations of the godhead.” In order to grasp those spirits, human imagination helplessly assigns to them names that are nothing but “vacuous tirades and empty platitudes”. Further on, our imagination “embodies and personalizes them,” and finally, the kabbalists populate the entire world “with those monsters that exists merely in their brains”. If the kabbalists now indeed “feel as though they are in the presence of those demophanies” it is but a small step to actual idolatry – as Beer concludes his psychological account of the emerging of Kabbalah, for idol worship, too, began with the thought that idols are embodied ideas.¹⁶ Thus, the good intentions of the kabbalists were subverted because they asked questions whose answers God has purposely hidden from human knowledge. Beer’s own aim with his description of kabbalistic thought was to show “how one will become entangled in his own web” when attempting “to penetrated God’s secrets with presumptuous force”.¹⁷

 Beer, iv.  All quotes: Beer, vi.  Beer, viii.

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First and foremost educational, Beer’s book nevertheless served to spur the serious study of kabbalistic texts and ideas, the opposite of neglect and ignorance of Kabbalah. His was one of the first attempts to deal with the subject on scientific grounds and to show Kabbalah as meriting the attention of even rationalist scholars of Judaism’s intellectual history. Isaak Markus Jost (1793 – 1860), whose nine volumes of Geschichte der Israeliten (1820 – 1828) Schorsch held to be “the first major achievement of the new Jewish learning,” was arguably the first real historian of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.¹⁸ Jost was also one of the rather secular scholars of the movement, never holding a rabbinical post or teaching at a rabbinical seminary. Nonetheless, he had an avid interest in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, a subject he would return to time and again throughout his intellectual life. Unlike Peter Beer, who published his study on the Kabbalah towards the end of his life, obviously as a result of intensive research, Jost was just twenty-nine years old when the third volume of his history appeared. His first account of the origin and impact of the Kabbalah is shallow, polemical, and only sparsely supported by original sources. Thus, concerning the study of Kabbalah, the general shortcomings of Beer’s book are here reversed in comparison to Jost’s otherwise pioneering and highly regarded history writing. Over time, however, Jost will pay more and more attention to Kabbalah, and his third multi-volume history of Judaism, published in 1859, offers a discussion of the subject that spans three consecutive chapters.¹⁹ The third volume of Jost’s first Geschichte from 1822, dealing with the years 105 BCE – 135 CE, is introduced by a seventy-page-long section on the “Development of Jewish Knowledge” [Bildung]. The last two chapters of this section discuss kabbalistic knowledge and its origin in antiquity: like Beer, Jost identified in Philo of Alexandria’s allegoric Bible exegesis and in neo-Platonic philosophy the major sources for the emergence of kabbalistic concepts. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Jost’s 1822 account is a theory that later many Wissenschaft scholars rehearse in their explanations for the wavelike proliferation of Kabbalah: mystical tendencies have always had the greatest impact on the Jewish people in times of political suppression and spiritual destitution. In such periods of Jewish history, this theory has it, the Jewish masses willingly seek refuge in mystical promises of miraculous redemption. As long as the reputation of the kabbalists maintained its ground, Jost concludes at the end of his Kabbalah chapter,

 Schorsch, Scholarship, p. 74.  For Jost’s treatment of Kabbalah in 1859, see below p. 148 – 155 in detail.

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Lazarus Ben David, Peter Beer and Isaak Markus Jost (1822 – 1832)

philosophy could achieve nothing to straighten out the minds of the people. The early kabbalists “destroyed the words of the prophets,” which contained a religious demand for a moral life, and replaced them with an over-emphasis on ceremonial and sensual practice. The prophetic demand for “knowledge and benevolence” was substituted by the spirit of Kabbalah “with stupor and fear”. Moreover, in anticipation of the later, frequent anti-Kabbalah statements of German Jewish thinkers, Jost opines: “Two thousand years have gone by and many more will pass until all Jews have realized the harmfulness [of Kabbalah]”.²⁰ Such radical voices as that of the young Isaak Markus Jost remained in the minority within the Wissenschaft the Judentums. Any contempt for kabbalistic thought was generally accompanied by serious und unbiased research into Kabbalah, or at least by calls to enhance academic knowledge about Kabbalah, as one sees in the case of young Jost himself. In light of his rejection of Kabbalah as injurious, Jost’s extensive appendix of endnotes to the third volume of his Geschichte, which discusses the traces of Kabbalah in ancient Judaism in a straightforward, scholarly manner, is rather surprising.²¹ As we will see, this method, namely, taking a highly opinionated and at best theological position on Kabbalah in the body of a text and burying within endnotes an academic, philological and historical treatment of the subject, is forty years later par for par repeated by Heinrich Graetz in his controversial account of Kabbalah in the seventh volume of his History of the Jewish People. In the long endnote to his chapter on Kabbalah, Jost attempts to rationally justify the short shrift he gives to ancient Jewish mysticism. If all the kabbalistic tracts attributed to talmudic figures like Rabbi Akiba or Shimon bar Yochai had been authentic, he would have discussed them at length in the chapter, Jost declared. But those mystical tracts left no recognizable trace in the annals of ancient Judaism and no scholar thus far had presented evidence that they are indeed authentic productions of the talmudic era. To the contrary, Jost adds – one could produce evidence from language, content and certain allusions in the text that they are foisted [untergeschoben] upon their alleged authors.²² For that reason only does he refrain from discussing those books, Jost wrote in the endnote. Kabbalistic ideas and secret doctrines, however, must have existed already at the time of the Talmud, he argued, and consequently developed a sophisticated theory of why indeed talmudic literature left behind almost no record of those ideas. Therefore, from the scholarly perspective, medieval, obviously pseudo Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten von der Zeit der Maccabäer bis auf unsere Tage, vol. 3, Berlin 1822, p. 77.  Jost, Geschichte, vol. 3, p. 193 – 197.  Jost, Geschichte, vol. 3, p. 196.

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epigraphic works on Kabbalah (Jost mentions Yezirah, Bahir and Zohar, among others) must not be used to describe the mystical thought of ancient Judaism, even were we to be left “without a single word” about the Jewish mysticism of the Second Temple period. Jost’s early interest in Kabbalah research, despite his personal rejection of kabbalistic ideas, is expressed most clearly in the short outline of future Kabbalah studies that he proposed at the conclusion of his endnote from 1822. It might be worthwhile, Jost wrote there, to compare the teachings of the Zohar and other kabbalistic works with ancient mystical schools of thought that are indeed known to us, such as early Gnosticism for example, and to try to extract similarities and differences, so that older layers in the Zohar, and thus traces of ancient Jewish mysticism, could be identified – while at the same time the progress of kabbalistic thought until the Middle Ages could be demonstrated. But this program amounted to “one of the most difficult scholarly endeavours,” Jost believed, for which insufficient source material had been discovered, leaving him sceptical about the success of such a project.²³ The main works of the Kabbalah are also absent from the following volumes of Jost’s first History, where they might chronologically belong if one assumed medieval and not antique authorship. Then, in 1832, ten years after the aforementioned third volume of the Geschichte der Israeliten appeared, Jost published his second history work, a two-volume “General History of the Israelite People.” Clearly no précis of the earlier nine-volume work, “General History” aimed to amend the earlier history with an account of the events described in the Bible but also to correct errors and add episodes of Jewish history that had been under-represented.²⁴ One such episode was a description of the sixteenth-century kabbalistic school in Safed that developed around Isaac Luria. Interestingly, Jost used the occasion of this addition to insert a new, more balanced philosophical discussion of the origin and impact of kabbalistic thought in general on Judaism. He explained that the “ancient Kabbalah” of the Second Temple period did not develop a systematic philosophy because ancient Jewish thinkers never thought systematically at all but rather presented their philosophical ideas in connection with Scriptural exegesis. Only the “obsession of the medieval Aristotelian school with systems” led the kabbalists to formulate their secret doc-

 Jost, Geschichte, vol. 3, p. 197. Interestingly, this is more or less what Gershom Scholem did when he set out to prove the ancient origin of the Zohar, based on much more manuscript evidence than Jost had – but still in vain.  Isaak Markus Jost, Allgemeine Geschichte des Israelitischen Volkes, Berlin 1832. See the introduction to the first volume.

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Lazarus Ben David, Peter Beer and Isaak Markus Jost (1822 – 1832)

trine in systematic form, a new effort that culminated in the book of Zohar, dated here by Jost to the twelfth century. The Zohar was for Jost, as for many other scholars of his generation, still a kind of general anthology of kabbalistic ideas and motifs that had accumulated over the centuries of Jewish mysticism and were finally edited into a single book by mostly anonymous, impartial literary editors. Now, “because of the sophisticated symbols and expressions that appear in the Zohar, many Spanish and French medieval kabbalists tried to extract from this mixture of material universal truths, concerning the highest matters of thinking. But because they had no terminology for such an endeavour, one had to resort to metaphors. For the ingenious friends of the symbolic expression this was an attractive field and more and more thinkers began to cultivate it.”²⁵ More philosophically inclined rabbis, though, had always criticized this secretiveness in exegesis and custom, but such critique was to no avail, Jost argued, because “those who claim to hold the highest truth are never really restrained by such reproach.”²⁶ He continued: Most medieval rabbis knew at least a little Kabbalah and held kabbalistic thought in high esteem, because to them it seemed to represent a higher system of philosophy. Kabbalah, for those rabbis, meant translating into more convenient sense perception difficult metaphysical subjects like revelation, creation and the communications of the soul. In the course of this development, Jost explained, soon “Kabbalah would no longer be content with philosophical acumen [Scharfsinn] but also began to solve the practical problems of alchemy and astrology, and several kabbalists, even rabbis, now devoted all their thinking to this foolery” [Thorheiten].²⁷ The kabbalistic personification of the entirety of nature, both physical appearances and also the matter of the soul, contributed decisively to this change from theosophy to practise. The profusion of angels and spirits of all kinds that the Kabbalah created, Jost argued, caused a constant need to ban harmful spirits and to entice good ones. The masses thought their pious rabbis capable of having a powerful impact on this world of ghosts, thus boosting the prestige of the secret science of Kabbalah. While the rational school among the Jewish thinkers of medieval Spain and southern France had been able to limit the power of medieval kabbalists, the Lurianic school of the sixteenth century and its overwhelming impact changed the picture in favour of “the mystical folly” [mystischer Unsinn]. This school produced a sect within Judaism, according to Jost, which

 Allgemeine Geschichte II, p. 293.  Allgemeine Geschichte II p. 294.  Allgemeine Geschichte II, p. 295.

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later developed into “a completely new religion”, which was probably (but not necessarily) an allusion to Sabbateanism.²⁸ In a later passage of the same book, it becomes even more obvious that Jost’s main criticism of mysticism is directed against what is called practical Kabbalah, defined by him as “the use of amulets, talismans and exorcisms”. Jost admits that he finds it “almost unbelievable” that serious rabbis could have dealt with this practise. But here, as in his previous discussions of kabbalistic thought, Jost makes it clear that he views practical Kabbalah as a “degeneration” [Ausartung] of the more philosophical aspects of Jewish mysticism – an assessment that implies a certain appreciation for philosophical Kabbalah. Practical Kabbalah, however, is made responsible for almost all the harm done to Judaism in the pre-modern era: “it squeezed into the synagogue liturgy all kinds of formulae and customs connected to angels and Satan”, for example, Jost complained, and, what is worse for his own time, “by the force of habit those insertions took root in such a way that all reformation cannot pull them out anymore without causing pain.”²⁹ But even this more moderate approach to Kabbalah from 1832 is by no means Jost’s last word on the subject, as we will see. Notably, he was in personal contact with almost all Kabbalah scholars of the Wissenschaft movement, exchanged manuscripts and ideas, and followed the progress of their research closely. In 1859, he again published his own thoughts in his last multivolume History, where Kabbalah is eventually treated as an intellectual stream on equal footing with other schools of Jewish thought.

 Allgemeine Geschichte II., p. 295.  Allgemeine Geschichte II, p. 454

Leopold Zunz and Moritz Freystadt (1818 – 1832) In the meantime, the Wissenschaft project of identifying, collecting and making accessible kabbalistic texts had made progress. Also here it was the pioneering work of Leopold Zunz (1794– 1886), one of the founders and the most influential representatives of Wissenschaft des Judentums, that laid the ground for most of the scholarly disputes on Kabbalah that were to emerge in nineteenth-century Germany.¹ Zunz was the editor of the journal in which Lazarus Ben David’s essay on kabbalistic messianism was printed. But already four years earlier, in 1818, Zunz had suggested an idea that shaped the opinions about Kabbalah among the Wissenschaft scholars throughout the nineteenth century. In an essay published in Jeremias Heinemann’s journal Jedidjah, Zunz distinguished between the early Kabbalah, which was often taken to include the Zohar and was perceived as being of certain original value for the theological development of Judaism, and the later Lurianic Kabbalah, which was generally seen as pure superstition. In the same “barbaric” manner, in which the Zoharic Kabbalah treated the Bible, Zunz protested, the disciples of Lurianic Kabbalah later treated the earlier Zoharic Kabbalah – until Kabbalah “sank into the most obscure superstition”.² As early as 1818, Zunz called the Zohar the “first and most brilliant representative of the Kabbalah”, a school of thought that, hailing from Palestine, pulled both Talmud and gentile philosophy into its magical circle [Zauberkreis]. Kabbalah was even less able to solve the Masoretic questions discussed in the Zunz article than the Talmud, however, because it “worshipped the letter more than the word.” It seems that Zunz had studied the Zohar by this time, but not much more kabbalistic literature. The Zohar, he wrote at the age of twenty-four, was a mixture of “neo-Platonic concepts with oriental magic”, probably indicating that he still saw the work as of ancient origin.³ But already in his early classic Etwas zur Rabbinischen Literatur, published the same year, Zunz mentioned almost incidentally, in one of his famous footnotes full of philological detail, that some

 For Zunz’ life and work, see Ismar Schorsch’s monumental biography Leopold Zunz – Creativity in Adversity, Philadelphia 2016 – not discussing Zunz’ view on Kabbalah, however.  Leopold Zunz, “Masora, Talmud, Kabbala, Grammatik in historischer Wirksamkeit”, first in Jedidjah 1818, p. 265 – 268, reprinted in Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 80 – 82, here 81. Heinemann (1778 – 1855), who had been one of the two non-rabbinic members of the Reformminded Westphalia consistory under French rule, later became a successful journal editor and translator.  Zunz, Masora, p. 81. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-003

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sources of the Zohar signal that the work originated between the ninth and the twelfth century.⁴ Fourteen years later, in 1832, the year that Jost’s second history work appeared, Zunz published his trail-blazing “Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden”. This work sought to demonstrate that the Reform Movement’s renewed emphasis on the synagogue sermon had strong support in earlier centuries of Jewish learning. In fact, the book was much more. The first encyclopedic compendium of the history of Jewish literature, the book instantly became a standard reference work, in time proving to be of enduring value.⁵ In all its five hundred pages, however, Zunz devoted only some short passages to kabbalistic literature. Nevertheless, some of these findings took on almost canonical importance for the next decades, due to the towering stature of its author.⁶ Zunz’ sparse account of kabbalistic works in this book is particularly perplexing since it is also his last word on the subject, except for a few lines jotted down here and there, as we will see below. Ironically, Zunz is widely considered the prototype of the disinterested Wissenschaft scholar, while the historian Heinrich Graetz, for example, who devoted huge amounts of philological scholarship to Kabbalah, is generally thought to have held a negative bias towards all mysticism. As it emerged in “Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden”, Zunz, too, thought that the original Jewish mysticism and its secret doctrines emerged from a mixture of “ancient Jewish and younger Alexandrian thought” which developed over the centuries into a cosmogonic and theosophical philosophy.⁷ This Kabbalah, according to Zunz, then “attributed to the teachings of Bible and Talmud certain traditional or invented laws of the mysteries of the divine majesty”. All the different ideas that ancient wisdom left behind, Zunz argues, “were drawn by Jewish thinkers into the previously forbidden field of merkava and then expanded into a large variety of Jewish philosophical systems of mysticism, in all kinds of literary productions”. There are almost as many of those kabbalistic systems, Zunz added, as there are authors of the systems. In order to lend their works higher authority, or from fear of being personally associated with the secret subject matter, those authors tended to rely on pseudo-epigraphy – attrib-

 Leopold Zunz, Etwas zur Rabbinischen Literatur, first Berlin 1818, reprinted in Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, p. 1– 31, the footnote on the Zohar is on p. 12 note 2.  On Zunz see also Amos Bitzan, “Leopold Zunz and the Meanings of Wissenschaft”, in: Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 78, 2, April 2017, p. 233 – 254.  Cf. Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, Berlin 1832, p. 157– 170 and 402– 409. One such canonical statement was the dating of Sefer Yezirah to the Gaonic period. (Vorträge, p. 165.)  Vorträge, p. 162 f.

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uting their books to biblical or talmudic personalities, even to angels.⁸ Thus, the designation of “Kabbalah” is manifestly inaccurate for that school of thought, Zunz remarked, “because everything was young and new, every author was only the creator of his own ideas.”⁹ Kabbalah, in this sense, originated in Italy and southern France not before the twelfth century, Zunz continues, and the book of Zohar “was compiled, in part, from very young writings” around the year 1300. It is important for Zunz to emphasize that kabbalistic thought had been subject to sharp criticism from the time of its first appearance in the Middle Ages, when charges of idolatry and lack of authenticity were leveled at it.¹⁰ The meticulous and passionate philologist Zunz is primarily occupied with the subject of pseudo-epigraphy concerning many kabbalistic tractates. This accounts for his observation about the “youth” of Kabbalah – although its ideas have “strong roots in ancient Judaism and weak connections to famous names of newer times”, as he interestingly admits.¹¹ But the kabbalistic works themselves have been written much later than many of their actual authors claim. Thus Zunz’ main contribution to the Kabbalah research of the Wissenschaft movement are his extensive footnotes to the paragraphs just summarized here. It is in those long notes that Zunz lists all kabbalistic and related literature known to him, comments on several works and authors and connects the works by cross-references (including a page-long list of all works known to him that refer to the Zohar), identifies pseudo-epigraphy and refers to unpublished manuscripts. In short, he begins the scholarly philology of Kabbalah in a highly sophisticated way. Interestingly, for pseudo-epigraphic works, Zunz also used the German word erdichtet [fictitious] or angedichtet [imputed], which is rather close to the loaded word Fälschung [forgery] that Steinschneider and Heinrich Graetz used later in connection with the Zohar and which caused a fiery scholarly debate that reverberated down to the days of Gershom Scholem.¹² This is more or less all that the great Wissenschaft scholar Leopold Zunz had to say about Kabbalah. He left to his disciple Moritz Steinschneider, who, as we shall see, solved those problems masterfully, the continuation of the spadework

 Vorträge, p. 403.  Vorträge, p. 404.  Vorträge, p. 405 f.  Vorträge, 408.  Zunz complains, for example “Sogar dem Maimonides wurden von den Kabbalisten Schriften angedichtet” p. 407, note. Scholem would later forcefully reject the term Fälschung for pseudoepigraphy as a complete misunderstanding of its actual purpose, thus himself arguing theologically. This non-philological position is, nevertheless, defended by his student David Biale in his discussion of Heinrich Graetz’ rejection of Kabbalah. (See Biale, Scholem, p. 119).

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in uncovering pseudo-epigraphic fictions in kabbalistic works. Abhorring theology, Zunz hardly entered into disputes regarding the substance of kabbalistic doctrine. This part of the discourse was taken up by his main opponents within the Wissenschaft movement, namely, Abraham Geiger and Heinrich Graetz.¹³ Yet another academic work on Kabbalah that appeared in 1832 caused considerable reaction among German Jewish scholars. A childhood friend of Abraham Geiger, the twenty-two-year-old Moritz Freystadt (1810 – 1870) from Königsberg, who had studied there with Johann Friedrich Herbart, published his Latin dissertation as a book under the title Philosophia cabbalistica et Pantheismus. Freystadt later settled in Königsberg and authored several books on philosophical subjects, but he was also active in the battle against nineteenth-century antiSemitism, as a pamphlet from 1862 against Wilhelm Marr shows.¹⁴ A reviewer of Freystadt’s first book wrote that the author was a candidate for the rabbinate “but because he was inclined to more comprehensive studies he then acquired within a short time the knowledge necessary to follow university lectures and got acquainted with the modern philosophical achievements of the Germans.”¹⁵ Freystadt himself reveals in the preface that up to the age of seventeen he has studied only “Jewish theology in Hebrew and Aramaic”; that is, like most other Jewish young men of his generation, he had received only classical talmudic training.¹⁶ In his thesis, Freystadt attempted to show that, particularly for the theologian, Kabbalah is not identical with pantheism. His book is a courageous Jewish response to certain views held by several influential Christian philosophers. Freystadt aggressively confronts them with the claim that, in contrast to pantheism, all kabbalists maintained a distinction between creator and creation, between finite beings and infinite spirit.¹⁷ Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743 – 1819), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775 – 1854) and others who held Spinozism and Kabbalah to be essentially identical systems of thought were ignorant of the

 To be discussed below. Zunz was accused by many of his fellow scholars of the Wissenschaft movement to be nothing but an antiquarian, with a research method that amounted to rather “pettifogging pedantry” (Zacharias Frankel) because Zunz, in the name of theological neutrality, refused to evaluate his philological results according to importance – or any other standard. (For the quote, see Schorsch, Zunz, 2016, p. 285).  Moritz Freystadt, Der Christenspiegel von Anti-Marr, Königsberg 1862. See for background: Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays, London 204, p. 173.  A Dr. Rupp in the journal Der Jude of 1833, p. 24.  Moritz Freystadt, Philosophia cabbalistica et Pantheismus, Königsberg 1832, p. viii.  Freystadt, Philosophia cabbalistica, p. 112 ff.

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original kabbalistic sources, Freystadt wrote. Had they been willing and able to read the Zohar in the original, they would not have mistakenly taken the Sefirot as a metaphor for the pantheistic theory of emanation.¹⁸ Quoting extensively from what he believes to be the ancient book of Zohar (giving the original text in footnotes) and other kabbalistic works, Freystadt composed a list of twentyfour basic doctrines of the “philosophy of Kabbalah,” which he proceeded to compare with pantheistic theories.¹⁹ For Freystadt, Kabbalah is an originally Jewish intellectual product of antiquity, which left distinct traces in Christian and Islamic writings, including even the New Testament.²⁰ In a review of Freystadt’s book, the German orientalist Franz Ferdinand Bernary (1805 – 1880) claimed that some of the author’s Zoharic quotes were copied from Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s work Kabbala Denudata. ²¹ Freystadt defended his work, calling Bernary an anti-Semitic Hegelian Modephilosoph. Bernary related here to works of Jewish literature that he knew from his boyhood, Freystadt protested, obviously referring to the Zohar. Furthermore, Bernary’s critique of his belief in the antiquity of the Zohar did not address the actual thesis of his book, since even the Zohar is not, in the main, pantheistic.²² Freystadt set out a defence of Kabbalah from a Jewish point of view, even going so far as to actually re-introduce Kabbalah into the Jewish intellectual heritage from a modern scholarly point of view, of course, as several other contemporary reviewers of Freystadt noted. Abraham Geiger, for example, argued in his review of Freystadt’s book that the author, as a student of Herbart, obviously intended to demonstrate that Kabbalah, “this unique, peculiar phenomenon of Jewish philosophy”, is essentially reconcilable with theism. Just as Herbart, in his anti-Hegelian religious philosophy, retains theism, although not as a result

 In fact, at least Jacobi’s claims as to the relation of Spinozism and Kabbalah had a clear polemical background, see here Christoph Schulte “Kabbala-Rezeption in der deutschen Romantik”, in Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, ed. Karl Erich Grözinger and Joseph Dan, New York 1995, p. 305. Freystadt agrees with Jacobi at least in that pantheism is atheism.  Freystadt, p. 20 ff. On page 15 Freystadt writes explicitly that R. Akiba is the author of the Sefer Yetzira while R. Shimon bar Yochai has written the Zohar.  See Freystadt, p. 58 – 61.  See, for this review, Jahrbücher für Wissenschaftliche Kritik, März 1833, here p. 371. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636 – 1689) was a Christian Hebraist and a student of the Kabbalah, in which he believed to find proofs of the doctrines of Christianity: the Adam Kadmon of the kabbalists is Jesus, and the three highest sefirot represent the Trinity. Between 1677 and 1684, he published four volumes of a collection of kabbalistic texts in Latin translation, called Kabbala Denudata. sive Doctrina Hebræorum Transcendentalis et Metaphysica Atque Theologia.  Published in the Königsberger Preussische Provicialblätter 1833, p. 140 ff.

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of but as in addition to philosophical speculation, Freystadt seeks to save the theism of Kabbalah from pantheism’s alleged atheism.²³ If Geiger is right, Freystadt’s work features the first philosophical apology of Kabbalah within Wissenschaft des Judentums, sparking a trend that other authors will soon follow. Significantly, this school of Jewish Kabbalah scholars will consistently use what might be called a positive filter when analyzing kabbalistic thought, thus in a way philosophically refining Kabbalah according to their own religious, ideological or apologetic needs.²⁴ For the same reason, the positive school often attributes antiquity to the Zohar or at least resists arguments to the contrary. This understanding of Kabbalah stands in stark contrast to the more frequently employed method of putting into place a negative filter that extracts only the desired ‘pejorative’ parts of kabbalistic thought, mostly irrational, superstitious or purportedly idolatrous ideas. It is probably for that reason that, in his review of Freystadt, Geiger stated that “with all due respect for the strong religious convictions and the candor of the author” – this positive apologetic filtering “might have done harm to his scholarly sobriety”. Geiger himself rejected Freystadt’s opinion about the antiquity of the Zohar and the alleged influence of the Kabbalah on the New Testament, and eventually accused him of deliberately suppressing pantheistic tendencies within kabbalistic thought.²⁵ Nevertheless, in 1832, we find in Moritz Freystadt a university-trained Jewish scholar of the Geiger-generation who possessed considerable knowledge of the original sources of Kabbalah. This was a type of scholar that, according to Gershom Scholem, did not exist in nineteenth-century Germany. Geiger’s review of Freystadt’s first book is intriguing in another respect as well. Published 1835, in the first volume of Geiger’s own journal, the Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie, the fifteen-page-long review article on Freystadt is prefaced by almost five pages of general introduction into the subject of Kabbalah. We are thus granted here insight into the young Geiger’s opinion (aged 22) not only about Kabbalah itself but also about the necessity and the possibilities of future Kabbalah research within the emerging Wissenschaft des Judentums. At this point, Abraham Geiger (1810 – 1874) was a young rabbi in Wiesbaden thinking not only about radical reforms of the Jewish religion but also about what Jewish Wissenschaft ought to look like when providing a

 Abraham Geiger, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie, 1835, No 2, p. 235 – 50, here p. 241.  In his third chapter on Isaac Luria and Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Freystadt classified (as did Geiger later) the entire post-Zoharic Kabbalah as philosophiae cabbalisticae doctrina secundaria; see Philosophia cabbalistica, from page 50 ff.  Geiger’s review, p. 242.

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modernized Judaism with a new but stable identity, based on proven knowledge of the past. Geiger called this project theology, and his first journal was meant to be the very organ of Jewish theology. Already in 1831, he had announced this in a letter to his intellectual hero Leopold Zunz, proposing to found a journal “that unites all Jewish scholars who take an interest in Judaism.”²⁶ For Geiger, this was the real goal of the Wissenschaft movement; not to gain civil emancipation for the Jews but to modernize their beloved old religion.²⁷ This ambitious project obviously included Kabbalah scholars and scholarship on Jewish mysticism, as Geiger’s review of Freystadt reveals. Kabbalah, the young Geiger wrote here, “is one of the darkest, but at the same time one of the most interesting points in the history of the development of Judaism.” Geiger, too, held that there exists both something like a ‘true Kabbalah’ and a degenerated version of it, and it is only this latter form of Kabbalah “that in its degeneration forcefully blended all intellectual capabilities.” Kabbalah, for Geiger, had an “important, but predominantly pernicious influence on the outward formation of Judaism.” ²⁸ For the systematic thought of Geiger, there are three main, interrelated, reasons that Kabbalah is such a dark force: a) its origins lie in complete darkness – indirectly, kabbalistic ideas went back to Philo of Alexandria, but penetrated Judaism through the mediation of Christianity and Islam, which led to b) the absorption of some of those ideas, especially the theory of emanation, into Judaism, where they were then modified, filtered through Jewish doctrine, but not consistently integrated and, finally, c) traditional Jewish elements were now mixed with this foreign philosophy. Yet, the affected elements were not theological doctrines of Judaism but only ceremonies and other formal, outward aspects, as well as some isolated biblical verses.²⁹ Geiger and Freystadt, then, belong to distinctly different schools of thought about Kabbalah within the Wissenschaft movement. Kabbalistic mysticism, for Geiger (as later for Heinrich Graetz), is explicitly a foreign element to Jewish thought. Geiger conceded Kabbalah’s impact on the development of Judaism but only with respect to specific externalities. This approach to Kabbalah, which Geiger essentially maintained throughout his life, is consistent with the theology behind his equally lifelong reform project of Judaism. Thus, reforms, for Geiger, are not ‘innovations’ but the restoration of the old, true essence of Ju-

 Geiger to Zunz on April 25th 1831, published by Ludwig Geiger “Aus L. Zunz’ Nachlass”, in: Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1892, p. 243 – 47. (my italics)  See for Geiger: Christian Wiese (ed. et al.), Jüdische Existenz in der Moderne: Abraham Geiger und die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Berlin 2013.  Geiger’s review, 236.  Geiger’s review, 236 f.

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daism, which prefers pure spirituality, a reasonable approach to the law, social justice and morality to autotelic ritual and ‘empty ceremonies’.³⁰ Kabbalah, at least as it presented itself to Geiger in the nineteenth century, did not fit this theological pattern and hence its provenance must have lain outside of ancient Judaism. In its further historical development, its main sources of influence were the theologies of Islam and Christianity, both of which Geiger rejected.³¹ Geiger offers a single example of Christian influence on the Kabbalah, namely, what he perceived as the introduction of a divine trinity into kabbalistic thought. This phenomenon also interested several other contemporary scholars dealing with Kabbalah, probably as a result of the frequent mention of a Trinitarian god in the Zohar. It was this random melding of Christian, sometimes pagan, and Jewish (non-philosophical) motives into the most important kabbalistic ideas that was responsible, according to Geiger, for the great confusion that developed over time about the extensive symbolism of the Kabbalah within Judaism. The colourful inconsistencies caused by this melding process made it impossible to consistently describe a kabbalistic system already in the first attempt to do so (here Geiger is referring to the Zohar), and the later misinterpretations of this work naturally increased the chaos of the symbolisms.³² Rather than neglecting or even discarding this difficult subject, however, Geiger surprisingly continued to outline, step by step, a detailed scholarly research plan that might eventually cope with the chaotic field of mystical symbolism within the Jewish intellectual tradition. The potential author of a comprehensive academic study of Kabbalah must first and foremost proceed historically, Geiger wrote. He must preface his work with an overview of Jewish Alexandrian philosophy, develop from here an account of neo-Platonism and its main modifications in Christianity, then proceed with the penetration of this amalgam into Judaism through the literature of the hechalot, the author of the Sefer Yezirah, and further with the Gaonim Hai and Sherira (10 – 11th century) and the original form they gave to the idea of emanation. The next thing to look at would be the philosophy of Yehuda Halevi (1075 – 1141), where mystical and spiritual elements are harmoniously united, until, eventually, in the mature works of Nach-

 About Geiger’s reform project, see Ken Koltun-Fromm, Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism, Bloomington 2006.  For Islam, see Geiger’s price winning dissertation, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?, Bonn 1833; for Geiger’s anti-Christian intellectual polemics, see, for example, his open letter to the Protestant theologian Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, printed in Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte, Breslau, 1865, p. 185 – 203, here 188 – 189, discussed in Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, Chicago, 1998, p. 206 – 209.  Geiger’s review, 237 f.

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manides and Abraham ben David of Posquieres (thirteenth century), mysticism had become completely incorporated into Judaism. The last and final step is the completion of the Zohar by a student of Nachmanides, as Geiger believed – because even if the Zohar does not feature a precise philosophical system, many of the book’s concepts nevertheless present kabbalistic thought in a coherent manner.³³ After the Zohar appeared, in Geiger’s view, Kabbalah lost its creativity. Up to now, he praised kabbalistic thought as a “philosophical phenomenon, honestly (though not always consciously) striving for intellectuality” [nach dem Geistigen]. But soon afterwards, Kabbalah came into “the service of the letter [Buchstabendienst], a slavish, hair-splitting worship of the Zohar, the play with symbols and numeric value and the introduction of all possible superstition into this theosophy.”³⁴ Nevertheless, if a comprehensive study of Kabbalah were undertaken in accordance with his research plan, and the author of this study possessed, in addition to “a sense of history also philosophical subtlety”; and if, furthermore, this potential author were to make use of the critical results that had been produced thus far in Kabbalah scholarship, and if he himself were to employ an a academic, critical methodology – in this case, writes Geiger, such a study would be a “true jewel” [eine wahre Zierde] of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. ³⁵ Thus, in the case of the Kabbalah-critical Abraham Geiger, too, we discern a strong appreciation of scholarly research into kabbalistic subjects and an evident public encouragement to finally take serious steps in that direction. Geiger, in his mid-twenties, had long been reading the basic texts of Jewish mysticism, as the literature mentioned in his research plan shows. Again, we can note that a personal rejection of the theological ‘value’ of Kabbalah has in fact no impact on Geiger’s conviction that Kabbalah, in some way, influenced the development of Judaism and deserves, for just this reason, to be given its scholarly due. How much the present absence of serious Kabbalah scholarship was felt to be a real desideratum of the Wissenschaft movement was reflected in the responses that Freystadt wrote to some of the many reviewers of his books. He had not set out, he reiterated, to write a comprehensive history of origin and development of kabbalistic thought but merely a short defence of Jewish mysticism against the Christian accusation of its inherent pantheism.³⁶ Freystadt complains

 Geiger’s review, 238 f.  Geiger’s review, 239. Interestingly, Geiger, like many of his contemporaries do not refer here to Lurianic Kabbalah at all.  Geiger’s review, 239.  For example Freystadt in Preussische Provincialblätter 1833, p. 142 f. and in Der Jude 1833, p. 107.

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that Zunz’ description of kabbalistic literature in his Gottesdienstliche Vorträge from 1832 (discussed above) is “everything but a comprehensive and critical discussion of Kabbalah.”³⁷ Remarkably though, Zunz’ 1833 review of Freystadt’s book in the Jenaische Allgemeine Literaturzeitung was positive, however; he called it a “very meritorious outline for larger studies” – academic studies on kabbalistic thought that Zunz, too, noticed were missing. Freystadt’s account of pantheism, however, was a little too simplistic, Zunz continued, and he was sure that Spinoza could have readily refuted Freystadt’s claims for the non-pantheistic nature of Kabbalah.³⁸ Such was the discussion among German scholars of the early nineteenth century generated by Moritz Freystadt’s Latin book on Kabbalah and pantheism that eight years after the publication of the work, the first volume of the influential journal Der Orient ran yet another review of Freystadt’s book – written most likely by Orient editor, Julius Fürst himself.³⁹ Fürst (1805 – 1873) was a Jewish orientalist who had studied with Hegel in Berlin and later with Wilhelm Genesius in Halle. Teaching from 1838 at the University of Leipzig, Fürst became the first Jew to be Full professor there in 1864. In the years between 1840 and 1851, Fürst published the weekly Der Orient, a journal that, thanks to the academic interests of its editor, became the leading voice of Jewish Kabbalah research during the one decade of its existence. Fürst had been in close contact with all Wissenschaft scholars working on kabbalistic matters, and subsequently many, if not all, major articles written on the subject in Germany between 1840 and 1850 appeared in the Orient. Fürst also became the mentor of Adolf Jellinek, probably the most prolific Jewish Kabbalah scholar of the 1850s, who came to Leipzig in 1842 as a student of orientalism. Fürst’s late review of Freystadt praised the “laudable intention” of the author “to refute the claim of some famous Christian scholars” that kabbalistic philosophy was an offshoot of pantheism. While Freystadt fulfilled this duty with fine philosophical thoroughness, in Fürst’s view, this was not the real purpose of his book. Freystadt’s motivation for writing his tract, Fürst claimed, was evidently and intrinsically Jewish. Specifically, he was prompted by “the wish to return our coreligionists – by a defence of Kabbalah – to the appreciation of the mystical sages from the age of the Zohar.” For too many centuries, Fürst wrote, the Jews had followed “the overrated Maimonides” and the Aristotelian school of  Preussische Provicialblätter 1833, p. 144 f.  Leopold Zunz in Jenaische Allgemeine Literaturzeitung of September 1833, No. 177, col. 453 – 56.  “Philosophia cabbalistica”, in Literaturblatt des Orient 1840, p. 333 – 334.

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philosophy. Freystadt’s intention was to proclaim “the obligation to study kabbalistic literature, especially because the doctrines of the Zohar grew from Israelite soil.” The teachings of the Kabbalah would facilitate more accurate biblical interpretation, Fürst explained, because both bodies of literature, the Kabbalah and Bible, are products of the Hebrew spirit. Maimonides’s methods, in contrast, cannot conceal that they exhibit certain “traces of foreign thought.”⁴⁰ While Fürst rehearses here a well-known argument of Jewish orthodoxy against Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed that was forcefully advanced in the nineteenth century by Samson Raphael Hirsch,⁴¹ more interesting in the present context is Fürst’s call to Jewish scholars to return to kabbalistic studies. And although he seems to deny the non-Jewish sources of kabbalistic thought that most scholars before him had identified, there is still little doubt that Fürst’s direct invitation to read the Zohar was meant in terms of academic research and not necessarily for mystic ritualism. That Fürst himself was no immediate follower of kabbalistic practice and not even a partisan ideologue of kabbalistic ideas became obvious when he published in the same year (1840) the first printed, academic edition of Leon de Modena’s Ari Nohem, a well-argued and influential anti-Kabbalah work that first appeared in 1638. Although versed in astrology and alchemy himself, Modena (1571– 1648) attacked in this book not only the philosophical consistency of kabbalistic thought but also the antiquity of the Zohar, which he held to be a medieval composition. This ambiguity of Modena’s life, his hovering between zeitgeist and the courage to confront entrenched authority, made him later an intellectual hero of Abraham Geiger, who devoted a whole monograph to Modena in 1856 (to be discussed below). Fürst’s edition of Ari Nohem, however, reveals almost nothing about the relationship of the editor to the author. The Hebrew preface explains merely how the manuscript of the book first came (from somewhere in Eastern Europe) into Fürst’s hands and continues with a lengthy translation into Hebrew of Leopold Zunz’ exposition of Kabbalah, discussed earlier.⁴²

 Julius Fürst, Literaturblatt des Orient 1840, p. 334.  See the 18th of his 19 letters about Judaism (Samson Raphael Hirsch, Neunzehn Briefe über Judenthum. Altona 1836, English edition: The Nineteen Letters About Judaism, ed Joseph Elias, New York 1994.)  See, for the history and reception of Fürst’s edition of Ari Nohem: Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice, Princeton 2011, p. 218 – 21.

The Young Abraham Geiger (1840) Still in 1840, the German Jewish Wissenschaft scholar’s endeavours produced several other works with kabbalistic subjects. Abraham Geiger published a biography of Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591– 1655), the seventeenth-century scientist and philosopher, and the descendant of the famous Renaissance Averroist Elijah Delmedigo (1458 –1493). Delmedigo was the first thinker to publish a systematic criticism of Kabbalah and an outspoken rejection of the claim that Rabbi Simon bar Yochai was the author of the Zohar. ¹ Geiger’s biography included (what he held to be) a previously unpublished letter by Joseph Delmedigo that ultimately proved, according to Geiger, that this philosopher was, at least inwardly, wholly opposed to Kabbalah. Later in the same year, Moritz Freystadt published an edition of Moses Haim Luzzatto’s work Hoker umekubbal, and introduced it with a twenty-five-page-long biography of Luzzatto that gave him ample opportunity to further reflect on the development of kabbalistic thought. The religious persecution of the Italian Kabbalist Luzzatto (1707– 1746) had already been discussed one year earlier by Isaak Marcus Jost in a short essay published in Jost’s own journal, Israelitische Annalen. This text again demonstrated Jost’s lifelong interest in the impact of Kabbalah on the intellectual development of Judaism. As opposed to formal Talmudism, which postulated halacha as an end in itself, Jost wrote in 1839, Kabbalah saw in the Mosaic law only the means to gain knowledge of higher truths. After he supported this theory by a lengthy quote from the Zohar, Jost continued that, as such, mystical doctrines were necessarily felt to be dangerous by the Talmudists – especially because of their appeal to enthusiastic rabbinic youths. Still, it is not the Kabbalah itself that is harmful, in Jost’s eyes, but it was only “its misapplication that led into heresies.” Here, Jost is arguably the first historian to portray Kabbalah as involved in an eternal struggle with talmudic rabbinism, a notion that later comes up with more frequency. The Talmudists fought Kabbalah because of the inherent dangers of its misuse and the kabbalists tried to convince the rabbis to take up more metaphysical-mystical studies. But neither side ever branded the other as heretical, Jost claimed, and while in Luzzatto’s time, the eighteenth century, the Talmudists prevailed in Italy, Kabbalah was victorious in Eastern Eu-

 In 1833, Elijah Delmedigo’s Sefer Bechinat haDat was republished by the Italian scholar Isaac S. Reggio in Padua, probably because he had been of the opinion that its primary message was the rejection of the Kabbalah. For Delmedigo, see Kalman P. Band, “Elijah del Medigo’s response to the Kabbalahs of fifteenth-century Jewry and Pico della Mirandolo”, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1991, 1, p. 23 – 53. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-004

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rope.² Interestingly, Jost himself, who was known to have no sympathy for Talmudism at all, seems to take a neutral position between the two conflicting camps of Jewish thought he describes in his essay. In his 1840 biography of Luzzatto, Moritz Freystadt followed exactly the same line: In the eighteenth century, the ideological battle within Judaism was fought between the “mystical machinations of secret doctrine” and rabbinic casuistics, between “Zohar and Talmud”, while neither human reason nor the Bible was referred to any longer, Freystadt asserted. Kabbalah, which was originally a “Jewish national philosophy” dealing with the “highest problems of metaphysical thought”, had turned into a “miracle-science” in the “delirious heads” of the modern kabbalists.³ The standard differentiation between theoretical and practical Kabbalah, found in Freystadt’s first book on Kabbalah, is here specified inasmuch as the practical “miracle-science” is for Freystadt, too, only a “degeneration” [Ausartung] of the philosophical Kabbalah, not an independent stream, as we observed Geiger and Jost arguing. From this point on, the German word Ausartung appears frequently in connection with practical Kabbalah. Theoretical Kabbalah, what Moses Luzzatto’s book was about, is now again subdivided by Freystadt into primary and secondary ideas. While primary Kabbalah consists of the “pristine theorems” of en-sof, adam kadmon, the ten sefirot and the four worlds, secondary kabbalistic elements are identified by Freystadt as all the later additions to the original philosophical system. Most of those additions, interestingly, Freystadt blames again on the influence of Christian thought on the Kabbalah – he mentions specifically Thomas Morus (1478 – 1535) and Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614– 1698). Nevertheless, Freystadt continued, because Luzzatto’s arguments are based on the Zohar, there is no question that he, too, belongs to the secondary stream of philosophical Kabbalah, indicating that he had changed his mind in the meantime as to the antiquity of the Zohar. ⁴ It seems, thus, that for Freystadt, is was nevertheless important to preserve a kind of originally Jewish, ancient (“pristine”) content of Kabbalah against all degeneration and decline – a phenomenon that Freystadt would not deny. But in his discussion of Luzzatto’s text, he attempts to show that in Luzzatto, as well as in all “true Jewish Kabbalah,” enough religious aspects can be found “that dismiss the Christian accusations of fatalism.” In addition, although the kabbal-

 Isaak Marcus Jost “Die Verfolgung Luzzattos”, in Israelitische Annalen 1839, p. 25 – 27, here p. 27. For a modern biography, see: Joëlle Hansel, Moïse Hayym Luzzatto (1707 – 1747). Kabbale et Philosophie, Paris 2004.  Moses Chaim Luzzatto, Hoker umekubbal, Königsberg 1840 (Hebrew title page), Freystadt’s German introduction, p. iv.  Hoker umekubbal, Freystadt’s German introduction, p. xx.

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istic system of the Zohar (and thus that of Luzzatto) indeed exhibits echoes of pantheism, a clear distinction can still be drawn between the Kabbalah and all forms of Spinozism, atheism and materialism, Freystadt concludes. It was Luzzatto’s merit to have shown that “speculative theology is more or less always mistaken” and that kabbalistic thought, too, suffers from some of those errors of philosophical speculation – but that Kabbalah, “understood in the right sense, is still the purest theism.”⁵ With that dual defence of Kabbalah, against atheism on the one hand, and against the denial of free will on the other, Freystadt is convinced that he has saved the authentic Jewish character of kabbalistic theology. In that same year, Abraham Geiger presented a far more sophisticated account of the historical emergence of Jewish mysticism. Still less than thirty years old, Geiger used the time he was waiting in Berlin for the Prussian government’s approval of his appointment as a community rabbi in Breslau to devote himself to intensive research. For some reason, Geiger felt it was necessary to preface his biography of Joseph Solomon Delmedigo with a long theological introduction titled “The Previous Development of Judaism,” that is, up to Delmedigo’s time. The outcome is a classical document of the Wissenschaft movement – a text that amounts to a complex exposition of the origins of mystical thought within Judaism, while explaining the major differences between a philosophical and a kabbalistic approach to Jewish theology.⁶ The profundity of this introduction demands a literal translation; in its absence, we shall sketch the text’s general line of thought: The emergence of kabbalistic thought, for Geiger, is a direct result of the theological confrontation between the talmudic and philosophical schools in the intellectual history of Judaism. The conflict between tradition and reason is irreconcilable, in Geiger’s consistent view, notwithstanding the efforts of Maimonides and others to harmonize philosophical truth with biblical teachings. Such efforts must necessarily fail, as Geiger unequivocally argued in his discussion of Maimonides elsewhere.⁷ Nevertheless, new, vain efforts in Jewish thought to mediate between the two antagonistic streams continually spring up, Geiger held, efforts to forge a middle path that would be acceptable to all parties interested in preserving Judaism itself.

 Hoker umekubbal, Freystadt’s German introduction, p. xxviii.  Abraham Geiger, Melo Chofnaim, deutscher Teil, “Biographie Josef Salomo del Medigo’s”, Berlin 1840, p. ix – xxi. For some reason, Geiger’s son, the well-known historian Ludwig Geiger, republished only the biographical and bibliographical parts of the essay on Delmedigo in his father’s Nachgelassene Schriften and left out the philosophical introduction, discussed here. See Abraham Geiger, NS, vol. 3, Berlin 1876, p. 1– 33.  See Kohler, Reading Maimonides, p. 66 – 74.

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In the context of this ongoing interest in harmonizing rational philosophy with the Bible, at some point, a new school of theology emerged that adopted elements from both sides – the school of Jewish mysticism. Mystical thinking adopted the approach of metaphysical, non-literal Scriptural exegesis from the Jewish philosophers (from Philo’s time on) but rejected their concept of God, which deduced a necessarily existing highest being, a first cause, by starting from the empirical world as the philosophers found it. Contrary to that God-concept, mysticism and Talmudists began their worldview “from above” proceeding downwards, Geiger explains, based on religious intuition or traditional knowledge of the godhead. Nonetheless, for this reverse path of theology, mystical thought used the terminology of the philosophers instead of that of the Talmud, if only in a rather arbitrary, non-contextual way. In addition, as opposed to the philosophical method of presuming chains of so-called intermediate causes, the mystics rather follow the biblical approach and ascribe the recognizable effects of higher causes in the world to the direct interference (emanations) of the deity.⁸ Those emanations could change the laws of nature temporarily or have special influence on specific humans, according to mystical thought, for which reason the law, given by such persons, expressed the immediate will of the deity. Geiger explained that, although from this special, personal emanation the duty to observe such law cannot be directly inferred, the kabbalists nevertheless held that, in this way, the keeping of the mitzvoth interfered with the chain of natural causes, which alone would render law-observance salutary.⁹ Furthermore, while Jewish philosophical thought had always anatomized nature in order to understand its laws, mystical thinking – like the traditional view of the talmudic sages – grasps the world as a whole. Philosophy, Geiger argued, proposed, thus, only a causal relation between the objects of the world, while mysticism was able to see the “immanent intertwining” of all things, and eventually “all specifics merge into the total”. Medieval philosophy turned intellectual powers into beings [Wesen]; objective truth and rationality hence became an independent being in the sekhel hapoel; the mere concept of an object (tzorah) turned, as its true essence, into reality. Contrariwise, in mysticism, beings were only transient appearances of the powers into which they eventually dissolved themselves. Objective truth was the infinite, the en-sof itself, though in a different perception of it; the concept of an object rather appeared as resting in God.¹⁰

 See here the discussion of intermediate causes in Maimonides’ Guide II, 48.  Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xii.  Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xiii-xvi.

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As a result of those harmonizing efforts between reason and tradition, mysticism “hovered back and forth between pantheism, emanation and abstract philosophical theism, until all mystical concepts were blurred and melded into the longing for the highest spirit [das höchste Geistige] and for the ascent towards it.” While the philosophers saw in Mosaic Law an instruction to obtain insight and to gain knowledge [Erkenntnis], which in itself was for them the highest goal of religion, the mystics agreed with the philosophers that the law is not an end in itself, as the Talmud still had it, but saw in it first and foremost a means for healing and purification, that is, to obtain holiness.¹¹ In Geiger’s view, the impact of the emerging of Kabbalah from the confrontation of philosophy with talmudic tradition is particularly apparent on the field of Scriptural exegesis. The Talmud provided a highly distorted interpretation of the Torah, Geiger forcefully claimed throughout his intellectual life. Reading the law of the Talmud back into the Pentateuch (based on perceived irregularities in biblical language), the talmudic rabbis imputed to their own legal regulations both eternity and divine authority that they did not deserve – thereby obviating the flexibility and adaptability to time and place that the earlier strata of Mishnaic law still possessed.¹² But the damage caused to Scripture by philosophy was no less: At the hands of philosophical theology, many Biblical verses were stripped of their poetical coating, sensuous expressions were intellectualized [vergeistigt], and, gradually, the whole Bible was transformed into a set of metaphysical propositions. Mysticism, too, Geiger explained, was not content with the literal meaning of the Bible, but instead of turning it into a textbook of philosophy, Jewish mystics transformed single Hebrew words into individual spiritual forces. This happened because mysticism, in general, has the tendency to cling [anschmiegen] to the holy and therefore to ally itself with the accepted authority of ceremonies, words and even single letters of biblical origin.¹³ The beginning of the thirteenth century saw the completion of the development of the philosophical school of Jewish theology, Geiger explained. From then on, Jewish philosophers would “only convulsively [krampfhaft] adhere to

 Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xiv. It remained unclear to him, adds Geiger the Reform rabbi, how the kabbalists could find such a force in the positive law of talmudic Judaism (ibid.).  Judaism, demands Geiger, must return to the natural sense of the Bible and a ‘healthy’ interpretation of it, while all existing extra-biblical law must be seen within the historical context of its emergence. See Abraham Geiger “Das Verhältnis des natürlichen Schriftsinnes zur thalmudischen Schriftdeutung”, in: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie 1844, No. 1, p 53 – 81/No. 2, p. 243 – 259, and the extensive discussion by Jay M. Harris How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Jewish History, New York 1995, p. 157– 65.  Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xv.

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their apparent truths, found earlier on,” creative thought eventually ceased and abstract, symbolic exegesis was grotesquely exaggerated. Thus, medieval philosophy lost the element that reason feels to be gratifying and mysticism gained traction. Out of its respect for authority, the mystical school had to declare that all the arbitrarily absorbed philosophical content that it had wrapped into holiness was indeed part of an ancient tradition of Judaism. For that reason alone, Jewish mysticism made use of the well-known and accepted term of Kabbalah, actually meaning tradition or handing down. It was in this intellectual atmosphere at the middle of the thirteenth century that Moses de Leon, in what Geiger calls a “stroke of luck” [glücklicher Wurf], composed [anfertigte] the Zohar. Geiger cannot hide his respect, at least for the literary qualities of the author of this “complete midrash on the Pentateuch,” who handled the existing material at his pleasure, as he writes. When attributing his work to Rabbi Simon bar Yochai, Moses de Leon “skillfully concealed his deception [Betrug] from the eyes of the more credulous readers” while giving obvious hints to the more enlightened ones – especially when he intentionally inserted the proclamation (in the name of Simon bar Yochai) that his book will be hidden and only be discovered at the beginning of the sixth millennium. “At all times, mysticism has secured its success only with a combination of skill and impudence”, Geiger comments.¹⁴ Thus, in 1840, Geiger was the first Wissenschaft scholar to openly and unqualifiedly declare Moses de Leon to be the author of the Zohar. This was more than a decade before Adolf Jellinek attempted to prove this theory, which probably in Geiger’s thought, too, goes back to Jacob Emden.¹⁵ Consequently, for Geiger, the Zohar is to be seen as a ‘deception’ [Betrug], because it itself claims to be authored by Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai more than a thousand years earlier. This classification became famous with Heinrich Graetz in the 1860s and prompted a furious reaction from Gershom Scholem and his followers in the twentieth century. With the Zohar, the triumph of Kabbalah was overwhelming, Geiger added. It spread “like a disastrous avalanche” and soon “degenerated into an arbitrariness that concealed its abysmal subjectivity with self-declared holiness, with made-up secretiveness and false attributions to ancient authorities.”¹⁶ Geiger continued his historical account through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mentioning here and there weak resistance against the triumphal Kabbalah both from Jewish philosophers and talmudic traditionalists. But nothing could pre-

 Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xvii.  Still in 1845 Michael Sachs followed Geiger here; on Sachs, see below.  Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xvii.

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vent the eventual transformation of Kabbalah from a secret individual practice into a public activity, its “exorbitant expansion into the marketplace”, as Geiger put it. While Kabbalah was originally seen as a form of “theoretical knowledge that created holiness” – an approach that, for example, the kabbalist Moses Cordovero (1522– 1570) still followed in the middle of the sixteenth century – with Lurianic Kabbalah, emerging at the end of this century, the tables were finally turned, according to Geiger. The students of Isaac Luria (whom Geiger here called himself a pious and modest teacher) developed Kabbalah into a “practical thaumaturgy, causing conscious deception and charlatanism on the one hand and unlimited superstition on the other.”¹⁷ However one assesses Geiger’s account of the emergence of Kabbalah or evaluates his strong opposition to what he believes are the eventually disastrous effects of mysticism on the theological development of Judaism, there is no denying that he invested deep thought and extensive historical research in the forming of his negative opinion. Geiger’s complex philosophical analysis, especially in the first part of the text, shows that he never lightheartedly relegated kabbalistic thought to the dusty shelf of the negligible lore of Jewish intellectual tradition or demanded of others to do so, as many critics have it. His study of Kabbalah is rather based on sophisticated theological and historical reasoning, while his outright rejection concerns, above all, only what he calls the later degeneration of a once fruitful and creative school of Jewish thought. Following this introduction, Josef Salomon Delmedigo is portrayed by Geiger in a biographical sketch as a man who outwardly embraced Kabbalah out of fear of religious persecution but, in fact, despised it. Naturally curious, Delmedigo studied kabbalistic texts extensively, only to find his negative preconceptions confirmed.¹⁸ Geiger’s view is, of course, not exactly supported by the written works Delmedigo left behind; especially in his later writings, he appears to be a great follower of kabbalistic thought and practice. But Geiger is convinced that Delmedigo frequently employed what Leo Strauss later saw as an esoteric method of writing, designed to avoid persecution by religious authorities: “In part, he [Delmedigo] introduced [into his account on Kabbalah] his own opinions; in part, he would speak [of Kabbalah] only in very general terms, only to soon follow his own path; in part, he lets it [Kabbalah] appear to be such a complete chaos that every reasonable person must turn away from it by himself.”¹⁹  Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xxi. Geiger does not mention here Sabbatianism but concludes his account with much criticism of Hassidism.  Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xxxiii (NS III, p. 11).  Geiger, Delmedigo, p. xliv, ( NS III, p. 23 and in detail p. 29 – 31) See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Chicago 2013.

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In order to correct the picture of Delmedigo’s relationship to Kabbalah on the exoteric level as well, Geiger published as an appendix to his biography a long letter he believed to be written by Delmedigo that proved beyond doubt not only a certain reluctance to accept kabbalistic ideas but demonstrated his outright aversion to the basic doctrines of Jewish mysticism. To support that demonstration, Geiger had obtained, with the help of his friend Samuel Loeb Goldenberg from Tarnopol, a copy of the original letter that was in the possession of the Karaite hakham of Halicz in Galicia. Geiger’s annotated edition of the text indeed reveals rough language; a tirade of disgust rather than a sophisticated argument against the Kabbalah, both philosophical and practical, on the part of the author.²⁰ Of interest for our subject are especially Geiger’s notes and explanations of the kabbalistic concepts that are singled out in the letter for unmitigated criticism. The God of the Jews, one reads in the letter, has no interest in mystical epithets, sefirot and its effects, and the concepts of en-sof, keter and atzilut (emanation) are nothing but foolishness, because only outright idiots would study the Zohar. Those blatant conclusions, declares the Delmedigo of the letter, are the result of his own extensive study of Kabbalah, and not a lightheaded judgment. While he labored hard to understand Kabbalah’s deeper sense, he has not found an effective means for that endeavor.²¹ In his edition of the letter, Geiger appended an explanatory endnote to every kabbalistic term or idea mentioned in Delmedigo’s text. In those thirty-nine notes, reaching over ten full pages of the book, Geiger again exhibits a surprising knowledge of kabbalistic literature and motives – which, for want of academic standard works on the subject at his time, seems to have been the exclusive fruit of Geiger’s own study of Kabbalah before the year 1840, that is, before he even entered his third decade. Still, the degree to which the young Geiger himself identified with the negative message of this letter seems obvious. It is as if Delmedigo describes Geiger’s own history of private kabbalistic studies – Geiger has apparently invested a considerable amount of time and energy in finding an approach to what he originally understood to be an important and influential part

 David Rudermann has raised serious doubt as to the authenticity of this letter, based only on the text and evidence ad hominem. See his Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe, New Haven 1995, p. 146 – 152. Rudermann’s suspicion is not new, however; Leopold Zunz and Heimann Josef Michael (1792– 1846) had already claimed that the letter (in the version printed by Geiger) contained Karaite interpolations – a claim that Heinrich Graetz later refused to accept as “groundless” (Geschichte der Juden, vol. 10, Leipzig 1868, p. 158, note) For the purpose of this study, however, it is only important that Geiger was convinced that the letter was authentic, which I believe he was.  Geiger’s edition, p. 4– 10.

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of the Jewish intellectual tradition. But, finally, like the Delmedigo of the letter, he failed in that search – and from then on, his evaluation of Kabbalah became increasingly depreciative. Already in Geiger’s next book dealing with this subject, his biography of Leon de Modena, this tendency can be easily discerned, as will be shown below. Meanwhile, another highly popular rabbinical figure of nineteenth-century Germany wrote a review of Geiger’s book on Delmedigo and of Fürst’s edition of Ari Nohem. Ludwig Philippson, the Rabbi of Magdeburg, began publishing his Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums as early as 1837, and soon this weekly paper became the most influential organ of German Jewry, Philippson himself becoming a sought-after voice in the many contemporary debates about the future of Judaism in the modern era.²² Philippson edited the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums for more than 50 years, until 1889, and as Hermann Cohen once put it, “there was no movement, no event, no hope or nor worry that touched Judaism, either from the outside or from within, where not everybody was first waiting for the opinion of that man.”²³ As did many nineteenth-century German Jewish scholars, Philippson shows a highly hostile stance towards kabbalistic thought. But even if he perceived certain dangers in a mystical approach to Judaism, this perception is the cause and very reason for Phillipson’s call for thorough research into the history of Kabbalah. In his above-mentioned review, he recommended both Geiger’s and Fürst’s publications, openly identifying with Geiger’s praise for Delmedigo’s letter. For Philippson, too, this letter would triumphantly “belie the kabbalists and denounce their empty fantasies and deceptive claims.”²⁴ Nevertheless, compared to Delmedigo, Modena was the more coura-

 On Philippson see: Meyer Kayserling, Ludwig Philippson. Eine Biographie, Leipzig 1898; Josef Bass, “Ludwig Philippson- Eine literar-historische Würdigung zur Hundertjahrfeier seines Geburtstages”, in: Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 56, No. 3/4 (März/April 1912), p. 218 – 249; Johanna Philippson, “The Philippsons, a German-Jewish Family 1775 – 1933”, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 7 (1962), 95 – 118; dito., “Ludwig Philippson und die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums”, in: Hans Liebeschütz / Arnold Paucker (ed.), Das Judentum in der deutschen Umwelt 1800 – 1850, Tübingen 1977, 243 – 291; Hans Otto Horch, “‘Auf der Zinne der Zeit’ – Ludwig Philippson, der ‘Journalist’ des Reformjudentums”, in: Bulletin des Leo Baeck Institutes 86 (1990), 5 – 21, Klaus Herrmann, “Translating cultures and texts in Reform Judaism. The Philippson Bible”, in: Jewish Studies Quarterly 14 (2007), 164– 197, Andreas Brämer, “Ludwig Philippsons Konstruktion der jüdischen Geschichte als Fundamentalkritik des Christentums”, in: Ludwig Philippson, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Andreas Brämer, Cologne 2015, p. 7– 33.  Hermann Cohen, in: Ludwig Philippson, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Leipzig 1911, vol. 2, p. 461.  Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 17, 1840 p. 247.

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geous thinker, according to Philippson. Modena “relentlessly attacked the allpowerful Kabbalah” in public, and Fürst’s edition of Ari Nohem has, thus, “a more general value for the history of Kabbalah, which is therein explained.”²⁵ But, despite this encouragement for kabbalistic research, Philippson himself never dealt intensively with Kabbalah, not even in his main theological writings, published in the 1860s, as we will see later on. In the early 1840s, three important theological works by three different authors appeared that virtually founded modern Jewish philosophy in Germany. Interestingly, of this rich religious philosophy written by Samuel Hirsch, Salomon Formstecher and Salomon Ludwig Steinheim, only Formstecher’s book contains an extensive discussion of kabbalistic thought.²⁶ Salomon Formstecher (1808 – 1889), for five decades the liberal rabbi of the town of Offenbach, published in 1841 his Religion des Geistes, a work that virtually initiated the theology of a cultural-ethical mission of Judaism to the world, a theory that became widespread later in German-Jewish reform circles. Judaism, in Formstecher’s view, was a universal religion with ethical monotheism as its essential feature. It was Judaism’s historical task to preserve this doctrine and teach it to the other nations. Thus, it was to show the devious route taken by its half-pagan daughter religions while standing aloof from all hybrid beliefs, maintaining its particularistic law as long as the mission of pure monotheism has not yet managed to unify an ultimately refined humanity. In this universalist and essentially anti-talmudic philosophy, Formstecher systematically integrated kabbalistic thought that, for him, as for many of his contemporaries, commenced in the immediate post-prophetic era of Jewish intellectual history. At this time, Judaism’s doctrines were relatively weak and thus open, according to Formstecher, “to absorb theosophical theorems and mystical customs and to develop thereof a theoretical and practical Kabbalah in order to hold its ground against the powerful force of paganism.”²⁷ The basic idea of this, in itself, “half-pagan Jewish theosophy was the belief that human intellect can penetrate and finally know the inner economy of God”, an idea that the prophets had rigorously rejected and that was only later adopted into Judaism from the mysterion of the gnosis. While midrashic literature contained all manner of description concerning God’s form, size, occupations and inclinations, this as-

 Ibid.  For Formstecher, see Bettina Kratz-Ritter, Salomon Formstecher: ein deutscher Reformrabbiner, Hildesheim 1991, Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity, Detroit 1995, p. 70 – 72, Thomas Meyer, “Salomon Formstechers ‘Religion des Geistes’ – Versuch einer Neulektüre”, in: Aschkenas 13,2 (2003), p. 441– 460.  Salomon Formstecher Religion des Geistes, Frankfurt 1841, p. 324.

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sumption to know the super-sensual world never attained the status of dogma in Judaism, according to Formstecher, but always remained a metaphor, a poetical allegory of the imagination.²⁸ Nevertheless, in antiquity, theosophy was vital for the survival of Judaism. It served the human tendency towards the mystical, the miraculous and the supernatural – thus, the Jews, too, found for themselves what paganism boasted about, and so Judaism became part of the surrounding culture despite its religious separatism.²⁹ But the absorbed mystical teachings were then “Judaized until they represented a strictly moral way of life and loathed all physical barbarism that paganism deified,” as Formstecher insisted elsewhere in his book.³⁰ Following the prophetic period, Judaism was split into “esoteric doctrines and exoteric cult,” Formstecher writes in yet a different chapter. And while the exoteric ceremonial law was developed in order to protect Judaism’s pure monotheism from pagan influences, concurrently, esoteric speculation connected and harmonized the Jewish idea of God with the contemporary pagan mystical notions. The rituals of Judaism came to shield the non-thinking masses from the influences of their surroundings, Formstecher claims, while kabbalistic thought “coated monotheism in the fashionable dress of the time in order to effectively furnish the thinking scholar with the apologetic means against the powerful gnostic influence of paganism.”³¹ This idea, that mystical thought had a protective influence on the development of true and essentially original Jewish thought, is Formstecher’s main contribution to the history of the Kabbalah within the Wissenschaft des Judentums. For him, Kabbalah itself never had a major influence on Judaism, understood as theology, and had “only relative importance” for practical religious life. Although Kabbalah tried “to introduce into Jewish doctrine a mysterion of knowing God, theogonic concepts and pantheistic emanation”, those ideas “never completely took hold in Jewish folk life and always had learned opponents.” Kabbalah could never entirely reverse the mainstream Jewish theology of divine transcendence, because eventually it founded its pantheistic teachings on the spirit of the Hebrew letters of the Bible and not on the powers of nature, as in classical gnosis. The Jewish God remained above nature, even in kabbalistic mysticism.³² For Formstecher, kabbalistic thought was an expression of the enduring battle between Judaism and paganism, just as talmudic literature contains the on    

Formstecher, Formstecher, Formstecher, Formstecher, Ibid.

Religion, Religion, Religion, Religion,

p. 321. p. 325. p. 172. p. 105.

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going controversy between prophetism and tradition within Judaism. The conflicts are fought in parallel and with alternating results. Both Talmud and Kabbalah are necessary products of a transformational period of Judaism for Formstecher, but while the Talmud in general “remains within the narrow sphere of the religious life of the people of Israel, untouched by the revolutions of mankind”, the Kabbalah goes beyond this national individualism and “considers Judaism as part of humanity.”³³ Kabbalistic thought, Formstecher writes, has the advantage of establishing a constant relation between Judaism and the other parts of humanity, because it affirmed that God was not only Israel’s father and king but the creator of the world, manifesting itself in every being. Transcending the particularistic view of the talmudic rabbis, who saw God only as the savior of Israel and codified supposedly divine precepts in a highly diversified halacha, the kabbalists found in the results of the Talmud merely the external form of an inner spirit. Unrestricted, as it were, kabbalistic thought declares all possible religious matters to be the objects of its speculation, including the essence of God, the angels, the human soul and the heavenly bodies.³⁴ Where the Talmud demanded blind obedience to its law and strict belief in authority, Kabbalah explicitly permits and encourages the question about the reasons of the commandments, Formstecher emphasized in what almost sounds like an appreciation of mystical thought for his own reformatory, anti-talmudic purposes within Judaism. Unlike talmudic teachings, kabbalistic teachings always pretend to be independent of apodictic knowledge and claim to know the only true meaning of every veiled expression of Scripture. The gnostic character of Kabbalah makes it, at one and the same time, a contradiction and a harmonization between Judaism (with its demand of submission to revelation) and pagan philosophy (with its apotheosis of man). In Formstecher’s view, Kabbalah takes from paganism the possibility of absolute knowledge about metaphysical subjects while it identifies the source of such knowledge in Jewish sources, most prominently in the biblical revelations.³⁵ Formstecher’s theories about the origin and function of Kabbalah are supported by a profound knowledge of kabbalistic thought, available texts and popular motives, which he quotes and analyses at length throughout his work.³⁶ Thus, it turns out that in Rabbi Salomon Formstecher, too, the nascent Wissenschaft des Judentums had a well-versed scholar of kabbalistic traditions who, in addition to his knowledge of Jewish mysticism, even attempts to develop a reli   

Formstecher, Religion, p. 260. Formstecher, Religion, p. 265 – 66. Formstecher, Religion, p. 266. See, for example, Formstecher, Religion, p. 344– 347.

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gious philosophy of Kabbalah that fits his general approach to the intellectual history of Judaism and its mission to the civilized world. Kabbalah, it seems, functions for the reform theologian Formstecher, first and foremost, as a powerful counter-balance to the dangerous efforts of the Talmud to regulate, if not to suppress, metaphysical thought in Judaism and thus to create through Kabbalah a creative counter-concept to an unquestioned obedience of the talmudic law. While Formstecher, Geiger, and several other German theologians of Judaism in the first half of the nineteenth century tried to extract the religious essence of kabbalistic thought in Judaism, at the very same time other Jewish scholars of this generation began to tread an entirely different and new path. The theological approach, those first Jewish academic orientalists held, was necessarily confined to the existing printed kabbalistic literature. As valuable as the philosophical insights about those texts, their history and the development of Jewish mysticism in general might be, they were not yet based on comprehensive philological research, which was one of the major goals of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. In addition, even the historical and bibliographical background of the printed texts was by no means beyond doubt, let alone entirely clear, as the unresolved dispute about the authorship of the main kabbalistic source, the book of Zohar, impressively demonstrated. What was worse, most kabbalistic literature was still in manuscript, spread among many European libraries, and was barely or badly catalogued. Acutely aware of this situation, Geiger and his colleagues repeatedly called for an intensive pursuit of kabbalistic research, the results of which they were eager to evaluate and publish in the academic organs of the Wissenschaft movement.

Meier Hirsch Landauer and Abraham Adler (1838 – 1845) One of the first of those young Jewish scholars who scoured the libraries for unknown kabbalistic material was Meier Hirsch Landauer (1808 – 1841), the son of a pious cantor from the kingdom of Württemberg. Joining other young intellectuals of the Geiger-generation, Landauer had complemented his extensive talmudic education with university studies in Munich and Tübingen, where he first came into contact with the beginnings of higher Biblical Criticism. Already in 1838, he published a monograph titled Essence and Form of the Pentateuch that demonstrates also his interest in the Zohar and its origins in terms of the history of ideas. Contrary to his later views, in this book Landauer still tried to defend the antique authorship of the Zohar, arguing that the several references to a Trinitarian concept of God in the Zohar are proof of the pre-Christian, that is, Jewish, origin of the doctrine of the Trinity.¹ But Landauer knew well that he had to substantiate his at-times far-fetched theories about the concept and the names of God in the Pentateuch and in the Zohar (which, in this respect, he perceived as on par with the Pentateuch)² with sound manuscript evidence. In the first half of the nineteenth century, several wealthy European libraries invited Jewish scholars to catalogue the abundance of Hebrew manuscripts that those libraries held and that hardly anybody thus far had examined for academic purposes. In 1848, for example, Moritz Steinschneider was invited to catalogue the Hebrew manuscripts of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The result was one of the most famous bibliographical works of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Already a decade earlier, the Munich Court Library had allowed the young Jewish scholar Max Lilienthal to catalogue its Hebrew manuscripts. Lilienthal published a detailed list of his findings in the literary supplement of Philippson’s Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in several installments from May 1838 until November 1839.³ As Landauer later explained, the rich collection of Hebrew manu-

 M.H. Landauer Wesen und Form des Pentateuch Stuttgart und Tübingen 1838, p. 92. For a discussion of the contents of this book, see Eveline Goodman-Thau “Meyer Heinrich Hirsch Landauer – Bible Scholar and Kabbalist”, in K.E. Grözinger (ed.) Mysticism, Magic, and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, Berlin-New York 1995, p. 275 – 294. For a modern theory of Trinitarian references in the Zohar, see Yehuda Liebes “Christian Influences on the Zohar”, in his Studies in the Zohar, New York 1993.  Landauer, Wesen und Form des Pentateuch, p. 90.  Beginning from AZJ, No. 13, 1838 – No. 49, 1839. Lilienthal (1815 – 1882) earned a Doctorate from the Munich University in 1838 and accepted in 1839 the office of principal in the newly eshttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-005

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scripts in Munich was originally the property of Johann Albert Widmanstadt, a sixteenth-century Hebraist and student of Johannes Reuchlin, the first Christian Hebraist in Germany, who was extremely interested in Kabbalah himself. Widmanstadt had bought or copied mainly kabbalistic manuscripts from Jews in Italy, where he travelled around the year 1538.⁴ The wealth of literary treasures that Lilienthal found and catalogued in Munich was a revelation to the scholarly world, and Landauer followed Lilienthal’s publications with great interest. By 1839, even before the entire catalogue was published, he decided that there was no better place to begin his kabbalistic manuscript studies than the Court Library in Munich. Being poor, he had to apply for a stipend for his research in Munich. Interestingly, it was the königliche israelitische Oberkirchenbehörde (the umbrella organization of the Jewish communities of Württemberg) that understood the need for research into the mystical traditions of Judaism and convinced the Württemberg government to support Landauer generously. Thus, beginning from late 1838, even before Geiger and Formstecher publicly philosophized about the antique origin of mystical thought in Judaism, Landauer spent many months tucked away in Munich’s Royal Library reading hundreds of manuscripts on Jewish mysticism. A new world opened up for him, and, fascinated, he developed several highly original theories about the history and essence of Kabbalah. The most famous among these theories was the claim that the author of the Zohar was Abraham Abulafia (1240 – 1291), whose texts Landauer had studied in Munich. Abulafia was a Jewish mystic from Saragossa, widely unknown up to that time. Landauer found in Munich more than a thousand Hebrew manuscripts, the bulk of which were kabbalistic or medical in nature. This made Munich the largest kabbalistic library in the world, according to Landauer’s estimate. Soon, he realized that Lilienthal’s catalogue was of little scholarly value and at the end of 1839 he even issued a public warning against the further use of it in Jost’s Israelitische Annalen. ⁵ At the same time, Landauer offered to share his newly gained knowledge of Kabbalah, and we know that he was in close contact and discussion, at least with Isaak Markus Jost, concerning the kabbalistic manuscripts he had copied in the library.⁶ Ultimately, Landauer’s research revolutionized Kabbalah scholarship in Germany when his results were published in Julius Fürst’s journal Der Orient some four years after Landauer’s untimely death in 1841. tablished Jewish school of Riga. In 1844, he moved to America, where he finally settled in Cincinnati, teaching history and literature at the Hebrew Union College.  Cf. Landauer in Literaturblatt des Orient 1845, No. 21, p. 324.  Israelitische Annalen 49, 1839, p. 391.  See Jost’s remark about that fact in Literaturblatt des Orient 52, 1845, p. 812.

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Fürst, who was himself interested in Jewish mysticism, as we saw, immediately realized the immense value of the unorganized papers Landauer had left behind when they came into his hands late in 1843, as he tells his readers.⁷ And it was only the chaotic state of Landauer’s literary remains that prevented an earlier publication in the journal. But once they began to appear in the Orient, beginning from March 1845, carefully edited by Fürst, the depth of Landauer’s research and the originality of his findings became apparent. In the minds of many, Meier Hirsch Landauer was the very pioneer of the academic study of Kabbalah, as Heinrich Graetz will later emphasize. Landauer was probably the first scholar to turn to the academic examination of kabbalistic manuscripts and publish impartial research results concerning even the most sophisticated philosophical evaluation of the impact of Kabbalah on the ‘essence of Judaism’. But Landauer was not attracted by kabbalistic antinomianism or the often strong hostility of the kabbalists towards talmudic legalism. Landauer himself declared that he studied Kabbalah “historically/critically, in a top-down [approach]”,⁸ meaning that he did not put forward, unlike Abraham Geiger, any ideological or theological theory according to which he would measure his results. Instead, he assumed a neutral and entirely scholarly position – exactly what Steinschneider would later forcefully declare to be the ideal stance of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Contrary to most other authors discussed so far, for Landauer, Kabbalah did not begin in the mystical antiquity of the post-prophetic era but only with the start of written kabbalistic documents, that is, in the Gaonic period. While during this time Kabbalah was still characterized by gross anthropomorphisms, the Golden Age of refined Jewish mysticism began for Landauer after the death of Nachmanides in late thirteenth-century France. But Landauer’s greatest discovery was surely the person and the work of the Spanish kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, today widely considered one of the most important mystics of the Middle Ages. Landauer extracted from his findings the first biography of Abulafia and published a list of ten manuscripts from Abulafia’s writings that he found in the Munich library.⁹ Carried away by his enthusiasm about the discovery, Landauer concluded from several cases of presumptive evidence that Abulafia must also be the author of the Zohar – one proof being the conspicuous similarity in the literary character of this book and Abulafia’s attested writings. “Who  Literaturblatt des Orient 12, 1845, p. 178.  Literaturblatt des Orient 22, 1845, p. 343 (von oben herab).  Literaturblatt des Orient 22, 1845, p. 380 ff. See here: Ronald Kiener: “The Vicissitudes of Abulafia in Contemporary Scholarship”, in: Peter Schäfer / Joseph Dan (eds.): Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 50 Years after, Tübingen 1993, p. 145 – 162.

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has once read a work by Kant”, Landauer argued, “and now finds another book by the same author, but missing the title page – will soon know that both are children of the same father.”¹⁰ In addition, Landauer claimed, Abulafia studied Greek philosophy and he was a great philologue, an intelligent and a daring thinker. Thus, he was in every respect capable of composing a work like the Zohar. Remarks like these expose Landauer’s approach to Kabbalah and the Zohar: he reads the best of Jewish mystical tradition as great works of original thought. Landauer, however, did not in any theological way identify with Abraham Abulafia, the hero of his research. At the end of his lengthy argumentation on why Abulafia must have been the author of the Zohar, Landauer admitted that this theory contradicts what he published in his earlier works, especially that which concerns the nature of the Pentateuch. His previous claim about the antiquity of the Zohar resulted mainly from his inability “to understand how a Jewish author of the thirteenth century would transfer purely Christian doctrine to the [exegesis of the] Old Testament, given the mutual hatred of medieval Jews and Christians.” Therefore, Landauer thought at the time, the Zohar’s references to the trinity, for example, must be pre-Christian ideas. But with the discovery of the works and thought of Abulafia, this theory completely changed – “because now I have had found such a Judeo-Christian monster [as Abulafia], and because all the other kabbalists are silent about these doctrines,” as Landauer explains.¹¹ He was also tracking the author of the Bahir, Landauer announced subsequently, and lamented that the field of Kabbalah research was “entirely desolate,” the few existing bibliographies riddled with serious errors. Landauer’s ambitious plan to publish a comprehensive “historical-critical study about the whole of kabbalistic literature, beginning from the Sefer Yezirah,” never materialized, though, as he died after a prolonged illness at the age of thirty-three at his home in Württemberg.¹² In the fall of 1842, one year after Landauer’s death, another young man interested in Kabbalah came to Leipzig, then the stronghold of German orientalism. Soon, this scholar would turn into a worthy successor of Landauer, whom he had held in great respect. During the almost fifteen years of his stay in Leipzig, Adolf Jellinek (1820 – 1889) became the leading and most industrious German-Jewish scholar of kabbalistic thought of his time, probably even of the en-

 Literaturblatt des Orient 27, 1845, p. 421.  Literaturblatt des Orient 37, 1845, p. 590.  Literaturblatt des Orient 37, 1845, p. 592.

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tire nineteenth century.¹³ Jellinek was born in Moravia and had studied in Prague with Solomon Judah Rapoport and Michael Sachs. He came to Leipzig at the age of twenty-two, attracted by the fame of Germany’s leading orientalist at the time, Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer.¹⁴ Jellinek was introduced to Fleischer by his friend and compatriot Moritz Steinschneider, and in 1843, Julius Fürst employed Jellinek at his journal Der Orient. One year later, only two years after his arrival in Leipzig and some intensive university courses with Fleischer and Fürst, Jellinek demonstrated an outstanding knowledge of Kabbalah in his first major publication: the German translation of a book by the French philosopher Adolphe Franck titled La Kabbale (1843) and presumptuously subtitled Philosophie religieuse des Hebreux. ¹⁵ Jellinek’s German version of the work was much more than a simple translation. In an extensive apparatus of footnote references, he commented on Franck’s kabbalistic theories, oftentimes openly correcting Franck’s erroneous information. What emerged was an almost new and original edition that soon enjoyed great popularity among educated German Jewry and caused many learned reactions in the form of critical reviews in the scientific journals of Jewish thought. Jellinek’s translation project was in no way an attempt to distinguish himself at the expense of the French scholar. Rather painfully, Jellinek realized the paucity of Kabbalah scholarship within the Wissenschaft movement and set out to make the existing work of Franck available to a grateful German reading public. In all likelihood, he felt that it was too early to publish a monograph on Jewish mysticism of his own, but he was nevertheless unable to let (what he saw as) the “delusions” of Franck, who was eleven years his senior, go uncorrected. Howev-

 For Jellinek’s biography, see Moses Rosenmann, Dr. Adolf Jellinek: Sein Leben und Schaffen, Vienna 1931. As a good summary of the following pages: Samuel J. Kessler, “Rediscovering the Study of Spanish Kabbalism in Wissenschaft des Judentums: Adolf Jellinek in Leipzig, 1842– 1856”, in: Pardes 24, 2018, p. 125 – 144.  On Fleischer and Jellinek, see Ismar Schorsch “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth Century Germany”, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 2010, p. 3 – 36, here p. 29 f.  Adolphe Franck (1809 – 1893) was one of the main proponents of the French branch of Wissenschaft des Judentums and, unlike his German colleagues, enjoyed much recognition in French academic circles. In 1844, he became professor of classical languages at the Collège de France. He was the editor of the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques (1843 – 49, 6 vols) for which he himself authored several important entries. On Franck and Kabbalah, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff “The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah”, in Huss ed. Kabbalah and Modernity, Leiden 2010, p. 111– 118, and Paul Fenton, “La contribution d’Adolphe Franck à l’étude historico-critique de la kabbale”, in: Adolphe Franck; philosophe juif, spiritualiste et libéral dans la France du XIXe siècle, ed. Jean-Pierre Rothschild et Jérôme Grondeux. Turnhout: Brepols 2012, p. 81– 97.

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er, already in 1844, he announced his own study on the authorship of the Zohar – a monograph that finally appeared only in 1851, as the first volume of a whole series of influential books by Jellinek on kabbalistic subjects, to be discussed below in detail. Jellinek’s 1844 preface to his translation of Franck’s La Kabbale outlines his critical approach both to Franck’s Kabbalah research, but even more to the study of the Jewish mystical traditions in general. Kabbalah as “oriental philosophy”, Jellinek writes, has still no unique standing, no “place of birth” in modern scholarship; furthermore, the main kabbalistic book, the Zohar, has still no undisputed author. The scholars of mysticism of previous centuries, including Reuchlin and Pico della Mirandola, are of no help here, because their results for critical research are of the same value as those of “any random Zoharist or Hasid.” After reviewing the academic literature of his time about the subject, Jellinek seems to agree with Franck that Kabbalah was of Persian and not of biblical origin, but that the initial Zoroastrian ideas at the basis of Kabbalah were extensively modified before being integrated within antique Jewish thought. Concerning the Zohar, Jellinek takes no position whatsoever but lays out a research plan he wishes to implement for his own proposed volume on the subject. From the Zohar itself “it must be shown which doctrines are its original elements, further how the Zohar developed under the hands of different teachers, which components of other works it contains: in short, a critical analysis of the entire Zohar, according to its contents, must be written.”¹⁶ Note that this call for the critical, academic study of the Zohar within the Wissenschaft des Judentums was written before Landauer’s aforementioned research results from the Munich library were published by Julius Fürst in the Orient. After Jellinek took notice of Landauer’s papers, he referred to them extensively in his own study of the Zohar from 1851. Concerning his translation of Franck, Jellinek openly calls it an “improvement and expansion” [Verbesserung und Vermehrung] of the original work. However, Franck’s book was chosen by him because it is the first study on Kabbalah that is “unbiased and written in the spirit of our times.” These were criteria for scholarship that Jellinek seems to appreciate and which were utterly lacking in previous works on Jewish mysticism, like those by Tholuk, Rosenroth and even by Molitor, as Jellinek points out.¹⁷ Franck, in contrast, had delivered a “detailed  Die Kabbala oder die Religionsphilosophie der Hebräer, von A. Franck, aus dem Französischen übersetzt, verbessert und vermehrt von Ad. Gellinek (sic), Leipzig 1844, Preface by Jellinek, p. X.  Preface by Jellinek, p. XI. The reference is to Franz Joseph Molitor (1779 – 1860), a Catholic enthusiast of Kabbalah, and his book Philosophie der Geschichte, (1827) discussing Kabbalah

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and complete” introduction on subjects such as age, authenticity and relation to other philosophical systems of the Kabbalah, which would be appreciated not by scholars of Jewish mysticism alone. What Jellinek had done in his German edition was, according to his preface, mainly correct inaccurate quotes from kabbalistic works and modify erroneous or missing references. In fact, however, even a cursory glance at the book reveals that Jellinek corrected on almost every other page the numerous errors that Franck made in the French original – here setting right the biographical data of a medieval scholar, there explaining the true meaning of a specific Mishnah or correcting the translation of a Hebrew word or phrase, and often even giving the original text where Franck had used only a secondary source. With all this, Jellinek somewhat abashedly demonstrated his (even at his young age) superior knowledge of (at least) the field of Jewish mysticism, the subject of Franck’s book. At the end of his edition, Jellinek added an appendix that he wrote entirely by himself and that contains several longer comments which he refrained from inserting into Frank’s text for fear of confusion, and some important bibliographical notes on the different titles, editions and translations of the Zohar. In the appendix, Jellinek also reveals his original plan to add an even longer scholarly excursus to his translation, noting that he was unable to finish his research in time for publication. The intention of the excursus was to “extract the mystical tendencies of most Tana’im (teachers of the Mishnah) from Talmud and midrash, as well as to show the influence of Persian thought on rabbinical Judaism.”¹⁸ One telling example that Jellinek already in his preface singled out for an explanation of his method for improving Franck’s book is found on page 130: Franck has translated the Aramaic word for belief with the French loi (law), which Jellinek corrected to the German Glauben – because otherwise it would be “in direct antagonism to the spirit of kabbalism”, continuing to comment thus: “For the allegorical method of the Kabbalah, even the law itself is flexible [flüssig] to such an extent that it loses its inherent rigidity.”¹⁹ One sees here a rare hint to the theological underpinning of Jellinek’s interest in Kabbalah: when he left Leipzig and moved to Vienna in 1856, after he was elected to become the successor of the famous preacher and moderate reformer Isaac Noah Mannheimer at

in the spirit of Schelling, (see, on him: Katharina Koch, Franz Joseph Molitor und die jüdische Tradition, Berlin 2012), to the Protestant theologian August Tholuk (1799 – 1877) and his work De ortu Cabbalae (Hamburg 1837), and to Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (see above, p. 40, n. 21).  Franck, Kabbala, p. 291.  Jellinek’s preface, p. XII.

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the central Temple in Leopoldsstadt, he followed Mannheimer’s non-orthodox approach to the rigidity of religious law.²⁰ It was again the deistic rationalist and first historian of Judaism Isaak Markus Jost who published a detailed review of Jellinek’s translation in the Orient. Jost declared at the beginning of his essay that he would refer to Jellinek’s German and not to Franck’s original French edition of the book because the former is “by far better.” Once again, we note the interest in Jewish mysticism expressed by a leading representative of the Wissenschaft movement. Jost begins by taking Franck to task for failing to provide a comprehensive list of the main known works of kabbalistic literature – an omission that Franck had justified by saying that all mystical Jewish writings were similar in content. Jost flatly rejects this argument as insufficient. “In addition, a description of the historical development of Kabbalah would have been appropriate”, Jost continues, “as well as an outline of kabbalistic influences on Jewish liturgy and life.” All this was necessary, Jost claims explicitly, in order “to illustrate the importance of Kabbalah” within Judaism.²¹ Following a detailed discussion of Franck’s theory about the antiquity of kabbalistic motives, in which Jost not only demonstrates his interest in Jewish mysticism but also exceptional knowledge of the subject, he states that Franck is ignorant of, or not willing to participate in, the German scholarly discussion about Kabbalah. Otherwise, he could not have proposed that the Sefer Yezirah is one of the first Jewish literary productions after the Bible without first refuting Zunz’s convincing proofs that this work was written only many centuries later, during the Gaonic era.²² Moreover, Franck’s argument that the advanced astronomical and anatomical knowledge of the author of the Zohar does not militate against the antiquity of this work had previously been made by Zunz and also by himself, Jost remarks. And even if Franck could not have studied the research results of Landauer, because they were published only after Franck’s book appeared – Landauer had already in 1840 publicly offered to share his findings with the academic world, an offer that Jost himself had happily accepted, as he explains.²³ We see, then, the eagerness with which Jost and other scholars within the Wissenschaft des Judentums sought to build academic networks for the study of Kabbalah, a subject they considered of crucial importance for the understanding of the Jewish religion.

 See however Jellinek’s 1887 publication of the Sefer ha-ot by Abulafia to be discussed below.  “Die Kabbalah, deutsch von Jellinek, beurtheilt von I.M. Jost”, in: Literaturblatt des Orients 49, 1845, p. 777.  Cf. Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, p. 165.  Jost, in Literaturblatt des Orient 51, p. 812. I was not able to find out in which way Landauer has made this offer.

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The third and last installment of his review of Franck/Jellinek, that is, almost one-third of the whole text, Jost dedicated, somewhat surprisingly for today’s standards, to a theory of his own about the origin and authorship of the Zohar. Unlike Franck, Jost seems to believe that the Zohar was a medieval production because neither the Karaites, nor Rashi, Ibn Ezra nor Maimonides, ever mentioned any knowledge of the work, although at least many Karaite thinkers and certainly Maimonides would have found the mysticism of the Zohar quite offensive.²⁴ Therefore, Jost deemed the Zoharic Kabbalah not an immediate continuation of the secret doctrines mentioned in talmudic literature but rather an unsystematic admixture authored by some “Asian ascetics living at the time of the Crusades” who combined older midrashic material with their own contemporary oriental mysticism.²⁵ With this vague theory, Jost believed, all difficulties about the Zohar could eventually be solved, as he explained in the detailed elaboration that followed in the text. That, in contradiction to his thesis, the influence of Aristotelian philosophy, rather dominant in the Middle Ages, is missing in the Zohar, Jost explains with an interesting comparison to his own times: Although Mendelssohn and other Maskilim had introduced into Jewish thought the philosophies of Leibniz, Wolff and Kant, there were still many rabbis, even in places that usually received information through books and newspapers, who are ignorant even of the very names of those German philosophers.²⁶ Returning at the very end of the text to the literary style of a review, Jost warmly welcomed and recommended Jellinek’s translation of Franck, primarily because of the substantial corrections made in the German edition. In addition, he expressed his hope that Jellinek’s announced critical monographic study of the Zohar would soon appear, Jost concluded, notwithstanding his own opposing theory, and that this study would contain knowledge that can “bring light into this dark matter.”²⁷ Jellinek’s Moravian friend, Moritz Steinschneider, took a different view, proposing that the whole German translation was a waste of time, given the poor scholarly quality of Franck’s original. This assessment emerged from an epistolary exchange between Steinschneider and the editor of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Rudolf Anger from Leipzig. Anger had refused to publish a review of the Jellinek translation, written by Steinschneider, in which the criticism of Franck seems to have been

   

Jost, Jost, Jost, Jost,

in in in in

LitBlO LitBlO LitBlO LitBlO

51, p. 813. 52, p. 817. 52, p. 819. 52, p. 820.

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so blatantly judgmental that the Zeitschrift saw itself unable to deviate from its strict neutrality in reviewing scholarly works.²⁸ Nevertheless, another non-Jewish journal published a review of the FranckJellinek book, further demonstrating the interest in serious Kabbalah research during the nineteenth century, also in gentile scholarly circles, as well as the widespread attention the translation gained among the movement of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. The author of this almost book-length review for the Jahrbücher für speculative Philosophie, edited by the Protestant Hegelian Ludwig Noack, was Rabbi Abraham Adler (1811– 1856) of Worms, one of the lessknown figures of the Wissenschaft movement.²⁹ Adler, like so many of his fellow Jewish scholars, was forced to earn a living with a synagogue post while conducting academic research in his spare time. Like Geiger, he studied at the University of Bonn, later working with Simon Scheyer in Frankfurt on Scheyer’s first translation (of the third part) of Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed into German.³⁰ In 1842, he returned to Worms, taking over the positon of preacher and teacher from his more famous brother, Samuel.³¹ Adler participated actively in all three assemblies of Reform-oriented rabbis from all of Germany in the 1840s and stood out there because of his radical reform proposals. At the same time, Adler began publishing his surprisingly positive views on the Kabbalah. His extensive review of Jellinek’s translation of Franck’s La Kabbale, published in four lengthy installments in 1846 – 1847, is not only a previously overlooked learned essay about Jewish mysticism written at a high academic standard, it is also a warm re-appraisal of the Kabbalah from a true scholar of the Wissenschaft movement. Kabbalah, for Adler, was an outright miracle within Judaism. It was Judaism’s creative and artistic principle, which began its steady and diligent activity more than one thousand years ago. Kabbalah had even sent to the Christian Church its praiseworthy creations, without that anyone knew where they came from, or without that anyone ever saw them face to face. Like a fresh breath of spring Kabbalah had touched the icy landscape of Judaism, dissolving fossilized matter and yielding the most benevolent sprouts.

 Mentioned by Ismar Schorsch in: “Converging Cognates”, LBIYB 2010, p. 30.  See, however, Michael A. Meyer, “Religious Reform and Political Revolution in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Case of Rabbi Abraham Jakob Adler”, in: Christian Wiese, Martina Urban (ed.), German-Jewish Thought Between Religion and Politics: Festschrift in Honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, Berlin 2012, p. 59 – 81.  Cf. Dalalat al Haiirin = Zurechtweisung der Verirrten von Moses ben Maimon; ins Deutsche übersetzt mit Zuziehung zweier arabischen Ms. und mit Anmerkungen begleitet von Simon Scheyer, Frankfurt am Main, 1838. For discussion, see my Reading Maimonides, Dordrecht 2012.  In 1842, Samuel Adler (1809 – 1891) was elected rabbi of the Jewish congregations in Alzey. In 1857, he became the head rabbi of the leading Reform congregation in the US, the Temple Emanu-El, New York.

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Kabbalah has turned dry wasteland into a truly divine garden, in which all who are breathed on by it soon felt blessed and privy to the deepest secrets of infinity. All is revealed to her, but she remains a miracle for man, busy with his daily life. Her light finds its way in all directions, but she herself lives in the dark, denying access to the uninitiated.

The metaphysics of reason would haughtily smile at the Kabbalah, Adler continues, but this is only because reason does not understand itself. Its dry categories could never comprehend the Absolute and must be content with the ignorance [Nichtwissen] that is its actual result. Kabbalah herself, however, would graciously accept metaphysics as her ancillary power, but rightly holds that all that metaphysics knows of the real truth is what reason had “overheard in the antechamber of the veiled queen of the palace.”³² Adler’s view of the irrational character of the Kabbalah leads naturally to disagreement with Jellinek’s scientific-historical, at times even philosophical, approach to Jewish mysticism. In short measure, then, the review moves from a discussion of Franck’s book to training a spotlight on Jellinek’s preface to his translation of Franck. Adler is opposed to the very possibility to understand Kabbalah by philosophical, that is, purely rational means. Adler read as a result of shallow rationalism Jellinek’s claim that Kabbalah was kept a secret doctrine because at the time of its intrusion into Jewish thought from Persian sources it was deemed dangerous for public study. The secretiveness of Kabbalah was inherent to its doctrines, he countered. All ancient peoples possessed secret teachings, and thus political explanations would never do for an account of the secrets of the Kabbalah. Rather, “Kabbalah was not kept secret, but was a Secret Doctrine in itself, the secretive was its inner essence.”³³ For Adler, “Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism, that is, the truth in form of pure inwardness [bloße Innerlichkeit].” Kabbalah is, like all mysticism, a secret even to the initiated, who themselves do not know how they came into the possession of this secret knowledge. That is why they refer this knowledge to a process of ‫קבלה‬, to tradition or transmission from earlier, or even divine sources. Only thus can the controversial phenomenon that Adler’s fellow scholars in the Wissenschaft movement had so often complained about be explained, namely, that kabbalistic texts were so prone to pseudo-epigraphy. Neither evil nor falsification was intended here. The attribution of texts to heroes of the past was clearly an attempt to cope with the mystical source of the knowledge that those texts contained. Interesting-

 Abraham Adler, “Die Kabbala oder die Religionsphilosophie der Hebräer”, in: Jahrbücher für speculative Philosophie 3, 1846, p. 183 – 198, (quote p. 185); No. 4, p. 211– 221; 1847, No. 1, p. 175 – 191; No. 2, p. 385 – 393.  Adler, Die Kabbala., 189. Emphasis in the original.

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ly, Adler here comes very close here to a modern descriptive scholarship’s view on pseudo-epigraphy, while in the nineteenth century scholars as far afield from one another as Heinrich Graetz and Moritz Steinschneider perceived this technique as an immoral “forgery”.³⁴ “Kabbalah suspended the otherworldliness of heavens”, in Adler’s view; it opened the gates to timelessness for the initiated – not by the long and tedious way of dialectics but by the immediate and intuitive path of poetry. Adler’s concept of Secret Doctrine would lead to vastly different results than those gained by Franck and Jellinek. Surprisingly, Adler makes a case for a truly spiritual understanding of Kabbalah, rather unlike the dry philological and bibliographical one proposed by modern scholars interested in Jewish mysticism before him. Franck and Jellinek collected stones for the erecting of the Temple, in Adler’s poetic words; they were mere “henchmen, laboriously carrying building material that they do not know what to do with.” In the end, they consider the whole Temple as their own work and think little of the true, masterful architect.³⁵ Of course, the philological and bibliographical henchmen-work must be done, as Adler admits in the second part of his review, and Franck is credited there with advancing very far on this track. An external, historical approach to Kabbalah, however, is never enough. If we wish to determine, for example, Adler wrote, if Kabbalah is of Jewish or Persian origin, we would have to take into account its inner, ideational aspects. And here the Wissenschaft scholars still lag far behind Adler’s demands for research into the kabbalistic thought of Judaism. Almost entirely missing in their works, he claims, is an ideational definition of Kabbalah, that is, both an analysis of the inner motive that prompted and created the kabbalistic ideas, and a philosophical differentiation of Jewish mysticism from other, related forms of mystical thought. Franck neither knows what the essence of Kabbalah might be nor what is essential about religion or philosophy in general, Adler writes. It is only after filling this gap that a conclusive judgment can be made “if such a religious idea [as Kabbalah] could have developed from the inner concept of Judaism, or if it was a foreign plant, transferred to Jewish soil by force.”³⁶ Ironically, at this point, Adler’s views apparently accord with the majority of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft scholars, headed by Geiger and Graetz. All of these figures assume the existence of a definable essence of Judaism, the compliance with which then turns into the very  This subject will be discussed in detail below in connection with Steinschneider and Graetz.compare here Gershom Scholem’s sharp rejection of viewing pseudo-epigraphy as forgery, for similar reasons to Adler’s. (Scholem, Major Trends, p. 204)  Adler, Die Kabbala, p. 190.  Adler, Die Kabbala, p. 191.

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criterion for the acceptance of Kabbalah as ‘authentically Jewish’, even independent of its geographical origin. For most of those applying this criterion in the nineteenth century, however, the answer regarding Kabbalah seems to be negative, while for Abraham Adler, it is clearly positive. Strikingly, in this review article, Adler appears to be describing his own mystical experiences while studying Kabbalah, or practicing kabbalistic exegesis of the Bible. As peculiar as this might seem for an academic text, it flows naturally from Adler’s general approach to Jewish mysticism, which is avowedly far removed from dry speculative reasoning or the simple gathering of bibliographical data. In the process of kabbalistic exegesis, the abstract form of the biblical text would not be left standing as it is, Adler reported, but would be completely absorbed into the mystical spirit until the text is fully permeated by this mysticism. At this point, the kabbalist experiences a disturbing result: What has become of the biblical passage? Thus interpreted, it is changed beyond recognition, compared to the abstract original. Suddenly, the kabbalist recognizes that he is alone in this world with his result, and is therefore forcefully driven to the accept “that the whole world of appearances, and within it also the word of God – as it appeared – is merely a shell that enshrines the deepest secrets.”³⁷ The rest of Adler’s review (more than thirty-five print pages) is dedicated to a detailed discussion of specific problems in Sefer Yezirah and in the Zohar. Adler takes Franck to task for diverse shortcomings in his account of these two kabbalistic works, demonstrating his own impressive knowledge of the texts and their religious and cultural background. The entire essay is thus a cogent example of a thoughtful, and, probably unintentionally profound, philosophical approach to Kabbalah, written in the middle of the nineteenth century by a German reform rabbi that has thus far been completely ignored by modern scholarship. Adler discussed Kabbalah and much more mysticism in general, at the highest level of abstraction, taking Franck’s volume only as a pretext for developing and presenting his own view of the philosophical meaning of kabbalistic concepts. While Franck had tried to limit his discussion of Kabbalah to a demarcation of mysticism from other forms of thought, Adler did precisely the opposite: He showed the degree to which the boundaries between rational and mystical thinking, theology and philosophy, are blurred. Emphasizing the symbolic meaning that the Kabbalah attributed to all objects of sense experience does not lead to mysticism, as it did for Franck. Rather, this is exactly the point where mysticism is broken for Adler, because here mysticism becomes aware of itself. External appearances, for the kabbalists, are spirit [Geist] turned into sensual forms;

 Adler, Die Kabbala, p. 194.

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therefore, their meaning is not symbolic but mystical – it is the voice of God frozen [erstarrt] into letters that now become visible to our eyes.³⁸ Adler related at length to the often-argued antinomianism and disrespect for Torah and Talmud of the kabbalists, a subject of intense interest during the heyday of the Reform Movement of Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. While this essay appeared in print, Adler himself took part in the above mentioned rabbinical conferences discussing reform measures for liturgy and practice on the basis of a modernized Jewish theology. The accusation, for example, that kabbalists used demonology to dismiss Scriptural authority is much too severe, Adler claimed, and cannot be justified. In a certain sense he was ready to admit that the kabbalists defied religious authority, but only because every “authority ceases to be an authority the moment I have comprehended it, if it has become a property of my understanding.” According to Adler, this is what the kabbalist did at all times: “to intellectualize [begeistigen] everything, to understand everything as given by the intellect, and thereby to break the limits of authority everywhere.”³⁹ It is only in this sense that they can be said to have dismissed Scripture – insofar as they have removed from the Bible its literal immediacy, so important for the “one-sided orthodoxy”, and penetrated the depth of its spirit. The kabbalists cannot be blamed for the Bible losing its objective meaning through this manner of interpretation. It is rather a consequence of their attempt to read into the Biblical text a more substantial meaning than the Bible itself wants objectively to present. In his certainty that the kabbalists were not aware that they overloaded the Scriptural text with mystical meaning, Adler takes an interesting middle position between Geiger and Jewish mysticism itself: While on the one hand he agrees with Geiger and many other Reform exegetes that the “natural sense” of the text (Geiger’s natürlicher Schriftsinn) must be preserved and can even be called the “objective sense” of Scripture, it is, on the other hand, the kabbalists’ deep exegetical project he appreciated rather because Adler himself did not endorse a veiled meaning, “objectively” hidden within the verses of the Bible. For him, all kabbalistic interpretation was an artful, imaginative reading of the Bible, which was but an entirely human and natural achievement on the highest intellectual level. To substantiate this view, Adler noted that the biblical text lent itself wonderfully to the kabbalistic play of thoughts, “which would have been unthinkable in case the text was only a fig leave for prohibited goods.” In this way, Adler adroitly avoids the charges of antinomianism and dis-

 Adler, Die Kabbala 4, 1847, p. 386.  Adler, Die Kabbala 4, 1847, p. 388. The German word Geist can also mean spirit, but I believe (despite the mystical context) Adler refers here indeed to human understanding.

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respect: If the religious contraband hidden by the cloak of the literal sense of the Bible was not real, but rather an exegetical imagination of the kabbalists, the heresy is their own mistake at best and not an attempt to undermine Judaism’s Scriptural foundations.⁴⁰ What is true for the interpretation of the Bible and its commandments is true to an even greater extent for Jewish theology, Adler argued. Concerning theology, no real religious authority must be challenged – except perhaps for the authoritative claim that Judaism possesses no dogmatic beliefs at all.⁴¹ For this argument, he offered the example of creation ex nihilo. What right could somebody have to predicate, Adler asked provocatively, that the kabbalistic teachings regarding this subject stood in contradiction to Judaism’s doctrine of creation? Although it cannot be denied that what the kabbalists hold to be the naught from which God created the world is very different from what it is in popular belief [Volksglauben], but, Adler argued here, “since when is the thinker, who tried to comprehend religion intellectually, forced to accept popular belief as it is?” This demand would only result in disingenuousness on the side of the thinker, Adler answered, and apparently, such a result is far worse, in his view, than all kabbalistic theories concerning creation. And, just in case his readers still thought that the kabbalistic emanation theory contradicts Judaism’s core assumption of an absolute transcendent Deity, he adds that what popular Jewish belief contains is theologically the much bigger catastrophe. Thus, the traditional view would not only limit the creator-God to finitude, God would thus also possess will, which makes the creation process and eventually the world itself a product of arbitrariness. “Ask popular belief if God can make a triangle from four right angles and nobody would deny it, because that contradicts divine wisdom”, Adler stated. Kabbalah, however, tries to truly apprehend the creation process intellectually and consistently – a contention to which only very few other Wissenschaft scholars in nineteenth-century Germany agreed. ⁴²

 Adler, Die Kabbala 4, 1847, p. 388.  A deeper investigation as to the authority of dogmatic claims in traditional Judaism was only begun by the Wissenschaft scholars in the first half of the twentieth century – with pathbreaking essays by Leo Baeck, Max Wiener, and ultimately the philosopher Julius Guttmann. See Guttmann, “Die Normierung des Glaubensinhalts im Judentum”, in: Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 1927, p. 241– 255. For discussion: Kerstin von der Krone, “Jüdische Wissenschaft und modernes Judentum: Eine Dogmendebatte”, in: Andreas Kilcher, Thomas Meyer (eds.), Die Wissenschaft des Judentums: Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Paderborn 2015, p. 115 – 138.  Adler, Die Kabbala 4, 1847, p. 388 – 89.

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For Adler, unlike many others, Kabbalah’s justification was to be achieved in a demarcation from tradition and not from religious philosophy – as his own subsequent sophisticated explanation of how the kabbalistic theory of creation is logically comprehensible clearly shows. “Kabbalah never had reason to hide under the cloak of popular belief what is the direct opposite to this belief in its own theories,” Adler argued in general. Jewish tradition, in the theological sense, never was a power to be afraid of when it came to the judgment of a refined religious doctrine [geläuterte Lehre], he held, sounding here like the radical reform rabbi he indeed was. For Adler, Kabbalah was the better Judaism, compared to traditional orthodoxy – it had its sources already in the Talmud and Midrash but was also prepared to provide consistent answers to the Jewish seeker of spirituality in his own day. Concluding a long elaboration, Adler stated that for a true understanding of the essence of Jewish mysticism “a more speculative spirit than the one that Franck possesses is necessary”, and that Franck’s research method can bear no fruit at all in Kabbalah studies. Alongside his aforementioned criticism of the ‘shallow rationalism’ in Jellinek’s and Franck’s approach to Kabbalah, Adler makes several mentions in this essay of another serious obstacle standing in the way of the French author and his German translator achieving a true understanding of Jewish mysticism: They speak of a self-contained, cohesive ‘kabbalistic system’ instead of recognizing that there always have been different kabbalistic schools, which in themselves underwent substantial historical development.⁴³ This insight, obviously based on Adler’s intensive study of kabbalistic texts, will only a few years later become one of the major innovations in the Kabbalah-research of Jellinek himself, when he begins to publish his own series of studies on the subject. Adler, for his part, hoped in 1847 that his account of Jewish mysticism, as outlined in the essay, “will motivate other scholars to penetrate more into the depth of this Wissenschaft” (as he called it) and will contribute to finally spreading the truth about the Kabbalah.⁴⁴ The year before he began publishing this review, Adler had found similarly sympathetic words for the Kabbalah – albeit in a completely different context. In 1845, he authored an aggressive pamphlet against the seventy-seven (later 116) orthodox German and Hungarian rabbis who attacked the first Reform rabbinical

 Cf. Adler, Die Kabbala 1, 1846, p. 186, and No. 2, 1847, p. 393. There is no sign in the text that Adler is aware of Landauer’s research results from the Munich library, published in the Orient throughout the year 1845.  Adler, Die Kabbala, p. 393.

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conference that had assembled in 1844 in Braunschweig.⁴⁵ When his childhood friend Raphael Kirchheim (from Frankfurt) responded to Adler in an equally aggressive tone in the name of the orthodox camp, Adler penned a more conciliatory open reply to Kirchheim. Notably, Adler established in this letter a rare theological coalition between radical Jewish Reform and kabbalistic thought that adds another original element to the reception and discussion of Jewish mysticism in nineteenth-century Germany. Like many other orthodox and non-orthodox German Jewish thinkers of mid-nineteenth century, Adler is highly critical of medieval Jewish philosophy, and especially of the theory of the reasons behind the biblical commandments, formulated by Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed. ⁴⁶ Ironically (given the reform-friendly nature of his text), Adler here nearly verbatim repeats Samson Raphael Hirsch’s diatribe against Maimonides’ philosophy from Hirsch’s 1838 book Nineteen Letters about Judaism, calling the Guide’s method “subjective and arbitrary, abstract and external” towards living Judaism. Philosophical theology, in the wake of Maimonides, saw even the essence of God as an empty abstraction, remaining incomprehensible. This theology “has no idea [keine Ahnung] of the secrets of the mystical elements in religion, and where it was unable to fight them, it would timidly get out of their way.”⁴⁷ The “divine laws”, Adler wrote, in Maimonides’ thought would turn into mere “rules of acumen” (using the same devaluing German word Klugheitsregeln, as did Hirsch before him),⁴⁸ or into the result of a mere concession, referring apparently to Maimonides’ explanation of the biblical sacrifices.⁴⁹ Criticizing even the “Mishneh Torah” as superficial, Adler argued that as sharp as it may be, Maimonides’ intellect would nevertheless nowhere surpass the same famous ‘shallow rationalism’ that is so often invoked by nineteenth-century thinkers against

 Abraham Adler, Die sieben und siebzig sogenannten Rabbiner und die Rabbiner-Versammlung, Mannheim 1845.  For the criticism of Maimonides’s theory of mitzvot by S.R. Hirsch, but also Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger, see Kohler, Reading Maimonides, esp. chapter 7.  Adler, Die sieben und siebzig, p. 39.  Adler, Die sieben und siebzig, p. 39 – 40. Cf. Samson Raphael Hirsch, Neunzehn Briefe, p. 89.  Maimonides in Guide III.32 declares that animal sacrifice, although being a rather primitive form of worship, was included in the Torah as a concession to the mentality of the Israelites in the biblical period. Animal sacrifice was the accepted practice of serving God at that time, and a divine law radically changing this practice would have been contrary to human nature, which tends to follow confirmed habits. This historical view on the origin of legal regulations in such an authority as Maimonides was a welcome occasion for many reform rabbis to justify their legal adjustments with historical reasons, safeguarded, apparently, by the highest medieval legalist. For this phenomenon, see Kohler, Reading Maimonides, Dordrecht 2012.

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medieval Aristotelism. Philosophical rationalism, in Adler’s view, neither caused historical progress nor “deep religiosity” in Judaism – the last example for this verdict being Moses Mendelssohn and his rationalist school, which left no lasting religious legacy.⁵⁰ What Adler understood as an alternative to strict rationalism, however, is very different from what both Geiger and Graetz on the one hand, and Samson Raphael Hirsch on the other, had offered during the nineteenth century. While Hirsch demanded blind belief in the authority of the oral Torah, the non-orthodox thinkers usually preferred the romantic spirituality of Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari over Maimonides’ ‘cold and abstract’ Guide. ⁵¹ Adler favored here what all others rejected on principle: The Kabbalah. Only in Kabbalah was Jewish theological dogmatics not only “understood in the right way but even duly appreciated,” in Adler’s view. In Kabbalah, he claimed, anticipating Gershom Scholem time and again, Judaism would “not have to tolerate being judged with foreign measure and tailored according to pagan philosophemes.” The biblical commandments are not arbitrary rules for the Kabbalah but a living “organism awakened by the idea.” Only Kabbalah is able “to solve the most difficult problems of Judaism”, but, contrary to philosophy, Kabbalah has also “produced the most profound creations” of Jewish liturgy and “worked miracles in times of terrible ordeals”. For Adler, it is only within kabbalistic thought that “man stands in the focus of creation, and in his hand was given the key to all temples, even to the Holy of the Holiest.” This is because only for the Kabbalah is man truly the likeness that appeared instead of the non-depictable Urbild. ⁵² But Kabbalah, too, is not perfect, according to Adler. “It is a pity”, he continues, that “because of the many persecutions of the Jews, it was by force hindered to develop further.” The development of Kabbalah that Adler would have preferred to see was a general ascent from referring to mere appearances [Vorstellungen] to philosophical thought. “It is a pity”, he repeats, that Kabbalah soon “hypostatized the ten categories it had created and endowed them with an exuberant imagery.” In Adler’s view, while Kabbalah originally exemplified

 Adler, Die sieben und siebzig, p. 40. Critique of Mendelssohn’s religious philosophy was widespread among the first generation reform rabbis of the nineteenth century. See for example the outright rejection by David Einhorn (1809 – 1879), discussed in Gershon Greenberg, “Mendelssohn in America: David Einhorn’s Radical Reform Judaism”, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 27: 1, 1982, p. 281– 293.  Cf. George Y. Kohler “The Captivating Beauty of the Divine Spark – Breslau and the Reception of Yehuda Halevi’s Sefer Kuzari (1877– 1911), in: Transversal – Journal for Jewish Studies, 14 (1), 2016, p. 26 – 34.  Adler, Die sieben und siebzig, p. 41.

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the production of thought according to Hegelian dialectics, it “later sank into child’s play and phantasmagorias.” Adler is still ready to recognize, probably because of its semantic meaning, the “power of the word,” but soon Kabbalah began “to transfer this power to the letter, and even to the stroke or the tittle on the letter, which were then thought to be able to open the gates of heaven and to invoke all the hosts of Angels to serve the egoistic needs of man.” Adler bitterly complains that gematria, the mysticism of numbers, made it now possible “to read every subjective fancy into Holy Scripture” and thus to create whole worlds out of pure imagination. Here, Adler is again in agreement with Geiger and several other nineteenthcentury thinkers who valued Zoharic Kabbalah high above the later Lurianic expressions of mysticism, which were generally held to be ‘degenerated’ forms of the former peaks. “The evolving of those delusions we owe to the Polish rabbis of the past centuries”, he wrote, like nearly all his fellow Wissenschaft scholars. No wonder, then, Adler summarized his argument, that some of the orthodox rabbis he attacked in his pamphlet, are still backward enough to believe in and to practice this kind of superstition.⁵³ But despite this standard conclusion for the nineteenth-century, Abraham Adler is an outstanding scholar of the Wissenschaft des Judentums whose assessment of Jewish mysticism was, overall, highly sympathetic, and whose knowledge of kabbalistic literature was apparently quite vast. Especially his response to Adolphe Franck’s book elucidates not only how knowledgeable German Jews could be about kabbalistic subjects in the first half of the nineteenth century but also the degree to which they could still personally identify with Kabbalah.

 Adler, Die sieben und siebzig, p. 42.

Michael Sachs and David Joel [1845 – 1849] Until Adolf Jellinek finally published the book on the Zohar, which he had originally announced in his 1844 translation of Adolphe Franck’s La Kabbala, another six years went by – years in which the research of Kabbalah by the Wissenschaft des Judentums made considerable progress towards a better understanding of the influence of mysticism on Jewish thought. In 1849, the young rabbi David Joel finished a very sophisticated book-length study on the religious philosophy of the Zohar which was both another critical examination of Franck’s book as well as an attempt to examine Zoharic thought in relation with medieval Jewish philosophy. But before discussing Joel’s book at length, several smaller studies must be considered. Already in 1845, Jellinek’s former teacher in Prague, Rabbi Michael Sachs, had published his major Religious Poetry of the Jews in Spain, a book that displays much abhorrence towards mysticism.¹ Sachs (1808 – 1864) had studied with Hegel, Schleiermacher, and August Boeckh at the newly founded Berlin University, and, after a stint at Prague, in 1844 he became the Chief Rabbi of Berlin, where he introduced moderate reforms and published his own conservative prayer book. Sachs, who was already familiar with Landauer’s posthumous publications at the time of publishing his own book on Hebrew poetry from medieval Spain, agreed with him that the Zohar was a product of the time immediately following Nachmanides’ death, i. e. the late 13th century. Based on his discovery that the author of the Zohar apparently adopted an entire line from Ibn Gabriol’s famous poem Keter Malchut (11th century), Sachs claimed that “probably the author did not even have the intention of [his book] appearing as antique” – only the uncritical acceptance on the part of his readers and disciples produced the pseudo-epigraphic effect against his will.² But contrary to Landauer, Sachs clearly attributed the Zohar to Moses de Leon (1250 – 1305) whose actual authorship of the work in Sachs’ view was only “forcefully suppressed by the subsequent authority of the book.” The Zohar’s teachings, however, were a product of the intense ideological fights raging in southern Europe at this time in Jewish circles: “Still not fully overcome or refuted, philosophical doctrines struggled with gnostic and other dull elements.” It was from this very power struggle, though also from the “unnatural pairing” of philosophy and Gnosticism that eventually the “brew-

 Michael Sachs, Die Religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien, Berlin 1845. For Sachs, see: Franz D. Lucas, Heike Frank: Michael Sachs. Der konservative Mittelweg, Tübingen 1992; Margit Schad: Rabbiner Michael Sachs. Judentum als höhere Lebensanschauung, Hildesheim, 2007.  Sachs, Die Religiöse Poesie, p. 229 f. (note). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-006

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age of Kabbalah” [Gebräu] and the Zohar itself emerged. According to Sachs, only the lack of thought and the absence of proper judgment in later generations, who did not themselves experience this brewing of Jewish mysticism, “made it possible that they could accept as a deep mysterion or even introduce in Judaism as something sacred what was originally combatted and expelled.” This theory about the emergence of Kabbalah appeared even to Sachs himself somewhat daring, and he promised to provide sufficient proof for it at a later opportunity.³ The relation of Kabbalah and Gnosticism is also what interested the young Heinrich Graetz in his first published academic work, from 1846. Graetz (1817– 1891), in his later years a famed historian and one of the most influential Jewish scholars of all times, is probably the one Wissenschaft scholar most frequently singled out in modern research literature for his loathing of Jewish mysticism – mainly based on what he wrote regarding Kabbalah in the seventh volume of his major opus, History of the Jews, from 1863. While this oft-quoted text will be discussed in detail below (including the decisive, but mostly ignored endnotes), even Graetz’s very first publication demonstrates what we will claim with respect to his later treatment of Kabbalah as well: That even given all of Graetz’s outright rejection of the inherent value of Jewish mysticism for what he conceived as the essence of Judaism, he hardly neglected or even discouraged the study of kabbalistic texts or teachings, which he considered to be a worthy object of research in the context of the intellectual history of the Jewish religion.⁴ In 1845 the young Graetz submitted a Latin dissertation to the university of Jena, titled De autoritate et vi, quam gnosis in Judaïsmum habuerit, discussing among other subjects the Sefer Yezirah. In 1846, a German version of the thesis was published under the title Gnosticismus und Judentum, devoting the entire last chapter of some thirty pages length to a discussion of the age of the Sefer Yezirah, a work that, by that time, Graetz had obviously studied intensively. In the introduction to his German book, Graetz noted that “indeed, Gnosticism and Kabbalah had at first glance a common origin,” but that as long as there was no sufficient academic research into the Kabbalah’s inner essence and basic nature, all similarities would remain on the level of suspicion. This research was obviously a highly desirable development, according to Graetz. Specifically, the genesis of kabbalistic doctrine was yet to be determined beyond every doubt, because what Adolphe Franck had achieved in that direction was more decorum than the result of scholarly depth and thoroughness. Franck’s  Sachs, Poesie, p. 326 – 28. As far as I know, he never made true on this promise.  For an exception to the rule: Joseph Dan explicitly dedicated his article “Jewish Gnosticism?” to the 150th anniversary of the publication of Graetz’s book (referred to in the next note). See J. Dan, Jewish Mysticism – Late Antiquity, vol. 1, Cambridge 1998, p. 1.

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book, Graetz further complained, would neglect especially those literary documents whose age is proven, that is, first and foremost talmudic sources, a literature which Graetz had especially mastered thanks to his long years of rabbinical training. Only in critical comparison to talmudic literature could the age of kabbalistic documents be established to an acceptable degree of certainty, Graetz wrote. Thus, his study was to contribute to the our knowledge of origin and content of Kabbalah, as Graetz explicitly declared, by verifying the impact of gnosis on Judaism in the first two centuries CE.⁵ Notwithstanding his criticism of Franck’s methods, concerning the Yezirah, Graetz in 1846 agrees with Franck as to the old age of the book. Nevertheless, in the same manner as Jost had earlier acted, he criticized Franck for not first refuting the arguments of Zunz, who placed the origin of the Yezirah in a later age, the seventh century being the earliest conceivable date. Even worse was what Franck had written on the age of the Zohar. In Graetz’s view, Franck had shown “unbelievable impertinence in rebelling against the consistent opinion of the competent German scholars” who all dated the Zohar to the Middle Ages based on their increasing doubts about the authenticity of the book.⁶ The Zohar must be strictly disconnected from the Yezirah, Graetz demands, and it is obvious that he, already in 1846, believed it to be pseudo-epigraphic. In order to disprove Zunz vis a vis the age of the Yezirah, though, a much more thorough analysis of the content of the work was called for than the one delivered by Franck, Graetz claimed, and so it is exactly this analysis that was the subject of the concluding chapter in his book on Gnosticism. After accomplishing his goal to his own satisfaction (by establishing parallels of the contents of the Yezirah to several apparently contemporary gnostic works), Graetz remarks that there would arise considerable consequences from his results for further research into Jewish mysticism, “in the case that one is willing to locate the nucleus and the original doctrine of Kabbalah in the Yezirah.”⁷ But although here, again, this further research is postponed into an unforeseeable future, the end of Graetz’s first book demonstrates that he was interested in taking up this subject again – obviously because he deemed it a valuable contribution to the entire project of Wissenschaft des Judentums. In that same year of 1846, Julius Fürst’s Orient published a German-language article by the Hungarian school principal Lazar Skreinka that also dealt with the

 Heinrich Graetz, Gnosticismus und Judenthum, Krotoschin 1846, p. 5 – 6. More on Graetz in detail below.  Graetz, Gnosticismus, p. 103.  Graetz, Gnosticismus, p. 132.

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“Gnostic Principle in the Kabbalah”.⁸ But first and foremost, Skreinka emphasized in his learned essay another tendency of kabbalistic literature, according to his view: Its frequently expressed contempt for the rabbinic faithfulness to the Talmud. Aaron Chorin, the late chief rabbi of his home town of Arad, had pointed out to him several passages in the Zohar, Skreinka wrote, where mysticism is seen as “the queen-like ruler over the enslaved kingdom of religious observance, where the followers of the latter are an uneducated mob, while the mystics stand to them in the same relation as rational man to the animal world”.⁹ This apparent Zoharic view obviously outraged Skreinka, but he offers an interesting, openly reform-minded explanation for what he sees as a timeless phenomenon that repeats itself continuously throughout the history of religion: In the same way that early Christianity emerged from Jewish criticism of the overemphasis on the ritual in the Mishnah – and later Christianity (especially in the orthodox church) was completely absorbed in ceremonies, so too the expansion of mysticism within Judaism was only a natural reaction to the ever-increasing post-Mishnaic rabbinic excesses in ritual law. According to Skreinka, the “gigantic mountain range of ceremonial regulations” that rabbinic Judaism produced throughout the centuries can only find support for a religious justification of its continued observance “in the auxiliaries of mystical imagination.” The development of kabbalistic thought in Jewish religious history is thus for Skreinka just another case where “the servant makes himself lord over the one he was actually to serve – and eventually robs him of all his freedom.” No wonder, Skreinka argued with reference to developments that for him were only recent history, that those who delved deepest into all subtleties of rabbinic casuistics became the first to follow Sabbateanism, whereas Sabbatai Zevi himself could base his system only on the Zohar and not on the Talmud, which was the very reason why he

 Lazar (Elazar) Skreinka (1789 – 1860) was the principal of the Jewish Realschule, founded at Arad by Rabbi Aaron Chorin, one of the first Hungarian Reformers. In 1845 Skreinka contributed a legal opinion to a printed collection of Reform-oriented rabbinical responsa concerning the synagogue service (together with Geiger, Philippson, Frankel, and others) where he is referred to as “Rabbinats-Assessor” in Arad. (Zulässigkeit und Dringlichkeit der Synagogen-Reformen begutachtet von vorzüglichen in- und ausländischen Rabbinen, ed. Schlesinger et al., Wien 1845, p. 28.) In 1861, his son Ludwig published his late father’s major work Beiträge zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der jüdischen Dogmen, Wien 1861.  Aaron Chorin (1766 – 1844) himself had published already in 1803 his controversial work Emeq haShave, including a learned discussion of the Zohar, which he considered a rich source of philosophical knowledge. Thus we find already in Chorin the later so frequent distinction between theosophical and practical Kabbalah, where only the latter is rejected while the former is warmly appreciated, often as a welcome alternative to the philosophy of Maimonides (as also in Chorin’s book).

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and his followers so easily fell off from Judaism.¹⁰ What Skreinka thus seems to convey in his short article is again the message that with all theological rejection of Zoharic Kabbalah, it must nevertheless be studied carefully, not only in order to understand the threats is poses to Judaism, but also to understand the meandering developments of intellectual Jewish history as such. The young rabbi David Joel chose an entirely different approach in his book on the religious philosophy of the Zohar from 1849: Where others had outright rejected this work, Joel tried to harmonize the theological message of Zoharic Kabbalah with what he conceived of as ‘true Judaism’, at times even bringing the Kabbalah into harmony with the philosophy of Maimonides.¹¹ David Joel (1815 – 1882) came from a family of rabbis, his father serving as chief rabbi in several towns of Western Prussia and actually authoring several learned halachic works, while his brother Manuel Joel became the chief rabbi of the town of Breslau in 1864. Indeed, before succeeding Abraham Geiger in that position, Manuel Joel taught philosophy at the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary and published several groundbreaking works on medieval Jewish philosophers – thus effectively establishing philosophy as an independent discipline within the Wissenschaft des Judentums. David Joel himself learned Talmud with Rabbi Akiva Eger in Posen and studied later, like his brother Manuel had, at the Berlin University. Ordained as a rabbi in 1842, he served first in the small town of Schwersenz and later for twenty years the larger community of Krotoschin in the province of Posen. In 1879, he accepted a call to the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary, where he was director until his death.¹² David Joel’s book on the Zohar, written during his time in Schwersenz, is a pioneering study in many respects. First, it is the first German language monograph on the Kabbalah written by a an avowed representative of the Wissenschaft movement – but it is more than that: it is the intellectual product of a real philosophical mind dealing with his mystical subject in a scholarly manner, and above all: it is the first, and in its honest seriousness, probably also one of the last attempts to philosophically integrate Kabbalah into ‘mainstream Juda-

 All quotes Lazar Skreinka, “Ueber das gnostische Princip in der Kabbalah”, in Literaturblatt des Orient 20, 1846, p. 312– 315.  For this aspect see Kohler, Reading Maimonides on David Joel, p. 215 – 216.  For Joel, see Bernhard Ziemlich “David und Manuel Joel” – In: Ost und West 11, 1904, p. 775 – 780. Joel’s appointment to the post in Breslau was very much to the disappointment of Heinrich Graetz, definitely the greater scholar of the two, who could not become director of the seminary because the statutes stipulated that the post must be filled by a practicing rabbi. (See Graetz’s letter to Philipp Bloch from June 1879, in: Heinrich Graetz, Tagebücher und Briefe, Tübingen 1977, p. 358 f.)

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ism’, as conceived by the author. Although this attempt must obviously come at the price of what later scholars often criticized as selective reading of kabbalistic thought, Joel himself was convinced that he had in part saved the mystical tradition for the religious history of Judaism – and this re-integration of Kabbalah was done explicitly as a defense against the theories of Adolphe Franck, who tried to locate the origin and basic doctrines of Kabbalah outside of the Jewish tradition. Joel had turned to researching kabbalistic ideas because he believed that “of all the disciplines of Judaism, it was Kabbalah which suffered most frequently from misconceptions and obfuscation, which had the most suspicions directed against it, and which had at the same time experienced the weakest defense” against all those delegitimizing forces. On the other hand though, Joel is sure that “true knowledge of Kabbalah is indispensable for a proper judgment of Judaism in general.” In Joel’s view, Jewish religious philosophy, a line of thought that deals not with halachic questions but with what he calls theoretical aggadah, is and always has been divided into two rival camps: a scholastic-philosophical school around Saadia and Maimonides and an oriental-theosophical school of kabbalistic thought. For a better understanding of the “primordial spirit” of Judaism first and foremost the latter school must be studied, according to Joel, because Jewish mysticism was (at least in part) based on original antique traditions, while the philosophers blatantly brought independent speculation from the outside into Jewish thought. But as clear as the path for Kabbalah research seems to be outlined by this theory, difficulties are still abundant. The subject under discussion is veiled “in such darkness and the research path is therefore exceedingly winding, so that because of this fact alone the entire Kabbalah was branded as heretical both from a dogmatic and from a moral point of view.” Kabbalah studies, in Joel’s opinion, up to his time unjustly had to bear the consequences of the inherent difficulties of their very subject: Jewish mysticism.¹³ Thus, interestingly, Joel seems to believe that what so far delayed or even prevented Kabbalah research within the Wissenschaft movement was not the inaccessibility of the mystical texts – physically and regarding the nebulous content – as so many other nineteenth century scholars assumed, but rather a dogmatic prejudice within Judaism towards its mystical tradition: its alleged heresy and immorality. Ironically, these two allegations will by later Kabbalah scholars be brought forward as the reason why Joel’s own generation deferred the re-

 David Joel Die Religionsphilosophie des Sohar und ihr Verhältnis zur allgemeinen jüdischen Theologie, Leipzig 1849, p. IX f.

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search of mysticism, while it is especially the “heresy” of Kabbalah what made it attractive for twentieth century authors. In any case, however, there is no doubt that already in the nineteenth century Joel explicitly called for overcoming all those obstacles, to eventually begin this important project, and to explore a new field of Jewish thought. The purpose of Joel’s book is therefore first to correct all misconceptions about kabbalistic thought, or as he put it, “to cast light upon this dark part of Jewish doctrine, to set right all errant or biased judgments passed on the Kabbalah by both Wissenschaft and life, judgments that have not yet been rectified because of a lack of will to do so, because of a lack of seriousness or courage.” This general clarification concerning the mystical traditions of Judaism would have a much wider impact on the conception of the Jewish religion than the mere introduction of Kabbalah as yet another discipline or research topic into the Wissenschaft des Judentums. For Joel, the ultimate proof of the Jewish origin of the Kabbalah would at the same time disprove any claim of Christian governments that – for moral reasons – Jews are unsuitable for civil integration into the state. In other words, convincing evidence for the autochthony of Kabbalah within the bounds of Judaism refutes the main objection against “the emancipation of the Jewish spirit [Geist].” For Joel, Kabbalah was an “equal child” of the spirit of Judaism – obviously his expression for what was later called the essence of Judaism – like so many other directions of Jewish thought. From this higher Jewish spirit, he argued, “all healthy philosophemes and every moral theology are derived.” And since there is no doubt for Joel that the essence of Judaism is a deeply moral one, it follows that Kabbalah cannot be immoral, as some thinkers, both inside and outside Judaism, allege it to be. In fact, Joel primarily intended with his books to demonstrate that Kabbalah is characterized “by the same ethical principles as is universalist Jewish doctrine” to which Jewish mysticism stands in a unique and surprisingly intimate relation.¹⁴ Within the Wissenschaft project, Kabbalah had been treated up to this point, Joel wrote, only in very few studies worthy of its importance. Most Kabbalah scholars, instead of studying the sources themselves, had merely referred to secondary literature and to commentaries. But even those who had read the original kabbalistic works often misunderstood and misinterpreted their content. What Joel suggests as a more fruitful alternative in Kabbalah research, and what he himself set out to do in his monograph, is a strictly abstract, philosophical approach to Jewish mysticism. It is crucial to extract the “metaphysical principle” out of the different kabbalistic texts, according to Joel; Kabbalah scholarship

 Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. X.

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must proceed like the research into medieval Jewish philosophy and differentiate substantial philosophical ideas of the kabbalists from the outer, literal form of their presentation, that is, from the very frequent mystical-imaginative metaphors and allegories. Joel suggests carefully distinguishing between formal contingencies and the intellectual core of Kabbalah, which is to say, between systematic thought and linguistic ornament. Moreover, a historical-comparative approach to Jewish mysticism can actually be harmful, Joel argued. Most scholars to date had attempted to identify within Jewish mystical traditions foreign elements, believing that associating these ostensibly external motives found within the Kabbalah to their respective original, non-Jewish cultural contexts would amount to a sufficient academic treatment of Kabbalah. But what those scholars in fact were doing, Joel thought, was proceeding quite conversely by “reading those foreign elements into Kabbalah,”, instead of beginning from the Jewish texts themselves. This methodological error was certainly a direct result of the textual nature of the mystical writings: The language of the Kabbalah heavily accommodates almost all preconceived notions, for the “darkness and ambiguity” of the character of the texts makes them soft and smooth, such that the text material of mysticism naturally “adheres” to the preconceived views of everyone who comes to interpret these texts.¹⁵ For exactly this reason, Joel was convinced that only his own absolutely rational, abstract philosophical method of Kabbalah research could yield efficient, scholarly results, and that neither a descriptive-phenomenological nor a historical-comparative approach could achieve the same. Joel believed that it must be possible to analyze Kabbalah according to abstract ideas, reproducible by every thinker – ideas that could be found in other systems of thought as well. This is the reason why “every friend of truth” must welcome the combined efforts of Adolphe Franck and Adolf Jellinek in explicating Kabbalah in a scholarly manner in the book discussed above. Franck, although he was unable to cover “every little detail within the large structure of Kabbalah”, is said to have been committed to Joel’s metaphysical method: Franck presents in the book, systematically and lucidly, the leading principles of kabbalistic thought. But while this “well deserved praise” regards only the form and method of Franck’s book, Joel is exceedingly critical of the content and the results of the work. The main accusation is, as was to be expected, that Franck located the origin of Kabbalah outside of Judaism.¹⁶

 Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. XI.  Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. XIf.

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This is the very theory that Joel wants to correct with his own scholarship. By means of a close examination of the books of Zohar and Yezirah he proposed to “re-establish the truth” against Franck. Joel wrote that he felt that it was important for him to defend the original kabbalistic ideas by fighting on several fronts: He sought to refute both those who declared Kabbalah to be “the imaginative product of idle and ignorant minds”, but also those who, in contrast, declared Kabbalah to be a very sophisticated yet nevertheless pantheistic doctrine, including those who saw kabbalistic thought as a pagan influence which was “smuggled into Jewish theology in order to antagonize the traditions of Judaism”, and even those who, although they saw Kabbalah as an ancient Jewish, even patriarchic heritage, nevertheless claimed that it “Christianized” Judaism in a certain way.¹⁷ Against all those many different voices that he surprisingly recognized in the short history of Kabbalah research, Joel intended to establish the real truth about kabbalistic thought: The ideas of Jewish mysticism, as found basically in the Zohar, are for him “ideas dealing with the most important problems in the life of the world and of human beings; ideas that, although they belong in form and essence to philosophy, have produced only such fruit that was sown and which ripened on the soil of the Jewish belief in revelation.” Joel therefore thought that Zoharic Kabbalah “is by no means mysticism in the common sense of the word,” for though the Zohar might use a mystical style and a fantastical nimbus, its basic intellectual ideas are common to all works of religious philosophy.¹⁸ This was precisely the difference, Joel declared in an instructive footnote, to Lurianic Kabbalah – another field of research “that was as yet but barely touched by us.” It would be desirable, he immediately adds, that this other school of mystical thought be academically explored as well, especially because of its “decisive impact” on Judaism, of which Joel was obviously well aware. If God would give him life and sufficient energy, he concluded this digression, he would himself take up this challenge in the future – a plan that apparently never materialized.¹⁹ He limited his discussion of the Zohar, however, to the detection and description of its basic philosophical teachings about “God, the world, and the relation of the two”. For a more detailed account he refers to the monograph on the Zohar that Adolf Jellinek had announced in his translator’s preface to Franck’s book. Joel wished that this book might be published as soon as possible, because

 Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie. p. XII.  Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie. p. XIII.  Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie. p. XIII, note 2.

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“so much remains to be done in giving a critical picture of the whole Zohar”, as he writes. He himself hoped that some never-before translated passages from the Zohar that he had provided in the footnotes to his own work would in the meantime attract the attention of interested readers.²⁰ The main thrust of Joel’s book, however, is to refute Adolphe Franck’s theories on several counts. Not only did Joel doubt Franck’s claim that the Mishnah’s secret teachings of the merkava could be the direct predecessors and actual source of medieval Zoharic Kabbalah. But what is more interesting is Joel’s firm argumentation against Franck’s assertion that Kabbalah was always directly antagonistic to, and thus dangerous for, the revealed, positive theological doctrine of Judaism. Naturally, this is an important thesis for Franck, Joel argued, because Franck wanted to demonstrate both the pantheistic nature and the Persian origin of Jewish mysticism – both of which claims Joel repudiated and which he believed to have been proven wrong in his book. For this contrarian purpose, he presented the general outline of the philosophy of the Zohar according to his own understanding of it, which “collided with all previous accounts”, as he had already announced in the introduction to the book. For Joel, Zoharic Kabbalah is “the fruit of virtually free and independent, original, and daring thought – not always in full harmony with the theological principles of Jewish scriptural hermeneutics, but nevertheless always remaining within the essentials of Judaism.” The kabbalists simply “shared with all religious philosophers the drive to elaborate those essentials according to their individual philosophical views – a compulsion that might explain and justify their deviant exegetical methods.” Therefore, Kabbalah is closely related to general Jewish theology, with Joel claiming that the major dissimilarities between the two might only be found in such fields as “cosmology, matter, and evil”, while in fields like “soul, man, and destiny”, Kabbalah differs from mainstream Jewish thought only in its own peculiar further development of those subjects. ²¹ The bottom line for Joel is that “Kabbalah is a doctrine that did not emerge from any other system other than from Judaism itself.”²² At a later point, Joel presented his readers with a detailed list of eleven basic philosophical doctrines of the Kabbalah that should demonstrate his main theory claiming that a great degree of theological uniformity exists between kabbalistic teachings and pristine Jewish monotheism – including the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and God’s free will.²³    

Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, note 1. All quotes: Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. XXI f. Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. XXI f. Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, S. 327.

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Impressively, Joel approached Kabbalah always as a true philosopher, searching for the answers to the great metaphysical and religious questions in the Zohar. Essentially, wrote Joel, there are two contradicting ways to answer those questions: One can either unreservedly rely on the ability of human reason to solve these problems rationally, or one can alternatively posit the actual incomprehensiveness, for example, of God’s creation. According to Joel, Zoharic Kabbalah mediates between the two extremes. Kabbalah accepts that the very act of creation is beyond the naturally limited human understanding, but nevertheless offers a plausible alternative to a rational solutions to incomprehensive metaphysical problems. This substitute, Joel argued, comes from “a deep-seating inner intuition,” the truth of which is, for the believing mind, equal to that of rational deduction.²⁴ Joel then laments that it was only latterday Lurianic Kabbalah that was no longer satisfied with acknowledging the limits of human understanding. The later kabbalists in Safed “thought they would do Kabbalah a favor by breaching the lines of the incomprehensible and dealing with problems that belonged, in accordance with their nature, to the realm of belief.” It was only this transgression, Joel claims, that gave rise to the gnostic notions of Zimzum and Atzilut in Kabbalah, by which Joel apparently meant: to the eventual intrusion of foreign philosophical elements into authentic Jewish mysticism.²⁵ Thus even here, in this standard Wissenschaft accusation of Lurianic Kabbalah as but a corrupt form of medieval or even ancient Jewish mysticism, Joel proposed a more sophisticated, philosophical approach, rather than merely referring to Lurianic excesses in superstition and deceit. Joel’s method of argument is obvious: In order to save the Jewish origin and nature of the Kabbalah, he systematically identifies and excludes from his idea of Kabbalah all elements, motives, and concepts that, as outside influences foreign to the actual essence of Judaism, contradict his thesis. While this at first seems to be a case of self-fulfilling prophecy, it is in fact more of an intellectual approach than a pure description of kabbalistic phenomena, as most scholars before and after Joel preferred. Joel essentially analyzed kabbalistic thought according to a certain assumption, that despite its mystical nature, Kabbalah ultimately confirms the basic teachings of Jewish theology. Such an approach requires of Joel first to formulate Jewish theological ‘articles of faith’, abstracting from the entire religious literature of Judaism, which is interesting in itself, of course. In addition, he measured Kabbalah against this Jewish dogmatism, thus constructing a Jewish philosophy where mystical traditions are not a

 Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. 174.  Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. 174 f., note.

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‘stream’ or ‘phenomenon’, but an inseparable part of Judaism’s intellectual history – connected to it through permanent inner-coherence of thought, and not through ‘outer’ affiliation of the kabbalistic rabbis with the Jewish people, that is, through an empirical, non-permanent appearance in Jewish history. Interestingly, Joel is fully aware of the tension that the scholarly approach of his book creates. He himself even emphasized the fact that his reading of Kabbalah is purposely selective, and he seems to have been satisfied that by following this path he facilitated at least the possibility of an acceptive strategy of Wissenschaft des Judentums towards Kabbalah research which is beyond a mere descriptive empiricism. It is important to note here that the twentieth-century notion of academic bias, as opposed to an ‘objective’ science, did not exist for most Wissenschaft scholars, including and especially concerning those who were theologically hostile towards mysticism. The expressed common goal of their scholarship was to foster living Judaism, because they believed that only a scholarly approach to religion can guarantee the very survival of Jewish religiosity in the modern era – when both the intuitive adherence to tradition and, alternatively, rabbinic political power, had ceased to determine the lives of the Jews in Western Europe. This religious-renaissance project of the Wissenschaft des Judentums was based on the dual scholastic doctrine, firmly anchored in Jewish thought, that philosophy is a religious obligation, and that philosophical thinking is an expression of religiosity. Thus, David Joel explained that, when he confined his discussion to “the kabbalistic doctrine of God and His relation to the world,” and did not expound the entire structure of Zoharic Kabbalah, he did this because of several well-conceived philosophical reasons: a) the doctrine of God is “the basis supporting everything else”; b) the kabbalists’ doctrine of God is an independent creation of theirs, while in other fields they had developed talmudic ideas in a rather more mystical direction; c) practical Kabbalah (as opposed to this doctrine) has no philosophical but only mystical content; and d) the Zohar does not represent a consistent, systematic, philosophical whole, and therefore the very structure of the work permits selectiveness in the scholarly discussion of it.²⁶ Only by way of this deliberate confinement Joel is able to reach his ambitious scholarly and theological goal: the philosophical rehabilitation of Jewish mysticism. According to the lengthy summary at the end of his work, Joel has shown to his satisfaction that the basic teachings of Kabbalah were inherited from neither Persian nor Greek or Christian gnostic influences, but rather were produced by

 Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. 176 f., note.

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Judaism on its own, for answering an internal “need for a deeper understanding of Scripture and the desire to solve increasingly difficult problems of Jewish theology.”²⁷ Nevertheless, surprisingly, this is not the end of the book as might be expected for an academic treatise. What follows are some interesting personal reflections, not necessarily consistent with Joel’s philosophical analysis, but highly indicative for our study of the attitude of German Jewish Wissenschaft scholars towards kabbalistic thought – as well as for the religious motivation behind this attitude. The question of whether or not Kabbalah is indeed a solution for those difficult theological problems of Judaism must necessarily remain open, Joel declares. This is because every single adherent of Judaism has his own way “to comprehend as far as possible the sacred teachings of his religion.” But then again, it is for exactly this reason that kabbalistic thought exists with the same justification as any other school of Jewish thought. “The same rights we acknowledge for the religious philosophers of all times, Kabbalah can claim for itself,” Joel wrote, who, as we have seen, viewed theosophical Jewish mysticism as yet another expression of the same philosophical ideas on which, from his perspective, Judaism is based. Kabbalistic meditations are profound, and kabbalistic thought is spirited, Joel continued by asking, “Who can doubt that the initiators of Kabbalah possessed great amounts of true Jewish learning, and mastered the entire field of Jewish theology?” In this light, Joel summarized his book in one sentence: “Kabbalah will always be a valuable monument of authentic Jewish knowledge and aspiration.”²⁸ Next to this astonishingly full-hearted appreciation of Kabbalah, or at least of a philosophical understanding of it, there is yet another interesting aspect of Joel’s monograph to be discussed here. Joel knows and takes issue in his work with all existing scholarly literature about Jewish mysticism produced by the Wissenschaft des Judentums so far. In this respect, Joel’s 1849 book is not just another ‘pioneering study’ of one of the few scattered Kabbalah scholars working in Germany at this time, but the beginning of a new phase of networking and of summarizing of the combined efforts of those scholars, the preliminary stage of which we already saw in the cooperation between Jost and Landauer. Joel complains concerning the Zohar that both Geiger and Michael Sachs (in their works discussed above) assume the authorship of Moses de Leon without providing further proof. Sachs in particular is singled out by Joel for groundless hostility towards Jewish mysticism, especially because he postponed the necessary justification of his hostile views to a later opportunity. What Sachs has ar-

 Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. 386 f.  Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. 387 f.

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gued in his book on Spanish Jewish poetry about Rabbi Salomon ben Abraham Aderet (1235 – 1310) and his critical relation to Kabbalah, Joel refuted with counterproofs. Also some of Sachs’ literary proofs for the medieval origin of the Zohar are scrutinized critically by Joel. All this does not mean, however, that Joel himself believed the Zohar to be of ancient origin. Other arguments by Sachs as to the age of the book, especially the comparison to Ibn Gabriol, he willingly accepted – but with true scholarly correctness only for the specific fragment of the Zohar (Raya Mehemna) where the apparent citation occurred.²⁹ For the purpose of upholding academic standards, Joel himself then demanded that no more absolute statements regarding the age of the Zohar should be made as long as scholarly research has not produced sufficient evidence for one or the other theory. All that could be said so far was, according to Joel, on the one hand, Simon Bar Yochai was obviously not the author of the Zohar, but that on the other hand, many Zoharic ideas were much older than the Middle Ages.³⁰ The longest discussion of the research results of his predecessors in Kabbalah studies Joel devoted to the posthumous publication of Meyer Hirsch Landauer’s findings in the Munich Court Library. Here, too, Joel would not explicitly refute Landauer’s theory that Abraham Abulafia was the author of the Zohar, but simply glean literary proof from the sources that tended to negate this thesis. Interestingly, what Joel is much more eager to disprove is “Landauer’s claim that the Zohar, namely again the Raya Mehemna (‫)רעיא מהימנא‬, preaches hatred towards the Mishnah and Talmud.” If true, this claim was inconsistent with Joel’s own main assertion in his book that essentially Kabbalah nowhere contradicts mainstream Judaism, and that it is just a peculiar way of interpreting the same theological basics that it shares with rabbinic Talmudism and rational religious philosophy. All that Landauer might be able to prove regarding anti-talmudic tendencies, Joel wrote in a detailed defense of his view, is that the Zohar raises the secret teachings of the Kabbalah far above the status of halacha – but there is no sign of hatred. Some sources that Landauer advanced for his purposes are only “dark and sarcastic hints” and not clear evidence, while other sources he flat out misinterpreted. The same is true, by the way, for the claim of the Hungarian scholar Lazar Skreinka and his article in the Orient, Joel inserted at this point. Skreinka’s apparent proof for the hatred of the Zohar towards the Talmudists is also based on a blatant misinterpretation of the phrase Am Haaretz (actually: uneducated mob) that Skreinka understood to mean the teachers of the Mishnah. After all, as per Joel’s summary of this part, none of the passages in

 Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. 62 f., notes.  Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie. p. 72 f.

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the Zohar, referred to by both Landauer and Skreinka, prove hatred for the talmudic rabbis or even contempt for the ritual law of Judaism. To the contrary, Joel now presents a long list of quotes from the Zohar that, in his view, demonstrate “that on almost every page of the Zohar the strict observance of the ceremonial laws is impressed upon, and their high value praised.”³¹ Whatever reading of the Zohar might be correct, Joel’s dedicated defense of his harmonization-theory of the Zohar and Talmud against all his predecessors shows clearly the increasing interaction between mid-nineteenth-century German-Jewish Kabbalah scholars in general, and Joel’s commitment to a theological rehabilitation of Jewish mysticism specifically. Ultimately, what is decisive about Joel’s important contribution to Kabbalah research within the movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums is the fact that he is one of its mainstream representatives. David Joel is neither an odd peripheral figure with a strange interest in mysticism, nor is he in any way intellectually rebelling with his book against the main lines of scholarship of the movement. On the contrary, he is simply one of the hundreds of scholarly interested, practicing, and religiously liberal community rabbis of 19th-century Germany, and actually, at the end of his days, he even became for two years the director of one of the most influential educational and research institutions of the Wissenschaft des Judentums – the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary.

 The entire discussion is in the footnotes of Joel, Die Religionsphilosophie, p. 66 – 70.

Moritz Steinschneider (1850) As we transition to a discussion of Moritz Steinschneider’s article on Jewish Literature for the Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, and eventually the important contributions of Adolf Jellinek to Kabbalah research, we finally arrive at topics that are slightly better documented in modern research literature concerning the subject of this study. Guilio Busi, in a 2011 article on Steinschneider’s relation to the irrational, comes to the surprisingly new, but well-founded conclusion that Steinschneider was “a pioneer in kabbalistic studies”. Moreover, Busi’s research, probably for the first time, revealed “the fact that Steinschneider did not confine himself to the external side of mysticism, that is, to bio-bibliographical elements: albeit in short remarks, he analyzed the Kabbalah from an internal point of view and sketched some crucial methodological principles necessary to deal with the symbolic patterns of mysticism.”¹ This important observation is confirmed by the present study, and becomes thus another cornerstone of the thesis that even the most influential representatives of the Wissenschaft des Judentums were always interested in kabbalistic studies, encouraged them, and contributed to them themselves – despite their theological and moral reservations concerning the value of Kabbalah for Judaism. The beginnings of this ‘internal view’ of Kabbalah is already noticeable in Steinschneider’s first major bibliographical study, published in 1850. Steinschneider (1816 – 1907), who worked at the time under not very favorable conditions as a freelancing author in the Prussian capital, finished writing his entry on “Jüdische Literatur” for the famous Ersch and Gruber encyclopedia in 1848, immediately before he left Berlin for Oxford, where he was invited to catalogue the Hebrew manuscripts of the Bodleian Library,² though for technical reasons, his pioneering essay on Jewish literature was only published two years later. At this time, he was still working in England. Steinschneider would later complain that he was unable to receive and read the galley proofs of his entry, and consequently many mistakes remained in the encyclopedia version, printed long after he had finished writing it.³ Nevertheless, the 120 pages long entry was surprisingly accepted by the editors of the encyclopedia uncut, and eventually even

 Guilio Busi, ‘Steinschneider and the Irrational’, in: Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, ed. R. Leicht and G. Freudenthal, Leiden 2011, p. 213 – 232, here 231.  For the latest Steinschneider research see the collection of essays in the above-mentioned volume.  See the preface to the English translation of the same essay, discussed below. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-007

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earned Steinschneider a doctorate from the University of Leipzig.⁴ In 1857, seven years after the text first appeared in German, Steinschneider published a revised edition of his entry for the encyclopedia, this time as a full monograph and translated into English.⁵ As a devoted bibliographer and antiquarian, Steinschneider’s basic point of friction with Kabbalah was its tendency to pseudo-epigraphy. Before discussing kabbalistic literature itself, in an earlier section on talmudic Haggadah, he already warns his readers not to confuse the haggadic ‘secret doctrine’ with the later Kabbalah. Many kabbalistic works were purposely attributed by their actual authors to the higher authority of antiquity, as Steinschneider found, and although this practice always met with the protest of other Jewish thinkers, only the critical research of his own time could finally clarify the historical distinction between original and pseudo-epigraphy.⁶ However, Steinschneider emphasizes here that Adolphe Franck’s book about Kabbalah contributed very little to this clarification, it being superficial and arbitrary in its treatment of the subject. Interestingly, Steinschneider refers rather to the Reform theologian and philosopher Solomon Formstecher (discussed above), who had described the Kabbalah as a “universal element” in Jewish thought which is thus opposed to the often particularistic Talmud.⁷ In any case, Steinschneider suggested that better knowledge about the true age of mystical writings can only be gained through the study of oriental philosophy – until this is achieved, research must be confined to the critical, albeit external tools of philology. What those philological tools are, Steinschneider demonstrated in his discussion of the kabbalistic literature itself, a few chapters further on in his essay. Here again he claims that the secret doctrine of the Haggadah turned into Kabbalah only in Europe, from where it later returned to the Orient, obviously referring to Lurianic Kabbalah in Safed. Kabbalistic pseudo-epigraphy, however, Steinschneider finds despicable – and most likely, not only because it is a moral offense in the eyes of a professional bibliographer, whose work-ethos is undermined by such behavior, as it was sometimes suggested.⁸ It would seem

 For the emergence of this essay see: Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision beyond the Books”, in: Moritz Steinschneider (ed. Gad Freudenthal), Leiden 2011, p. 3 – 36.  Moritz Steinschneider, Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century, London 1857.  Moritz Steinschneider, “Jüdische Literatur”, in: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, ed. by J. S. Ersch and J. G. Gruber, Section 2, vol. 27, p. 357– 471, Leipzig 1850, here p. 379.  Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, p. 379, note 94. Cf. Busi, “Steinschneider and the Irrational”, p. 222– 223.  For example by Busi, “Steinschneider and the Irrational”, p. 221.

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that Steinschneider had more serious objections against this secret practice of false attribution than merely the violated honor of the insulted bibliographer. It might be possible to find in this encyclopedia entry a (better) key to his oftquoted contempt for Kabbalah as such, although (as must be pointed out time and again) this rejection never led him to discourage or even abandon the study of mystical texts. In pseudo-epigraphy, Steinschneider suggested already before 1850, “prejudice and superficialness find welcome support.”⁹ In the introduction to his later monograph Zur Pseudoepigraphischen Literatur (1862), this insight is formulated even more clearly: “The natural companion of superstition and religious enthusiasm is deceit.”¹⁰ Falsely attributing his own text to an earlier authority, the author of the kabbalistic work is likely to affect the truthfulness of the claims he made in the book itself in a negative way, Steinschneider seems to suggest here, at least in the eyes of those who penetrate the mystery, that is, himself, the man of Wissenschaft. Deceit on the title page, in other words, might easily lead to deceit in the argument in the body of the book, and thus ruin the credibility and the reliability of both author and work – which is much more serious, in the eyes of Steinschneider, than the technical deluding of bibliographers.¹¹ His view of the historical development of kabbalistic literature, Steinschneider went on to explain, is based on three assumptions: a) that the date of a work’s writing must be distinguished from the date of the origin of the doctrine discussed in said work, which might be much earlier; b) nevertheless, pseudoepigraphy, or even “treacherous fabrication” [betrügerische Erdichtung] usually comes to veil the introduction of radical new ideas that could not have been arrived at by traditional midrashic exegesis, and, most importantly, c) Steinschneider insisted (before Jellinek) that Kabbalah is not a coherent philosophical system, but developed in the thought of several disparate individuals, mostly as a mystical exegesis of Scripture that works with the external method of midrash, applied to a secret doctrine.¹² Next to this philosophical Kabbalah, Steinschneider distinguished “practical Kabbalah”, which belonged to the fields of astrology and magic. Called here (al-

 Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, p. 400.  Moritz Steinschneider, Zur Pseudoepigraphischen Literatur, Berlin 1862, p. 3, cf. Busi, “Steinschneider and the Irrational”, p. 216.  For Steinschneider’s view on Wissenschaft des Judentums in general and Gerschom Scholem’s making a “caricature” of this view (however not mentioning Kabbalah), see Charles Manekin, “Steinschneider’s ‘Decent Burial’: A Reassessment,” in: Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. H. Kreisel, Jerusalem 2006, p. 239 – 251.  Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, p. 400 – 401.

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ready before Graetz called it so) an “Afterwissenschaft” (pseudo-science),¹³ Steinschneider insisted however, that practical Kabbalah is a later addition to the original philosophical manifestation of Jewish mysticism – as did many of his fellow scholars in the Wissenschaft movement, thus leaving room for a certain appreciation of Kabbalah as a school of original thought, without being forced to include superstitious practices into their appreciative perception. As metaphysical thought, Steinschneider suggested, Kabbalah literature is actually not very different from medieval religious philosophy – both genres attempted to disguise certain liberal theological ideas in intentionally dark language – “lest they should offend the multitude.” Both genres further attempt to harmonize what Steinschneider called the “oriental sensualism” of the Biblical language with an abstract-intellectual, monotheistic theology.¹⁴ While the philosophy of the medieval Aristotelians developed a distinct system of thought that allegorized the Bible in order to preserve the rule of reason, and thus “deduced the idea from the metaphor and even identified the law in the miracle”, Kabbalah went completely the opposite way. It developed fantastic images and exaggerations, drawing into its circle the entire field of the inexplicable in the worlds of nature and of demons. While traditional midrash had deduced meaning only from the mere letter of the Bible that it considered as divine, Kabbalah soon treated the letter in a mystical way, deducing meaning also from its sound, external form, and numerical value.¹⁵ When the haggadic ‘secret doctrine’ entered in medieval Europe upon a new course in the form of the Kabbalah, Steinschneider wrote, several aspects came together in forming what Salomon Formstecher in 1841 has described as a ‘new Jewish theosophy’. The influence of the immediate surroundings – of Christian religious persecution, but at the same time of Christian mysticism – led the Jews to seek refuge in the “comforting darkness of the soul [Gemüth] and the entertaining power of superstition,” Steinschneider argued. The crusades and other political events together with Oriental mysticism and demonology brought this tendency about, until even halacha degenerated into a mere shell for the kabbalistic secret (‫ )סוד‬that was supported by the pseudo-epigraphic authority of antiquity. Finally, “alleged inspiration and open deceit” [vermeintliche Inspiration und

 The correct English translation in the context of nineteenth-century terminology should be simply Pseudo-Wissenschaft (science), and the confusion about the pejorative connotation of the word, especially as used by Graetz, is probably caused by the German prefix After, meaning also anus. The English translation of Steinschneider’s essay from 1857 has “Left-handed science”. Cf. p. 106.  Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, p. 401, engl., 107.  Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, p. 401.

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Betrug], as well as the introduction of only too well-known foreign elements like the Trinity, for Steinschneider turned Kabbalah into the opposite of what its name (“tradition”) designated: a radically new religious ideology, prone to the wildest subjectivism.¹⁶ Interestingly, with this point Steinschneider has arrived at exactly the same conclusion, discussed above, that Leopold Zunz had reached in 1832, almost two decades earlier – and he is well aware of this agreement, and has probably even sought it. Although by this time in his career he certainly knew more about kabbalistic manuscripts than Zunz ever did, and had positively acknowledged the pathbreaking studies of Landauer, it is this common conclusion that will shape the Wissenschaft movement’s at best ambiguous relation to Jewish mysticism for decades to come. Despite the attack on the historical integrity of the Kabbalah, Steinschneider immediately in the next paragraph of his article bemoaned the fact that many important kabbalistic manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries “still require thorough investigation for the writing of the history of Kabbalah,” and proceeded to reproduce the classification of all kabbalistic schools into the same four main groups that were originally suggested by Landauer. At the end of the section on Kabbalah, Steinschneider discussed the Zohar, calling this work (as was often angrily quoted) the “famous or infamous mystical midrash on the Pentateuch” from the end of the thirteenth century, at the time of an intimate connection between Judaism and Christianity, a time “when false prophets and soothsayers appeared everywhere.”¹⁷ The Zohar, as Steinschneider boldly summarized its content, developed earlier teachings of Jewish mysticism “into a Trinitarian doctrine” – but for the purpose of attacking Christianity as much as the Zohar attacked the Talmud and halacha, in Steinschneider’s view.¹⁸ In the short discussion of the Zohar, there appears the only significant difference between Steinschneider’s original German encyclopedia entry from before 1850 and the revised monographic English translation of this entry from 1857. In the original German he mentioned that although some anti-kabbalists had attributed the work to Moses de Leon, Landauer rather believed that the “remarkable enthusiast” [merkwürdige Schwärmer], as Steinschneider called him, Abraham

 Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, 402. Referring to Zunz, Steinschneider quoted here the statement from Gottesdienstliche Vorträge (p. 403) that in Kabbalah, “the number of the systems and expositions was almost as high as that of the [kabbalistic] authors.”  Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, p. 403 – 404. Interestingly, this quote appears twice in the article by Busi, once falsely and tendentious without the “famous or”, and the second time complete. Cf. p. 213 and 224.  Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, p. 404.

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ben Samuel Abulafia, was the author of the work.¹⁹ In the revised English version, Steinschneider could now refer to the fresh research work of Adolf Jellinek on the Zohar and the authorship of Moses de Leon, and amended now carefully: “The research commenced by Jellinek seems to confirm the opinion that this author [de Leon], who is known to have been guilty of plagiarism, was involved in the forgery [of the Zohar], if indeed he was not the principal perpetrator of it.”²⁰ Here we find the same language, used later by the much criticized Graetz (‘forgery’) in Steinschneider’s text. What follows now in the English version is a lengthy bibliographical discussion of the immediate reception history of the Zohar which ostensibly serves to demonstrate the reasons for Steinschneider’s agreement with Jellinek’s new proofs for the authorship of Moses de Leon, but which also very much proves just how intensively and thoroughly Steinschneider had studied kabbalistic literature, via both primary and secondary sources, in the few short years between the writing of his German essay and the publication of the English translation in 1857. Thus, Steinschneider must definitely be seen as a true pioneer in the research of the literature of Jewish mysticism, even if his personal opinion about the credibility of many of its authors was rather negative, and his judgment of ‘practical Kabbalah’ was clearly hostile. But nowhere in his vast writings, it seems, is there an appeal to neglect or even abandon kabbalistic research as a consequence of this personal hostility.

 Steinschneider, Jüdische Literatur, p. 404. The English version translated this with ‘celebrated fanatic’, which I believe is misleading, but gave rise to many 20th-century claims about Steinschneider’s outright disdain for Abulafia as a kabbalist. Steinschneider himself writes in the very same sentence that Abulafia was even in the nineteenth century “only little known”, let alone celebrated. The German Schwärmer might often be used pejoratively, but it seldom means fanatic, but rather a dreamy enthusiast. To be fair to the translator, it must be mentioned that fanatic in nineteenth-century English had still another connotation as it might have today.  Steinschneider, Jewish Literature, p. 111.

Adolf Jellinek (1851 – 1852) Between Steinschneider’s two publications, that is, in the first half of the 1850s, a major event in the history of the development of the academic approach to Jewish mysticism took place. Probably the most important scholar of Kabbalah in the nineteenth century, Adolf Jellinek, published between 1851 and 1854 no less than five books that came to change Kabbalah research in a radical way and which maintained their impact until deep into the twentieth century. In addition to Landauer, Jellinek is the only other scholar of the Wissenschaft movement who is mentioned more or less approvingly by Gershom Scholem,¹ while Scholem’s student Moshe Idel even dedicated a short article to Jellinek’s contribution to the field, although only as late as 2004.² In any event, Adolf Jellinek’s work in the 1850s is the strongest case that could possibly be made against the thesis of the neglect of Kabbalah by the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. All attempts, whether by Idel or others, to portray Jellinek as the significant exception from this movement’s general rule must necessarily fail, since Jellinek himself is not only an integral part of the Wissenschaft movement, but his research on mystical literature, far from being rejected or ignored by others, very soon became common lore within the movement’s many academic publications, independent of the personal sympathy of other scholars (referring to Jellinek) towards Kabbalah and mysticism. As soon as Jellinek began publishing his groundbreaking results, his research was discussed, reviewed, and eventually fully integrated into the Wissenschaft movement’s larger project of penetrating the literary heritage of Judaism for the first time in an unbiased and critical way – in order to find a future-oriented alternative to old Jewish traditionalism. It might be true that Jellinek’s personal preference for Kabbalah research, as opposed to the choices of other Wissenschaft scholars, was motivated by a certain affinity for the philosophical aspect of Jewish mysticism that appeared to him as a true and still-useful alternative to medieval religious philosophy in its cold rationalism. But this rejection of especially

 Gershom Scholem, Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala, Frankfurt 1962, p. 2.  Moshe Idel, “Al Aharon Jellinek ve haKabbalah”, (Hebr.), in: Pe’amim 100, 2004, p. 16 – 21. Recently also Samuel J. Kessler, “Rediscovering the Study of Spanish Kabbalism” (see above). See for Jellinek also the very short remarks in: Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar I, p. 47– 49, Idel, New Perspectives, p. 9, Myers, Philosophy and Kabbalah, p. 67, Kiener, Vicissitudes of Abulafia, p. 149 – 52, Biale, Scholem, p. 25, Guilio Busi even went so far as to claim that “in fact, Gershom Scholem adopted Jellinek’s definition of Abulafian mysticism”. (See his “Beyond the Burden of Idealism”, in: Kabbalah and Modernity; Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations, ed. Boaz Huss et al., Leiden 2010, p. 29 – 46, here 37– 38.) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-008

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Maimonides’ perceived opposition to spirituality Jellinek shared with most nineteenth century Jewish thinkers, most certainly with Abraham Geiger and Heinrich Graetz.³ As soon as Jewish identity in modernity was no longer built around a traditional lifestyle of the almost intuitive fulfillment of the Rabbinic law, true religious spirituality appeared to be the only working replacement for the legal approach to Judaism, now widely abandoned. The difference, then, between Graetz, Geiger, and Jellinek, is to be found at most in how much those three thinkers were ready to ignore the more ‘problematic’ aspects of Kabbalah, in literature or in practice. The common reservations of Geiger and Graetz against Kabbalah included, for example, the rejection of pseudo-epigraphy, but to a much larger extent it was the discomfort with what is usually described as superstition, illusion, subjectivism – that is, phenomena that elude rational explanation. As a modern scholar, even Jellinek would not denounce rationalism as such, but only rationalism’s apparent claim to being able to provide simple solutions for the most complex problems of human understanding. Jellinek was not a kabbalist in any practical sense; he was a critical scholar of Jewish mysticism, for all intents and purposes – and even this only for an early and relatively short period of his life, after which he became a liberal community rabbi and celebrated preacher in Vienna. In truth, even in Leipzig, Jellinek had already worked as a preacher, a rabbi, and a teacher, but his lasting impact was first and foremost as a scholar. After he had published his much-noticed translation of Adolphe Franck’s La Kabbale, discussed above, Jellinek began in the early 1850s another project that to this day probably contributed more to his fame in Jewish literature than even his Kabbalah scholarship: the publication, ultimately in six volumes, of a collection of midrashic texts, including also some more mystical texts, called Bet ha-Midrasch (1853 – 1877).⁴ But what was truly ground-breaking, although less known for several reasons, was what Jellinek achieved in his research of Kabbalah. In 1851, he published the first of his five influential volumes on kabbalistic subjects, this being the very study of the Zohar he had announced a full seven years earlier when he had translated Franck’s book on Kabbalah into German. In the preface to this work, Jellinek explained the long delay as being due to the necessary intensity of the research and the many difficulties he encountered. The basic intention of his book, he professed, was to prove that nobody other than Moses de

 See Kohler, Reading Maimonides’ Philosophy, p. 66 – 81.  Vol. 1 was published in Leipzig in 1853 (vol. 2 Leipzig, 1855; vol. 3 Leipzig, 1855; vol. 4 Leipzig: 1857), after he moved on to Vienna, vol. 5 appeared there only in 1873, and finally vol. 6 in 1877. For Jellinek’s view of midrash, see Samuel J. Kessler’s unpublished dissertation, chapter three.

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Leon could have been the “main initiator” [Haupt-Urheber] of the Zohar ⁵ – which was actually a long-accepted thesis that had only lately been shaken by the surprising theory of Hirsch Landauer that it was rather Abraham Abulafia who had composed the work. But Landauer’s detailed proof for this claim came, after all, from the first ever serious study of previously unpublished kabbalistic manuscripts in an important library, and was thus to be taken seriously. Jellinek emphasized that his monograph was nevertheless not a refutation of Landauer as such, but an independent study of the Zohar. In truth, Jellinek had indirectly refuted Landauer’s Abulafia-theory already in the preface with five general arguments. The overall impact intended by Jellinek’s monograph is another one: “May my investigations succeed to free both Jewish and Christian scholars from the delusion that the Zohar was written in gray antiquity!”⁶ Now, this is a meaningful statement in more ways than one. First, it is likely that Jellinek was convinced the Zohar was an even more interesting work to study, after the pseudo-epigraphic authorship of Moses de Leon was finally discovered and thus the Zohar was identified as what it really was: a highly sophisticated kabbalistic text from the thirteenth century. But more than that, the intended result of Jellinek’s book was at the core of the tension between Kabbalah scholars of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While it can clearly be presumed that both groups conducted their critical research without being biased by their respective theological agendas, it must nevertheless be considered that those agendas existed. For Jellinek, to prove that the Zohar is not a work of talmudic antiquity, let alone rejecting the authorship of Simon bar Yochai himself, is more than a formal, technical research result. Wissenschaft des Judentums often described itself by being a Zweckwissenschaft (Ismar Elbogen),⁷ a research project that follows a purpose lying beyond being science for its own sake. Jewish Wissenschaft in nineteenth-century Germany was always an integral part of the development of the very subject of its study, i. e. Judaism. The modern world had destroyed the instinctive naturalness of the traditional Jewish life and thus forced Judaism to raise the question of the very meaning of its own further existence. For an answer, Wissenschaft des Ju-

 Adolf Jellinek, Moses ben Shem-tob de Leon und sein Verhältnis zum Sohar, Leipzig 1851, p. 6.  Jellinek, Moses, p. 8. A few years later, in 1855, Jellinek made a curious and ironic attempt to prove that the Zohar was written after 1280, because, as he claimed, the date of August 22, 1280 was to be found in the book. On the 25th of Elul, the Zohar predicted, the ruler (‫ )שליטא‬of Rome will die (III, 212b). In 1280, this day was August 22, Jelinek calculated, exactly the day on which Pope Nicolaus III. passed away. See Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, Vol. 3. Leipzig, 1855, p. xxvii – xxxviii. (This text was brought to my attention by Samuel Kessler.)  Ismar Elbogen Ein Jahrhundert Wissenschaft des Judentums, Berlin 1922, p. 43 – 44.

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dentums tried, in addition to being an academic discipline, to achieve the historical and intellectual rehabilitation of Judaism, that is, its eventual integration in the world history of ideas.⁸ Only thus could modern Jews again be proud of their ancient religion and look to the future with optimism. Seen in this wider framework, Jellinek’s project to identify the true compiler of the Zohar and remove all pious doubt about its true epoch of origin was clearly intended to spur a fresh appreciation of Kabbalah as an original school of Jewish thought that could foster a new Jewish self-confidence within the realm of modernity.⁹ Jellinek opened his discussion about the authorship of the Zohar with the usual criticism of Peripatetic Jewish philosophy in general, and specifically of its two most influential representatives, Saadia Gaon and Maimonides. He is especially outraged by a manuscript of Saadia’s commentary to the Sefer Yezirah that had come into his possession – because he found that Saadia declared in this text that the ten names of God, mentioned at the beginning of the Yezirah, were an adequate expression of the ten Aristotelian categories of being.¹⁰ Philosophical thought is insufficient, Jellinek contended, like many of his contemporary fellow scholars in the Wissenschaft movement, when it comes to the more spiritual aspects of religion, not only concerning the soul, but also the intellect. No wonder then, Jellinek argued, that not only the traditional pietists had rebelled against this exaggerated rationalism while openly defending anthropomorphism, but also the exponents of a deeper, speculative Jewish mysticism who had gained a wider footing during those years. The main medieval adversaries of Maimonides in the debate about his works were at the same time ardent followers of Kabbalah, Jellinek emphasized, and “it would be wrong not to see in this controversy [about Maimonides] a fight between philosophy and Kabbalah.”¹¹ Thus, “the flames that burned Maimonides’ Guide were not only fanned by the materialistic inclination towards rude anthropomorphism, but significantly by the unsatisfied longing for mystical contemplation.”¹² Jewish mysticism, in Jellinek’s view, is superior compared to theoretical rationalism because it not

 Cf. Max Wiener, Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation, Berlin 1933, p. 175 – 177.  Interestingly, Gershom Scholem, from basically very similar motives (i. e. to identify ‘authentic Judaism’) initially claimed the very opposite: that the Zohar was indeed antique. Thus, Jellinek and Scholem have a common theological agenda besides pure scholarship, and although this agenda hardly influenced the quality of their research results, both arrived at completely opposite conclusions. In the end, it would appear that Jellinek was right. Furthermore, it seems worthwhile to investigate how much they admit to being aware of their shared agenda.  Jellinek, Moses, p. 8, note 4.  Jellinek, Moses, p. 14, note 7.  Jellinek, Moses, p. 14.

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only solves the highest problems of thinking, but also imparts to the religious ceremonies and legal regulations of Judaism a supernatural aura, whereas rational thought treats them superficially, according to mere utilitarian considerations. In Kabbalah, however, religious laws function as the connection to a higher, ideal world. As such, Kabbalah is at the same time intellectual speculation about transcendental problems and a mystical justification of the ceremonial law [Gesetzesmystik].¹³ This vehement opposition of the mystics against the philosophers is also one of the important links that unite the figure of Moses de Leon and the Book of the Zohar. Among the main reasons for him to embark on a career as an author in general, Jellinek believed, was not only the intention to introduce his friends into the secrets of Kabbalah, but to thereby “thwart the rule of Aristotelian philosophy.”¹⁴ The same intention Jellinek discovered in the Zohar. “The original tendency of the Zohar-collection was to counterweight rationalism and its consequences,” he wrote. If this was true, however, it would clearly support Jellinek’s aforementioned position of the importance of the Zohar precisely as a medieval work of literature, and not as a talmudic tractate – but it would contradict the intention of pseudo-epigraphic attribution to Simon bar Yochai. Here Jellinek explains that the attribution of the Zohar to talmudic antiquity was only a secondary aspect of the true author’s plan and purpose. This technique came to the fore only after the first layers of the collection were already in existence, and then became more dominant only after a second revision of the text.¹⁵ With this stage in the genesis of the Zohar completed, though, even Jellinek is prepared to call the pseudo-epigraphy of the book “barefaced and systematic deceit”.¹⁶ The main part of Jellinek’s book is devoted to a detailed textual proof of the thesis that Moses de Leon is the ‘originator’ [Urheber] of the Zohar. Moses de Leon, according to Jellinek, had several assistants, however, and could draw on a rich collection of earlier texts that he used, side by side with his own previous Hebrew works, which he translated into Aramaic for their re-publication in the Zohar. At the end of his book, Jellinek added an appendix, mentioning that

 Cf. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 29, who wrote that in kabbalistic interpretation the commandments are represented “as the performance of a secret rite”.  Jellinek, Moses, p. 18.  In one of his articles about the Zohar for the Orient from 1851, Jellinek explained in detail that “in the first stadium of the Zohar [the Biblical] Moses was the main character” and not Simon bar Yochai. The article was reprinted in his Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala, vol. I, Leipzig 1852, here p. 33.  …ein Handwerk und bloßer Betrug. Jellinek, Moses p. 21.

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while working on the volume he had turned to his “highly accurate and reliable friend Steinschneider in Oxford” with the request to provide him with more manuscripts by the hand of Moses de Leon. Steinschneider had only answered his letter after Jellinek’s manuscript went to the printer, so Jellinek reports that he is publishing Steinschneider’s reply from Oxford in this appendix.¹⁷ He would use the occasion to thank his friend publicly and call on him in the name of Wissenschaft to better acquaint the public with the works of Moses de Leon by providing longer excerpts.¹⁸ This cooperation with Steinschneider is remarkable, for it proves again the same intense networking of Wissenschaft scholars within the field of Kabbalah research that was shown earlier in the case of Isaak Markus Jost and Hirsch Landauer. But in addition, the scholarly friendship of Jellinek and Steinschneider, as manifested by their mutual exchange of research results, demonstrates that the ‘Kabbalah-friendly’ Jellinek could cooperate with the ‘Kabbalah-hating’ Steinschneider without their personal sympathies towards mysticism having any impact on their relation to their Wissenschaft. More than that, the subject of their cooperation is the ‘arch-forger’ Moses de Leon, whom even Jellinek eventually called a “fraud” in his book, while all this is obviously no reason not to publicly challenge Steinschneider at the Bodleian library to make more of ‘forger’ Moses de Leon’s manuscripts available. In the same year of 1851, when Jellinek published his book on Moses de Leon, several smaller studies by Jellinek on other kabbalistic subjects appeared in the journal Der Orient, indicating how intensely Jellinek must have researched this field during the early 1850s. The printing of his first book was delayed due to technical difficulties, such that we can assume that the larger part of the manuscript was ready by 1850, the preface of the book on Moses de Leon being dated July 1851.¹⁹ Less than a year later, during 1852, Jellinek published two additional books, containing all of his scattered articles on Kabbalah from the Orient, with the first volume’s preface dated September 1851, and the preface of the second volume February 1852. This chronology demonstrates that Jellinek was already collecting his studies from the journal in the summer of 1851, while he was awaiting the printing of the book on Moses de Leon, and it was probably only his publisher who delayed the appearance of the two new volumes to 1852. In the preface to his first collection of Orient articles, titled Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala (Contributions to the History of Kabbalah), Jellinek wrote that these  Jellinek, Moses, p. 41.  Jellinek, Moses, p. 45.  Literally, and some would say mystically “the day of the great solar eclipse in Leipzig”, which was July 28, 1851.

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studies fall into line with his book on the Zohar, but were mostly written later than his first book. He would dedicate this collection of his articles to the friends of Kabbalah, an area of Jewish literature that was “neither treated comprehensively, nor unprejudicedly.” His contributions, he hoped, would be received like “building blocks” of a history of Kabbalah. The “weathered ruins of Kabbalah” have been found so far by only very few experts, so he was confident he would attract the attention of the scholarly world with this publication.²⁰ Just five months later, when the second volume of Jellinek’s Beiträge appeared in (re)print, this hope seems to have partly materialized, at least concerning the Jewish scholarly world. While in the original journal articles and in his book on Moses de Leon Jellinek at times mentioned his cooperation with other scholars, like his teacher Solomon Judah Loeb Rapoport (1790 – 1867) from Prague²¹, or Steinschneider, as mentioned above, the situation seems now to have changed to a significant extent. As if the Jewish scholarly world had just been waiting for an outstanding, learned thinker to finally employ a more serious approach to the study of Jewish mysticism, Jellinek reports to his great pleasure that he was now receiving kabbalistic manuscripts from several sources located all over Europe. The publication of his first two books, and his many smaller articles in the Orient, seems to have motivated Jewish scholars and manuscript collectors to turn to their personal archives and libraries in order to find kabbalistic manuscripts that had been buried there until a courageous colleague would one day be ready to enter upon this difficult task, full of pitfalls both theologically and philologically. Garnering special mention by Jellinek are manuscripts that had reached him from Padua, from the hands of Samuel David Luzzatto (1800 – 1865).²² This is interesting, of course, because Luzzatto was known as a confirmed anti-kabbalist and coincidentally published in the same year of 1852 his own refutation of the antiquity of the Zohar. In this book, which he had actually begun thirty years earlier, Luzzatto likewise confirms his acceptance of the authorship of Moses de Leon.²³ Although like Jellinek, Luzzatto absolutely reject-

 Adolf Jellinek, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala, vol. I, Leipzig 1852, p. III-IV.  Rapoport was at the time the chief Rabbi of Prague, but at the same time an industrious contributor to the Wissenschaft des Judentums.  Adolf Jellinek, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala, vol. II, Leipzig 1852  S.D. Luzzato, Vikuach al hochmat ha-Kabbalah, Gorice 1852. Luzzatto worked on this subject starting in his mid-twenties, and tried to publish this work several times prior to 1852. See: Jordan Penkower, “S.D. Luzzatto, Vowels and Accents, and the Date of the Zohar”, in: Samuel David Luzzatto, ed. R. Bonfil, H. Kasher, Jerusalem 2004, p. 79 – 130. For Luzzatto’s already-formed anti-Kabbalah position, see also his letter to Gideon Brecher from May 1840, published in Igrot Shadal, vol. I, p. 689 – 696.

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ed abstract Maimonidean philosophy, unlike Jellinek, he did not see Kabbalah as a serious alternative to the shortcomings of dry rationalism.²⁴ Nevertheless, Jellinek not only mentioned Luzzatto as one of the providers of useful manuscripts for his kabbalistic studies, he so valued Luzzatto’s generosity and contribution to his own research that he dedicated the whole of the second volume of the Beiträge to the venerable professor from Padua – “respectfully and in friendship”, as he wrote. This dedication is thus just another proof of how little personal dislike of Kabbalah, or even the outright repulsion at kabbalistic authors, had any impact on the academic treatment of Jewish mysticism among the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Two additional names mentioned by Jellinek of manuscript collectors who provided him with kabbalistic texts in the wake of the research project he had begun were that of Giuseppe Almanzi (1801– 1860), another Paduan scholar, and that of Bernhard Beer from Dresden. Almanzi was a poet and an ardent bibliophile; his connection to Kabbalah is testified to by his biography of Moses Haim Luzzatto, first published in 1838.²⁵ His wealthy father had bought the large library of Haim Joseph David Azulai (‘haHida’, 1724– 1806), which Giuseppe himself increased even further until he was in the possession of one of the most important private collections of manuscripts and rare books. His treasures were regularly tapped by Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider (who visited him personally in 1853), and by his close friend Samuel David Luzzatto, who published a catalogue of Almanzi’s Hebrew library after the latter’s early death.²⁶ Giuseppe Almanzi sent Jellinek a copy of Moses de Leon’s Sefer Shekel haKodesh, to which he added a very bitter-ironic introduction in rhymed Hebrew verse by his own hand. Almanzi’s poem clearly states that he was convinced that the author of this manuscript is also the author of the Zohar (‫)זהר רשבי יצא ממנו‬, but makes fun of Moses de Leon in repeating several times with great seriousness that Moses knew all the deep kabbalistic secrets that we mere mortals could never understand.²⁷

 For Luzzatto’s rejection of Maimonides, see the letter collection Peninei Shadal, and for discussion see Michah Gottlieb, “Counter-Enlightenment in a Jewish Key: Anti-Maimonideanism in Nineteenth Century Neo-Orthodoxy” in: The Cultures of Maimonideanism, (ed. James Robinson), Dordrecht 2009, p. 259 – 270.  In Kerem Hemed, vol. 3, Prague 1838, chapter 10, p. 112– 169.  Cf. Asher Salah, “Steinschneider and Italy”, in: Studies on Steinschneider, p. 422.  The poem is published as an appendix to Alessandro Guetta, “The Last Debate on Kabbalah: I.S. Reggio, S.D. Luzzatto, E. Benamozegh”, in: The Jews of Italy; Memory and Identity, ed. Bernard D. Cooperman and Barbara Garvin, Bethesda 2000, p. 275. For the Sefer Shekel HaKodesh itself, see the critical edition by Charles Mopsik, Cherub Press 1996.

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Bernhard Beer (1801– 1861) was a German collector of manuscripts, but also a journalist, philanthropist, and above all, a talented lay theologian.²⁸ As such, he was an uncompromising follower of Maimonides, publicly arguing with Heinrich Graetz about the religious worth of the strict rationalism displayed in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. ²⁹ In light of this and other arguments, also Beer’s spontaneous contribution to Jellinek’s Kabbalah research seems to provide additional proof for the general disregard of personal theological preferences and opinions for the sake of the Wissenschaft itself. Through arrangements of his friend Zacharias Frankel, Beer’s large library of Judaica went, after his death, to the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary. From Beer, Jellinek received a valuable manuscript-copy of Isaac of Acre’s Sefer Me’irat Enaym. Those manuscripts that had been provided to him, Jellinek explained in the preface to the second volume of the Beiträge, allowed him to shed new light on two important kabbalists of the thirteenth century: Rabbi Azriel ben Menachem of Gerona (1160 – 1238) and “the mystical Moses de Leon”, although the German word mystisch that Jellinek used very likely comes to mean here something more like ‘enigmatic’ or even ‘puzzling’. Kabbalah was an area of such “great importance for the history of theology and philosophy” that he intended with this volume to arouse the interest of the scholarly world for Kabbalah, Jellinek repeated, since this importance “was by many scholars hardly guessed at, let alone understood.” In fact, medieval Kabbalah, according to Jellinek, must be regarded as even superior to medieval Jewish philosophy: “The kabbalists count within their ranks men, who, concerning the depth of their thought and the consistency of their ideas, surmount the great number of rationalists that emerged from the school of Maimonides.” This is true especially concerning the respective views of kabbalists and philosophers on the relation of the human intellect to the absolute idea and to nature. Here, kabbalistic thought was “by far more reliable and more precise” than the ideas of Maimonides and the scholastics who, following Greek philosophy, developed a method of continuous elimination of false or contradictory predications of God in order to achieve more exact knowledge of the deity (Greek: kat’afairesin). Moreover, these scholastics defined our relation to God as an infinite correlation (Greek: kat schesin), as opposed to a real conjunc-

 See for example his “Die neuere jüdische Literatur und ihre Bedeutung”, in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 1853, No. 2, p. 46 – 53. In 1852, Beer translated Solomon Munk’s La philosophie chez les juifs, from the Dictionnaire des Sciences philosophiques (vol. 3, 1847) into German. On Beer, see in detail: Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity, Philadelphia 2016, p. 142– 154.  For this debate see Kohler, Reading Maimonides’ Philosophy, p. 213 – 214.

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tion.³⁰ In this way, Jellinek added, revealing his own, obviously rather immanentist views even clearer, the Maimonidean school further “divided intellect and nature by a deep, unbridgeable gulf.” This accusation seems to be (so far) the fiercest attack by Jellinek on medieval Jewish philosophy in favor of his beloved kabbalist thinkers. To find out what his own views on the matter might have been certainly deserves a separate study, because although he sometimes rather openly sides with the pantheistic immanentism of the protagonists of his studies, at other places he praised their ability to preserve a transcendent view of the divine despite their kabbalism. Nevertheless, his claims are well-founded on evidently extensive knowledge of Maimonides’ thought. The teachings of the Guide for the Perplexed about the divine attributes, where this often discussed negative theology is developed in detail, certainly belong to the most complex and puzzling parts of Maimonidean philosophy.³¹ Interestingly, later rationalist philosophers of the Wissenschaft movement focused on exactly this method of Maimonidean negative theology to provide the theological hallmark of Wissenschaft, the idea of the Jewish origin of the concept of ‘ethical monotheism’, a sound philosophical foundation. In the thought of Hermann Cohen (1842– 1918), the leader of this group, consequently also the idea of a correlation between man and God becomes central. Cohen demonstrates in a sophisticated argument that Maimonides’ “negation of privation” technique turns the apparently negative attributes of God, in fact, into attributes that are even more positive, because they are more illustrative than the actual positive attributes. By associating the Maimonidean technique of “negation of privation” with the logical concept of infinite judgment, Cohen is able to construct a concept of God that is not only similar to the Platonic idea of the good beyond being (Rep. 509b), but also one that is highly compatible with the Jewish traditional God of Bereshit, the Creator of the universe.³² Thus, what Jellinek saw as the essential weakness of medieval Jewish philosophy compared to Kabbalah: the “merely” negative concept of God as a transcendent idea, as opposed to the ontologically “real” God-Being of mystic theosophy, was in fact the philosophers’ (from Maimonides to Cohen) conscious effort to rescue divine transcendence for different philosophical reasons. Interestingly, Jelli-

 Adolf Jellinek, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala, vol. II, Leipzig 1852, p. VI.  See Harry A. Wolfson’s classical article “Maimonides on Negative Attributes”, in his: Essays in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy, New York 1977, p. 180 – 215. For a modern discussion of Maimonides’ “negative theology” see the edition of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly dedicated to this subject (76, 1– 2002).  See (among other texts) Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Maimonides, translated with commentary by Almut Sh. Bruckstein, Madison 2004.

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nek’s position on this question comes indeed closer to that of those existentialist twentieth-century thinkers who not only preferred a re-ontologized, “palpable” God, but who also were much more sympathetic towards mysticism – such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, or even Gershom Scholem himself. Concerning Jellinek, however, it seems to be an important feature of his writing that he is intellectually at home both in the world of Jewish mysticism and in the world of Jewish philosophical rationalism, and that his affinity for Kabbalah would not cause him to neglect the study of Maimonides. To the contrary, at several instances in his books Jellinek is able to identify hidden critical references to Maimonides’ Guide in the kabbalistic manuscripts he analyzed; and those discoveries further support his own theory about the general enmity between philosophy and Kabbalah.³³ His bold theological claims at this point led Jellinek then to promise that in his future publications he would penetrate deeper into the philosophical teachings of the Kabbalah, into what he calls the “inner history of Kabbalah.” But for now, basic historical facts need first to be firmly established in Kabbalah research – “knowledge of the acting persons, and knowledge of times and circumstances seems to be the inevitable bedrock on which the development of ideas firmly relies.” The preface to the second volume culminated in yet another call to the scholarly world to strive to discover the wealth of kabbalistic manuscripts that at the time were virtually buried like hidden treasures in European libraries. If Jellinek’s publications would motivate such discoveries, he added, “then I am rewarded for my efforts that are devoted exclusively to the temple of Wissenschaft.”³⁴ The two volumes of the Beiträge contain studies of the Sefer Bahir, more research on the genesis of the Zohar, but the lion’s share of both books is reserved for what Jellinek himself called kabbalistic teachings and writings before the Zohar, beginning from the Gaonic era, indicating that he saw a continuous development of mystical doctrines, eventually culminating in Zoharic Kabbalah. Discussing these earlier influences on the Zohar, Jellinek included an essay on medieval Jewish poetry, a composition that impressively demonstrates how much he was also at home in this field of Jewish literature that was held in equally high esteem by the ‘anti-kabbalists’ Abraham Geiger and Heinrich Graetz.³⁵ Jellinek provided a long list of examples where the Zohar borrowed lit See for example, Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 62.  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. II, p. VI.  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 26 – 30. Geiger had translated Yehuda Halevi’s Hebrew poems into German and published them together with a short essay on Halevi the philosopher at about the same time of Jellinek’s Kabbalah research. (Abraham Geiger, Diwan des Castiliers Abu’l -Haßan

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erary material from the hymns of medieval writers, especially those of Salomon Ibn Gabriol and Yehuda ha-Levi, and commented later: “What the poet had used as an artistic metaphor, the Zohar tacitly transformed into a Biblical interpretation.”³⁶ When it comes to poetry, there seems to flare in Jellinek’s writings a somewhat ironic distance to the usurpatory techniques of Kabbalah, also Jellinek’s never-completely-faded love for rational philosophy, or at least his mastering of the major philosophical schools of modernity, is noticeable throughout the essays collected in those volumes. One of the most interesting parts of the Zohar, the mystical explanations of laws and phenomena of nature, reminded him of the identity philosophy of Schelling, he wrote, because in the Zohar too, “the real world is subtilized to the scheme of the purely ideal.”³⁷ In another essay, Jellinek claimed surprisingly that the speculative teachings of thirteenth-century kabbalist Rabbi Azriel ben Menachem of Gerona regarding the ten Sefirot can be explained “as a systematic whole, according to the method of Spinoza’s Ethics”. He then proceeds to actually break down Azriel’s work using the categories of definition, proposition, proof, and scholion – which proves yet again how much Jellinek saw kabbalistic thought as superior to philosophy: It was a rational system with the additional value of spirituality.³⁸ The second volume of the Beiträge attempts to reverse the relationship between medieval Jewish poetry and Kabbalah by demonstrating that even Salomon Ibn Gabriol himself had absorbed several ideas of earlier mystical thought, especially from Babylonian sources, and integrated them into his poetry. Gabriol’s Keter Malhut in particular is full of mystical hints, Jellinek claimed, and as proof he provided an extensive list of lines from the poem that he sensed had their origin in Gaonic mysticism.³⁹ Moreover, the second volume once again featured an article on Rabbi Azriel of Gerona, who was probably Jellinek’s favorite kabbalist. Combining both mystical and philosophical thought, Azriel apparently achieved a productive synthesis to Jellinek’s liking – although, ironically, as a Juda ha-Levi, Breslau 1851). See also Geiger’s lengthy and poetical description of Gabirol’s outlook on life and fellow men from 1865. (Abraham Geiger, Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte, vol. 2, Breslau 1865, p. 102 ff.)  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 38, note 6.  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 35. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775 – 1854) developed a philosophical system of the Absolute wherein subjectivity and objectivity are seen as identical, and are understood through speculative thinking – the ‘absolute knowledge’ (absolute Erkenntnis).  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 61– 66. Baruch Spinoza (1632– 1677) wrote his major opus, the Ethics, “according to the method of geometry” (ordine geometrico demonstrata).  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. II, p. 26 – 29.

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theologian, Azriel adopted exactly those methods of Maimonides’ negative theology that Jellinek emphasized as the main philosophical difference between the medieval Aristotelians and the kabbalists. What interested Jellinek about Azriel, at this point, is rather a problem that was even more of a burning actuality in his own days than it was in the Middle Ages: The problem of the reasons behind the commandments (‫)טעמי המצוות‬. It is for this purpose that Azriel’s teachings are referred to by Jellinek as especially helpful, again, contrary to those of the rationalist Maimonidean school. Maimonides’ Guide, in the eyes of most German-Jewish theologians of the nineteenth century, had gravely secularized if not profaned the reasons behind many Biblical precepts, including (for some) even the sacrificial law of the Torah. Jellinek himself, as mentioned above, was not only a Kabbalah scholar, but also, like so many of his allies in the Wissenschaft movement, an active, liberal community rabbi. At the height of the first wave of religious reforms of Judaism in the 1850s, the question of the reasons behind the commandments turned into one of the most frequently discussed criteria for the abandonment or the preservation of legal religious regulations and ceremonies: In case the reason to observe a certain commandment was still valid and meaningful in the modern age, this commandment was accepted by the reformers as still binding. The difficult question was rather to determine the precise reason behind each and every religious commandment, especially in the more ritual precepts. Here, surprisingly, many of the Reform theologians, including the founder of the movement, Abraham Geiger, rejected the method proposed by Maimonides in the third part of the Guide for the Perplexed, that is, to measure the commandments according to practical usefulness.⁴⁰ The Reformers attached much more value to the spiritual virtue of the commandments, that is, to the actual spiritual edification that is effected in the believer by observing any given commandment. Thus, Jellinek was, regarding a rational approach to the Biblical precepts, in full agreement with the ideology of his even more liberal rabbinic colleagues. The major difference consisted rather in the fact that he believed he had found a historical alternative to Maimonidean rationalism latent in the Jewish sources of almost the same time period as Maimonides. Rabbi Azriel of Gerona, “working during an era ransacked by rationalism and weak in religious ardency and faith,” attempted to give a mystical foundation to the Biblical commandments, especially to the ceremonial law. His intention was, according to Jellinek,

 For Geiger, the Guide’s chapters about the rationale of the commandments even turned out to be “the weakest part of Maimonides’ work and system”, see, Abraham Geiger Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte, 3 vols, Breslau 1865 – 71, vol. 2, p. 147 f.

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to “take the edge off the trenchant rationalism, which knew only advice but not deed,”⁴¹ – apparently meaning that philosophical advice leads eventually to non-observance, while deeds would increase spirituality. Thus, Rabbi Azriel became the first kabbalist to systematically detail the justification for each commandment, and, as per Jellinek’s contention, many of the later authors of works on the Kabbalah, including Moses de Leon vis a vis the Zohar, not only followed his explanations, but took his initiative as motivation to produce similar-minded tracts of their own, works that dealt, for example, with such topics as the spiritual foundation of prayer, dietary laws, and the benedictions. The other important contribution of Rabbi Azriel to the development of kabbalistic thought, according to Jellinek, was his philosophical theory of the ten Sefirot, which quickly turned into something like a “catechism of the Kabbalah”. Concerning the most important theological problem in Jellinek’s view, the question if the Sefirot are in an immanent way identical with the ein-sof, or rather, only tools (‫ )כלים‬of the transcendence, he held that Rabbi Azriel consciously avoided an open pantheistic identification. This controversial point and its historical development, however, deserved a separate study, Jellinek declared, and added a rather cynical footnote directed against Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488 – 1575), who, apart from famously being the author of the legalistic Shulchan Aruch, was also an ardent kabbalist. Karo, Jellinek wrote, later “meticulously collected all the details of rabbinism”, but as a theologian allowed himself to be persuaded that the Sefirot are identical with the deity, and thus “never overcame his position of the immanence of God.”⁴² Next to analyzing the influence of Moslem Sufism on the Kabbalah, Jellinek devoted another essay to the impact of Christianity on Jewish mysticism in thirteenth-century Spain.⁴³ There are many aspects of Kabbalah, he admits, that can “only be understood through the medium of Christian influence,” that is, through identifying Trinitarian metaphors, or even through a Trinitarian interpretation of the name of God. Interestingly, Jellinek wanted his reader to believe, however, that most of these Christian influences on the Jewish mystics were subliminal: Christian thought involuntarily seeped into the Jewish consciousness because of the Jewish need to learn about Christian dogma to be able to confront it in the forced public disputations with the Church. Never had those Trinitarian metaphors indeed convinced the Jews to accept the Christian dogma of trinity, Jellinek argued, but, because of their resemblance with certain metaphors of Jew Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. II, p. 37. The German is a play with words: “…der nur Rath aber nicht That kennt.”  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. II, p. 40.  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. II, p. 51– 56.

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ish mysticism, especially those metaphors attempting to explain the relation between the Sefirot and the deity, Trinitarian similes had a significant impact on the kabbalists. “Although actually Jewish-monotheistic consciousness resisted all differentiation of the absolute divine unity,” Jellinek had to concede that “some Jewish mystics of the thirteenth century, unintentionally and while protesting against it, were in fact misled to establishing a trias of their own.”⁴⁴ Also at this point, Jellinek’s theory is fully consistent with classical theology of the combined Wissenschaft and Reform movements of Judaism, and his remarkable affinity for Kabbalah obviously had no influence on his rejection of Christian dogma as contrary to Jewish theology. Increasingly excluding practical law-observance as the means of constituting modern Jewish identity, the Reform theologians of the movement had replaced the traditional, observant Jewish lifestyle as an identity-marker with the establishment of specific and singular theological and ethical doctrines as the main characteristics of Judaism, prominent among them, as a matter of course, strict monotheism. Monotheism as constructing Jewish identity was especially helpful at this point because of the increasingly felt need to distinguish Jewish Reform theology from Christianity, especially from modern cultural Protestantism, to which its new, ethic-centered creed had come dangerously close. Thus, Jellinek’s somewhat odd but still unconditional insistence on the ‘non-Jewishness’ of the Trinitarian imagery of the Zohar and other kabbalistic writing becomes understandable. Otherwise, the unconscious adoption and frequent use of a theological metaphor that was actually and explicitly rejected would be rather strange, even in a man like Moses de Leon. But Jellinek, who emphasized the importance of the Zohar’s origin in the thirteenth century, would not even accept Landauer’s daring theory that all hints to Trinity in the Zohar really go back to antique Jewish teachings about a trinitarian god, teachings that existed long before Christianity. For Jellinek, unambiguously, all trinitarian references in the Zohar are nothing but “a phenomenon that brusquely contradicts Judaism and can only be explained if we accept Christian influence.”⁴⁵ Obviously, none of the other nineteenth-century Wissenschaft scholars, less sympathetic to Kabbalah than Jellinek, would actually have disagreed here. The second volume of Jellinek’s collected essays on Kabbalah ends, consistent with the overall tendency of the author’s appreciation for mystical readings of the Bible, with yet another attack on Maimonides. Because the kabbalists as-

 Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. II, p. 54. To this group belonged Abulafia and Moses de Leon, in and out of the Zohar.  Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. II, p. 56.

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sumed that there is an identity between the laws of nature and the laws of reason, he wrote, they often used analogies from nature in order to explain Biblical commandments. These explanations are simply “far more appropriate than those of Maimonides” [viel richtiger] for Jellinek, referring here now specifically to the laws of biblical sacrifices. The superiority of the Kabbalah’s approach is because the mystical method of bridging the gap between nature and the human intellect is not only in accordance with modern identity philosophy (another reference to Schelling, whom Jellinek seems to have held in some esteem), but in addition has “naturally a much stronger appeal to the believing soul [gläubiges Gemüth] than Maimonides’ rationalism.” Truly religious Jews, Jellinek declared, were left unsatisfied by Maimonides’ explanation of divine law as mere concessions to the Biblical zeitgeist – and here we can certainly include Adolf Jellinek himself in this category.⁴⁶

 Jellinek, Beiträge, vol. II, p. 74– 76.

First Reactions to Jellinek Jellinek’s first three books on kabbalistic subjects raised great interest among the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. In most cases, journals chose to review all three as a single unit that constitutes the beginning of the modern, systematic, academic-critical research of Jewish mysticism. In August 1852, Bernhard Beer, who, as we noted earlier, had contributed key Kabbalah manuscripts to Jellinek, wrote a four-page review of the three books for the newly founded Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums. Thus, Kabbalah research made it already in 1852 into what was soon to become the flagship journal of the Wissenschaft movement, established by Rabbi Zacharias Frankel only one year earlier. Still in 1852, Steinschneider reviewed Jellinek’s three volumes for the highly-respected Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, the leading organ of German academic orientalism, and Isaak Markus Jost even published a small seventeen-page booklet of his own in praise of Jellinek, called Adolf Jellinek and the Kabbalah. Far from being a sign of neglect or even rejection of Kabbalah, the immediate and approving reactions to Jellinek’s research project underscores the observation that Kabbalah research was widely accepted by the Wissenschaft scholars, despite their often strong theological reservations. Indeed, examined closely, those reservations were, in most cases, caused rather by the grossest kabbalistic anthropomorphisms and the over-simplisticness of numerology (gematria), and not by the Kabbalah as such. This was so even with regard to the most controversial case of Heinrich Graetz, which will be discussed in detail further on. Kabbalah, and especially earlier, pre-Zoharic Jewish mysticism, was held by many scholars in high esteem, for it apparently provided a useful and acceptable alternative to Maimonidean rationalism without, at the same time, retaining the Talmud’s iron rule over the Jewish religion. Only in very rare cases, including that of the mature Abraham Geiger, as we will see below, was the entire system of Jewish mystical thought rejected as superstitious from its very foundations. But even with the most adamant of Kabbalah rejectionists, historical-critical research into Kabbalah was never discouraged, but always considered and discussed among the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Thus, the arch-Maimonidean Bernhard Beer wrote in the Monatsschrift that Jellinek was in fact the first truly unbiased scholar of Kabbalah, and his first three books contain so many new and interesting insights that no other scholar of this field is allowed to ignore them. More than that, according to Beer, Jellinek is not only a researcher, but himself a zenith in the approach of Judaism to Kabhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-009

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balah: While in pre-modern times, Jewish mysticism “was accepted with absolute faith and sacred dread as an emanation of the divine spirit,” the Enlightenment thinkers went to the opposite extreme: they saw in Kabbalah “nothing but a wondrous chimera of a sick fantasy and products of fanciful enthusiasm.” The earlier Wissenschaft scholars, among whom Beer counted Zunz and Landauer, eventually brought the torchlight of critical reason also to this field, and thus they, for the first time, achieved more trustworthy insights into this mysterious land. But naturally and necessarily, it was a very negative approach that led these earlier scholars in their investigations. Uncompromisingly, they had to uncover pseudoepigraphy and remove false authority from kabbalistic literature and therefore often “overlooked its hidden treasures”. Still later, during the 1840s, authors like Adolphe Franck and David Joel returned to the exact opposite approach, proposing what Beer called “scientific apologetics” [wissenschaftliche Apologetik] for Kabbalah. It was only Adolf Jellinek, argues Beer in his review of the three volumes, who found a truly disinterested way of treating Kabbalah, as evidenced by the fact that Jellinek “did not deny its deficiencies and abnormalities, but also philosophically demonstrated to the thinking reader some of its substantial truths.”¹ This short historical sketch is interesting in a twofold manner: First, because it views manuscript research and theology, faith, and critical reason on the same methodological level; and in addition, because it demonstrates almost perfectly the purpose-oriented nature of the Wissenschaft des Judentums: to be an essential, almost vital part of the development of its own subject: living Judaism. Bernhard Beer is giving here a representative sample of the Wissenschaft approach to Kabbalah: It is part of living Judaism and Jewish thought to the same extent as is Wissenschaft itself; there is still no separation line between belief and scholarship, and theology is the connecting link between the two inasmuch as theology, for nineteenth-century authors, is both a science and a personal religious conviction. Earlier the same year, Beer had published a booklet with the German translation of a groundbreaking article from 1847 by Salomon Munk (1805 – 1867) on ‘Jewish Philosophy’ for the French Dictionnaire des Sciences philosophiques, edited by Adolphe Franck, and here Beer already showed a very similar approach. Adding several learned notes to Munk’s text, quite in the same manner as Jellinek had annotated his translation of Adolphe Franck’s book on Kabbalah, Beer saw reason to expand the very few words Munk had written on the Kabbalah in the original entry on Jewish Philosophy for the Dictionnaire. The proto-Kabbalah

 Bernhard Beer, Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 1852, p. 427– 430, here 427.

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that Munk proposed was essentially a philosophical product of the Jewish sect of the Essenes. But because of its dominant pantheistic tendency, Munk contended, it could in no wise be called “Jewish philosophy”, and therefore had no extended place in his essay on this subject.² Beer inserted a note of his own at this point, referring to a dense, four-page summary of kabbalistic thought and concepts that he added at the end of his German translation. This summary, however, was not authored by Beer himself, but is Beer’s excerpt from another one of Munk’s entries for the Dictionnaire, the entry on the keyword Kabbale itself. This ten-page essay by Munk, demonstrated that his rejection of Kabbalah as part of Jewish philosophy was clearly not the result of ignorance, but based on an enormous knowledge of kabbalistic material.³ For some reason though, as it would appear, this long French article by Munk never gained entrance into the discussions of the German Wissenschaft scholars, and, except for Beer’s German summary, is never referred to by anyone. Beer’s excerpt of it, in any event, concluded, in agreement with Munk, with this personal remark: “To the thinker, it is clear that such a system of emanation [as the Kabbalah], carried to the very extreme, must end up in pantheism. The undiluted doctrine of Judaism, based on pure monotheism, was never really comfortable with it – while the Christian church, which indeed derived its main dogmas from kabbalistic philosophy, resorted to blind faith!”⁴ While in this summarizing comment Beer’s theological preferences seem to prevail over historical research of the Jewish reception of Kabbalah – it is especially in the light of those anti-Kabbalah preferences of the Maimonidean Beer that his very sympathetic review of Jellinek’s books for the Monatsschrift must be read. Beer praised Jellinek’s research as the beginning of a new era, adopting Jellinek’s own metaphor of the ‘building blocks’ for a full history of Kabbalah, still to be written. Beer, who obviously stood in continuous correspondence with Jellinek, revealed to the reader of his review that Jellinek at this time “was indeed working on a larger opus, called Introduction to the History and  Bernhard Beer, Philosophie und philosophische Schriftsteller der Juden, aus dem Französischen des S. Munk, mit erläuternden und ergänzenden Anmerkungen, Leipzig 1852, p. 11.  Salomon Munk, ’Kabbale’, in: Dictionnaire des Sciences philosophiques, vol. 3, Paris 1847, p. 382– 392. Munk studied philology in Berlin and Bonn, but immigrated to Paris in 1831 for the lack of an academic future in Germany. There he was the curator of the Hebrew manuscripts at the Sorbonne. In 1865, Munk followed Ernst Renan as the prestigious chair for Oriental languages at the College de France. Though nearly blind late in life, he still managed to publish the first translation of Maimonides’ Guide into a modern European language (Guide des égarés, Paris 1856 – 66). On Munk, see Chiara Adorisio, Dialectic of Separation: Judaism and Philosophy in the Work of Salomon Munk, Brighton 2017.  Beer, Philosophie, p. 55.

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the Essence of Kabbalah”, which – assuming Beer’s information was true at all – was never published. Interestingly, Beer at this point in time is not yet convinced by Jellinek’s proof that Moses de Leon was the author of the Zohar, as he admitted in the review, not because he was believed that someone else wrote the book, but only because the evidence Jellinek provides was not sufficient. But, Beer concluded his text, “may Herr Jellinek find time and leisure to finish his intended larger work about the Kabbalah soon, that finally even this still dark portion of the Jewish Wissenschaft may be brought to brighter light!”⁵ His own dislike of kabbalistic theology, obviously, is no reason for Bernhard Beer not to eagerly await and demand convincing academic proof for the authorship of the Zohar, one of Kabbalah’s central works. Moritz Steinschneider’s review of Jellinek’s three volumes is more of an announcement of their publication than a critical analysis of their content, but given the place of publication – the renowned Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft – even this was a statement in itself, both in terms of demonstrating Steinschneider’s conviction that Jellinek’s Kabbalah research belonged to the world of general scholarship (and not just of Jewish special interest), but also in terms of displaying the leading German journal’s agreement with Steinschneider on this point. Jellinek himself was a member of the Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, and was even briefly considered for the position of the editor of its Zeitschrift, as Ismar Schorsch discovered.⁶ Steinschneider’s review did not even come at the author’s initiative, but rather at the invitation of the journal. It should actually have also included a reference to Jellinek’s translation of Adolphe Franck from 1844, but on this point Steinschneider’s views were too radical to be printed, as mentioned above. Concerning Jellinek’s works on Kabbalah, Steinschneider observed that they were the result of a long occupation with the subject on the part of Jellinek, as Steinschneider well knew from their personal contact. Steinschneider is more convinced than Beer by the evidence Jellinek provided for the firm linkage of Moses de Leon to the Zohar, possibly because he himself contributed manuscript material by Moses to Jellinek’s research. Yet despite his explicit agreement regarding de Leon’s role as the “Haupturheber” (the main initiator/originator; Jellinek’s term) and not explicitly the author of the Zohar, for Steinschneider, de Leon decidedly remained a “falsifier” (using here the uncommon German word Falsator) who wrote “cheeky polemics”, and who promulgated a kabbalistic system of thought that was only an “alleged system” by Steinschneider’s

 Beer, Monatsschrift 1852, p. 430.  Schorsch, Converging Cognates, p. 30.

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standards.⁷ Like Beer, Steinschneider, too, claimed to know of a larger book that Jellinek was planning to write about the Kabbalah, but in Steinschneider’s version of the claim, this was to be a work dedicated to the composition of the Zohar – and indeed this is precisely what Jellinek himself had parenthetically announced in his short monograph on Moses de Leon.⁸ Unfortunately, this book, too, was never realized. Steinschneider nevertheless outlined at the end of his review the framework such a book should follow, thus displaying again his own interest in the research of Zoharic mysticism. In case Jellinek was right, Steinschneider wrote, and the Zohar consisted of various, later revised layers from different periods of time, then ipso facto Jellinek was wrong in his other claim that before analyzing the ideas of the Zohar, its date, country, and author must first be established. Steinschneider insisted that an analysis of the Zohar’s different parts must first be accomplished, and only afterwards can positive knowledge for every single layer be gathered.⁹ This is how Zunz had proceeded in his research on the midrashim, and moreover, or so Steinschneider argued, this was also the way to draw the attention of a wider public to the investigation of the Zoharic literature, because people usually first want to know what the content of a book is before they bother to learn about its genesis.¹⁰ Whether Steinschneider’s proposed procedure for an analytic book on the Zohar was feasible or not, in any event it shows that Steinschneider was interested (and not at all embarrassed) to spread knowledge about kabbalistic literature even among a larger, non-expert audience. As per the usual practice in nineteenth-century Germany, (to our advantage) Isaak Markus Jost introduced his small booklet devoted to the praise of Adolf Jellinek’s Kabbalah research with a short speculative statement of his own on the subject of Jewish mysticism. Jost had always shown strong interest in the mystical tradition of Judaism, beginning from the rather disparaging discussion of it in his first youthful works on Jewish history from 1822, although even there explicitly calling for more intensive research of Kabbalah. In 1832, he already published a much more balanced account of mystical texts, and ultimately, by the end of the 1850s, he would change his mind completely concerning the theological worth of Kabbalah, as we will see below.

 Moritz Steinschneider, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 1852, p. 298.  Cf. Jellinek, Moses, p. 21. (note)  See for today’s state of the field: Daniel Abrams, “The Invention of the ‘Zohar’ as a Book: On the Assumptions and Expectations of the Kabbalists and Modern Scholars,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 19 (2009).  Steinschneider, ZDMG 1852, p. 299.

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Judged by its imagery, Kabbalah belongs to the orient, Jost claimed in 1852, and in Europe it was further developed exclusively by such thinkers who had received ‘oriental’ education – referring here obviously to the much abhorred traditional talmudic studies. But nevertheless, continued Jost surprisingly, Kabbalah is throughout monotheistic, it is deeply rooted in the belief in the One God – such that, despite the resemblance with oriental paganism, it is far removed from any pagan influence or origin. But at the same time also the classical Greek world was “the exact opposite of kabbalistic thought,” and although early Jewish mysticism had had a certain impact on Christianity and Islam, Jost argued, only in its specifically Jewish form did Kabbalah remain the pure monotheistic doctrine it originally was.¹¹ Jost agreed with the general scholarly opinion of his century that Kabbalah was something like a middle way between strict, dry Talmudism and Jewish religious philosophy, influenced by Greek ideas. While the increasingly technical study of the Talmud and its laws deprived Judaism of its higher spirituality, the influence of Greek philosophy unsettled Judaism by corroding its concepts and by cutting off its non-rational traditions and customs. Maimonides, Jost wrote, was the tragic example of “the vain attempt to harmonize tradition and reason”. Thus “Kabbalah was a necessary result of the corrosion of the homogeneous service of God and [a the result of] the dispersal of the Jews in exile.” Jost identified the earliest traces of Jewish mystical thought in the Biblical prophets, especially in Ezekiel, who was “the root of the Kabbalah”, as he claimed.¹² But only during the last century of the Temple’s existence, when Jewish scholarliness originated and then spread over wider parts of the population, was mysticism more fully developed within the Jewish world. This was a time, in Jost’s view, when that which was once the official law of the Jewish state now came in need of a more spiritual explanation and motivation to be preserved in future generations. This “intellectual context of divine revelation” as Jost called it, was provided by early Jewish mysticism. For obvious reasons, according to Jost, there are no written sources of these secret doctrines until the seventh century. But when kabbalistic manuscripts finally began to appear, they were still without any significant foreign influence, Jost insisted. In deliberate and explicit contrast to the “brilliant scholarship” of the Wissenschaft movement from the previous few years (excluding Jellinek), Jost insisted that the Kabbalah had neither gnostic, nor Alexandrine sources, but grew solely and

 Isaak Markus Jost, Adolph Jellinek und die Kabbalah – Ein Literatur-Bericht, Leipzig 1852, p. 3 – 4.  Jost, Jellinek, p. 5.

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exclusively on Jewish soil.¹³ Here, at the latest, it becomes obvious that from its beginning, Kabbalah scholarship can be divided into the group of ‘sympathetic’ authors, who almost always hold Kabbalah to be indigenous to Judaism (like Jellinek or Jost, or later Scholem) and the group of ‘hostile’ scholars who, with very few exceptions, attribute to Kabbalah a foreign origin (like Heinrich Graetz and others, as will be shown below). What determined the emergence of that glaring division is certainly the protagonists’ respective ideologies, which originated quite outside of Wissenschaft for its own sake. Interesting for the present study is the question of whether those preferences influenced scholarly results, or even just determining the amount of research invested into the study of Jewish mysticism – and here, very surprisingly, a clear answer, one way or the other, turns out to be impossible. Before discussing Jellinek himself, Jost referred his readers to two pre-Jellinek publications on Kabbalah: Adolph Franck’s book, which is “not particularly deep”, but gains a lot by the additions of the German translator (Jellinek himself), and Samuel David Luzzatto’s dialogic refutation of the Kabbalah, which appeared in the same year of 1852.¹⁴ And although this work is not exactly a scholarly treatise, Jost praised it as a “substantial work, written in a beautiful Hebrew style.” But Adolf Jellinek’s latest research on kabbalistic subjects is, compared to everything else, “an enormous advance”, in Jost’s eyes – not only because of Jellinek’s comprehensive knowledge of Kabbalah, so finely demonstrated in those recent books of his, but also because of Jellinek’s “lucidity and the sobriety of his judgments and conclusions”, echoing what Bernhard Beer had written in the Monatsschrift about Jellinek’s disinterested scholarly approach to Kabbalah. Jost could not explore within the confines of his limited space all the details of Jellinek’s results, but he hoped that even a short overview-presentation of the content of Jellinek’s books would “encourage further scholarship” [weitere Forschungen anregen] on kabbalistic subjects.¹⁵ Thus, once again, we have a clear sign of the attempt of one of the leading Wissenschaft scholars, himself a radical deist, to prompt the academic study of Kabbalah and to give the results of such studies the widest possible attention. Jellinek deserved the gratitude of the scholarly world for finally proving that Moses de Leon authored the Zohar, but even more so for revealing the entire literary career of Moses and the history of the genesis of the Zohar. At this point Jost could refer to his own opinion on the age of the Zohar, published ten  Jost, Jellinek, p. 7.  “Vikuach al chochmat haKabbalah”. For further discussion see Penkower, Luzzatto, p. 79 – 130.  Jost, Jellinek, p. 8.

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years earlier in a review of Franz Joseph Molitor’s Philosophie der Geschichte, where Jost had claimed to be the first to discover clear references to the Crusades in the Zohar, which would obviously exclude the authorship of Simon bar Yochai.¹⁶ Other than the more skeptical Bernhard Beer, Jost is fully convinced that Jellinek’s book on Moses de Leon “once and for all put an end to all claims that the Zohar originated in the second Christian century”.¹⁷ But Jellinek’s two volumes of Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala (the collected Orient essays) are judged by Jost as even more important than the study on the genesis of the Zohar. Jost specifically mentioned that Jellinek was the only one of all previous students of the Sefer Yezirah who agreed with the young Heinrich Graetz – at this time still largely unknown – who in 1846 had published his dissertation on the gnostic origin of the work, as discussed above. This agreement and the mutual esteem between Graetz and Jellinek, independent of sympathy for or (as in the case of Graetz) dislike of the Kabbalah, continued throughout Jellinek’s life and culminated with the publication of his last study of Abulafia in 1887, in a festschrift for Graetz of all places. However, contrary to his agreement with Jellinek regarding the Zohar, Jost in his 1852 review is still not satisfied with the research results of both Graetz and Jellinek concerning the Yezirah, and demanded emphatically that a later scholar write a more detailed reception history of this work. This particular admonishment is also the tendency for the remainder of Jost’s booklet on Jellinek. Faithfully summarizing Jellinek’s books, Jost time and again interspersed his account with the urgent demand for more elaborate studies of Jewish mysticism. Clearly, it is Jost’s intention that knowledge of kabbalistic literature reach a wider public, far beyond the inner circle of Jewish specialists. At least twice on every page of Jost’s essay, one encounters remarks such as, “unfortunately this is much too brief”, that “further details are asked for”, or that a certain aspect “is regrettably passed over”. Special emphasis is placed on the demand for further Kabbalah research in connection with what Jost called – obviously in the wake of Jellinek’s above-described opinion – “the struggle of Kabbalah against Christianity since the beginning of Christian attacks on Judaism” in the thirteenth century. Here Jellinek would have done well to fill what Jost saw as a complete void in the research of Jewish-Christian relations.¹⁸

 Cf. Jost, in Neue Jenaische allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 1842, No 51– 53, p. 209 – 212, 213 – 216, 217, here: No. 51, p. 211 (footnote). Those references to the Crusades, however, had been identified before Jost by Rabbi Jacob Emden, cf. his Miṭpaḥat Sefarim, Altona 1768.  Jost, Jellinek, p. 9.  Jost, Jellinek, p. 13 – 14.

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At any rate, all those remarks definitely demonstrate again that both Jellinek and Jost stand at the center of the German-Jewish Wissenschaft project. Not only are they apparently not embarrassed to expose Kabbalah to a non-Jewish audience, they even season their research results with outright and harsh criticism of Christianity, the religion of most of their fellow scholars in Germany, whose attention and recognition they intend to attract. “However one might judge the worth of Kabbalah,” wrote Jost at the end of the book,¹⁹ – and I myself believe it is one of the many aberrances of the human intellect, celebrating itself in the exceptional […] – one is nevertheless not allowed to deny that Kabbalah is a magnificent phenomenon. Knowledgeable and deep thinkers dedicated their lives to it, and thus Kabbalah became a remarkable direction of human occupation, having a distinctive impact on the edification and customs of the Jewish people, sometimes even on the moral education of the masses. Many facts and widespread developments [in Jewish history] find their explanations in this impact [of Kabbalah], and this is true not only for singular and local events, but also for continuous and recurrent appearances. Therefore, it is very meritorious to provide information about essence and substance of such a profound intellectual endeavor, especially if its creations are only accessible to such a small number of scholars, and have up to now so often been misunderstood.

This fascinating manifesto of Jost’s could well have been penned by any one of the Wissenschaft scholars of nineteenth-century Germany, as it perfectly represents the consensus position of those scholars: A personal rejection of kabbalistic thought surprisingly combined with a full appreciation of the impact of Kabbalah on Jewish history, and therefore unequivocal support for the further and more intensive study of this ‘magnificent phenomenon’ – most likely in order to arrive at a clearer picture of the overall intellectual past of Judaism, as the basis for its further development in the modern age.

 Jost, Jellinek, p. 14– 15.

Adolf Jellinek [1853 – 1854] Significantly, on the last page of Jost’s small booklet appears an advertisement for a brand new book on Kabbalah by Adolf Jellinek, to be published the following year, i. e. 1853, indicating that this new study was already ready for publication at the time of Jost’s writing his review of the previous series of Jellinek’s scholarship. Indeed, Jellinek published in 1853 and in 1854 two more books on kabbalistic subjects, thus bringing the amount of his publications in this field to an impressive five volumes within only four years – probably the most fruitful period of Kabbalah research within the Wissenschaft movement. In 1853, Jellinek published a collection of four Hebrew manuscripts with mystical texts, including an extensive German introduction to every manuscript regarding its origin, author, and time.¹ In the preface to this volume, he complained that although “mysticism is such an essential aspect of the intellectual development of mankind that it is found in all nations and religions”, only the Egyptian, the Arab, and the Indian mystic texts were being studied, and also some fruitful historical research was being conducted on Christian gnosis, while the Jewish Kabbalah, by contrast, was being almost totally neglected. From the foundational elements of Jewish mysticism until the “complete gigantic construction” of Kabbalah, there had been nearly no profound research dedicated to this unique development, Jellinek wrote. Most scholars would not even have an idea of the problems involved in this field. Yet this apparent neglect was easy to explain: relevant manuscripts are scattered over many libraries, the study of kabbalistic texts is difficult, and for many a scholar, “because of the abstruse material”, it is all rather daunting. He himself has therefore undertaken “to subject the development of Kabbalah to a thorough and conscientious investigation.” No religious or even dogmatic motive has guided him in doing so, Jellinek emphasized, but rather a “purely academic one”. He hoped his three publications about the subject until this point would “have brought light to the darkest spots of Kabbalah”. As a professional scholar, Jellinek explicitly challenged his colleagues to contradict him with well-grounded arguments, although he was probably aware that at this time, very few scholars had reached his own level of knowledge about Jewish mysticism. In addition, he again invited the manuscript collectors among his readers to send him handwritten sources so that he might be able to write the history of Kabbalah in a more coherent way. For the meantime, he acknowledged that he had received two epistles written by Abulafia in manuscript – both of  Adolph Jellinek, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, Leipzig 1853. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-010

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which he would be publishing, one in the present volume and the other one in the next volume – as well as some excerpts from Abulafia’s Sefer ha-Ot, given to him by the Italian scholar and rabbi Isaac Samuel Reggio (1774– 1855). The latter texts, however, Jellinek published only more than 30 years later, in the abovementioned Festschrift for none other than Heinrich Graetz. For his next project in Kabbalah research, he announced a longer study about Nachmanides, “the most influential kabbalist of the thirteenth century”, but also this plan apparently never materialized.² Jellinek’s last publication concerning our subject, before he moved on to become the chief rabbi of Vienna, is a small booklet from 1854 combining the manuscript of the second epistle by Abraham Abulafia that Jellinek had received earlier, with the Hebrew translation by Elijah ben Joseph Habillo (Xabillo) of Thomas of Aquinas’s “De animae facultatibus”, a manuscript found in the city library of Hamburg. This interesting combination led him to call the brochure “Philosophie und Kabbala”.³ Jellinek obviously had planned to publish a series of such text combinations because the brochure introduces itself as “Erstes Heft” (book one) on the title page. Unfortunately, no sequel ever appeared. Still, it is interesting that Jellinek saw common features in both texts, probably indicating again that he would not agree to a consistent separation between philosophy and Kabbalah as two antagonistic fields of Jewish studies. Rather, Jellinek, like several other scholars of the Wissenschaft movement, was interested in the intellectual content of mysticism as a kind of supplement for the obvious shortcomings (in his view) of rational philosophy. Thirteenth-century Jewish thought, so he wrote in the introduction to the brochure, was virtually framed by Maimonides’ Guide and its tremendous influence at the outset of this century, and by “the book of Zohar, canonic for the school of kabbalists, as its final border line”. Between these poles, however, “the dialectic powers of the intellect caused turmoil and conflict, and blended elements of thought and intuition, of speculative reason and playful symbolism.”⁴ Throughout the thirteenth century, Jellinek argued, the combination of Kabbalah and philosophy can clearly be observed in many forms: the adoption of Saadia by the German mystic Elazar of Worms, Rabbis Azriel’s use of Maimonides, Nachmanides’ thought as permeated by the “dark kabbalistic work

 All quotes: Jellinek, Auswahl, p. III-VI.  Philosophie und Kabbala, Erstes Heft, Nach Handschriften herausgegeben von Adolph Jellinek, Leipzig 1854. In a 1988 reprint edition, most of Jellinek’s five brochures of kabbalistic studies were made available again in one volume. See Adolph Jellinek, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte der Kabbala, Hildesheim 1988.  All quotes: Jellinek, Philosophie und Kabbala, preface, p. III.

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Bahir” and Abulafia’s references to Ibn Ezra. But for Jellinek, the upshot of all that synthesizing was the Zohar. Only with Moses de Leon does “the syncretism of philosophical and kabbalistic ideas become something completed and finalized, a closed chapter.” His task, so Jellinek, was to track those diverging and then again coinciding lines of thought. If it was the declared intention of his own century, the age of Wissenschaft, to “consider the results of the development of mankind so far, then Kabbalah can justifiably demand that her own path through history must also be traced. Kabbalah, like other modes of thought, also deserved a rightful place in modern research because it tried to solve the problems that unremittingly engaged the thinkers, just by fashioning the teachings of mathematics, astronomy, anthropology, physics, and linguistics into allegories of the Most High.”⁵ This enthusiastic statement is the last word about Kabbalah that Jellinek has to say for more than three decades – before he comes back, towards the end of his life, for a final excursion into this field with the publication of excerpts from Abulafia’s Sefer haOt in the Graetz Festschrift of 1887. In this final statement of the very fruitful first half of the 1850s, Adolph Jellinek clearly hinted at an approach to Kabbalah that is probably informed by more than just academic interest and the will to do scientific justice to a neglected field of Jewish studies. Although he still feels the need to compare or even raise Kabbalah to the obviously more accepted level of philosophical speculation, Jellinek seems to claim in this (unintended) closing remark that the Zohar had eventually achieved exactly that upgrade to the status of philosophy, and that from the thirteenth century onwards, the two disciplines, philosophy and Kabbalah, must be considered to be on the same intellectual level: Fundamental metaphysical questions that in philosophy are treated through speculative reason, were equally well solved in Kabbalah by allegoric symbolism. Not many fellow scholars of Judaism were ready to follow him here, as we shall soon see. Jellinek, however, as probably one of the most dedicated and knowledgeable Kabbalah scholars (next to Heinrich Graetz), was certainly the single scholar most sympathetic to Kabbalah in nineteenth-century Germany (other than Graetz), even on a personal, emotional level. During the first half of the 1850s, Adolf Jellinek also contributed regularly to the Hebrew journal Kerem Chemed, the last two volumes of which were edited between 1852 and 1854 by the east-European scholar Senior (Schneur) Sachs (1816 – 1892). Sachs resided between 1841 and 1856 in Berlin where, among other projects, he attempted to revive this mascilic journal. Kerem Chemed had

 All quotes: Jellinek, Philosophie und Kabbala, preface, p. IV.

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been founded in 1833 by Samuel Goldenberg in Vienna, and later continued in Prague, where the last issue was printed in 1843. In the 1850s in Berlin, Sachs successfully engaged even several well-known German-Jewish thinkers, like Zacharias Frankel, Abraham Geiger, Isaak Markus Jost, and Moritz Steinschneider to write Hebrew contributions. Like Jellinek, Sachs was an admirer of the literature of Jewish mysticism, and continually encouraged the academic study of it. Jellinek wrote out several excerpts of kabbalistic manuscripts for Kerem Chemed that were printed there accompanied by short, explanatory epistles to the editor. It is in these letters to Senior Sachs that we find Jellinek’s most emotional statements expressing – in Hebrew – his sympathy for the Kabbalah. While in academic German he always displayed a cool distance to his beloved subject of research, in Hebrew he allowed himself to be more sentimental, probably motivated by the poetic, maskilic language he wrote in, interspersed with Biblical and talmudic phrases. In the spring of 1855, Jellinek cried out on the pages of the journal: “Oh, my friend, the wisdom of the Kabbalah – my soul is connected to her like the flame to the coal! (‫)כשלהבת קשורה לגחלת‬.⁶ Two years earlier, in the autumn of 1853, he wrote in an epistle to Sachs that: My friend knows that with all my might I turned to the interpretation and the research of history and the development of the wisdom of Kabbalah. In her temple, everyone speaks of her glory (Psalms 29,9). There they sit and seek counsel together (Psalms 71,10). Those who possess depth of thought come to her; the great among the Rishonim – dear and honorable subjects they discuss, like in the disputations of Abaye and Rava.⁷ And it is not hidden from you that this field of research is like a sealed desert (Ex 14,3), its ways are like a hedge of thorns (Mishlei 15,19), because one needs to intensively study the manuscripts which are scattered over many countries. This is why I am grateful to the Lord with my whole heart that He caused it to happen to me (Gen 24,12) that I received valuable transcripts of this wisdom – wisdom it is, and not labor – because I do not gain any [material] benefit from it right now. He who wants to learn this wisdom might not deal with the laws of finance [‫]בדיני ממונות‬. You know me; my ways are different from the ways of several other scholars of our times who hide or keep secret what they have, whose desk is like the table of the priests,⁸ whose books are holy and concealed in the innermost rooms [‫ ]בחדרי חדרים‬so that no stranger may come close.⁹

Jellinek, contrary to that behavior, would freely share the manuscripts he received and the lessons he had learned from them, as he further wrote to Sachs. Who those other scholars might be, who keep things concealed, we can

   

Keren Chemed, vol. 9, ed. Senior Sachs, Berlin 1856, p. 154. TB Baba Batra 134a, a general expression of talmudic scholastics. TB Menachot 6a. Keren Chemed, vol. 8, ed. Senior Sachs, Berlin 1854, p. 159 (my translation).

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only guess: manuscript collectors who refused to open their treasures, or some individual representatives of Wissenschaft like Leopold Zunz, who refused to deal more extensively with Kabbalah, perhaps. Moshe Idel tried to construct from this letter a certain likeness of Jellinek’s approach with the “more positive position [towards Kabbalah] that was adopted by twentieth-century scholars”, but given the fact that also Graetz and Steinschneider collected and used kabbalistic manuscript material, the whole difference between them and Jellinek consisted either in the mere quantitative amount of manuscripts used and published, or rather in what might be called a certain positive bias towards mysticism – both not very convincing academic criteria.¹⁰

 Moshe Idel, Al Aharon Jellinek, p. 17– 18. Of course, Idel ultimately defines the difference according to the larger amount of manuscripts used, and cites as evidence Jellinek’s (never-materialized) plan to publish all of Abulafia’s writings (as he announced to Sachs in the same epistle).

The Mature Abraham Geiger (1853 – 1856) In addition to Jellinek’s above-mentioned friends (Isaak Markus Jost, Bernhard Beer, and Moritz Steinschneider), another serious reviewer of Jellinek’s corpus of research on kabbalistic texts was Abraham Geiger. But Geiger’s reading of Jellinek was very different. Geiger, now at the beginning of his forties and probably at the height of his rabbinical career as a reformer of Judaism and, at the same time, a leading scholar of the Wissenschaft movement, used the occasion of the review to formulate once and for all the full force of his learned rejection of Kabbalah. This is probably his most philosophical attempt at Kabbalah-hatred, and at the same time his most interesting justification for this open condemnation of Jewish mysticism. Geiger’s text gives us an almost perfect opportunity to understand what motivated several scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums to refuse to see any intellectual or cultural value in Kabbalah. While officiating as the rabbi of the large Jewish community of Breslau, Geiger wrote in 1853 his so called Literaturbriefe (epistles on literature), a collection of letters to an unnamed friend who had stayed for an extended period of time in a remote spa and had asked Geiger to be updated on the latest developments and publications in the field of Jewish studies. Geiger informed his friend of these developments in long and philosophical letters, not only listing several new publications, but commenting on them and analyzing them in great detail.¹ Ludwig Geiger, in an elaborate biography of his father, reported in 1910 that the friend in question was Osias H. Schorr, (Josua Höschel Schorr, ‫יה’’ש‬, 1814– 1895), the “Galician Voltaire” (as per Raphael Kirchheim), a publicist (in the journal heChaluz, where also Geiger contributed) and critical scholar.² Geiger planned to publish his letters to Schorr in the Russian-language journal “Zion”, which appeared in Odessa until 1862 (edited by Leon Pinsker and others), and when this project failed, in his own journal Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben, for which purpose he re-worked all the letters again in 1866 – but eventually decided against a publication at all.³ Geiger’s Literaturbriefe, which afford

 In 1866, Geiger assured his readers in the preface to the letters that he hardly changed anything from the original as he had penned it in 1853. See Abraham Geiger, Literaturbriefe aus dem Jahre 1853, in: Nachgelassene Schriften II, (ed. Ludwig Geiger), Berlin 1875, p. 277– 367.  Schorr and Geiger agreed, for example, that the rabbis of the Gemara did not fully understand the meaning of the Mishnah, and that therefore their decisions were very often absurd and contrary to reason as well as to the spirit of the Mishnah. For Schorr, see: Eliezer Schweid, History of Modern Jewish Religious Philosophy, vol. II, Leiden 2015, p. 125.  Abraham Geiger: Leben und Lebenswerk, ed. Ludwig Geiger, Ismar Elbogen (et al.), Berlin 1910, p. 103 – 104. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-011

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interesting insights into his reading of Pinsker, Reggio, and Samuel Luzzatto among others, were finally published posthumously in 1875 by Ludwig Geiger – in the five-volume edition of his father’s Nachgelassene Schriften. The letter from July 28th, 1853 deals with Jellinek’s Kabbalah studies. It begins with a long exposition of Geiger’s view of Kabbalah in general, providing us with a very sincere analysis of the serious shortcomings of mysticism, as he saw it. Geiger complained that “Kabbalah has never created anything; it has always leaned against existing results of thought and has deformed them.” Kabbalah has consistently flourished at times when the intellect was weak and Bildung was low, he explains, in contradiction to what Jellinek had claimed concerning the dialectical symbiosis of Kabbalah and philosophy. Geiger concedes that there are those who believe that “Kabbalah, mysticism, and romanticism were reactive responses to the cold rationalism of speculative thought,” and who saw mysticism as a “protest of the soul against the degenerating pretense of the intellect, against the reduction of holiness to earthly matters.” But this is the wrong comparison, because shallow rational thought is in itself already the sign of a weak intellect prone to spare the effort to penetrate into its own depth. Both phenomena, shallow intellectualism and all sorts of mysticism, are the “spawn of the same intellectual slackness” for Geiger. Kabbalah possesses nothing whatsoever that is original, the most characteristic feature of Kabbalah being its lack of any kind of system.⁴ But even here, Geiger is ready to explicitly praise “the [proper academic] attempts made by Senior Sachs and Jellinek to find the beginnings of Kabbalah in earlier systems of thought,” because such research, Geiger believed, would ultimately only find support for his own theory that Kabbalah was not born from deductive analytical thought, but originated from synthetic, empiric, even sensual systems of human experience. What follows at this point of the letter is a lengthy epistemological excursus about these different approaches of human understanding to reality which is interesting in terms of the philosophical views of Geiger himself, but which strays far afield from the subject of his rejection of mysticism. Geiger divided the history of all previous philosophy into Aristotelian (empirical-synthetic) and Platonic (idealistic-analytic) directions, but claimed that Jewish thought never took sides in this strict dichotomy of his “because Judaism was never a philosophical system.” Thus, the early mystical work Sefer Yezirah (which Geiger dated with Zunz to the 8th century) was still an odd combination of both philosophical directions, and only Maimonides’ Guide

 Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 313 – 314.

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represented almost pure analytic thought – a climax in Jewish philosophy that was not reached by previous thinkers like Halevi, Ibn Gabriol, or Bahya.⁵ But when original philosophical thought was in decline, towards the end of the thirteenth century, did Kabbalah gain in prestige. Inspired by the heroes of philosophy, as Geiger called the aforementioned authors, the kabbalists mixed their own fantasies [Hirngespinste] with the philosophical ideas they had adopted from their heroes. But it would be absolutely wrong, Geiger insisted, to call those medieval kabbalists the followers or even successors of the Jewish philosophers of the previous century. He continued with the following interesting statement: Equally wrong is the claim that Kabbalah, only because it is dubious and effusive, because it breathes spirit into earthly matters, would possess depth or a greater inwardness. Inwardness, the life of the soul, must not be achieved by spiritual searching; it should rather be expressed through love in our relation to God and man. In mystical [schwärmerischen] systems, all enthusiasm, all movement of the soul, is exhausted, as it were, and then there is nothing left for real life.⁶

What we have here, is one of the more sophisticated reasons offered by a Wissenschaft-scholar for his all-out rejection of Kabbalah. It is not that Geiger rejects inwardness per se, and would permit only rational thought when it comes to a description of the essence of Judaism. But inwardness, the emotional, empirical side of religion, is a purely ethical, interhuman category for Geiger, not a spiritual and individualistic one. It must find expression in the selfless love of God, and through love of God, love of fellow human beings, though not in an effusive searching for “deeper” spiritual meanings in texts or symbols. Geiger the reformer was consistent in demanding of religious inwardness as he demanded of religious ritual and ceremony, that it yield concrete moral results in real life – and not exhaust itself in mystical speculations and playful allegories. This moral demand seems to be the true motive behind Geiger’s strong rejection of Kabbalah: It does not promote the reformed Judaism that he wished to see as

 Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 315 – 317.  Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 317. “Ebenso falsch ist es, wenn man der Kabbala, weil sie schwärmerisch und unklar ist, Geist in Irdisches versenkt, deshalb Tiefe beilegen, deshalb größere Innigkeit zuschreiben wollte. Die Innigkeit, das Gemüthsleben darf sich nicht in der Forschung kundgeben, sie muss sich als Liebe in den Beziehungen zu Gott und den Menschen äußern. In den schwärmerischen Systemen erschöpft sich gewissermassen die Begeisterung, die gemüthliche Regung, und es bleibt für das Leben Nichts übrig.” (I am aware that my translation ‘mystical’ for the German schwärmerisch is not always right, but here it seems to be what Geiger had in mind.)

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a viable, ethical alternative to traditional religion, the Judaism that is capable of survival in the modern age. Even more surprisingly, as an example for this anti-mystical theory, Geiger evoked Maimonides, as if he had not many times before called the author of the Guide the archetype of the cold rationalist. But on the other hand, Geiger claimed here, the seemingly unemotional Maimonides had grasped moral doctrines with much warmth, and maintained close friendships in his private life. This was the exact opposite of his younger contemporary Meir ben Todros Abulafia (1165 – 1244), who was well known for his complacency, and for his pride and arrogance, not only towards Maimonides himself, but towards other humans in general, as Geiger showed, giving several examples from the sources.⁷ Geiger seems to conclude here that whatever the intellectual worth of kabbalistic speculations, mystical activities in thought or in practice lead inevitably to an estrangement from real life at best, or to the immoral behavior of an arrogant elite at worst. Both these consequences of the occupation with kabbala were the ultimate opposite of what Geiger saw as the mission of Judaism to the civilized world: The promotion of a truly ethical relationship with men and God. Continuing his letter to Schorr, Geiger confessed that he had never managed to convince himself to read the Zohar from beginning to end. “Of course, says the true kabbalist, this is because his soul is not made for it, he is not chosen”, Geiger objects to himself, and concedes: “It is indeed possible, and I believe this myself, that a certain predisposition is needed to have your reason confused in such a way.” And although Schorr knew well that his friend was “actually able to rifle even through nonsense” in order to identify the idea laying at the bottom of the text, in the case of the Zohar this was asking too much [wird es mir zu bunt]. In this work of Kabbalah, the inner connection between the different ideas of the text were driven only “by phantasmagoric transformations”, Geiger claimed.⁸ Probably for this reason Geiger called the “high level of attention” devoted to the historical research of Kabbalah in his time “a strange phenomenon” [merkwürdige Erscheinung] – the only formulation within the extensive literature of nineteenth-century Germany regarding Kabbalah research that could reasonably be interpreted as discouraging this research. But Geiger, as if anticipating that twentieth-century scholars of Jewish mysticism would endlessly repeat this unfounded claim of an intentional discouragement to study Kabbalah on the side of their nineteenth-century predecessors, immediately entered into a de-

 Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 318 – 319.  Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 319.

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tailed praise of the scientific efforts of his colleagues in this field, mentioning especially Luzzatto’s “sober and healthy criticism” of the Zohar in the Dialogue sur le Kabbale et le Zohar, because the author had demonstrated compellingly the incorrect use of Aramaic in this work. Adolph Jellinek is also mentioned again, with Geiger applauding his detecting that some passages from the Hebrew works of Moses de Leon are literarily translated into Aramaic in the Zohar. The epistle by Abraham Abulafia, published by Jellinek (as mentioned above), earned the appreciation of Geiger because Abulafia “is voicing therein, in an unconcealed way, his mania to have delighted in higher inspiration.” But Geiger is also fully aware of Jellinek’s personal love of Kabbalah beyond the academic interest, and is highly critical of Jellinek’s attempt to raise Kabbalah to the level of speculative thought. It is clearly “too much of a good thing”, Geiger wrote, with Jellinek publishing so many small kabbalistic treatises with only some scattered notes accompanying them, and it would be even worse if Jellinek “tries to find philosophy everywhere, without accounting for an organized historical development of thought.”⁹ There is still so much work to be done on all fronts of the historical and philological research of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Geiger continued, that nobody has the right to present us with his specific raw material in such great detail as Jellinek did. He should have published “scientific results with sufficient evidence” instead of some single manuscripts without proper annotation. What is missing in Jellinek’s Kabbalah studies, according to Geiger, is Ariadne’s thread, leading us through the textual and intellectual labyrinth of Jewish mysticism. This is obviously the result of the fact that Jellinek himself had not yet found this thread, Geiger concluded his criticism.¹⁰ Again, this notion very much anticipated the difference between nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to the humanities in general, and to Kabbalah studies specifically: Whereas the nineteenth-century scholars were always looking for the great, compelling ideas that organized and categorized all the material under research, the twentieth century saw the rise of detailed manuscript studies, often without acknowledging at all that such overarching ideas exist. If Jellinek was thus a pioneer of modern Kabbalah research, or if Kabbalah indeed cannot be categorized systematically under philosophical subject matters, are absorbing questions to be discussed today. Concerning Geiger, however, upon closer reading, it seems to be obvious from the above-cited passage that he was not actually discouraging Kabbalah research per se, as it may appear, and this despite the clear fact

 Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 319.  Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 320.

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that he held the medieval kabbalists to be “maniacs”. Rather, his criticism is about methodology: he wanted to truly understand the various kabbalistic ideas as part of a non-kabbalistic systematic theory of thought, which is very different from ignoring or neglecting them. Interestingly, Geiger believed he had found Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of kabbalistic thought without doing much detailed manuscript work himself. As long as the specialists in the field (like Jellinek, apparently) did not prove him wrong, Geiger declared that he would adhere to his own results, as described at the beginning of his letter on Kabbalah, and repeated here: “Kabbalah is chewing on the chunks of handed-down philosophy and is stewing up a fantastic ragout out of them.” During this process of stewing, the philosophical ingredients are increasingly extracted from the ragout, to take Geiger’s metaphor further, “until nothing but absurdity [Wahnwitz] remains.” Historically speaking, Geiger saw a clear decline of the sophistication of kabbalistic thought, as did several other Wissenschaft scholars, both before and after him. When Kabbalah came from Spain to the orient, Geiger argued, obviously hinting at Safed and Isaac Luria, it lost all linkage to philosophy and became ever more unreasonable [unsinniger]. The lowest point, however, was Hasidism, Geiger wrote, when eventually Kabbalah “retreated to areas of deep ignorance”, it becoming “arbitrary, hostile to knowledge, superstitious and – immoral.”¹¹ The engendering of unethical behavior is here again the heaviest accusation against Kabbalah that Geiger can think of, and the best reason to reject mysticism universally.¹² Three years later, in 1856, Abraham Geiger published his aforementioned biography of the 17th-century scholar Leon de Modena – one of his true heroes of Jewish intellectual history. The book’s subtitle reads “His Views of Kabbalah, Talmud, and Christianity”, and since in all three cases Modena’s views are highly critical, and since furthermore these three subjects coincidentally also describe Geiger’s own archenemies, his admiration of Modena is but little surprising. As the founder and undisputed head of the Jewish Reform Movement, Geiger was constantly engaged in attempting to oust the Talmud from the throne of Judaism – a goal which, if achieved, would necessitate that his fully reformed and modernized version of the Jewish religion be clearly demarcated from cultural Protestantism, which also emphasized an ethics-oriented and non-dogmatic approach to religion. More interesting is therefore the question of how Geiger’s  Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 320.  Geiger, Literaturbriefe, p. 320. In the rest of the letter (p. 320 – 321), Geiger tries to demonstrate from the Tzava’at Harivash (the ‘Testament of the Baal Shem Tov’) that he possessed in the 1797 Lemberg edition, how Hassidic thought would allow for immorality because it teaches us to ignore our moral (and other) sins for the sake of a pleasurable service of God.

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rejection of Kabbalah, which ostensibly dovetails with the desired rebellion against the Talmud, fits into this scheme of Jewish reform theology. We have seen before how Geiger’s position towards Kabbalah changed over the course of his career from a youthful, enthusiastic call to research Jewish mysticism into an almost unveiled loathing of Kabbalah, particularly in his letter to Joshua Schorr from 1853. This trend continues in the book on Modena. Although the discussion of Modena’s Kabbalah criticism occupies only little space compared to his critique of the Talmud, which attack seems to be Geiger’s main motivation for writing the book, we find here another instance of the harshly worded rejection of Kabbalah by the mature Geiger. Contrary to the equally Kabbalah-loathing Heinrich Graetz (as we shall see below), in this text Geiger is no longer calling for a scientific research of Jewish mysticism – let alone undertaking this research himself, such as Graetz did extensively. Geiger explicitly mentions in the short preface to his book on Modena that his “presentation is written in all objectivity, without the interference of my own view.”¹³ But in order to fully expose what Geiger saw as Modena’s bravery in his unqualified public rejection of Kabbalah, he is forced – somewhat ironically it should be noted – to yet again describe kabbalistic thought in some detail. At the same time, this forced review afforded Geiger another opportunity to clarify his enmity for Kabbalah. In this vain, Geiger claimed that in seventeenth-century Europe, Kabbalah virtually ruled over the minds of many Jews because it presented itself with the pretense of being the highest form of knowledge, and even the ultimate “science of tradition”, as per Geiger’s translation of ‫[ חכמת הקבלה‬Wissenschaft der Ueberlieferung]. Kabbalah posed as an ancient, mysterious secret that only the initiated could join and understand and that the un-initiated had to accept with humility. Geiger assumed that in Modena’s time “only few had the courage to altogether break with this pretentious theory, and even fewer dared to pronounce a judgment of rejection. Many of the not numerous opponents of Kabbalah thought that its contemporary form was distorted … but did not deny its general justification. It was Leon de Modena who belonged to the minority of those who rejected Kabbalah completely, because he saw in Kabbalah pure absurdity.”¹⁴ As we know, this was also Geiger’s own position. In his book on Modena he explained again how completely flawed were the workings of kabbalistic thought: “It presupposes metaphysical and supernatural notions as the basis of its proceedings without taking the trouble to remove from those notions the  Abraham Geiger, Leon da Modena – Rabbiner zu Venedig, Breslau 1856, preface (no page number). See for discussion of Geiger’s book: Yaakov Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah, p. 226 – 227.  Geiger, Modena, p. 11.

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slag of superstition. From here it descends to men and the world, confusing spiritual and material events in such a way that natural law has been abandoned, or rather that everything is now lawful because everything is under the influence of higher spirits.” According to Geiger, it was the intention of the kabbalists to embark on the opposite path, to ascend to the higher regions themselves, but only for the purpose of being able to rule the world now ad libitum. Naturally, they were thus able to work miracles. This arbitrarily constructed system, and the self-ascribed spiritual power of the kabbalists was soon venerated as holiness by many, Geiger complained, and “every doubt was not only fought as erroneous, but condemned as unbelief and sin.”¹⁵ As we saw before, even more than Geiger is interested in the speculative construction of kabbalistic thought, he discussed in his book on Modena its real impact and consequences for the communal and intellectual life of Judaism. But while in the letter to Schorr he feared for immorality as a result of individual kabbalistic practice, here he seemed to be more concerned with the political effects of the rule of the kabbalists. What is common to both accounts, however, is Geiger’s assumption that it is the very nature and essence of mysticism itself that must necessarily and inevitably lead to those unwanted consequences.¹⁶ In a rather precise summary of Modena’s anti-kabbalistic book Ari Nohem, Geiger wrote that Modena claimed Kabbalah was, ultimately, neither wisdom nor tradition. Yaacob Dweck has pointed out very convincingly why Geiger translated the Hebrew term hokhmah (wisdom) here with Wissenschaft: “Geiger seems to have taken a particular relish in positing that Kabbalah had absolutely nothing to do with Wissenschaft.” The term Wissenschaft, argued Dweck, “referred to Geiger’s own systematic pursuit of knowledge”, and he could use here the early authority of Leon de Modena to categorically disconnect Kabbalah from this pursuit.¹⁷ Indeed, for Geiger, Wissenschaft was in itself something very close to holiness, and moreover, it was the effective means of guaranteeing the survival of Judaism under the conditions of modernity, and thus much more than a mere tool for gaining objective knowledge. Kabbalah, by contrast, was according to Geiger’s reading of Modena, neither an authentic tradition (because it was based on pseudo-epigraphy), nor the source of any useful knowledge (because of the arbitrariness of its allegories). In addition, Geiger found in Modena’s Ari

 Geiger, Modena, p. 11.  Again, the German word used here by Geiger was Schwärmerei, which seems to have been his way of saying what we today might call mysticism.  See Dweck, p. 228. Of course, hokhmat Israel was (and often is) the term used to translate Wissenschaft des Judentums into Hebrew, also by the Wissenschaft scholars themselves (see Jellinek’s Hebrew letters to Sachs in Kerem Chemed, for example).

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Nohem the accusation of personal arrogance and false pride on the side of the kabbalists that so irritated him, and actually, it might be legitimate speculation to say that Geiger’s Modena studies first suggested this very idea to him as an additional point of criticism regarding the immorality of Kabbalah. Interesting is also Geiger’s theory why so few premodern rational Jews wrote tracts like Ari Nohem, condemning Kabbalah and exposing its absurdities. Segueing over to the main focus of his book on Modena – his critique of the Talmud – Geiger explained that the reason for the lack of premodern anti-Kabbalah critique was basically that many capable premodern opponents of the Kabbalah sensed that “the arrows they wanted to shoot at Kabbalah would hit more and larger targets than intended.” Although the theory and practice of Kabbalah were unknown at the time of the Talmud, as Geiger believed, undeniably there were seeds of mystical thinking in the talmudic literature. Therefore, those tradition-bound Jewish thinkers who were admirers of the Talmud and opponents of Kabbalah were “forced to tone down their attacks on the latter, in order not to battle the former” – obviously because talmudic law still stood at the center of premodern Jewish life, and that identity needed to be protected. Thus, criticism of Kabbalah was often formulated in such a way that the mystical sounding passages of the Talmud were left unscathed or, at best, reinterpreted – a maneuver that caused the sharpness of the attacks on Kabbalah to be much blunted. Leon de Modena, however, had no such reservations in Geiger’s view. Modena knew well “that the dagger he pointed at Kabbalah could swipe the Talmud as well, and, between the lines, Modena even hinted at his intention to do so.”¹⁸ This, of course, is again completely in line with Geiger’s reform project of Judaism, where no longer is the legal authority of the Talmud marshaled against mysticism, and talmudic learning is used to trump kabbalistic practice, but where both traditions have to yield to pure and objective Wissenschaft – as the new means of identifying as a Jew.

 All quotes: Geiger, Modena, p. 15.

Ignaz Stern’s Study on the Composition of the Zohar (1858) The Wissenschaft movement in German-speaking countries had already produced profound Kabbalah research before the end of the 1850s. For example, Leopold Zunz had discussed the influence of kabbalistic thought on Jewish liturgy and Heinrich Graetz had published a long, learned essay in the Monatsschrift on the origin and the date of the earliest mystical works of Judaism. However, first and foremost, it was a retired school principal and scholar from Hungary, Ignatz Stern (ca. 1810 – 1865),¹ who dramatically advanced scientific knowledge of the Zohar by providing the first extended scholarly analysis of the work’s content and composition. Stern published his long essay on the composition of the Zohar, in German, in numerous small installments between 1858 and 1862. They appeared in the Wissenschaft journal Ben Chananjah, edited by Rabbi Leopold Loew, himself an important figure of the Wissenschaft-movement. Loew was interested in Kabbalah, but he was not an expert.² Nevertheless, Loew’s publication of Stern’s sophisticated philological material demonstrates clearly how this influential patron of Judaic research tried to support Kabbalah studies. In his own 1863 review of previous Kabbalah research within the Wissenschaft movement (devoted especially to Graetz, as we shall see below in detail), Loew complained bitterly that the groundbreaking contributions to Zohar research Stern had published in his journal had so far mostly been ignored. As noted by Loew, Stern was very

 His name is also sometimes given as Ignác, Izsak or Ignaz. There is hardly any biographical data concerning Stern. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon (Hungarian Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1926, edited by Peter Újvári) records that he committed suicide in 1865. Stern was born in Nyitra ca. 1810 (today: Nitra, Slovakia). He worked as a teacher in Vásárhely (Hódmezővásárhely, 25 km north from Szeged). Stern wrote the “Lehrplan für den Sommer-Kurs” for the Vásárhely Jewish School (founded in 1844,) a fact that is mentioned in the school’s yearbook for the 1895 – 1896 academic year, as recorded by Zsigmond Kemény in A Hód-Mező-Vásárhelyi izraelita népiskola multja és jelene (The past and present of the Jewish Elementary School in Hódmezővásárhely). Since Vásárhely is so close to Szeged, Stern may have been in personal contact with Leopold Loew, who was the rabbi of Szeged at that time and the editor of the journal Ben Chananjah, where Stern’s long essay on the Zohar appeared. (I am very grateful to Zsuzsanna Toronyi for finding this information.)  See, however, his study on the introduction of Lurianic reforms in Jewish liturgy and the subsequent rabbinical dispute: Loew,”Kabbalistisch-liturgische Reformen”, first in Ben Channajah 1865 (several instalments), again in Loew, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, ed. Immanuel Loew, Szegedin 1898, p. 280 – 298. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-012

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likely the first scholar to find evidence that different authors, living at different times, had contributed to the work known as Sefer haZohar. Thus, Stern added a path-breaking new theory to the long debate about the work’s authorship.³ Stern was one of the very few Kabbalah scholars of the nineteenth century Wissenschaft des Judentums who won the appreciation even of Gershom Scholem. Scholem, who disproved some of the details of Stern’s research in 1931, a decade later still said of Stern’s work that it was “a very interesting essay and much can be learned from it.”⁴ At the outset of the essay, Stern claimed that no book of Jewish literature was as controversial as is the Zohar. While some would believe that the mere mechanical reading of this text could bring about salvation, others condemned it as an outright deception. From its first appearance, the Zohar was held to be forgery, Stern recounted, but only when the work was printed for the first time, did the real controversy break loose. On the one hand, the Zohar supported the “alarming influence of Kabbalah on Judaism”, as Stern called it, and on the other, Christian scholars like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and others took possession of the book and exploited it for their own interests. In recent times, however, “as much as the adverse effect of the kabbalistic school on Judaism has increased, the more irreconcilable opinions on the Zohar have become.” Finally, scholars like Graetz and his school believed themselves to have proven the pseudo-epigraphical status of the Zohar beyond all doubt.⁵ The only way to save the reputation of the Zohar, as Stern saw it, was to approach the text with unbiased, objective, academic research methods – the methods of the higher criticism – regardless of religious or other authorities. All scholars working on the history of Kabbalah know, Stern complained, how very much in arrears this research is, compared to other fields of Jewish studies, and what had been done in the last decades was “probably too much of a good thing. In order to confront the dangerous tendency to elevate every word of the Zohar to the essence of higher knowledge, the new school has much vilified this formidable part of Jewish intellectual life.”⁶

 Loew wrote this in 1863, without realizing how important this discovery was for the future of Zohar research. See Leopold Loew, “Die neueste Geschichte der Kabbala”, in: Ben Chananja VI, 1863 (several instalments), again in Loew, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, ed. Immanuel Loew, Szegedin 1890, p. 1– 55.  Scholem, Major Trends, 1941, p. 388, See Scholem’s short discussion of Stern in Monatsschrift 1931, p. 360.  Ignatz Stern, “Versuch einer umständlichen Analyse des Sohar”, in: Ben Chananjah 1858, No. 6, p. 267.  Stern, 1858, p. 267.

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Stern was well read in the latest Zohar research by Meyer Hirsch Landauer, David Joel, and Adolf Jellinek, and referred to them regularly, a fact that again attests to the network of Kabbalah scholars within the Wissenschaft movement. But unlike others, he would simply sit down and “subject the content of the Zohar to a precise inspection.” In Stern’s view, nobody could be so conceited as to claim he had discovered the ultimate truth about the Zohar’s origins, although diligently studying its content could provide hints in solving the centuries-old riddle of the Zohar. It was here that he introduced his main thesis, which he then demonstrated extensively throughout the lengthy essay: Because the main body of the text has often been discredited by the shimmering lights surrounding it, and because the supplements, the glossaries that later came into the text, contain much of what has recently been used to justify accusations against the Zohar itself, it might therefore be granted to me to shed more light on some of the passages of the book.⁷

Deviating from the usual positions taken in the debates about the origin of the Zohar (which either affirmed its antiquity or called it a “forgery” of Moses de Leon) Stern was convinced that the Zohar was essentially a patchwork of at least three layers of text composed during different periods that transitioned one into the other. This meant he affirmed the existence of an intellectual connection between the older mystical traditions of Judaism and the Zoharic literature, (an idea others before him had strictly denied), as well as the idea that the Zohar combined all of the different mystical traditions, together with philosophical speculation and Biblical exegesis.⁸ Stern’s thought and literary style were shaped by an interesting mixture of classical nineteenth-century assessments and surprisingly modern judgments. At one point, he would argue, for example, that the form and content of the older parts of the Zohar were “so original that one could not fail to recognize therein a truly Oriental imagination.” Spanish authors would not have been able to write something like this, Stern assumed. Probably less imaginative and endowed with more “subjective self-confidence”, Spanish scholars had hardly used the imagery of nature the Zohar featured in its earlier parts. This is why Stern believed this material was much “closer to antiquity.”⁹ While this was in some ways typical of nineteenth-century literary style analysis,¹⁰ what

 Stern, 1858, p. 268. The German is: Supplemente / Glossarien.  Stern, 1858, p. 269.  Stern, 1858, p. 449.  Compare, for example, how Heinrich Graetz would derive historical facts from the presumed character traits of historical figures (see below).

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Stern had to say about the moral problem of pseudo-epigraphy sounds much more like the assessments of many of today’s scholars. One must not judge the use of fictitious author names in kabbalistic writings by the usual standards, and call this a literary deception. Rather, this false attribution of writings is no fraud, since the real authors had neither the intention nor awareness of committing a forgery or falsification of history. Instead, they wished to promote certain doctrines and opinions under the name and authority of celebrated personalities.¹¹

Stern not only defended the “marvelous style” of the Zohar on many occasions, he even repeatedly justified the blatant anthropomorphisms of the work. “The kabbalists had no intention of describing the essence of God, but rather the way God presented Himself to us,” he explained.¹² Elsewhere, concerning the Zohar’s anatomic descriptions of a gigantic God, he added: “These enormous proportions were chosen so that the frightened intellect, eschewing all comparison, would calm down with the idea of the infinite.”¹³ Although the kabbalists had good knowledge of human anatomy, as Stern conceded, the kabbalistic anthropomorphisms were merely “allegories, determining the concepts that formed our understanding of divine manifestations.”¹⁴ But even for Stern, it was “in the nature of things that this development of ideas would lead to much extravagance, if only because so many hands have touched it.” It was this stylistic extravagance that “degenerated into monstrosity in post-Zoharic literature.”¹⁵ Even as a defender of the worth of the Zohar, here Stern joined the list of those many nineteenth-century scholars who saw a continuous decline in the literary and intellectual quality of kabbalistic writing after the composition of this work. Stern’s overall tendency in his essay to extract a positive meaning or an apologetic explanation for the oft-ridiculed Zoharic text was truly remarkable. Sometimes, this tendency reached the very limit of his declared lack of bias. Stern repeatedly explained the theological inconclusiveness of the Zohar concerning the nature of God – especially the inconsistent references to the Deity as simultaneously immanent and transcendent – as contradictions clearly intended by the authors. “The successive negation and affirmation shows how changeable and

 Stern, 1858, 450. This is reminiscent of David Biale, who wrote in 1979 that “Pseudo-epigraphy became a means for legitimizing a creative work as part of a hidden tradition. The authority of tradition is recognized, but the freedom of literary creation is preserved.” (Biale, Gershom Scholem, p. 119).  Stern, 1858, p.452.  Stern, 1858, p. 507.  Stern, 1858, p. 510.  Stern, 1858, p. 511.

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unstable the concept of God actually is,” he wrote, and even the rationally problematic playing with the names of God in the Zohar is explained away, because Stern believes that those names “do not contain theoretical-objective knowledge of God, but rather our subjective perception of God when contemplating the universe.”¹⁶ Nevertheless, he demonstrated with great philological effort how textual material of very different ages found its way into the Zohar – from “the earliest and pristine haggadic texts to the allegoric style of the latest midrashic material,” so that the collector had indeed to be accused of paying no attention to critical selection, making the Zohar, in Stern’s view, a disorderly concoction without a clear plan. Stern’s theory of the motives behind this collection of raw material, however, was less original: During the talmudic period, when Greek philosophy began to influence Jewish thought, a “peculiar national philosophy” emerged. At the end of the Gaonic period, when “Aristotelian philosophy assailed Judaism,” the more traditionally minded revived this old nationalistic thought and “transformed it into the newer Kabbalah,” as a powerful antithesis to shallow rationalism.¹⁷ While this view of Kabbalah as a reaction to Jewish Aristotelianism was indeed what most of Stern’s predecessors believed to be the reason for its regaining of strength at the end of the thirteenth century, Stern’s truly original contribution to Kabbalah research was his theory of the Zohar’s authorship. Stern repeatedly insisted that neither one single person (as Landauer assumed), nor a group of authors who met for the purpose (as Jellinek thought) could possibly have written the Zohar. ¹⁸ Stern also argued that the obvious similarities in style and content (as found by Jellinek) between Moses de Leon’s own Hebrew works and the Zohar proved nothing, for this resemblance could also mean that Moses de Leon had studied the Zohar so extensively that he unintentionally copied its style in his own writings. Thus, the “plagiarism” happened unknowingly. Some of the dialogues between different Tannaim that apparently parallel one another in the Zohar and Sefer HaMishkal (that Jellinek had used as proof for his theory) were appropriate within the text of Zohar but made less sense within Moses de Leon’s rather philosophical Sefer HaMishkal. Thus, Stern argued, they must have been copied from the Zohar into Moses de Leon’s book and not the reverse. In any case, “all this noise” was “nothing but literary shadow boxing (sit venia verbo)” according to Stern, because a specific author of the Zohar was unlikely ever to be identified.

 Stern, 1859, p. 18 (notes).  Stern, 1859, p. 359 – 360.  Stern, 1859, p. 361.

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The Zohar probably had the same genesis as many midrashim of this period, culminating in the thirteenth century. Pseudo-epigraphy was a trend at a time when authors were still not individual ‘subjects’ in and of themselves. Even Zunz had called pseudo-epigraphy a very old custom, Stern wrote, and the attribution of texts to others was probably more acceptable when much of the material used was indeed from ancient times. Therefore, Stern concluded, there could be no doubt that the redaction of the Zohar proceeded in several stages, and that what we have today was the product only of the last hands that touched the text.¹⁹ Systematically proceeding through the entire Zohar and summarizing, as well as contextualizing, the book’s content in Jewish and non-Jewish culture, Stern compared some of the more philosophical passages of the work with the thought of Yehuda Halevi, Philo and even later medieval works, like the occult writings of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486 – 1535).²⁰ Stern discovered in the Zohar beautiful interpretations of the Torah next to abstruse fantasies, as he repeatedly noted. For example, referring to a certain section of the Zohar he disliked, Stern would comment, “Now, this passage is an example of what the Zohar would sound like if the book really was what its newer critics want to brand it: a sorry effort at trivialities, pieced together by negligible impostors.”²¹ This open attack on his fellow Wissenschaft scholars, who saw the Zohar as entirely ‘worthless’ in terms of Jewish literary culture, must be viewed, at the same time, as Stern’s open praise for the work. It implies that he himself would neither view the authors of the Zohar as ‘frauds’, nor the Zohar itself as ‘forgery’. Even the kabbalistic content of the book was neither trivial, nor ‘fictional’ for Stern. At best, it was a little too eclectic. Compared to earlier passages in the Zohar, it soon became clear that the specific section attacked here by Stern was merely held to be a “clumsy imitation” of what Stern saw as the original and valuable content of the work. But even Stern admitted that it was only the first part of the work that was of true value for him. This he considered the magnum opus of the Zohar, while the later books were, for Stern, of much less literary and intellectual worth and of a much later origin.²² Consequently, Stern’s account of the content became increasingly critical from this point onwards, calling many passages ‘far-fetched’, ‘incoherent’ or ‘plagiarized’. Sometimes he would remark on a certain passage, saying, “here the author has got entirely lost in terms of the style and the spirit of the original    

Stern, 1859, p. 362. Stern, 1860, p. 474. Stern, 1860, p. 68. Stern, 1860, p. 70 – 71.

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Zohar.”²³ Ironically, he might say that “here the writer seems to have forgotten that he was writing in the name of Rabbi Shimon.”²⁴ Stern tried his hand at dating many sections according to philological criteria and content. At times, he discerned interesting theological developments in the text. “While the older Kabbalah still perceived the Biblical patriarchs as symbols of higher potentialities, later kabbalists exaggerated this into an apotheosis”, Stern wrote, hardly hiding his own preferences.²⁵ His dislike for the “younger kabbalists” was motivated by what Stern saw as their intellectual ignorance. They would “tear an antique doctrine out of its context, and build their soaring, Spanish, castles-in-the-air on it, decorated with much sophistry…” He complained, “One searches in vain in those castles for the philosophy of Plato or Pythagoras about the metamorphosis of the soul, for example, or even the doctrine of transmigration that Josephus reported as being held by the Pharisees.²⁶ Beginning from 1862 (No. 15) Stern described in Ben-Chananjah the Zoharic hehalot. Here too it was important for his argument that he placed the motives found in those texts in their cultural contexts. He pointed out that Virgil and old Indian manuscripts referred to ‘seven sections of hell’, and added that what was even more interesting was that parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy were very reminiscent of this kabbalistic literature. But since this work was written at the end of the thirteenth century, “one has to assume that, concerning those matters, some very widespread ideas circulated during this period of time.”²⁷ This substantiated Stern’s theory that the hechalot were younger than the older parts of the Zohar, into which they were forcefully incorporated, without much regard for their presence. The same was true of the “midrash ha-ne’elam”, which Stern called a “sorry effort of one of the most recent latecomers of the Zohar,” who already had the entire work at hand, but whose intellectual level was extremely poor. This was a fact Jacob Emden had noted before him, Stern wrote.²⁸ The Raya Mehemna (‫ )רעיא מהימנא‬did not find much favor in Stern’s eyes either. In his opinion, the fragment was “one of those weird [verschroben] brainchildren of the Middle Ages, shaped by petty quipping [kleinliches Witzeln].” It was thus a typical example of those works, “in which, by a hundred twists

 Stern, 1860, p. 175, “…ist dem Schreiber der Geist und die Sprache des echten Sohar abhanden gekommen…”  Stern, 1860, p. 468.  Stern, 1860, p. 466.  Stern, 1861, p. 387.  Stern, 1862, p. 129.  Stern, 1862, p. 322.

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and wrenches of the words and the letters of scripture, the main idea is dispersed in an underhand way, and where the aimless wandering of the flashing aphorisms causes the reader a feeling of dizziness.”²⁹ Interestingly, here, Stern’s language eventually came to sound exactly like all the well-known critics of the Zohar from Geiger to Graetz. During the years in which his essay on the Zohar was published, his persistent efforts to achieve a kind of descriptive objectivity or unbiased academic perspective finally broke down when faced with the literary nature of the Raya Mehemna. Contradicting all his previous attempts at an impersonal neutrality, he could not but join Graetz and others in assuming that ulterior motives stood behind the writing of this text. Some passages in the Raya fragment seemed to indicate, Stern claimed, what was often insinuated, that “Moses de Leon has written the Zohar to swindle rich people.”³⁰ If the author was not de Leon himself, it must have been somebody living under similar economic circumstances, certainly “a Spanish beggar rabbi [ein spanischer Bettelrabbi] who gave expression to his moods according to his changing success,” success apparently being meant only economically here by Stern. Whomever the author of the Raya Mehemna was, Stern continued his tirade, he was everywhere “exposing himself as a charlatan, who has bitten off more than he can chew, and, disregarding all rules of logic and hermeneutics, freely babbles away.” According to Stern it was simply incomprehensible that “this concoction could have been unified with the kabbalistic midrash of the Zohar, or even been virtually identified with it.” Here again, he returned to his appreciation for what he believed was the authentic Zohar, which he saw as diametrically opposed in style and intellectual standard to the Raya Mehemna. ³¹ But even though towards the end of his long article series, Stern joined those of his colleagues in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement who severely criticized (parts of) the Zohar for excessive literary freedom in its treatment of scriptural exegeses, Stern’s series remains one of the first sincere efforts at describing and analyzing the content of the Zohar in an unbiased academic way. Stern’s theories concerning the authorship of the book were path-breaking, and his historical classification of the different sections of the Zoharic literature shaped the view of the next generation of scholars of Jewish mysticism.

 Stern, 1862, p. 327, “…in welchen durch ein hundertfaches Verdrehen und Verrenken des Wortes und des Buchsstaben der Schrift der Hauptgedanke unter der Hand eskamotiert wird, wo das irrlichtartige Hin und Herfahren der Witzblitze dem Leser Schwindel verursacht.”  Stern, 1862, p. 327. For Graetz’s similar theory, see below. All this goes back to certain claims of the Sefer Yuhasin to this end, written by Abraham Zacuto (1452– 1515).  All quotations Stern, 1862, p. 328.

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When Leopold Loew, the editor of the journal Ben Chananjah (where Stern’s series of articles first appeared) wrote a review in 1863 of all recent Jewish Kabbalah research, he mentioned that Stern, in addition to this extensive discussion of the Zohar, translated parts of this work into German, specifically “the Book of the Hidden and the first two Idras.” Stern was also said to have composed a Vocabularium of Zoharic terms.³² This information seems to be confirmed by the British scholar Christian D. Ginsburg (1831 – 1914), who summarized modern Jewish Kabbalah scholarship in a lecture before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool. The book based on these lectures, The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines, Development and Literature (1865) became the first scientific English-language treatment of the Kabbalah, and it saw countless subsequent editions until the beginning of the twentieth century.³³ At the end of his work Ginsburg made special mention of Stern, saying that “the recent death of this great student in the Kabbalah is greatly to be lamented. With the exception of the analysis of the Sohar, all his works are in manuscript, and it is to be hoped that the accomplished Leopold Loew, chief rabbi of Szegedin and the editor of Ben Chananjah, who was the means of bringing the retiring Ignaz Stern into public, will publish his literary remains.”³⁴ But Loew, despite his own earlier complaints about Stern having been ignored by Heinrich Graetz and almost all other German Jewish Kabbalah scholars, never followed this call.

 See Leopold Loew, Die neueste Geschichte der Kabbala, original in: Ben Chananja 1863, again in Loew, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, p. 1– 55, here p. 2.  Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines, Development and Literature, London 1865.  Ginsburg, p. 148.

Isaak Markus Jost’s last Discussion of Kabbalah (1859) In November 1860, Isaak Markus Jost, one of the Wissenschaft scholars most interested in Kabbalah studies died in Frankfurt/Main. Jost, the first critical historian of the Jewish people, had followed the development of this new field of research with great interest and was in contact with several of the younger scholars of Kabbalah, as we saw. Sometimes, he even tried his hand at his own theories regarding Jewish mysticism. These were historical speculations, usually published as part of his many reviews of the works of modern Kabbalah research, which appeared in several scholarly journals, including his own Israelitische Annalen. While in his first great history work of 1822 Jost had condemned Kabbalah outright as harmful to Judaism, his views on the subject changed dramatically during the course of his life, at least concerning the necessity and importance of an academic study of kabbalistic works. The climax of this interesting development in the appreciation of Kabbalah research is arguably found in Jost’s third (and last) multi-volume history work, published more than thirty years after his first famous attempt to introduce scholarly historiography into the Wissenschaft des Judentums. ¹ This three-volume Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Secten again deals with the entirety of Jewish history down to the present. It was praised especially for its unbiased description of the developments of the nineteenth century – as opposed to the eleventh and last volume of Graetz’s history, which caused heated debate.² In Jost’s third volume, published in 1859, the year before his death, he gave a very detailed and unbiased account of the Kabbalah, almost the opposite, in every respect, of what he had held to be true in his youth. He devoted an entire chapter to the Zohar and another to Lurianic Kabbalah, each almost twenty pages long and treating their subjects with a noticeable attempt at scholarly neutrality. In a lengthy introduction to those Kabbalah chapters, entitled “The Essence of Mysticism”, Jost argued that the aspiration of Jewish mysticism was, from the beginning “to represent the intellectual essence of Judaism in word and deed”. Having emerged as a third direction of Jewish thought, after Talmudism and philosophy, in fact, Kabbalah could be integrated more readily by the students of the Talmud than by the admirers of philosophy, since latter field was, although more easily accessible than the Talmud, permeated with elements

 Isaac Markus Jost, Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Secten, 3 volumes, Leipzig 1857– 1859.  See for example the article on Jost in the Jewish Encyclopedia from 1906 by Isidore Singer. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-013

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foreign to Judaism. Philosophers thought of mysticism as idle musings, argued Jost, and although philosophy knew of secret doctrines, the purpose of this secretiveness was only to protect philosophy against misuse by the immature masses. The mystical secrets of Kabbalah, however, were of a completely different nature and demanded a holy initiation. Therefore, mysticism had to reject philosophy as presumptuous, while philosophy opposed mysticism because the mystic categorically denied simple reason and built his thought only on the imagination. “The mystic called philosophy paganism, in the sense of atheism”, Jost explained, still trying hard to maintain a neutral position, “while the philosopher called mysticism idolatry.”³ Nevertheless, neither side branded the other heretical, and often the more imaginative philosophers or Talmudists dealt also with Kabbalah, while some of the more rational mystics sometimes intruded on philosophy. Eventually, Jost concluded his harmonizing account of medieval Jewish mysticism somewhat over-placidly, with each side viewing the other as justified. In what he called “an even more important preliminary remark”, Jost added that in the study of Kabbalah, it was important to first acquire an acute sense of the very original way in which this secret doctrine was expressed by its authors. Here again, instead of rejecting this secret language as an erroneous invention (as others did), Jost actively encouraged its deciphering in the framework of an academic approach to mysticism, because otherwise the true intention of the kabbalistic authors would be lost to the scholar. Even the most careful attention to these mystical texts was in danger of misunderstanding their inner meanings, and blundering in translation if “this presently extinct language” was not understood within its own cultural context [Stimmung]. Especially for an historian like himself, Jost claimed, it was essential to present in his scholarship only those mystical phenomena that he had fully understood, and to leave the indepth research of the entire mystical construction to the expert. To this, Jost added a footnote, referring to Jellinek’s studies of Kabbalah, discussed above, but only after declaring that “this field has not yet been researched adequately enough” [noch gar nicht gehörig gewürdigt] – a situation he obviously wished would soon change.⁴ Mysticism, for Jost, was positively “the natural consequence of an abounding wealth of thought caused by the profuse richness of the sources in the Hebrew Bible”. Mysticism claimed “that divine revelation, seen consequently as  All quotations from, Jost, Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Secten, Leipzig, vol. 3, 1859, p. 65. Later he emphasized that if a philosopher like Saadia Gaon wrote a commentary on the Sefer Yezirah, this was a sign “that Saadia thought mysticism was philosophy” (p. 68 – 69).  Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 66.

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the epitome of truth, cannot be reduced to the Bible, since an infinitude of questions are not even touched upon in the Biblical text, while the solutions offered by the Bible are often so incomprehensible and contradictory that the most careful reasoning is unable to accept them.” To be turned into truth, those passages had to have a mystical meaning that only higher, unearthly imagination could grasp. Jost paraphrased what he believed to be the intellectual explanation for the origin of Kabbalah, but his language in this detailed passage of his History was sympathetic throughout, and devoid of the arguments he and others had previously made about Kabbalah barely filling a spiritual gap in times of intellectual crisis.⁵ Ultimately, Jost seriously doubted if the kabbalistic message would ever be accessible to uninitiated Jewish laymen and scholars alike. “Actual kabbalists have surely been smiling at all those attempts to understand the meaning of their teachings”, he wrote. Even more radically, he questioned whether there had been any kabbalistic message in the first place. Jost claimed it was highly questionable that original kabbalistic books had any meaningful content [wirklichen Lehrstoff] at all. “Probably everything is merely form” to be filled by the imagination of the kabbalist ever anew. This situation only changed when Kabbalah tried to defend itself against philosophy, or when it tried to win the philosophers over.⁶ Following this, Jost discussed Azriel ben Menachem of Gerona and Nachmanides in some detail, eventually arriving at the origin and impact of the Zohar. This work was “the Talmud of the Kabbalah”, Jost wrote, surprisingly adding the statement that the Zohar “had an unmediated impact on the concept of religion for a large number of Jews.” This rather unqualified assessment was truly remarkable for the nineteenth century in its lack of bias. No less surprisingly, Jost claimed that “the origin of this great work was covered by an impenetrable fog” that had been lifted only by his friend, Hirsch Landauer, who had claimed that “the authorship of the Zohar stood in close connection with the life of Abraham Abulafia”.⁷ Here followed a whole chapter on the life and works of Abulafia, and only at its end did Jost introduce, by means of half a sentence, the opinion of Adolf Jellinek, that Moses de Leon was the actual author of the Zohar. Back in 1852, seven years earlier, Jost had still claimed “Jellinek deserves the gratitude of the scholarly world for finally proving that Moses de Leon authored the Zohar”.⁸ However, apparently Jost’s view had changed in the meantime.

   

Jost, Jost, Jost, Jost,

Geschichte, 1859, p. 67. Geschichte, 1859, p. 69 – 70. Geschichte, 1859, p. 74. Jellinek, p. 9.

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He now assumed that the Zohar was a composite of several texts, authored by a group of editors, and that hence the question of authorship had become “less essential, as attractive as it might be.”⁹ Explicitly, Jost argued that the Zohar was not an original creation of the thirteenth century (he used the German term Erdichtung, a word often used pejoratively in the sense of forgery). It had not been written in order to spread new ideas and doctrines. Rather, the “most essential part of the Zohar consists of antique teachings from the oriental school.”¹⁰ Only here and there had the editors weaved in some of their own antirabbinic views. “The Zohar is not a work of deceit [Betrug]”, Jost continued, “but the final point of a long development.” Anticipating the argument of the Scholem School, he declared that “the suspicion of forgery is unfounded”, basically because “the attribution of the work to Simon bar Yochai is only an artistic device used to provide the authority of antiquity for the Zohar.” The name of Rabbi Shimon was recognized by all, even by the medieval adversaries of Kabbalah, “as nothing but the banner of the Zoharic school”.¹¹ Somewhat contradicting his own harmonizing introduction, as Jost now argued, the purpose of the Zohar was frankly revealed in the work itself: to oppose both the philosophical and the talmudic schools of Judaism. Jost agreed with the Zohar that philosophy led to arbitrariness [Willkür] and the talmudic treatment of the Law according to the dead letter led to the death of religion itself. Only the mystical approach to the Bible would raise man above the animal that was born to serve. Jost’s entire account of the Zohar is disguised as a paraphrase or a learned summary, but in fact it seems that by keeping the transitions vague, Jost actually tried to avoid giving the impression he appreciated the work too much. “The Zohar recommends itself to talmudic scholars as the revelation of a secret doctrine that had always existed [within Judaism]”, Jost explained in an apparently neutral, descriptive tone, “in order to demonstrate to the Talmudists that it stands firmly on the ground of the Jewish religion.” But then, without transition, he introduced a claim of his own: “So, if the Zohar here and there presents a foreign doctrine we must assume that this thought had existed within Judaism previously, and was not introduced into it [by the Zohar]”. The obvious but unmentioned example was the trinitarian god, for which Jost’s friend, Landauer, had already assumed a pre-Christian origin in Jewish mysticism. At any rate, the presumed indigenousness of the Zohar to Judaism was the very reason for its “sur-

 Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 78.  Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 77– 78  Jost Geschichte, 1859, p. 78.

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prising success”, despite “the peculiar forms” its doctrines often assumed, according to Jost. If those doctrines were not foreign to Jewish teachings, the kabbalists had discovered a new source of knowledge that was closed to the “common Talmudist”. For all those and additional reasons, the emergence of the Zohar was an “important event in the history of religion” (and probably in general), and its influence required extensive research.¹² In this passage, we find another confirmation of the rule, recognized earlier, that a sympathetic view of Kabbalah was usually accompanied by the assumption of its origin from within the Jewish intellectual tradition. Jost claimed that, as intended by their authors, medieval readers of most kabbalistic works did not suspect their relatively recent date of composition for quite some time.¹³ They believed that long-forgotten works taken from the literary remains of the revered teachers of antiquity had now been discovered. Thus, “faith in the depth of Kabbalah was nurtured, without a clear picture of how it was being conveyed”. Then again, the most important teachers of Judaism had always favored the assumption that there was a deeper meaning to many verses of the Bible, which was open only to the initiated, thus confirming belief in a secret doctrine. In this sense, even philosophers paved the way for Kabbalah, Jost emphasized. When the Zohar finally appeared, nothing stood in the way of its appreciation.¹⁴ Contrary to a widespread opinion among Jewish scholars of the nineteenth century, Jost saw in Lurianic Kabbalah, at least in its original form, a higher development, even a more “scientific Kabbalah”, as he called it, compared to antique or medieval mysticism.¹⁵ Most other scholars, while sometimes still holding the Zohar to be a creative addition to the development of Jewish thought, depreciated Lurianic Kabbalah as the climax of all that was wrong with mystical theories in Judaism. Leopold Zunz initiated this view as early as 1818, and, ironically, the younger Jost himself had held it, as we saw above, at least until the end of

 All quotes, Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 79. Jost refers here to “the remarkable attempt to describe the basic doctrines of the Zohar in a scientific way, made by Rabbi Dr. H. Joel in 1849”. (p. 79, note 2). See for Joel’s book p. 83 – 93 above.  Interestingly, as he had previously used the somewhat pejorative German word Erdichtung, here Jost employed the no-less problematic phrase “untergeschobene Schriften” [foisted] for pseudo-epigraphy, indicating that with all his sympathetic approach to Jewish mysticism, even for Jost this part – the perceived deceit – was at least objectively a problematic aspect of the history and nature of kabbalistic literature.  All quotes, Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 80 – 81.  “Wissenschafliche Kabbalah”, Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 142.

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the 1830s.¹⁶ In 1859, Jost recognized in the writings of Moses Cordovero (1522 – 1570) and Isaac Luria “an astonishing upsurge of the intellect [Geist]” in order to solve the most sublime riddles. About the sixteenth century developments, Jost now wrote, “No longer satisfied by the vague and ambiguous expressions of the Sefer Yezirah and Zohar, those kabbalists declared that the long-expected time of a new revelation of higher truths has finally come”. He argued that the genesis of the world and its relation to the divine attributes was especially riddlesome. He proceeded, very positively, to describe how kabbalistic thought tried to excerpt from the Bible solutions that were hidden there in delicate hints, in the sequence of the verses and chapters, in the names of God, in the form of the Hebrew letters, and in many other signs that most other Jewish scholars of the nineteenth century did not consider to hold any kind of higher meaning. But what they utterly despised as a method, Jost went as far as to call a Wissenschaft. For him, the kabbalistic method created “an infinitely extended symbolism [Sinnbildlichkeit], continuously generating itself further”. Thus, this method realized tenets [Lehrsatz] and opinions [Anschauungen] in our intellectual perception simply by way of allegory.¹⁷ As if to demonstrate the depth of Luria’s teachings, Jost then began a short philosophical account of the four steps of creation and the ten spheres, only to interrupt this discussion after half a page of serious deliberations with the open confession that, in fact, he was entirely unable to explain how this complex system of thought, signs, letters and numbers actually worked. “Those who want to comprehend this are forced to leave the entire present behind and to sink into a world of concepts that is completely lonely and populated only by a small number of rabbis who don’t even agree among themselves about the inner coherence of this world.”¹⁸ This was not the first time in his book that Jost admitted he could not comprehend kabbalistic thought the way he actually wanted to, thereby giving an impressive account not only of his modesty, but to an even greater degree, his deep respect of the subject itself, as well as its proponents.¹⁹ This almost impenetrable world of mystical thought, Jost wrote, “nevertheless inspires admiration as the work of a lofty imagination that is accompanied by judicious understanding – and this because of its purpose, rather than because of the ingenuity used to create it. The purpose of Kabbalah is to bring men into immediate connection with God, to altogether sanctify both the mind and the way of life  See Jost’s discussion of Luria in 1832, above, p. 33 – 34. Others who held this view were Abraham Geiger and Abraham Adler (see above p. 77– 78).  Jost, Geschichte, 1859, vol. III, p. 144.  Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 146.  See for another example, see p. 143.

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[Gesinnung und Wandel].”²⁰ Jost, who was not a rabbi nor primarily interested in the morals of his community or even in the social function of religion as such, could, contrary to Geiger, take intellectual pleasure in the complex labyrinths of kabbalistic mysticism without so much as thinking of the consequences of getting lost. While Geiger was a deeply religious person who cared for a strictly ethical relation between man and God, the philosophical Deist Jost acquired a taste for Kabbalah because of its beautiful allegories for the relationship between man and God. But it was precisely here, that also for Jost the “degeneracy” [Ausartung] that so many other Jewish scholars of the nineteenth century associated with Kabbalah began, especially in its Lurianic variety. In its attempt to deal with morality and ethical concepts, kabbalistic practice gradually lost control. Jost described a transition process here, proceeding more carefully than his predecessors. While “because of Adam’s original sin, humans as such must constantly work to improve their ways and expiate their faults, the Kabbalah does not only require repentance and contrition, but also continued mortification and penance.” If now, for example, the required act of penitence was the “writing down of an infinite number of formulae expressing the divine name in order to heal the soul, this practice will easily transition into the misuse of those formulae as remedies in cases of illness or as protection from dangers”. Neither Luria himself, nor even Haim Vital, his student and biographer, were to be blamed for this misuse, according to Jost, although Vital’s exuberant praise for Luria contributed to the belief that by means of Kabbalah, miracles could be worked even today. Only the later generations of kabbalists included “sinister characters who deceived themselves, if not even some outright hypocritical imposters.”²¹ At this point, Jost returned to his detailed explanation of some of the fundamental ideas of Kabbalah in general, this time proceeding successfully over two full pages of his book, but finally concluding again that all these theories, and especially gematria, were mostly “figments of an imagination that indicates a disease of the brain” [Ausgeburten einer hirnkranken Phantasie]. Every kabbalistic book after Luria, Jost concluded, was “only proof of how far human reason can stray [abirren].”²² Thus, eventually, even Jost agreed with the Wissenschaft des Judentums thesis of the gradual decline of the previously intellectual Kabbalah into superstition and fraud. But still, Jost’s account of Jewish mysticism in  Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 146. Emphasis in the original.  Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 147.  Jost, Geschichte, 1859, p. 150. The rare exemption mentioned in some detail is Isaiah Horowitz’s (1555 – 1630) work ‫שני לוחות הברית‬, [Shnei luchot haBrit] which Jost seems to value very much (p. 151– 152).

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general was far more balanced than the treatment of this subject by most other nineteenth century scholars and displayed a true and deep interest, sometimes even approaching an honest appreciation for the wealth of thought and imagination of Kabbalah. As it gradually developed from the outright rejection of his youth to a cautious rapprochement at the end of his life, Jost’s attitude towards Kabbalah moved in the opposite direction to that of several other Wissenschaft scholars. First and foremost among them was Abraham Geiger, as we will see below, who went from a critical appreciation of mysticism at the beginning of his scientific career all the way to a complete rejection of it in the late 1860s. From his youthful days in Wolfenbüttel, Jost’s friend Leopold Zunz, was less cautious about what he thought of as “a disfigurement of the most beautiful poetries” by the mystical and largely unintelligible kabbalistic accretions that began to cover the Jewish prayer books form 1500 onwards. In 1859, the same year that Jost published his last work on Jewish history, the second part of Zunz’ comprehensive historical work on Jewish liturgy appeared. In it, the author made no secret of his aversion to kabbalistic influences on liturgical poetry. “At the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared Haim Vital, Isaiah Horwitz, and Hirz ben Jacob with their Lurianic copycats, with new prayers, outrageous words, [and] unintelligible meditations (‫)כוונות‬.”According to Zunz, these “soon dominated the public prayer books.” No rite of prayer (‫ )נוסח‬remained untouched by this kabbalistic onslaught, Zunz claimed to have discovered from studying different siddurim from Jewish cultural centers far apart from each other. “Superstition and the service of spirits was perpetuated in the countless names of the angels and in sefirotic bombast, the meaning of public prayer was diminished, and charms [Amuleten-Kram] were brought into the siddur and among the people.”²³

 Leopold Zunz, Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes, geschichtlich entwickelt, Berlin 1859, p. 149 – 150.

Heinrich Graetz’s Study of Early Mystical Literature (1859) While Zunz bemoaned the penetration of Lurianic Kabbalah into Jewish liturgy, still in 1859, Heinrich Graetz published in the Monatsschrift, a new piece of serious scholarship that dealt with the mystical literature of the Gaonic Period in three longer installments. This is a somewhat ironic coincidence, since it was Zunz who is generally thought to have been the most dedicated Wissenschaft des Judentum scholar, while Graetz’s bias towards Kabbalah is considered a settled issue. At any rate, Graetz already complained in the introduction to his long essay that Zunz’s Kabbalah scholarship, especially what he had published in 1832 (in his Gottesdienstliche Vorträge, discussed above) was in fact “as trivial as possible” [nichtssagend]. But this ‘triviality’ was part of larger desideratum for Graetz, who emphatically regretted from the outset of the study that so little had been done to explore the mystical literature of Judaism. The “origin, meaning, content, and scope of Jewish mysticism, which, during the 12th century, assumed the name of Kabbalah, have been researched scientifically very little so far”, Graetz wrote, and although “many attempts have been made in the last decades in that direction, they have not led to satisfying results, in part for the lack of manuscripts, in part for the lack of critical scholarship.” According to Graetz, some of the research results Zunz published in 1832 were completely wrong, and he had not even considered some of the most important works on the subject (especially the Shi’ur Qomah). But in order to understand both the genesis and development of Jewish mysticism, it was necessary to critically illuminate all existing literature and to demarcate the relevant periods, Graetz insisted. Adolph Jellinek had paved the way for this research, but his introductions to the manuscripts he published often lacked a critical approach and the ability to ask the right questions. This was the purpose of Graetz’s present study: to analyze the oldest mystical manuscripts available scientifically, and put them into their historical contexts.¹ Going to work with meticulous, detailed analyses, and using manuscripts, printed books and Jellinek’s modern editions, in his essay of largely unbiased scholarship, Graetz focused fully on what he intended to prove: the age, origin, and intertextual connections of the earliest literature of Jewish mysticism. There

 Heinrich Graetz, “Die mystische Literatur in der gaonäischen Epoche”, in: Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1859, three instalments: p. 67– 78, 103 – 118, 140 – 52. Here, p. 67– 68. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-014

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is not a single personal judgment to be found, except for what Graetz presents as the result of his rather dry and technical research: that the main sources of the old mystics form a coherent whole, that in terms of periodization they do not belong to the talmudic, but the Gaonic age, and that their sometimes extreme anthropomorphic descriptions originated outside of Judaism. Concerning content, Graetz distinguished between theoretical and practical mysticism, and listed theosophical, angeologic and theurgic-thaumaturgic groups of texts, illustrating all of them with several examples.² The First Book of Enoch in particular had been written during the post-talmudic period, under a strong Christian influence, Graetz claimed. Interestingly, for this latter thesis, Graetz had no difficulty in contradicting the opinion of the most eminent Protestant scholars of his time, August Dillmann (1823 – 1894) and Heinrich Ewald (1803 – 1875). In 1851, Dillmann had published the first critical edition of ‘Ethiopian’ Enoch, but he had dated the book to the Hasmonean period. Graetz disagreed. For him, the Messiah described in the book was the Nazarene Christos.³ Whatever the academic merit of this theory, it is clearly apparent that in his discussion of early mysticism, Graetz would not try to appease Christian scholars in order to make the case for Jewish emancipation – as has so often been claimed.⁴ But Abraham Geiger was also refuted here by Graetz: the Quran did not adopt its own interpretation of Enoch from Judaism, as Geiger had claimed in his famed dissertation, but from Christianity.⁵ The most outstanding aspect of Graetz’s argument in this essay was that, apart from a few linguistic points, it was founded basically on strictly theological reasoning. The book of Enoch, which he called a ‘concoction’, could not date from the talmudic period, Graetz argued, because the talmudic sages generally showed far less reverence for that biblical figure than the mystical texts did. This argument was even more relevant to the Shiur Qomah: Graetz did not think there was any way this text could have originated in the same theological concepts that distinguished the Talmud.⁶ The “monstrous anthropomorphisms”

 Graetz, Die mystische Literatur, p. 145 – 150.  Graetz, Die mystische Literatur, p. 106, note 3. Graetz: “It is an odd thing with those pious exegetes: While everywhere in the Old Testament they want to find Christology, in the Apocrypha they see nothing but Jewishness.”  See as one example: Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past, p. 70.  Graetz, Die mystische Literatur, p. 106. Geiger has written a prize-winning dissertation on the question of the Jewish sources of the Quran, see Abraham Geiger Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?, Bonn 1833.  For a later discussion of the Shiur Qomah, see also Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 5, 3rd edition, Leipzig 1895, p. 193.

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of this midrash (in measuring God’s forms) could actually “not be of Jewish origin” at all, according to Graetz’s understanding. “Biblical and talmudic Judaism are opposed to nothing more than to the humanization [Vermenschlichung] of God”, Graetz wrote, “and now even this uncouth way of imputing to God body parts, limbs and even a beard!”⁷ On the other hand, though, for Graetz, the Shiur Qomah was the central text, “the actual focus” of Jewish mysticism in the Gaonic period, and its author was convinced he had made an important and salutary discovery with those anthropomorphisms that disconnected the text’s ideas so decisively from previous haggadic material. If the Shiur Qomah was thus thoroughly “un-Jewish and anti-Jewish”, Graetz consequently asked “from which side this monstrosity was smuggled into Judaism?” His answer was Islam. This religion, “because of its character as a bastard and its caricature of dogma” has produced numerous sects, among them those who held exactly this anthropomorphic view of God that Graetz reproduced so elaborately in his essay, according to the several Arabic sources at his disposal.⁸ Graetz identified here not only the same general literary principle, as compared to the Shiur Qomah, but even some identical figures of speech. With this, he claimed, “secured proof is given that the anthropomorphic mysticism of the Shiur Qomah had its origin in the extravagance of Mahommedan theology.”⁹ In the third part of the essay Graetz attempted to demonstrate in detail that in the same way that Islamic anthropomorphic theology arose to oppose a rational, allegorical interpretation of the Quran, the alleged Jewish reproduction of this theology in the Shiur Qomah also emerged in opposition to the non-literal, parabolic Biblical exegesis by Karaite “Jewish Mutazilites” in the ninth century. Only thus it could be explained, Graetz argued, that the author of Shiur Qomah did not only not realize his own anti-Jewish tendencies but was even convinced he had done something meritorious, believing himself to have saved the literal sense of the Bible. Interestingly, Graetz was completely unbiased in this case – he even summarized with a lesson of history: “As a rule, mysticism is a direct reaction to a destructive philosophy.”¹⁰ Radical rationalism in biblical exegesis, even the famed version of it proposed by Maimonides, was generally abhorrent to Graetz, as can be shown in many instances in his work, including here. In the essay under discussion, he preferred the “metaphorical interpretation of the talmudic sages” when it came to anthropomorphic descriptions in the Bible, to that

 Graetz, Die mystische Literatur, p. 114.  Graetz, Die mystische Literatur, p. 115 – 116.  Graetz, Die mystische Literatur, p. 118.  Graetz, Die mystische Literatur, p. 144.

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of Maimonides.¹¹ Graetz the critical historian, who himself wrote some Bible-critical works towards the end of his life, always read Scripture as historical literature and saw very little theological reason to re-interpret the literal sense of it philosophically. In this way, the theological argument that Graetz advanced here against a Jewish mysticism that was already endemic in the ninth century seems not to have been motivated by his own theological preferences, as much as he might have opposed anthropomorphism. Rather, he clearly believed he had shown on an unbiased, strictly textual and historical-critical level, that not solely the extreme anthropomorphisms of Shiur Qomah, but also their praise by the author of the text as a salutary element within Judaism, pointed towards the foreign origin of this doctrine. Graetz, with his deep learning in and honest appreciation for talmudic Judaism, was simply unable to accept a scenario in which these two ideologies could coexist within Jewish thought, as many later Kabbalah scholars assumed it to be possible. It was probably the nature of this theological argument that made Graetz the favorite hate-figure for the Scholem school in later Jewish Kabbalah research, a position he has continued to occupy until today.¹² Falsely accused of apologetically defending his own views on anthropomorphism, Graetz is said by his critics to have committed a sin that he himself demonstrably rejected time and again: reading history through the lenses of a particular ideology.¹³ It is likely that part of this accusation stems from Graetz’s critics’ own ideologies, in which they assume the existence of a preferred ‘authentic Judaism’, independent of ‘foreign philosophies’, that always contained a ‘sinful,’ nihilistic, and often antinomian element.

 For Graetz’s rejection of Maimonides exegesis, see Kohler, Reading Maimonides, p. 75 – 81 and 209 – 215.  See here for a longer discussion: Boaz Huss, “The Theologies of Kabbalah Research”, Modern Judaism 34:1 (2014), p. 3 – 26  See for this rejection already Graetz’ programmatic first essay “Die Konstruktion der jüdischen Geschichte”, first in: Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judenthums (1846): p. 81– 97, 121– 32, 361– 81, and 413 – 21. (New edition by Nils Roemer, Düsseldorf 2000. English translation: “The Structure of Jewish History” in: Heinrich Graetz, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, ed. Ismar Schorsch, New York, 1975).

The Seventh Volume of Graetz’s History of the Jews (1863) Heinrich Graetz’s most famous and most contentious work on Jewish mysticism was yet to be published, however. 1863, three years after the publication of the above-mentioned essay, Graetz finished the seventh volume (the fifth to be appear in print) of his landmark History of the Jews, which would eventually comprise eleven volumes. Volume seven dealt with the years from the death of Maimonides in 1204 until the expulsion of Spanish and Portuguese Jewry in 1492. It was in this book that Graetz published almost all of what he had to say about medieval Kabbalah, including all the derogatory language that would later earn him the infamy of having been the greatest foe of Kabbalah, and which meant that later Kabbalah scholars (in part excluding Scholem himself) would ignore all his research results. As was very typical for nineteenth-century works of history, Graetz divided his account of Kabbalah into two separate parts, the historical description of works and events in the history of Kabbalah, which appeared in the body of the seventh volume, and the actual scholarship (passages quoted from manuscripts together with philological analysis) which appeared in two essay-long endnotes in an appendix to the book. These were the extensive third endnote, which comprised seventeen-pages of small print and was entitled The Origins of the Kabbalah, as well as the equally extensive scholarly note on the authorship of the Zohar (endnote twelve).¹ Surprisingly, most critics of Graetz’ attitude to Jewish mysticism do not take these endnotes into consideration and focus only on the (occasionally) contemptuous style of the descriptive chapters.² This tendency appears most blatantly in Peter Schäfer’s two full-length articles devoted to what he calls Graetz’s “Adversus cabbalam”, intentionally associating the Jewish historian with the kind of hatred found in the literary antisemitism of the “Adversus Judaeos” genre. Not even once does Schäfer mention Graetz’s influential Kabbalah research as presented in the two long endnotes.³

 Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 7, first edition: Leipzig 1863, here quoted according to the second edition, Leipzig 1873, p. 421– 438, and p. 466 – 484.  Oddly enough, the endnotes are not included in the English translation of Graetz (Philadelphia 1894, reprinted 1956.)  Peter Schäfer,‘Adversus cabbalam’ oder: Heinrich Graetz und die jüdische Mystik‘, in: Reuchlin und seine Erben, ed. P. Schäfer & I. Wandrey, Ostfildern 2005, p. 189 – 210, and Peter Schäfer, ‘Ex oriente lux? Heinrich Graetz und Gershom Scholem über den Ursprung der Kabbala‘, in: Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs 2003, p. 69 – 90. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-015

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To be sure, in the book chapters in question, Graetz did indeed use some strong language in classifying kabbalistic thought within the general theological trends of Judaism. He used even more explicit formulations in describing the motives for kabbalistic pseudo-epigraphy, especially that of Moses de Leon. But even this language occurred only in a very small part of his account of the development of the Kabbalah in thirteenth-century Spain and its subsequent spread over all of Europe. In fact, judgmental attitudes are present only in some short passages interspersed within the otherwise rather intentionally objective, scholarly, and neutral descriptions of kabbalistic thought and concepts that make up most of his account. Above all, this entirely unequal relationship between the judgmental and the descriptive passages doesn’t take into account the two above-mentioned endnotes by Graetz on the origins of Kabbalah and the Zohar. Those endnotes are scientific and unbiased, quoting manuscripts (in Hebrew), dating relevant theological concepts, and comparing textual fragments.⁴ In fact, this method, in which Graetz separated the descriptive and occasionally judgmental accounts from the historical scholarship, presenting and discussing sources, was the common and widely accepted way of writing history books in nineteenth-century Germany. Initially developed by Leopold Ranke (1795 – 1886), the father of modern historiography, this method of separation of narrative from research was eagerly adopted by Graetz. In German, the word for history is also the word used for story. Stories had to be told, and they should be based on source material, but also on the intuition of the historian himself, filling the gaps frequently left open by the scarcity of the archive material found.⁵ Ranke was probably also Graetz’ role model for including in history books what in German is called Charakterbilder, the attempt to infer from a historical figure’s perceived character traits reliable reasons for historical developments, as well as discerning the credibility of his writing from the circumstances of his life.⁶ This was one of Ranke’s innovations in historiography, and this is exactly what Graetz adopted in his so often-maligned personal description of

 In his important book on the Jewish historian, Marcus Pyka devoted a long passage to Graetz’s technique and purpose in endnote writing. See Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz, Göttingen 2008, p. 228 – 229.  In Ranke’s work, those collections of historical material and sources are called Analekten and could even fill a whole separate volume (See his multivolume Englische Geschichte from the 1860s, vol. 4), but more often they follow the narration at the end of the same volume, as in Graetz.  For this method, see Marcus Pyka, “Der Held als Schwächling? oder: ein gemischter Charakter: zur ‘biographischen Methode’ in der Geschichte der Juden von Heinrich Graetz”, in: Historisches Bewusstsein im jüdischen Kontext, Innsbruck 2004, p. 109 – 118.

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Moses de Leon. Ranke and Graetz further shared a consequent rejection of any ‘philosophy of history’, because historicism itself was the philosophy standing behind their writing. Both historians were interested in the ‘objectivity’ of the pure fact, (“how things really were”) and both were therefore very much concerned with detecting and revealing historical counterfeiting. In fact, Ranke’s famous unmasking of the (previously canonical) Italian scholar Francesco Guicciardini (1483 – 1540) is again somewhat similar to what Graetz discovered about Moses de Leon and his work: The proper dating of the Zohar was achieved by Graetz through the revelation of the a-historical irregularities in the Zohar itself.⁷ Thus, technically, what Graetz did in writing on Kabbalah in the seventh volume of his History, was broadly consistent with nineteenth-century German historicism and its formal and literary style.⁸ This fact was probably another reason for the odd discrepancy between the positive evaluation of Graetz’s Kabbalah scholarship in the nineteenth as opposed to the rejection of Graetz in the twentieth century. An unbiased reading of Graetz’s account of Kabbalah and the Zohar, even within the main body of the seventh volume of the History, will lead to results quite different from the overall tenor of modern scholarship. Out of the eleven chapters in this volume, two are entirely devoted to Kabbalah, that is, to its origins and main protagonists. The third chapter of Graetz’s volume “The Secret Doctrine of Kabbalah” stretches over twenty-five pages.⁹ Ironically, Graetz opened the chapter with an attack on Maimonidean rationalism, a procedure that became quite common in nineteenth-century accounts of the origin of Kabbalah, at least for those German-Jewish scholars who were interested in justifying and explaining the rise of mystical thought in medieval Judaism, and did not straightaway reject it.¹⁰ Maimonides intended to unite Judaism beyond all doctri-

 For Ranke and Guicciardini cf. Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, Oxford 2011, p. 253 – 288. Of course, Graetz was not the first to point out the mentioning of the Crusades and other post-talmudic events and thoughts in the Zohar, but he constructed a historically consistent picture (in his view) from those facts and from the biography of Moses de Leon as it was known to him by then. Much of the latter was later corrected by Scholem.  On closer consideration, there are many interesting differences between Ranke and Graetz.. But for the purposes of this study, the general conformity might suffice. For a more detailed view, see Hans Liebeschütz, “Historismus und Wissenschaft des Judentums: Abraham Geiger und Heinrich Graetz”, in: Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild von Hegel bis Max Weber, Tübingen 1967.  I mention these numbers because, given the ongoing accusation of the neglect of Kabbalah research in nineteenth-century Germany, they seem to be appropriate.  For Kabbalah as a response to Maimonidean philosophy, see Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Kabbalah and Science in the Middle Ages”, in: Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, ed. Gad Freuden-

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nal doubt, but only brought divisiveness, Graetz argued. Maimonides tried to bring about peace and caused war. His attempt at systematizing Judaism in fact split the Jewish people, dividing the naïve believers from the “thinking Jews”, and thus causing much agitation. “Into this gap, opened wide by the debate around Maimonides, a pseudo-science [Afterlehre] wedged in” [einkeilen], Graetz explained. This was the Kabbalah.¹¹ From here, Graetz’s account of kabbalistic thought began. If they are not distracted by the sometimes judgmental language, the reader of the History will notice that in this chapter, Graetz gives, first and foremost, a rather descriptive, lengthy summary of the kabbalistic doctrines of the ten sefirot and of creation through divine emanation, both of which Graetz called mythical [phantastisch], a product of the imagination, that is, not logically deduced or deducible.¹² Kabbalah, Graetz wrote, “progressed from one inexplicableness [Unbegreiflichkeit] to the next, until, at last, all thinking is dissolved in a nebulous region, where even the power of imagination fails”.¹³ Proceeding to explain the kabbalistic doctrines of the soul, of retribution, and of the reasons behind the commandments at length, Graetz arrived at the summarizing assessment that the kabbalists “penetrated the secrets of Judaism much more deeply than the religious philosophy of Maimonides” had done¹⁴ and thus in fact saved Judaism from the danger of destruction by philosophy. This danger arose because Maimonides’s religious teleology, as presented in the Guide, had declared many commandments to be outdated and thus obsolete.¹⁵ The secret wisdom of Kabbalah, Graetz wrote, was nevertheless in itself “based on deception, at best on the self-deception of its initiators”. Where kabbalistic ideas claimed to be ancient “they were actually very young. Where they were indeed antique, they originated in neo-Platonic Alexandrian philosophy, not in Judaism”. Thus, “Kabbalah distorted both philosophical and Jewish ideas” and it was evidently this distortion that Graetz disliked, probably more so than the kabbalistic ideas themselves.¹⁶

thal, Cambridge 2011 p. 491 ff., see also Moshe Idel, “Maimonides and the Kabbalah”, in Isidore Twersky, Studies in Maimonides, Cambridge 1991, p. 31– 33.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, 2nd edition, Leipzig 1873, p. 65. (for the term Afterlehre, see above on p. 97 concerning Steinschneider’s use of the word.)  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 69 – 73. I believe, this is the correct translation of the word phantastisch when used in nineteenth century German.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 69.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 76.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 74.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 77.

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It was important for Graetz to show through the use of several examples that kabbalistic thought originated in the Jewish Middle Ages and had no actual roots in talmudic literature. From a historical point of view, wherever Kabbalah was introduced, he argued, it was initially rejected because traditional talmudic thinking immediately identified the mystical method as foreign to and different from rabbinic dialectics. For Graetz, Kabbalah was clearly nothing but an irrational reaction to the philosophy of Maimonides. As soon as a kabbalistic author let Kabbalah “talk in the language of logic, the secret doctrine showed in clear daylight all its callowness and ugliness.”¹⁷ But that Judaism taught naught but Aristotelian philosophy was no less repulsive for those “who saw in every word of Bible and Talmud divine truth.” While the German and northern French rabbis therefore “renounced philosophical thought about God and Judaism altogether”, in Spain and southern France, rabbinic thinkers held Judaism to be meaningless if it was not infused with deeper thoughts. This much even the anti-Maimonidean group had adopted from Maimonides, after all, they agreed with Maimonides about the ideal, sometimes hidden meaning of the commandments, since God could not be a despot, ruling through arbitrary decrees.¹⁸ This deeper meaning was now the subject of the new Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah for Graetz, and it was fed by older Jewish mystical ideas, as he had explained in his essay about this literature, discussed above. It was at this point that Graetz used the German word Verlegenheit, in connection with the origin of Kabbalah. This word has often been mistranslated into the English embarrassment,¹⁹ eventually being used as “proof” of the widespread claim that Graetz felt Jewish mysticism to be an embarrassment to Jewish religious and intellectual history. Therefore, mysticism had to be concealed from Gentile eyes in order that Judaism not become embarrassed of itself in the light of a modern, often Protestant approach to theology. All this lacks any justification, as we saw. Not only did Graetz not neglect discussing Kabbalah, he did not hide his results from the general public either. On the contrary, there are several complaints by Jewish scholars on record that Graetz dealt too extensively with the origin of Jewish mysticism.²⁰ The term embarrassment is simply a general and often copied misunderstanding of the German language used in the nine-

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 67.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 68.  All this seems to be based on the first English translation of Graetz’s history in six volumes, published in London 1891. The edition published in Philadelphia in 1956 (vol. 3, p. 549) still translates it as “embarrassment”.  See below, the discussion of the Hungarian rabbi and scholar Leopold Loew who reviews Graetz’ seventh volume in 1863.

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teenth century. Kabbalah, Graetz in fact claimed, came into existence because it offered a possible way out of the historical trap [Klemme] in which Jewish thought was caught in the thirteenth century, stuck between the “primitive anthropomorphic belief in the letter” and the shallowness [Verflachung] of Maimonides’ religious philosophy, as Graetz called it. Thus, Kabbalah was the “daughter of an exigency”, in Graetz’s German: “eine Tochter der Verlegenheit”.²¹ The same German word Verlegenheit also translates as embarrassment, but what Graetz actually had in mind here was that historically, Kabbalah became a “stopgap solution”. The text does not prove that Graetz was ashamed of its existence. Rather, as a historian of Judaism, Graetz was narrating and analyzing phenomena. He was hardly ‘embarrassed’ by his subjects. Already here, in the third chapter of the seventh volume, it becomes clear that one of the main objections Graetz raised against Kabbalah was its pseudo-epigraphy. While here he still referred to this method as ‘foisted’ [untergeschoben], not as a form of outright forgery, he began to develop his own theory as to why kabbalistic authors often pretended that their works were written by much earlier talmudic authorities. Because Kabbalah was necessarily unable to prove its doctrines rationally with convincing arguments, Graetz held it was forced to invent antique authors whose personal authority replaced the persuasive power of rational argument. As a true disciple of the new religion called exact Wissenschaft, he seems to have been repelled by the apparent arrogance that was revealed by the fact that every true scholar who was willing and able to undertake only a most preliminary reading of authentic talmudic authors would find “not a single trace” of all those mystical doctrines there.²² In the seventh chapter of volume seven, then, Graetz’s main enemy was Moses de Leon, the man he believed had authored, or at least edited, the Zohar. He was the worst of all the Spanish kabbalists of the thirteenth century for Graetz, but all of them together were to be blamed for “the damage they caused Judaism, which is perceptible to this very day.” They “darkened the light of reason”, that had been brought to Judaism by Maimonides and Saadia, and “replaced the refined belief in God with idolatrous phantasms [gotteslästerliche Wahngebilde]”.²³ But even concerning Moses de Leon, Graetz remained much more ambiguous than is generally appreciated. Thus, he was “not sure if he was a pious or a selfish deceiv-

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 69.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 78.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 206.

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er”,²⁴ or whether his intention was to open the hearts or only the purses of his audience.²⁵ But an impostor he was, and that is why, for Graetz, “he ranked lower than Abraham Abulafia”, who was at least honest in his own delusions, and whose life and works Graetz described at the outset of the chapter over five pages. Moses de Leon, however, was a “falsifier”, although the cleverest of all, basically because he attributed the Zohar to the most suitable authority for his purpose, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who bore a highly respected name.²⁶ Rabbi Shimon was a Tannaitic sage in ancient Israel, said to be active after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. According to popular legend, he and his son, Elazar ben Shimon, were noted mystics, a fact that, for Graetz, had contributed to the success of Moses de Leon’s intentionally false attribution. What Graetz especially reproached Moses de Leon for was that he made Rabbi Shimon “almost deify himself” in the Zohar, surpassing in holiness even the Biblical Moses.²⁷ This Moses, however, both for theological reasons and consequently also in the rational, Maimonidean, tradition of Jewish thought, was held to be the first of the prophets, excelling all other Biblical prophets in his (intellectual) closeness to God.²⁸ But this belief, on the other hand, was also “what reveals the falsifier”, Graetz wrote, because here the intention was evident: the Kabbalah itself should be religiously authorized, even beyond the authority of Rabbi Shimon.²⁹ Criticizing what he must have held to be another grave contradiction to the theological fundaments of traditional Judaism (which were not to be abandoned even in the modern age) Graetz observed that the Zohar valued the study of Kabbalah much more than the study of the Talmud, or even the Bible.³⁰ Worse still, the Zohar’s method of Biblical exegesis stood in complete contradiction to what became, in the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums, the search for an academic, scientific approach to the Biblical text that would reveal its literal meaning, an endeavor to which many Wissenschaft-scholars had devoted their energies. While Abraham Geiger had strongly denounced the “turbid” exegetical

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 216.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 218.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 219.  Here, see Boaz Huss, The Zohar – Reception and Impact, Oxford 2016, p, 7: “By means of this contrast [between R. Shimon and Moses] the compilers of the work sought to create a canonical literature which was not only comparable to the Torah of Moses but was, they claimed, superior to it.”  See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed II, 39 for the role of Moses.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 221.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 228 – 229.

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methods of the Talmud (which in Geiger’s view simply arose to justify its own Law with biblical verses)³¹ the “abuse of the interpretation of Scripture by Moses de Leon”, as Graetz called it, was obviously many times worse. For if Geiger still assumed that the talmudic rabbis believed in the validity of their retrospective reading legal meaning into the irregularities of biblical language, for Graetz, Moses de Leon clearly “distorted the literal meaning” with full intentionality.³² Nevertheless, even this “wrenching of all the limbs of the beautiful body of Holy Script” (as Graetz called it elsewhere) the kabbalists had in common with the philosophers (headed by Maimonides) who themselves “allegorized the Bible into excessiveness and incredibility.”³³ Graetz then described and analyzed the Zohar over nine full pages, and here again, is was not the Zoharic doctrine itself that he found fault with, but rather the method of its genesis. “The basic concept of the Zohar (if it is a concept at all)”, he wrote, is that the Pentateuch does not intend to transfer “the literal meaning of its text, but something higher, secret, and supernatural”. This secretiveness meant now, that everything Moses de Leon could think of [Alles und Jedes] could be “given a higher meaning, so that in the end a worthless [Afterlehre] doctrine” appeared that was not only “unreasonable, but sometimes even absurd and immoral.”³⁴ Knowing that in Graetz’s own rational theology the unreasonable and the unethical were natural companions, his rejection of the Zohar turned into a logical necessity and was no longer merely an emotional aversion. But still, Graetz conceded, there is “hardly any written monument that had such a great impact” as the Zohar, a work that “has no beginning and no end, and leaves undetermined whether it was ever an undivided whole, if the present parts had been there originally or were added later, or if there had been more parts during an earlier period.” All those assumptions, which modern scholarship had confirmed to a large extent, seemed to have been completely intuitional for Graetz, and based only on the impression he got while studying the text.³⁵ He summarized: Thus, a new religious groundwork [Grundbuch für die Religion] crept into the womb of Judaism […] The Zohar had the positive effect of countering the legal dryness of the Talmud

 See Geiger, “Das Verhältnis des natürlichen Schriftsinnes zur thalmudischen Schriftdeutung”, in: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie 1844.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 224.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 233 – 34.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 223.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 221– 22.

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with a certain momentum, stimulating the imagination and the soul, and thus counterbalancing pure intellectual activity. But the damage the Zohar caused outweighed this effect by far. The Zohar spread and strengthened wild superstition, consolidated in the minds of the people the kingdom of Satan, of evil spirits, and ghosts, which, merely tolerated in earlier Jewish circles, now received a higher affirmation…Through its luscious, sometimes even obscene language – as opposed to the virtuous and prudish tone of Jewish literature – the Zohar has caused indecent emotions […]. Eventually the Zohar numbed a sense for the simple and true, and created instead a world of dreams, in which the souls of those who seriously study the Zohar are lulled into dozing – making them thus unable to tell right from wrong.³⁶

Graetz mentioned here that the Zohar even included some utterances “that make the Christian dogma of the Trinity sound favorable”, a remark that caused Peter Schäfer to develop an interesting and original esoteric theory that Graetz’s entire aversion to Kabbalah was not based on his embarrassment in the face of gentile society, but actually on the very opposite, Graetz’ well-known and often-discussed rejection of Christianity “and its heresies [Irrlehren]”.³⁷ This theory is substantiated by Schäfer with a whole historical argument that referred to Graetz’s association of early gnosis with the Essenes (the “sect of Jesus”),³⁸ the rejection of Johannes Reuchlin’s adoption of Kabbalah, and the comparison of Issac Luria with Jesus, until the Christian tendencies of the Frankist movement, which Graetz indeed despised. Schäfer’s argument suffers, however, from the general lack of any esotericism in Graetz’s work. Graetz never had any problem criticizing Christianity openly. To assume that his critique of (Jewish) Kabbalah was in fact directed against the Christian religion and its dogma would presuppose much hidden intention on the part of Graetz. His very open attack on Christianity, though, was not lost on the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, for example, who initiated a heavy debate about antisemitism in the 1880s when he tried to accuse Graetz of anti-Christian hatred after reading his History.³⁹ But while Graetz indeed was one of the strongest Jewish critics of the Christian religion, this was based much less on theological grounds than it was on Graetz’s intensive occupation, in the course of his work as a historian, with the long centuries

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, p. 232– 233.  Schäfer, Adversus, here p. 199.  The argument about the Essenes was made before, however by Jonathan Elukin, see his “A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism, in: Journal of the History of Ideas – 59, No 1, 1998, p. p. 135– 148.  See on this George Y. Kohler, “German Spirit and Holy Ghost – Treitschke’s Call for Conversion of German Jewry: The Debate Revisited”, in: Modern Judaism 30:2 (2010), p. 172– 195.

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of Christian persecution of Jews.⁴⁰ Concerning the theology of the Zohar, and its religious doctrine in general, it seems again to have been rather an ethical argument that motivated Graetz’s rejection, as the above-quoted summary shows. Facilitation of the ability “to tell right from wrong” [das Rechte vom Unrechten] was, for Graetz, one of the basic purposes of religion in the universal history of humanity, and probably also one of the reasons he himself clinged to a practical Judaism, notwithstanding his academic approach to Jewish history, theology, and eventually even to the Biblical text.⁴¹ For rational and not for emotional reasons, only a superstitious, value-relativist, and antinomian conception of religion could be validated by the Zohar’s doctrines and language, and all those elements together caused Graetz to object to both the Zohar and the Kabbalah in general. But this well-founded theological objection against mysticism was never an impediment to the scholarly study of Kabbalah in Graetz’s view – such a conclusion would probably have appeared to him as irrational as the Kabbalah itself. Thus, a completely different, and even more positive picture was presented by Graetz in his two lengthy scholarly endnotes to the seventh volume of the History. At the outset, Graetz repeated his earlier call to his Wissenschaft des Judentums colleagues to devote more energy to Kabbalah research. He explained his scholarly interest in the Kabbalah in the third endnote, together with his conviction that the historian of Judaism (where Judaism was seen as a culture – Kulturbewegung) “must aim at tracing back all sides of the historical life to their beginnings.” Since a true “understanding of the origin and place within Judaism of the Kabbalah is still not investigated to full transparency”, this was the task he set himself in this study.⁴² The Kabbalah was referred to for a long time as noli me tangere (untouchable), Graetz wrote. “The pious feared to approach it for religious awe and the scholars because it was abstruse and ill-famed.” In addition, no-one possessed the key to its hieroglyphs. Graetz then called the above-mentioned works by Landauer “Epoch-making,” writing that Adolf Jellinek later con-

 See also Hermann Cohen’s argument to this effect in Cohen, “Zur Jahrhundertfeier unseres Graetz”, in: Neue jüdische Monatshefte 1917– 18, No. 3, p. 51– 57.  After he finished writing his eleven volumes of Jewish History, Graetz rather surprisingly turned to Biblical criticism, publishing amended versions of Kohelet, Psalms and the Song of Songs. This part of his scholarship remained almost untouched so far. See however: Alexandra Zirkle, “Remembering Heinrich Graetz, The Well-Known Exegete”, in: Jewish Quarterly Review, forthcoming 2019.  Graetz, vol. 7 as above, p. 422.

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tinued those kabbalistic studies, “delivering some nice contributions from rare manuscripts in order to disclose this enigmatic doctrine.”⁴³ For Graetz, however, much more seemed to have been left undone in Kabbalah research. Immediately beginning his analysis of the origin of Jewish mysticism, he plunged into the unpublished manuscript material at his disposal, which he quoted at length in the original Hebrew, a procedure that would have been unthinkable in the body of the book. Having thus demonstrated to his satisfaction that Kabbalah – according to the testimony of the kabbalists themselves – had no roots in the Bible and Talmud, Graetz identified its actual origin with Isaac the Blind in the twelfth century. As the reason for its appearance, he offered the “need to interpret the anthropomorphic Aggadahs literally, but still plausible”.⁴⁴ In the course of this small-print endnote, Graetz now followed up his argument in the third chapter about the development of kabbalistic thought, this time giving textual evidence for his claims, rather than personal, judgmental remarks about the characters and motives of the main protagonists (especially Ezra and Azriel of Gerona). In addition, Graetz discussed the theosophical consistency of the kabbalistic doctrines of the sefirot and the Deity, usually pointing out to their great weaknesses and contradictions.⁴⁵ But even for his standard theory that kabbalistic theosophy was foisted on traditional Judaism, Graetz was able to find manuscript proof, which he quoted extensively to the effect that most mystical teachings in Judaism originated in neo-Platonic thought. Graetz further argued that too much emphasis had been put on theosophy in Kabbalah research to date, while “for most earlier kabbalists themselves the ritual, quasi practical side of Kabbalah was much more important, and theosophy was merely the introduction to it”.⁴⁶ Here, “absurdities” abounded again: the sefirot were identified with body parts, even private parts, as Graetz pointed out.⁴⁷ After discussing kabbalistic psychology in detail, Graetz finally devoted another long passage to his favorite line of argument. Ultimately, Kabbalah was but a reaction to the rationality of Maimonidean philosophy, which, as we saw,

 Graetz, vol. 7, p. 421.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 425.  See for example Graetz, vol. 7, p. 432.  Interestingly, the very same critique was later echoed by Moshe Idel concerning Scholem and others, claiming, like Graetz that “the evaluation of Kabbalah as predominantly theoretical rather than practical is misleading.” (Idel, New Perspectives, p. 28.)  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 435 – 36.

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Graetz rejected, no less than he rejected Kabbalah itself.⁴⁸ It is not yet clear from where the first kabbalists took their neo-Platonic ideas, Graetz conceded, but he was able to prove, textually, that they absorbed contemporary philosophy in general without much hesitation. Thus, what they rejected was not philosophical thought as such, but the Aristotelian-Maimonidean attack on the authority not only of the Bible, but also of Aggadah, Graetz concluded.⁴⁹ Endnote number twelve of the seventh volume of Graetz’s History of the Jews (1863) exclusively discussed the authorship of the Zohar, a delicate topic since Gershom Scholem announced in his inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University in 1925 that he intended to devote all his scholarly efforts to disproving Graetz on this point – only to concede twenty years later that Graetz was “essentially” correct.⁵⁰ Scholem’s strong early motivation to prove him wrong might be explained by Graetz’s first sentence of this endnote: “In any lettered tradition there is hardly a book like the Zohar that, although it carries the brand mark of forgery, was still considered for such a long time as divine revelation and still finds, to this very day, unshakable devotees and believers”.⁵¹ At the outset, Graetz summarized the current state of research concerning the authorship of the Zohar: Landauer had assumed the author to have been Abraham Abulafia; Jellinek proved by striking parallels between the writings of Moses de Leon and the Zohar that he was the author, but only of the main parts of the work, while the other parts he still attributed to Abulafia. Adolphe Frank vindicated the antiquity of Zohar, even of its main parts, but believed them to be of Persian origin. Only recently, Graetz concluded, “a Pole, David Luria, took it upon himself to defend the Zohar as if nothing had happened,

 Jonathan Dauber reads Graetz correctly as having seen in Kabbalah a “positive response” to Maimonides. (Dauber, Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah, Leiden 2012, p. 6.) Dauber’s is one of the more sophisticated discussions of Graetz, and he eventually even rejects Scholem’s critique of Graetz’s theory of the origin of Kabbalah: if the focus is on the ethos of the kabbalists, (at least then) Graetz was right and Kabbalah was a new phenomenon in the thirteenth century (p. 25).  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 437.  Nevertheless, Scholem still retained a condescending tone when he acknowledged, in Major Trends, that all that he could claim to justify his odd formulation that Graetz was “essentially” correct (as opposed to “fully right”) was manuscript material that had not been at Graetz’s disposal. In my personal view, this passage is one of the less impressive texts of Scholem’s oeuvre, at least on ethical grounds. See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism, New York 1941, p. 192. Compare Schäfer, Adversus, (p. 197) who wrote Graetz was im Kern (at the core, in nuce) right, although Schäfer knows that the original question was a clear yes/no issue: Moses de Leon versus R. Shimon.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 466 – 467.

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and his apparent proofs made some people again volatile in their judgment.”⁵² Graetz described his own task in this study as “to summarize the previous arguments for the spuriousness of the Zohar and the authorship of Moses de Leon, and to add new arguments that would invalidate proofs of the book’s ancient origin, in parts or as a whole, and, finally, to come to a conclusion.”⁵³ But in fact, as Graetz stated in his discussion, there was no need to demonstrate that the Zohar was spurious [unecht]. The Kabbalah, that is, the concepts of the Ein-sof, of the sefirot and also the metempsychosis and its doctrine of retribution, were a product of the first half of the thirteenth century, according to the kabbalists themselves (as Graetz believed he had shown convincingly in the third endnote). Not a single trace of those concepts appeared in talmudic literature. Thus, the Zohar could not have been authored by Rabbi Shimon, since it presupposed knowledge of those doctrines.⁵⁴ As if to counter potential metaphysical arguments for an older origin of the book, Graetz promised “not to make his life too easy” and set out to present a detailed list (over six pages) of five distinct arguments, based on manuscript evidence, that would prove his point from different perspectives. At the end of this list, Graetz concluded that the Zohar was unknown to the Jewish world before the end of the thirteenth, if not the beginning of the fourteenth century. But while at first even rationalists like Joseph Albo (1380 – 1444) or Joseph ibn Shem-Tov (died 1480) acknowledged the work as an authentic kabbalistic tradition by R. Shimon, soon serious doubts about the Zohar’s authenticity appeared in a book by the Renaissance Averroist Eliah Delmedigo (1458 –1493).⁵⁵ But from then on, until the eighteenth century, nobody dared doubt R. Shimon as the author, except, of course, for the anti-Kabbalist Leon de Modena (1571– 1648), whom Geiger had portrayed in a monograph ten years earlier, as discussed above.⁵⁶ The turning point came only with the Sabbatian movement, according to Graetz. Because the sect of the “pseudo-messianic fraud Sabbatai Zevi saw the Zohar as their foundational document, drawing from it anti-Biblical and anti-talmudic conclusions, and even found Christian dogma within it, now even the ultra-orthodox [die Stockorthodoxen] had become suspicious of this work.” The reference is, of course, to Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697– 1776), who, in 1763, publish-

 Graetz, vol. 7, p. 467. Referring to R. David Luria who published in 1856 in Königsberg a work called ‫קדמות ספר הזוהר‬, aimed at proving that its author was indeed R. Shimon b. Yochai.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 467.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 467.  For Delmedigo, see above, p. 47, note 1.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 472. For Geiger on Modena, see above p. 135– 138.

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ed a learned pamphlet that Graetz called “a critical campaign against the Zohar” [kritischer Feldzug].⁵⁷ In this book, as Graetz recounted in detail, Emden provided three major arguments against the talmudic origin of the Zohar, all of them very close to modern scholarly methods of philological proof. The Zohar uses terms (such as esnoga, or synagogue) and religious rituals, that were introduced only by post-talmudic authorities; the Zohar mentions the Crusades, and the Zohar uses terminology found in Ibn Tibbon’s translation of Maimonides’ Guide (1204) as well as ideas from medieval Jewish philosophy, especially that of Yehuda Halevi’s Sefer Ha Kuzari (ca. 1140).⁵⁸ While Graetz himself was fully convinced by Emden’s “savage criticism” and actually expected, as a consequence, an “unrelenting condemnation” of the Zohar from him, he complained that Emden himself was much more reserved.⁵⁹ But Graetz even faithfully reproduced Emden’s reservations and obviously respected him as a serious scholar. When Emden tried to maintain that the core of the Zohar was indeed divinely revealed, and placed the redaction of the work (although not by R. Shimon) in the Gaonic period, undertaken by an unknown author of the same name (probably even a reincarnation of the original R. Shimon), Graetz explained all this through reference to an inner “fight between faith and criticism” on the side of Rabbi Emden. Out of keeping with his previous argument concerning Emden’s opposition to Sabbateanism, Graetz now claimed Emden “would have preferred to fully exculpate the Zohar from the charge of forgery” but simply could not do so. This was because he clearly understood that the other, non-central parts of the Zohar (Raya Mehemna and all Tikkunim) were probably indeed authored by Moses de Leon, and that the Midrash ha-ne’elam was even “the work of an impertinent falsifier abusing the sacred name of R. Shimon.”⁶⁰ For Graetz himself, Emden’s critique of the Zohar was thorough and “truly devastating,” and all recent arguments against it were worthless in his eyes. Graetz especially noted Rabbi Moshe ben Menachem Kunitz (1774– 1837) and

 Cf. Jacob Emden, ‫ מטפחת הספרים‬and the discussion of his controversy with Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz below on p. 210 – 211.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 473.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 474.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 474. Both Scholem and his followers later agreed that to the contrary, Moses de Leon wrote the core while the texts known as Tikunei hazohar and Ra’aya Mehemna were composed by a different, anonymous kabbalist in the early fourteenth century. (Major Trends, p. 156 – 204.)

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his book Ben Yochai (1815) which he called “trivial and empty” [eitel Wind].⁶¹ Even worse, in Graetz’s eyes, was Isaac Satanow’s (1733 – 1805) defense of the Zohar in his ‫( קונטרס ספר הזוהר‬Kuntras Sefer HaZohar, Berlin 1783).⁶² This book was not only vain, but outright “unscrupulous,” because Satanow, “the imprudent poet”, had imitated the style of the Zohar and included in this text his own modern views. Even in this side blow against Satanow, it was again obvious that Graetz’s heavy criticism was directed less against the kabbalistic doctrines themselves (which he mostly carefully recorded in his writing), but against the false attributions of pseudo-epigraphy, or what Graetz himself called forgery. One might probably assume that had Moses de Leon written the Zohar under his own name, Graetz would still have called the work superstitious, but in this case the full force of his contempt as a modern Wissenschaft scholar might not have been directed against it. Graetz refused to accept any division of the Zohar into older and younger parts, as suggested not only by Emden, but also Jellinek, and later, by Steinschneider. To this end, in the twelfth endnote, he devoted another detailed philological discussion, basically arguing against the division theory on the grounds of identical text passages appearing in parts that allegedly hailed from different time periods.⁶³ Additionally, he referred (although incorrectly) to proof given by Michael Sachs that the Zohar used a line from Ibn Gabriol’s Keter Malchut as well as to the discovery of Senior Sachs that the Zohar included a psychological assertion by Ibn Ezra.⁶⁴ What remained to be done, now that the Zohar’s alleged antiquity had, Graetz believed, definitely been ruled out, was to show that Moses de Leon was indeed the author of all parts of the entire work. Here, Graetz creatively attempted to prove his claim on the basis of some overemphasized hints to the Biblical Moses he found in the Zohar. He then followed up with some more detailed refutations of the arguments against Moses de Leon’s authorship that had previously been brought forward by Landauer, Franck, and David Luria. Basically, however, he relied on the philological proof provided by Jellinek, but argued that in actual fact, many more direct par-

 The German is a reference to Kohelet 1,2: ‫ֲהֵ֤בל ֲהָבִלי֙ם‬. For Moses Kunitz, see J.H. Chajes, “Critically Traditional: Moshe Kunitz’s RASHBI”, in: Kabbalah- Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 40, 2018, p. 85 – 106, and Marc B. Shapiro, “Is There a Requirement That One Believe That the Zohar Was Written By Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai?,” Milin Havivin 5 (2011), p. 4.  For Satanov, see: Elke Morlok, “Blurred Lines: Methodology and Kabbalistic Ideas within the Berlin Haskala”, in: Kabbalah 40, 2018, p. 33 – 60.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 475 – 76.  Graetz, vol. 7, 476, For Michael Sachs, see above, p. 79 – 80, for Senior Sachs, Kerem Chemed vol. 8, 1854, p. 74 ff.

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allels between Moses de Leon’s writings and the Zohar could be found. Graetz contented himself with two more examples that he believed to be absolutely compelling. In the Sefer HaRimon by Moses de Leon there was an argument about the different names of God and the creation of the earth that unwittingly confused its own biblical proof text, using Psalm 46 instead of Psalm 66, which was the appropriate one. The very same exegesis, including the same unintended error, also occurred in the Zohar, Graetz exclaimed triumphantly – not without mentioning how surprised the medieval commentators of the Zohar were when they discovered that the sacred text interpreted a misquoted verse. “They could not believe that the author was in fact a reckless preacher who did not care for exactness”, Graetz commented, temporarily abandoning the unbiased scholarly attitude that characterized the endnotes.⁶⁵ In this case, his deeply rooted dislike for Moses de Leon was apparently stronger than his academic ethos. In the second example, Graetz quoted Moses de Leon’s Mishkan HaEdut with an exegesis of a verse in Ezekiel that the author interpreted as calling for “coitus on the Shabbat.” This was bad enough, as far as Graetz was concerned, but now “one is amazed to find this same obscenity in the Zohar in the name of Shimon ben Yochai”!⁶⁶ Graetz, whose ideal understanding of Judaism was always determined by Bible and Talmud, apparently felt the attribution of “obscenities” to R. Shimon was an appalling vilification of the talmudic sage. His affection for the Talmud was also reflected in Graetz’s long collection of textual proofs from the Zohar in support for his claim in the History (vol. 7, chapter 7) that the Kabbalah depreciates the study of the Talmud, and sometimes even of the Bible itself.⁶⁷ In summary, both of the chapters of the History that have been under discussion, but even more so the two scholarly endnotes, show Heinrich Graetz to have been the leading Kabbalah scholar of his day. Any reader of these studies who is not distracted by sometimes judgmental language can easily discover the actual substance of Graetz’s account of Kabbalah in the often maligned seventh volume: serious philological research, the mastering of all relevant available manuscripts and a resulting level of scholarship that seems to stand in no relation whatsoever to Graetz’s manifest dislike of all mysticism.⁶⁸ His scholarly results,

 Graetz, vol. 7, p. 477. On the same page Graetz also called Moses de Leon a Spanish “flat head”.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 478.  Graetz, vol. 7, p. 482– 83.  Compare here the evaluation of Graetz’s endnotes by the Kabbalah scholar Isaiah Tishby: “In a special section of his work he explained and clarified the various arguments, added arguments and views of his own, and summarized the whole problem by formulating his critical con-

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as presented in these texts, substantially shaped Kabbalah research for many decades to come, in fact until Scholem began to devote all his energies to this field, but sometimes, as we saw, even beyond Scholem’s concerted efforts.⁶⁹

clusions with the utmost clarity and precision.” And although Tishby believed it was no use looking for balanced objectivity in Graetz’s approach, “we should bear in mind that Graetz’s hostility to the Zohar was not entirely unproductive. It led Zohar research into several important new areas.” (Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, vol. I, p. 44– 45.)  Interestingly, even Peter Schäfer in both his articles on Graetz and Kabbalah is forced to concede on every other page that Graetz was right “regarding content” [inhaltlich] and that was only his language that was disturbing.

Leopold Loew’s Review of Graetz’s Discussion of the Zohar (1863) Just how much research Graetz must have invested into the analysis of the origin and nature of Jewish mysticism was also noted in an extensive review of the seventh volume of Graetz’s History by the Hungarian rabbi and scholar Leopold Loew (1811– 1875). Coming from an originally more conservative position in Judaism, by the 1860s Loew had moved closer to mainstream Reform and participated in the Leipzig and Augsburg Reform synods of 1869 and 1871. His main achievement in the Wissenschaft movement is the establishment of a historical approach to halacha, proving the development over time of various halachic institutions and demonstrating the influence of foreign customs.¹ Apart from his work on halacha, Loew published in 1855 an extensive history of Jewish biblical exegesis from Saadia to the present, intended as “A Textbook for Young Adults – A Handbook for the Educated”.² In this work, a fifteen-page chapter was devoted to the kabbalistic school of exegetes. Both rationalists and kabbalists love to interpret Scripture allegorically, Loew explained there, but while the rationalists intellectualize the historical and the factual elements of the Biblical texts, the kabbalists are accused of materializing the more intellectual passages. In addition, kabbalistic exegesis is characterized by the attempt to find in the Bible not only accounts of the past, but also hints at future events.³ The main originator [Haupturheber] of the most important work of kabbalistic exegesis, the Sefer Ha-Zohar, was Moses de Leon, wrote Loew in 1855, but he “incorporated into this book the products of other kabbalists” as well as the more philosophical ideas of ideas of Ibn Gabriol, Yehuda Halevi and Abraham Ibn Ezra. Translating some examples of Zoharic exegesis into German, Loew

 His son Immanuel Loew (1854– 1944) published in 1889 – 1900 five volumes of his father’s Collected Writings. Loew’s interesting oeuvre awaits detailed scholarly attention. See however: Michael K. Silber, “The Historical Experience of German Jewry and its Impact on Haskalah and Reform in Hungary,” in Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz, Oxford 1987, p. 107– 157, here 125; and idem, “Löw, Leopold,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert, 2 vols., New Haven 2008, p. 1090 – 1092; and Tamás (Sinai) Turán, “Leopold Löw and the Study of Rabbinic Judaism: A Bicentennial Appraisal,” in: Jewish Studies 48 (2012): 41– 75. Also interesting is the biography of Loew written by another son, William Noah, who worked as a lawyer in New York: Leopold Loew: A Biography (New York, 1912).  Leopold Loew, Praktische Einleitung in die Heilige Schrift und Geschichte der Schriftauslegung: Ein Lehrbuch für die reifere Jugend, ein Handbuch für Gebildete, Gross-Kanischa 1855. For Kabbalah in nineteenth-century Jewish textbooks, see below.  Loew, Praktische Einleitung, p. 247. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-016

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tried to convey an unbiased impression of the interpretative techniques the work used.⁴ All in all, the chapter on Kabbalah from 1855 remains not much more than a detailed list of kabbalistic works of Bible commentary, reaching until the fifteenth century. At the beginning of his long review of Graetz from 1863, Loew complained over at least one and a half pages about the fact that Graetz had dedicated in this volume much more space to an historical account of the medieval Kabbalah than to other intellectual developments in the Jewish Middle Ages. But this overemphasis on Kabbalah studies, Loew ironically continued, was only a very characteristic tendency in the then latest research of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany, and therefore quite understandable on the part of the Jewish historian.⁵ What Loew had in the back of his mind, as a moderate Reform rabbi, was that Graetz in the seventh volume of his History had widely ignored the development of halacha during the Middle Ages. This is not a reproach of Graetz, though, Loews conceded, just a remark. What is really worthy of his criticism, Loew wrote, was that Graetz devoted a detailed refutation to the non-academic work on the Zohar by Rabbi David Luria, while the true scholarship and impressive results of the study by Ignaz Stern go unmentioned in Graetz’s History. ⁶ Loew’s review, however, published still the same year as the appearance of Graetz’s seventh volume itself, indicates not only how fast new books of Jewish scholarship were being devoured (and subsequently extensively reviewed), but also how interested Loew himself was in Kabbalah studies – despite his critical remarks on Graetz’s overemphasis of that very topic. Loew’s 1863 review contains a learned but nevertheless severe criticism of some of Graetz’s main claims concerning the origin of Kabbalah, demonstrating not only Loew’s independent mind and scholarly self-confidence, but first and foremost his intensive pre-occupation with the subject as well as the profound knowledge he had gained by then concerning the history and doctrines of Kabbalah. While in Rabbi Loew’s view, as per the scholarly consensus, there is not the slightest doubt that Shimon bar Yochai could not have been the author of the Zohar, the sheer impossibility of which, as he writes, “critical scholarship has triumphantly [siegreich] demonstrated”, Loew observed that the positive part of that problem – who the actual author was – is far from being solved. But even more troubling, according to Loew, is another question: Which were the earlier influences on the Zohar, and on Spanish thirteenth-century Kabbalah in gen Loew, Praktische Einleitung, p. 252– 253.  See Leopold Loew, “Die neueste Geschichte der Kabbala”, reprinted in his Gesammelte Schriften (ed. I. Loew), vol. II, Szegedin 1890, p. 1– 55 f. (here p. 1)  Loew, Geschichte, p. 2. For Stern see above.

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eral? On this score, Graetz had “cut with his critical scissors all the threads” to earlier sources: to Persian, Sufi, Gnostic, and Neo-Platonic concepts, as had been proffered as viable alternatives by Graetz’s sundry Jewish and Christian scholarly predecessors (whom Loew obviously had studied) on the field of Kabbalah research. Although Graetz conceded some neo-platonic influences on thirteenthcentury Kabbalah, as Loew asserts correctly, in fact Graetz claimed he had no idea how those influences reached Moses de Leon and his colleagues. For Graetz, as Loew pointed out, there is an insurmountable gap between earlier Jewish (and non-Jewish) mysticism and Zoharic Kabbalah. The teachings of the Zohar emerged as a reaction to the philosophy of Maimonides, according to Graetz. This theory of the genesis of Kabbalah, where its ideas “wedged themselves in” [sich einkeilen] between the Talmud and the Guide of the Perplexed, Loew called “Graetz’s truly new and original opinion”, that is, viewing Zoharic Kabbalah as non-contiguous, as a “foreign object” in Jewish intellectual tradition.⁷ But however original, Loew disagreed completely on this point. First, Graetz’s opinion would hardly justify the tone of condemnation [Wegwerfung] in which Graetz writes about “the kabbalistic masters”. Second, but closely connected and more important to Loew, as he explains quite systematically: Either one follows the ‘law of historical continuity’, which was a “strict and inexorable law that has shaped all historical development” – then there must be some earlier influences on Kabbalah. Or, as Loew adds ironically, this wedging-in-process, described by Graetz, was a miracle [Einkeilungswunder] – but then Graetz should have celebrated the kabbalists as real miracle workers instead of excoriating them. Loew devoted the pages following his above observation to a detailed scholarly refutation of Graetz’s original theory, arguing that even before the debates about Aristotelian philosophy, Rabbi Abraham of Posquieres (the father of Isaac the Blind and one of the most aggressive opponents of Maimonides) must have had knowledge of kabbalistic doctrines – doctrines that he later taught his son.⁸ Interestingly, here Loew complained about the treatment by Graetz of Rabbi Abraham “as a charlatan”, while in fact Abraham of Posquieres for Loew “possessed an independent individuality, was deeply learned in Talmud, and of great religious and moral seriousness”– this complaint turning

 Loew, Geschichte, p. 3 – 4.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 5 – 7.

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Loew into the earliest critic of Graetz’s derogatory style when writing about kabbalists, with many more critics to follow.⁹ But Loew went even further – he wholeheartedly suggested taking the personal accounts of the kabbalists themselves much more seriously than Graetz did, even in those cases where said kabbalists claimed to have had “higher revelations”. Usually, an engaged thinker is able to successfully reproduce his long train of thoughts, including all of his observations and conclusions, Loew argued, but we all know also of such moments, when we suddenly “see the light” [ein Licht aufgehen], when we have a new and original insight in a flash without being able to say where it came from. “Such operations of the human mind, that is, when the mind is anticipating itself, as it were,” Loew continued, “could very well be explained by the laws of psychology, while for the mystic, whose speculation is heavily influenced by his imagination, they seem to be divine revelations – because he feels he is in close relation with the divine.”¹⁰ This defense of Jewish mysticism using scientific arguments Loew interestingly corroborated with an example from the writings of the French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153), whose mystical preaching arguably led to massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the Crusades.¹¹ But Bernard’s written theological epistemology described as the highest level of knowledge a certain form of speculation on divine matters that comes close to what Loew had in mind here, and demonstrates to Loew’s satisfaction that this form of attaining knowledge through sudden mystical moments of insight was well known and frequently described already in the Middle Ages.¹² Interestingly, Graetz himself and even Abraham Geiger later used this psychological explanation in their own deliberately rational theories for the biblical phenomenon of prophecy.¹³ If this psychological explanation of mystical experiences is applicable, Loew now tried to infer, then Graetz stands corrected in yet another respect: Kabbalah might even have a talmudic background, an assumption that Graetz categorically denied. Loew referred here to the talmudic metaphor of the bat kol (a “voice from  Loew, Geschichte, p. 7.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 7.  Cf. for example: Jeremy Cohen, “Witnesses of our Redemption”: The Jews in the Crusading Theology of Bernard of Clairvaux, in: Bar-Ilan Studies in History IV (1995) p. 67– 81; or David Berger, “The Attitude of St. Bernard of Clairvaux toward the Jews”, in: Proceedings – American Academy for Jewish Research 40 (1972) p. 89 – 108.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 7– 8.  See Graetz’s long endnote on prophecy in the first volume of his History (Geschichte der Juden, vol. 1, Leipzig 1874, endnote 2 on p. 371– 78) Cf. Abraham Geiger Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte, vol. 1, p. 35 f. where he quotes in his discussion of revelation a Maimonidean passage from the introduction to the Guide that describes revelation as a flashlike epiphany.

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heaven”), which could be interpreted likewise, and to the talmudic exegesis of the verse in Psalms 25:14 about the “secret of God” (‫)סוד ה’ ליראיו ובריתו להודיעם‬ – both of which are related to the talmudic sage Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus.¹⁴ In addition, the Talmud reports several cases of direct contact between the Biblical Elijah and talmudic sages of different generations, cases which fed the belief in a continuous, supernatural contact between humans and the divine.).¹⁵ Obviously, all this critiquing missed Graetz’s original point, because the historian had explicitly argued that only core kabbalistic doctrines like the sephirot and the en-sof were unknown before the debate about Maimonides’ writings (first half of the 13th century), and not mystical thought and inspirations as such.¹⁶ But Loew’s criticism is still very interesting – for what Loew attempts here is a general enhancement of Kabbalah after Graetz’s devastation, as he saw it. He knew well that even for Graetz, “the debate about the age of Kabbalah is, at the same time, a debate about the worth of Kabbalah – the older the former was set, the more the latter increased.” According to Loew, this relation between age and worth has nothing to do with modern critical scholarship. As opposed to Graetz (and ironically, for that matter, also as opposed to many of Graetz’s modern-day pro-Kabbalah critics), Loew argued in 1863 that “historical-critical research must fairly analyze the true age [Ahnenprobe] of theoretical and practical Kabbalah without being bewildered by the judgment of its inner worth.”¹⁷ Loew ultimately pinpoints here the actual contradiction in Graetz’s account of the origin of Kabbalah (which also affects Graetz’s entire discussion of the intellectual history of the Jewish Middle Ages).¹⁸ On the one hand, Graetz complains about the shallowness [Verflachung] of Maimonides’ religious philosophy to which Kabbalah reacted, while on the other hand, he accused the kabbalists of having “darkened the light of reason”, afore brought to Judaism by Maimonides (and Saadia Gaon).¹⁹ How this riddle is to be solved Loew left to Graetz himself, but he would at least conclude that Graetz’s reaction-theory for the emergence of Kabbalah was mistaken. After having tried to refute this theory on the historical track, although not very convincingly (as we saw), Loew then

 Cf. BT Baba Metziah 59b and Chagigah 3b.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 9 – 10. Loew, as a good Talmudist, is certainly also aware of several rabbinic passages that would tend to contradict his theory, as he conceded, such as the fact that the ruach ha-kodesh disappeared from Israel with the last minor prophets (BT Yoma 9b).  Cf. Graetz, vol. 7, p. 467.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 15. Compare David Biale who assumed Graetz believed “that a late date of the Zohar would downgrade its importance.” (Biale, Scholem, p. 23.)  Cf. here Kohler, Reading Maimonides, p. 75 – 80.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 15. For both passages discussed above, see Graetz, vol. 7, p. 69 and 206.

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made a new attempt to disprove Graetz psychologically. The outcome of this fresh effort is a very emotional, yet nonetheless well-argued defense of Maimonides, impressing the reader with its level of personal commitment to truth-telling, independent of the political and theological consequences – this approach reflecting an attitude to religion and philosophy alike, for which Maimonides was the perfect example in the eyes of Leopold Loew. How much this description of Maimonides’ philosophical courage and political disinterestedness is related to what Loew thought about Heinrich Graetz on those matters, specifically regarding Graetz’s position on Kabbalah, remains to be guessed by Loew’s readers. There is actually nothing ‘shallow’ in Maimonides’s philosophy, Loew held,²⁰ and he then provides two reasons for why in the modern age we might reject something as appearing shallow: either it is an otherwise plausible, justified, and evidently true insight [Erkenntnis], but we let emotions and imagination prevail over our rational judgement, and this rejection might even be a truly autonomous one – or, alternatively, the shallowness is a product of calculated ingratiation, as was prevalent in Loew’s day with German government theologians, as he called them. During such reactionary times as in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, these “parroters” received certain hints from the authorities, Loew explained unabashedly, and consequently declared certain scientific truths, which are embarrassing to them, to be shallow – a tactic that indeed enjoyed success with many simpler minds. But the age of Maimonides did not know of the concept of shallowness at all, and Jewish literature does not even have a word for it. “Jewish orthodoxy and Kabbalah opposed Maimonides’s liberal views not because they were thought to be shallow or intellectually unstimulating,” Loew believed, but rather for a different reason: Orthodoxy and Kabbalah held that “the new Egyptian Moses did not interpret and understand the old Egyptian Moses the way the Talmud and tradition would like to have it.” It was this new, independent understanding of the Torah for which they could not forgive Maimonides, whereas mystics and traditionalists alike “would have happily forgiven shallowness” in Maimonides, Loew argued, “because it wasn’t even a crime in their eyes.” Therefore, Graetz committed an injustice when he claimed that Maimonides actively split Judaism. Great men like Maimonides have to fulfill their mission in Loew’s view, independent of the consequences. But even though only a few Jews learned from Maimonides’ philosophy how to think independ Graetz was frequently attacked for his accusing Maimonides of shallowness. In reaction to some of the reasons offered in the Guide for the Biblical commandments, Graetz criticized Maimonides in much the same way, drawing in particular the ire of Jewish scholar Bernhard Beer of Dresden (mentioned above). For this episode, see Kohler, Reading Maimonides’ Philosophy, p, 213 – 214.

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ently (while many others did not), this philosophy was much more beneficial for all of Judaism than if Maimonides had never written the Guide in the first place.²¹ Although Loew committed here his own injustice against Graetz – who used the word shallow regarding Maimonides always in a spiritual, and not in an intellectual sense – what is truly fascinating about Loew’s account is that he indeed does not take sides and tries to uphold the banner of unbiased, critical scholarship – as he had demanded for the scholarly analysis of the age and origin of Jewish mysticism. Although revealing himself openly as an ardent Maimonidean, he nevertheless defended the value of Kabbalah and the kabbalists against Graetz’s heavy-handed and deprecating attacks. Ultimately, Loew admitted without reservation that, notwithstanding Graetz’s aversion to the book, he had advanced the study of the Zohar considerably, especially because of the “clarity and lucidity with which he outlined the doctrines of Kabbalah”.²² Consistently, Loew praised Graetz’s scholarship in his review precisely at those points where he could add his personal critique to Graetz’s research, thus appearing, in the perception of his readers, even a little more advanced in Kabbalah knowledge than the scholar he was reviewing. Here as well, Loew followed his acknowledgement of Graetz’s contributions with some carefully honed criticism: He looked up the place in the Zohar where Graetz had found Moses de Leon’s ‘obscene’ psalm-interpretation reproduced, and “did not find a bit of obscenity,” only the interpreted verse.²³ Loew then set out on a detailed discussion of the age of the various parts of the Zohar, frequently contradicting Graetz’s assumptions on the basis of different textual proofs – only to conclude that the whole question of authorship and age of the Zohar is still not resolved, but that in fact it is actually “of little relevance in light of the history of religion.”²⁴ What is much more important, according to Loew, are such theological questions as the originality of kabbalistic doctrine, and thus the question of the actual relation of Kabbalah to traditional, non-kabbalistic Jewish orthodoxy. If the

 Loew quotes here Maimonides’ remark to his favorite student, Yehuda Ibn Aknin, that he preferred to have revealed a truth for one understanding person, even if ten thousand ignorant readers would dislike it. The whole account of Maimonides is in Loew, Geschichte, p. 15 – 17.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 17.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 18. (Loew, however, did not mention if the verse was misquoted – which was Graetz’s strongest argument.)  Loew, Geschichte, p. 18 – 20. In a later work, Loew will claim that the Zoharic Raya Mehemna must have been written by a German author, and not by a Spaniard, based on the use of apple (‫ )תפוח‬for a gallnut in this work. See Leopold Loew, Graphische Requisiten und Erzeugnisse bei den Juden, vol. 1, Leipzig 1870, p. 155.

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basic principle of all mysticism is indeed the possibility of “communication between a higher world of spirits and the world of senses,” as Loew assumed, not only do the Bible and Talmud have no theological difficulties with this concept, as Loew had shown earlier, neither do such figures as Flavius Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, as he now explains. Loew also mentioned in this connection the miraculous scene of the conversion of Paul, and referred later to several of the great thinkers of medieval Jewish philosophy, who all know of this kind of supernatural communication. Thus, “the source within the human soul from which mysticism flows was not discovered by the kabbalists,” Loew concluded, “they only drew from it more diligently.”²⁵ Discussing the doctrines of Kabbalah, he first mentioned the idea that alongside the literal sense of the Bible, there must exist a deeper, hidden interpretation. Esoteric exegesis, however, is known within Judaism already from the Greek period onwards, Loew argued, and actually was adopted by Jewish thinkers who were directly exposed to Greek influences. He took pains to find something similar to the allegoric readings in the Talmud, but hardly succeeded in this effort, except perhaps for the arguably apologetic interpretation of the Song of Songs,²⁶ which consequently turned Rabbi Akiva into one of the heroes of the kabbalists. But the Talmud does not even have a word for allegory, Loew must concede, while the New Testament, for example the Epistle to the Galatians, sometimes used allegorical readings of Scripture.²⁷ A Jewish renaissance for the use of allegories in biblical exegesis blossomed with the medieval Spanish school of Bible interpretation, and Loew complained in this regard that, right up until his day one could hear ideas like reading Abraham and Sarah as symbolizing matter and form “and many similar absurdisms”. This was because Jewish orthodoxy was unable to effectively fight allegorical exegesis – and we may add here: also kabbalistic exegesis – for theological reasons: orthodoxy preferred to accept such radical interpretations rather than be forced to acknowledge critical, “grammatical-historical methods of exegesis”, that is, it had to “refute the arbitrariness of the allegory and accept the unambiguity [Einsinnigkeit] of the meaning of the biblical word.”²⁸ But this would have brought orthodoxy into conflict with the ambiguous readings of the Talmud, and therefore the Zohar, ironically, found support even in the Talmud when it referred to the secrets of the Torah, according to Loew. The Zohar then stated openly that in addition to the literal  Loew, Geschichte, p. 20 – 25, quote on 25.  As an allegory on the relation between God and Israel, instead of the literal meaning as a love song, cf. Mishnah Yadaim 3,5.  Cf. Gal 4,22– 28.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 38

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sense of the words, which often amounted to “idiotic stories”, as Loew translated, there is a much higher level of meaning in the Bible. But still, Loew’s conclusion is unavoidable: “The kabbalists have not devised esotericism or allegorical exegesis, so much as they have invented the communication between heaven and earth.”²⁹ Notwithstanding his general defense of Kabbalah, it is probably the very arbitrariness of allegorical interpretations that Loew disliked. Never mentioning again the revered Maimonides in this context, he complained about the use of allegorization by Christian exegetes for their mission to the Jews, and that “even Kant was a defender of this method within certain limits” – a method that for Loew inherently contradicted the ethos of Wissenschaft. Thus, an allegorical reading, especially one like the Zoharic interpretation of the lists of Edomite kings (Gen 36) – what Loew called the “culmination of the kabbalistic allegorization of biblical-historical passages” – is in his eyes ultimately a failed reading of the biblical text. But while Loew still showed sympathy for the kabbalistic rejection of all previous and contemporary attempts to make sense of these “dry and simple” lists – because the kabbalists refused to understand in principle why such lists had a place in the Torah at all – he complained that “the thinking reader [of the Zohar] would expect that the allegory explained all of the eight names of kings on the list.” But very surprisingly, Loew bemoaned, this expectation goes unfulfilled. His disappointment obviously stemmed from the non-systematic nature of the Zoharic explanation. Nevertheless, the symbolism proffered by the Zohar, even if the basic idea is already to be found in rabbinic midrash, is at least “as original as it is bizarre” [abenteuerlich], Loew concluded.³⁰ The most important aspect for Loew, however, of the theological relations between kabbalistic thought and Jewish orthodoxy (under discussion in the last part of his lengthy review essay on the history of Kabbalah) is what the kabbalists have to say about the legal force of halacha and the reasons for observing religious obligations. Loew, who was an acting community rabbi while writing this learned study on mysticism, belonged to those conservative theologians among the first generation of non-orthodox rabbis who still believed that modernized Jewish legalism, albeit purged of outdated and xenophobic elements, was to be the very foundation of Judaism. Jewish legalism, instead of the increasingly emerging spiritualism, demanded of the first reformers a constant examination of arguments and criteria either for (or against) certain legal regulations, and examination of the continued observance of talmudic law in Judaism in gen-

 Loew, Geschichte, p. 39.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 40 – 43.

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eral. There is no question that even the most orthodox interpretation of the law knows of a metaphoric understanding of certain Biblical commandments, Loew declared: While the rabbis insist for some reason on taking the Bible literally in the case of tefillin, for example, Jewish orthodoxy read the prohibition not to place a stumbling block before the blind (Lev 19:14) as a metaphor, and “no doubt rightly so”, as Loew added.³¹ The kabbalists, however, “have employed this allegorical interpretation of the legal parts of the Torah to a far greater extent than the Talmud.”³² But here, too, this remark is not necessarily meant as criticism of Kabbalah, but probably rather to the contrary: Loew’s intention was again to point out that, even in strictly legal matters, the kabbalists did not invent the metaphorical reading of mitzvot, but in fact adopted it from their talmudic predecessors, and sometimes even extended it.³³ It would seem that the above argument remains in line with Loew’s earlier critique of Heinrich Graetz’s claim regarding the medieval origin of kabbalistic doctrine, even if Graetz is, for the remainder of the essay, hardly ever mentioned again, despite the essay’s ostensible focus on Graetz. For Loew, Kabbalah was merely a (sometimes exaggerated) continuation of the traditional talmudic approach to exegesis and Jewish legal thought, and thus an integral part of living Judaism. Curiously, Graetz seems to have called it a “foreign object” for exactly the same reason: to exclude all mysticism from what he perceived to be the Jewish religion’s talmudic mainstream. Both arguments, however, whatever their persuasive power, went far beyond academic research of Kabbalah, and apparently reveal conflicting theological agendas. Nevertheless, Loew believed that it was the popularity of the allegory within the Spanish school of medieval Biblical exegesis that prevented “a scandal”, which otherwise could have been caused by dangerous “extravagances to which the kabbalists got carried away in their allegorization of the law.³⁴ Because for the Zohar, as Loew showed with detailed quotations, the allegorization of the law is the very foundation of its hermeneutical principles. There are even a few groups of religious laws where the Zohar stands in direct opposition to the Tal-

 Loew, Geschichte, p. 43. This is a controversial subject in the Talmud, because actually the literal sense of a biblical commandment always had to be considered (BT Sabb. 63a). Note that, contrary to this rule, for the church fathers, the allegorical understanding of Mosaic law was the only possible way to interpret and thus follow it. This is especially obvious vis a vis the dietary laws (‫)כשרות‬.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 46.  See later on for the same conclusion the seventh chapter of Moshe Idel’s Kabbalah – New Perspectives (1988).  Loew, Geschichte, p. 47.

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mud, Loew argued. The example given is the laws of illicit sexual relations (‫)עריות‬, for which the Mishnah explicitly ruled that they must not to be interpreted allegorically (at least not in public), as Loew knew well, for fear that certain people would then be encouraged to transgress these laws in the literal sense.³⁵ But the Zohar allegorized at least parts of this specific set of laws “with the greatest elaborateness.” Loew’s clearly stated suspicion was that the author of the Zohar here tried to boast that he well knew the esoteric interpretation that the Mishnah warned against, and thus that he did not care about the perceived moral danger in publishing it.³⁶ There is one last kabbalistic concept, perhaps the most controversial one, that Loew took great pains to trace within the Talmud – a task he undertook in order to prove the rootedness of kabbalistic ideas in traditional Jewish literature: the frequent use of gross anthropomorphisms in kabbalistic similes relating to God. It is precisely on this point that Graetz, already in 1859, saw an insurmountable theological gap between the Talmud and the early mystical tracts of Judaism (like the Shiur Qomah) – the latter of which he therefore preferred to attribute to Islamic influences during the Gaonic period, as we saw earlier.³⁷ In the eyes of Loew, however, Graetz had simply not done his homework. It is typical for the method of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Loew complains, that “the names of the copyists of medieval Jewish books are registered with scrupulous exactness – yet nobody has had the time, so far, to conduct a critical examination of the talmudic teachings regarding the attributes of divine essence and being.”³⁸ This sounds like an unveiled criticism of the philological and antiquarian research of Leopold Zunz and his disciple, Moritz Steinschneider, who were often (and often are to this day) identified with the entire Wissenschaft movement.³⁹ And although Loew is right that even Graetz “had no room for the theology of the Talmud” in the fourth (the first to be published) volume of his History (1853), dedicated to the talmudic era, other Wissenschaft scholars in fact dealt with theological questions⁴⁰ – although not always in a systematic  Cf. M Megillah 4:9: ‫ משתקין אותו‬,‫ – המכנה בעריות‬It would seem that this passage contradicts Loew’s earlier statement that the Talmud does not even have a word for “allegory”.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 49.  Graetz, Die mystische Literatur, p. 114.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 51.  For a personal case against seeing Zunz as an antiquarian, see Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, 2016, p. 4.  The role theology plays in the Wissenschaft movement in 19th-century Germany is not analyzed enough. This is due to the open question of whether the great works in religious philosophy, written in the first half of the century by Samuel Hirsch and Salomon Formstecher, belong to this movement, and likewise, the lacuna in analysis is due to the controversial question

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and academic way, and not specifically with talmudic theology.⁴¹ In his 1859 study of the early mystical literature of Judaism, Graetz had devoted only “some loosely sketched lines” to the proof of his claim that the Talmud does not contain anthropomorphic views of God, Loew wrote, and ignored all the passages that contradict his position. But in order to substantiate such a sweeping claim as his – that Kabbalah and Talmud are in complete antagonism on the subject of anthropomorphism – Graetz should have scrutinized the Talmud in a more scientific fashion.⁴² Given the context of this criticism, it goes without saying that Loew included in his call to dedicate more, and especially more scrutinizing academic research to questions of theology also the theology of Kabbalah itself. This is at least what Loew himself attempted in the last part of his essay, but still in a way that is far from exhaustive, as he announced in advance. Basically, we need to distinguish between anthropopathic attributions (i. e. the attribution of human emotions) to God, which the Talmud is very eager to avoid, according to Loew, and anthropomorphisms, which the Talmud is much less anxious to suppress. This is hardly surprising, Loew argued, since also the church fathers and their students, the contemporaries of the talmudic rabbis, freely described God in anthropomorphic terms and even justified this practice with the religious need to direct one’s prayer to something corporeal. The important distinction between anthropopathism and anthropomorphism was overlooked even by Maimonides, who condemned both in equal measure in favor of a purely spiritualistic concept of God – causing therefore a whole wave of indignation among the rabbis of his time, Loew explained, because obviously they could not identify a clear talmudic source for Maimonides’ most radical anti-corporeal theology. It follows thus unanimously, Loew concluded, “that the anthropomorphisms of the Kabbalah do not stand in fundamental contradiction to the Talmud, as it has

(though only within Judaism) of whether theology is a Wissenschaft in the first place. However, many young German-Jewish thinkers of the Wissenschaft movement perceived themselves unequivocally as theologians, and Abraham Geiger’s project of a “Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für Jüdische Theologie” (1835 – 1847) is only one example among many.  For a more recent attempt to find theology in the Talmud, see Max Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind, New York, 1972 and Hyam Maccoby, The Philosophy of the Talmud, New York 2002.  Loew, Geschichte, p. 52. This demand by Loew reminds very strongly of an argument of Moshe Idel against Scholem’s view of Kabbalah, which is very close to that of Graetz here, surprisingly. Idel wrote: “Kabbalistic myth is the result of a tenuous endeavor to explain the rationales of the commandments in accordance with material extant in the recorded Jewish tradition Talmud and Midrash along with ancient, non-Gnostic speculative traditions passed down orally or in lost works.” (Idel, New Perspectives, p. 157)

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been claimed so frequently, and recently also by Graetz.”⁴³ With this conclusion, Loew believed, he had saved Kabbalah for the authentically Jewish tradition of thought. Leopold Loew’s review of Graetz’s account of the Zoharic Kabbalah is, after all, a document of a thorough scholarly attitude, mostly attempting to correct Graetz where the historian has abandoned unbiased, critical Wissenschaft in favor of personal opinion. Even if Loew is not always justified in his criticism on the factual level, he stands out as another impressive example of my assertion that a disinterested research of Kabbalah was already in place in the nineteenth century. Though personally a Maimonidean rationalist and a critical Talmudist, Loew nevertheless held Kabbalah to be an integral part of the intellectual Jewish tradition that, although essentially originating in thirteenthcentury Spain, almost naturally grew out of older literary sources of Judaism. Contrary to Graetz, it seems that for Loew, kabbalistic thought might even be part of Jewish theology as such, in so far as it described a historical development and not an ideal condition, as it was for Graetz. In general, it is the theological approach to the subject that turns Loew’s account of Kabbalah into a valuable contribution to the Wissenschaft movement, because here he gained new ground compared to earlier philological or historical research dealing essentially with questions of the age and authorship of kabbalistic works.

 Loew, Geschichte, p. 53.

Graetz’s Account of Kabbalah during the 15th to the 18th century (1864 – 68) If the impression of Graetz’s strong aversion to the Kabbalah was, in a sense, generally mitigated in the seventh volume of his History of the Jews by the amount and the seriousness of his philological scholarship concerning mystical texts – in the succeeding volumes (8th 1864, 9th 1866, and 10th 1868) the picture is somewhat different. Returning to the actual core of his history project, Graetz here described first and foremost several Jewish and Christian kabbalists (some of whom were previously unknown to Jewish scholarship), no longer focusing on the Kabbalah as such.¹ Although the accounts of each of those kabbalists are consistently accompanied by a new rant against Kabbalah itself, the sheer number of kabbalistic authors who appear in his work nevertheless attests to a great interest on the part of Graetz in the development of Kabbalah within the Jewish intellectual tradition. Contrary to Abraham Geiger, or even Isaak Marcus Jost, who, in their books on Jewish history, only very rarely introduced the names of kabbalists, Graetz seems to be the nineteenth-century Jewish scholar who devoted the greatest amount of research to the Kabbalah, at least in a purely quantitative sense. If Leopold Loew’s criticism was justified and Graetz indeed neglected halachic developments in the Middle Ages in favor of an extensive account of Kabbalah, this was even more true for the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries of Jewish history, when, according to Graetz, Kabbalah began its triumphant march, finally defeated its archenemy, philosophy, and eventually even penetrated rabbinic Talmudism. The Jewish philosopher Joseph Albo (1380 – 1444), for example, is criticized by Graetz in the eighth volume in this way: “So little was he a free thinker that he even granted the Kabbalah some justification. He did not realize clearly enough that this pseudo-religion and pseudo-philosophy [Afterreligion und Afterphilosophie] hits both Judaism and reason in the face, and to the same extent. Even the Zohar he esteemed as a holy book – a very suspicious symptom for the clarity of his thought.”² However, also here it is especially pseudo-epigraphy that aroused Graetz’s anger, because he perceived this technique as intentional lying. Writing about early fifteenth-century Spanish kabbalists who “were not very competent representatives” even of their own mystical field, he noted in particular Moses Botarel as a deliberate deceiver. At a time when “Kabbalah had gained increas-

 See Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 97, or vol. 9, p. 174, vol. 10, p. 128 – 131.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 177– 178 (second edition, Leipzig 1890). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-017

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ingly more ground through the skillful artifice to let the Zohar sneak in as a major work of holiness,” Botarel composed a commentary on the Sefer Yezirah “in which he tried to vindicate his shenanigans [Alfanzereien] by attributing [andichten] kabbalistic sayings or books to respected authorities of old, or by simply making up the names of alleged authors of mystical works.” Contrary to other kabbalists of his time, who were mostly “narrow-minded but honest men”, Botarel pretended to flirt with philosophy and claimed it was essentially identical with Kabbalah. But all this is “vain boasting” in Graetz’s view, for Botarel was not only “completely ignorant of philosophy, he was unable to form any rational thought at all.” What made things worse for Graetz was that Botarel claimed to have discovered a method of foretelling the future through proclaiming the names of God and the angels – and finally, that “he swore by his soul” that Saadia and even Maimonides had used this same method before him.³ Again, it seems obvious that it is less the kabbalistic doctrine itself that Graetz condemned here, but rather the immoral consequences that he saw almost necessarily connected with the practice of Kabbalah in deed and in writing. If this immorality was (pseudo-epigraphically) attributed by Botarel and others to the heroes of Graetz’s own version of Judaism, i. e. the talmudic rabbis and (although in a more limited way) the medieval Jewish philosophers, Graetz felt a strong need to reject those kabbalists as dishonest, but not as kabbalists as such. Graetz’s passion was evoked again by the anonymous author of two kabbalistic books, Sefer Ha-Kana and Sefer ha-Peliah, because “this man directed his stinger against the disciples of the Talmud, against the Talmud itself, and even against the religious law of Judaism.” While for Graetz, Kabbalah was on a general decline during the fifteenth century, this unknown Spaniard tried to give it a new impetus by his vicious attacks on Jewish tradition. Interestingly, it seems that for Graetz, “the rude Kabbalah with its windy fantasies” was generally unable to produce original thought, and is essentially forced to serve interests outside of itself.” In line with his low opinion about the rationality of kabbalistic doctrine, Graetz submitted that Kabbalah was permanently misused by its purveyors in their thirst for glory and influence. Thus, in the case of this anonymous Spanish author, “Kabbalah turned now to destruction because it could not create anything.” What was nevertheless original in the two books is the author’s way of applying talmudic concepts and hermeneutic rules to the Kabbalah, Graetz wrote, which ipso facto works out to be a way of fighting the Talmud with its own weapons. The anonymous author outdid himself in unloading his anger on the rabbis as the followers of the Talmud because they would ignore

 All quotes Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 96 – 98.

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the Kabbalah. “This kabbalist destroyed talmudic Judaism,” Graetz accused, “only in order to claim and to prove the indispensability of Kabbalah.”⁴ Graetz’s conclusion to this already angry account is especially dramatic, which is always a sign for Graetz having a hidden, subtextual fascination with the subject under discussion: “Before three centuries had passed since the emergence of mysticism, Talmud and Kabbalah became adversaries, and were engaged in bloody feuds – another two centuries later they were mortal enemies.”⁵ Surprisingly, however, the Sefer Ha-Kana and the Sefer ha-Peliah also awakened Graetz’s unbiased scientific enthusiasm again. To the description of the motives of the anonymous author, which appeared in the body of the eighth volume of his History, Graetz added another of those lengthy scholarly endnotes (stretching this time over more than six pages) that are written in a completely different tone and deal with manuscripts, dating, and research, rather than with judgmental biographies.⁶ Graetz mentioned that he received a manuscript of the Sefer ha-Peliah from the library of “my friend Raphael Kirchheim”. Kirchheim (1804– 1889), an illustrious scholar of the Wissenschaft des Judentums from Frankfurt, owned a huge collection of Hebraica and played an important role in the Wissenschaft movement, corresponding with many of its members from Abraham Geiger to Solomon Rapoport.⁷ His willingness to lend Graetz this valuable manuscript attests once again to the intensive networking of the Wissenschaft scholars when it came to kabbalistic studies, and reflects their interest in making substantial progress in this problematic field. Obviously challenged by the mysterious nature of the two works, Graetz appears to have devoted a serious amount of scholarship to the discovery of the time of origin of those books. He ultimately determined that they belonged to the second half of the fifteenth century, as he demonstrated in the endnote by using many small indicators in the manuscript itself and by building on the pre-

 Cf. Scholem, (Major Trends, p. 211) repeating the same: “It is not surprising that a latent antiTalmudism had been diagnosed in these writings…” (referring to Graetz in the footnote).  All quotes Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 221– 223. It is not entirely clear what Graetz means by that. Given that he dated the two works to the second half of the fifteenth century, 300 years earlier was 1150, and 200 years later was 1650. The first date might be referring to Isaac the Blind, whom Graetz considered to be the actual father of medieval Kabbalah, while the second date probably referred to Sabbatai Zevi (1626 – 1670). Banned by the traditional Talmudists, Sabbatai was a follower of Lurianic Kabbalah, which, according to Graetz, centered around intense messianic expectations. For Graetz’s account of the Sabbatian movement and its involvement with Kabbalah: Geschichte der Juden, vol. 10, Leipzig 1868, p. 206 ff.  See Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, Leipzig 1890, p. 449 – 455.  Kirchheim’s scholarship, religious role (he changed camp from Hirsch’s separatism to Geiger’s radical reform) and vast correspondence still await scholarly attention.

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vious research of Adolf Jellinek. This discovery, again disproving the pretended antiquity of a kabbalistic work, as in the case of the Zohar, gave Graetz much satisfaction, discernable still between the lines of the endnote. While Jellinek had assumed that the author was either Italian or Greek, Graetz thought that “only Spain, where both Kabbalah and skepticism were at home, could have produced such bold, anti-talmudic criticism.”⁸ But in addition, the content of the work gave enough evidence for a Spanish origin, which Graetz then showed in great detail, quoting extensively from the Hebrew text. For proof of the “savage criticism” of the Talmud and its law that Graetz had noticed earlier, Graetz now quoted at length in the endnote the interesting example of how the unknown author ridiculed the inconsistent talmudic regulations concerning the exemption of women from the religious obligation to study Torah.⁹ But almost as if Graetz had been forced as a matter of principle to contradict anything any kabbalist has ever written, he critically remarked on this proto-feminist passage from Sefer ha-Kana : “This sounds as if it came from an emancipation-of-women-addicted reform rabbi”.¹⁰ In fact, most of the other examples of Talmud criticism that Graetz cited from the two books sound like an anticipation of later Jewish Reform arguments – even without Graetz explicitly pointing out this interesting phenomenon. However, he clearly rejected the attempt by unnamed Christian scholars to see in the Sefer ha-Peliah a confirmation of Christian dogma. They have “erred tremendously” he exclaimed, showing that what they thought was a hint to the Trinity was in fact a common Hebrew mode of abbreviation. This rejection is important for Graetz, as we will soon see, for his entire account of Christian Kabbalah: Whatever his opinion was of Christianity and of Jewish mysticism respectively, the former can never be derived from the latter for Graetz. Summarizing his scholarly endnote to the eighth volume, Graetz concluded from his description of the Sefer Ha-Kana and the Sefer ha-Peliah that from “both works it can be inferred with certainty that already in the fifteenth century Kabbalah began to stand in contradiction to the Talmud” – a historical fact that Graetz interpreted as Kabbalah’s attempt to “corrode and dissolve” traditional main-

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 451.  Although Torah learning is not a time bound mitzvah which is the kind of mitzvah that, according to the Mishnaic ruling (Kiddushin 1:7), women are exempt, according to the Talmud, women are not obligated to study the Torah because of the verse in Deut. 11:19 (also part of the central Shema’ prayer) which literally says “…and teach them [the words of the Torah] to your sons [‫ ”]בניכם‬whereupon the Talmud adds: and not to your daughters (Kidd 29b).  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 453.

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stream Judaism itself – which became therefore another reason for the historian to dislike Kabbalah.¹¹ Certainly revealing concerning his general evaluation of the role of Jewish mysticism is Graetz’s account of Christian Kabbalah in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as given in the next and ninth volume of his History of the Jews. In the eighth volume, he had already briefly mentioned the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463 – 1494), “more of a bookman than a thinker”, as someone who “was tempted to descend into the abysses of the secret doctrine of Kabbalah”. Down in those abysses Pico found a confirmation of all of the important Christian dogmas, which Graetz listed in detail, and in a manner that cannot be read but as irony. In addition, Graetz quoted from Pico’s famous 900 theses the one that says: “Nulla est Scientia, quae nos magis certificet de divinitate Christi quam magia et Cabbala.” (There is no science that can certify the divinity of Christ better than magic and Kabbalah.)¹² In Graetz’s opinion, all this was the product of a “woozy mind and childish enthusiasm for the pseudo-doctrine of Kabbalah”, and it already becomes very obvious at this point that Graetz was unable to acknowledge any serious possibility of learning Christian truths from kabbalistic Jewish sources, unless one conceded that from the windy fantasies of Kabbalah everything could be inferred that one might wish for.¹³ Pico della Mirandola is then immediately contrasted with his Jewish teacher Elijah Delmedigo (1458 – 1493), whom Graetz generally held in high esteem. Delmedigo “kept aloof” of Kabbalah, Graetz wrote, and this alone is “striking proof of his sober mind and his healthy judgment.” But more than that, Delmedigo “despised the kabbalistic nightmare [Spuk] and did not hesitate to expose its worthlessness.” He had the courage to pronounce that there is no trace of Kabbalah in the Talmud and that the Zohar is “the product of a forger.” However, following this de rigueur rant, Graetz grants us another insight into the true motivation for his rejection of Kabbalah. Elijah Delmedigo, he writes full of sympathy, called the central kabbalistic assumption that mortal man – hardly able to improve himself – should have influence on the deity by means of prayer or religious ritual an idea that was “ridiculous if not blasphemous” (German alliteration: lächerlich oder gar lästerlich). Graetz not only agreed with Delmedigo that  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 455.  Pico is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all challengers who might come to Florence at his expense.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 246 – 47.

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the origin of Kabbalah was non-Jewish, neo-Platonic philosophy, in general he identified with Delmedigo’s “healthy views on religion”. The description of the Renaissance Averroist Delmedigo given here pertains not only to the intended object, but also to Graetz himself: “He was a warm adherent of Judaism and an admirer of the talmudic elements therein – very far, though, from accepting every talmudic dictum as truth.”¹⁴ On this theological basis, Graetz seems to say, there is no room for sympathy for the “foreign” Kabbalah. Graetz’s true opinion concerning the thought of the Renaissance Christian kabbalists, with all its inner complexity, comes to light only in his discussion of the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin (1455 – 1522). Devoting four full chapters of the ninth volume of his History to Reuchlin and the important debates he was involved in, Graetz became famous in modern historiography for his controversial thesis that the Reuchlin Affair (1510 – 1520) distinctly helped to spark the Protestant Reformation. In any event, Reuchlin fought at great personal risk against the burning of the Talmud by the Church, which saw the Talmud’s destruction as a measure taken to expedite the Jews’ conversion to Christianity. Reuchlin held the opposite view and even proposed that emperor Maximilian I should issue a decree to establish Hebrew chairs at every German university for the study of the Talmud. In principle, this position should have enamored Graetz of Reuchlin, but since the latter was also an ardent admirer of Kabbalah, convinced, as Pico was before him, that the truth of Christianity can be demonstrated using kabbalistic texts, Graetz’s reverence for this brave defender of Jewish literature was seriously impaired. Many scholars have discussed the motives behind Reuchlin’s astounding commitment to the Talmud, with options ranging from a true understanding of the importance of the work to Reuchlin’s personal view of precisely its usefulness in the conversion of the Jews.¹⁵ Graetz had his own opinion on this question – which has so far mostly been overlooked by modern scholarship. For Graetz, it was Kabbalah, of all reasons, “standing in the dark background” of every one of the debates between Reuchlin and the Dominicans as led by the inquisitor, Jacob van Hoogstraaten, who spearheaded the anti-talmudic efforts of the Church. Graetz argued in no uncertain terms: “Because of his enthusiasm [Schwärmerei]

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 8, p. 247. What follows here is a detailed summary of Delmedigo’s work Bechinat ha-Dat that contains also all the anti-Kabbalah claims, listed by Graetz before.  I cannot discuss here all that is connected to Reuchlin’s relation to Jews and Jewish literature. See for an overview: Julius H. Schoeps, ed. et al., Reuchlin und die Juden, Pforzheim 1993; Erika Rummel, The Case against Johann Reuchlin, Toronto (2002); David H. Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books, Oxford 2011; Jan-Hendryk de Boer, Unerwartete Absichten – Genealogie des Reuchlinkonflikts, Tübingen 2016.

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for this secret doctrine, which was supposed to provide the key to a deeper understanding of philosophy and of Christianity, Reuchlin demanded the sparing of the Talmud – because in his opinion the Talmud also contained mystical elements. The juvenile Kabbalah became the patroness of the grey Talmud.”¹⁶ Graetz developed this theory in several steps. Reuchlin had studied Hebrew already in the 1490s and soon began to venerate the ancient language, Graetz explained. But the object of his aesthetic love was not so much the language of the Bible: “Actually, Reuchlin glorified much more the language of the kabbalists – in his beautiful Latin phrases and in his classical learning – in order to recommend it warmly to the Christian audience.” The (Christian) hero of Reuchlin’s first treatise mentioning kabbalistic teachings (from 1494), apparently the alter ego of Reuchlin himself, had already “glamorized the kabbalists’ childish interpretation of the names and letters in the Hebrew Bible, and had applied them to the dogmas of Christianity,” Graetz wrote. Again, there is no doubt from Graetz’s account that he believed this application to be but “mystical child’s play”, especially when Reuchlin discovered in the combination of letters of the word Jesus “the culmination of all essence and of all secrets”.¹⁷ Graetz’s respective rejection of both Christian dogma and kabbalistic doctrine would not yet mean that both theologies have anything in common, or could even be derived from one another – all this is utter nonsense in the eyes of the historian. Once his long and intense debate with the Dominicans was over, and Reuchlin had emerged more or less victorious, he was only then reassured in his conviction concerning the congruence of Kabbalah and Christianity, Graetz continued his account. Reuchlin now set out to substantiate his view in greater depth, and after he had searched for a long time for guidance in this endeavor, “coincidence acquainted him with the most gloomy source: the senseless writings of the kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla of Castile.”¹⁸ Based on his reading of Gikatilla, Reuchlin authored his major work on Kabbalah, De arte cabbalistica (published 1517), with the intention “to exploit Kabbalah afresh for the dogmas of  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, 3rd edition, Leipzig 1891, p. 172. Ironically, Joseph Dan claimed concerning this tension: “Graetz had to overcome his aversion to the Kabbalah when he portrayed Reuchlin as the hero of this important chapter in his history; it was difficult for him to admit that it was Jewish mysticism, which he regarded as superstitious and irrational, that served as the vehicle for the first meaningful meeting between German culture and Judaism.” (Dan, Jewish Mysticism, vol. 3 (The Modern Period), Northvale 1999, p. 234) In the following, I will attempt to show the very opposite was the case: Since Graetz obviously could not overcome his aversion, he seems not to be aware of any historical meeting here.  All quotes: Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 84– 85, referring to Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico, Tübingen 1494.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 172.

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Christianity, and to prove once again his view that Kabbalah was good orthodox Catholicism [gut christkatholisch].” But not only that, Reuchlin believed that with the help of Gikatilla he was even able to solve “the very mystery of the world” – a delusion of the kind that Graetz could only chuckle over, as he wrote, because Reuchlin was otherwise such a sober-minded man.¹⁹ Nevertheless, as was his wont, Graetz is not deterred by his misgivings about Reuchlin from giving a detailed account of Reuchlin’s Kabbalah book itself, even crediting it with a great “expenditure of learnedness”. Nevertheless, Graetz judges the overall result to be a farce compared to the effort invested by Reuchlin in his Jewish studies, excoriating that the work was a “head-spinning jumble” of quotes pieced together from a mixed assortment of classical, theological, and mystical sources. Again, the conclusion of his account reveals more about Graetz than about the ridiculed Reuchlin: Towards the end of Reuchlin’s book on Kabbalah, the tone turned increasingly Christian, Graetz noticed, “as if Judaism had become reconciled [versöhnt] with Christianity through Kabbalah, and the long lasting conflict was finally resolved.”²⁰ This, of course, was fundamentally impossible in Graetz’s view, not because he discerned, like Reuchlin, a common source for Christianity and Kabbalah in antiquity, and thus called to defeat Christianity by rejecting Kabbalah, its Trojan horse within Judaism – but rather because for Graetz Kabbalah was a completely foreign object in the Jewish theological tradition, as we saw before.²¹ In the ninth volume of his History of the Jews, Graetz also discussed the origin, doctrine, and the repercussions of Lurianic Kabbalah. For Graetz, as for most other Wissenschaft scholars, Kabbalah’s theosophical value had been on a steady decline, from the Middle Ages to his own time, such that the Lurianic form of Kabbalah was on a lower intellectual level than even the much ridiculed Zohar. ²² This harsh judgment, however, was more the result of the practical effects of Isaac Luria’s teachings in magical and occult rites than his doctrinal ed-

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, 175. It is in this smile [Lächeln] that Peter Schäfer discovered more sympathy for the Christian Reuchlin than Graetz had for the true villain, “the Jewish Kabbalah”. (Schäfer, Adversus, p. 201). But for Graetz Kabbalah was hardly Jewish at all, which seems to contradicts Schäfer’s theory.  All quotes, Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 176 – 77.  Schäfer, Adversus, p. 201– 202, claims that since “Kabbalah had its roots in a Jewish aberrance,” which later developed into Christianity, Graetz believed that Judaism is to defeat in Kabbalah its own Christian antipodean.  See for example Geiger, discussed above on p. 53 and 135, the younger Jost, Abraham Adler etc. This view was initiated by Leopold Zunz as early as 1818.

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ifice itself, which gained sometimes no little respect, as we saw earlier, for example, in Isaak Marcus Jost’s discussion of Lurianic Kabbalah. Graetz’s opinion is very clear on this point: At the end of the sixteenth century, this new form of Kabbalah, coming forth from Palestine, began its triumphal march through large parts of Turkey and Europe, and “darkened and confused the minds, poisoned even the hearts, thwarted every healthy thought, or denounced it as heretical or sinful.” For Graetz this was the beginning of a long period of kabbalistic frenzy that was going hand in hand with the “demoralization” of Judaism. Lurianic Kabbalah “not only disparaged the sciences, but also the Talmud, because the Talmud taught intellectual sobriety.” Here again, Graetz’s consistent criticism can easily be identified: Mysticism led to a lapse in morality, which for him was closely linked with rationality and talmudic learning. The kabbalistic doctrines might have been widely irrational and hollow for Graetz, but what really disturbed him, however, was the “corruption of the heart” that, in his view, those doctrines inevitable caused. Thus, with Lurianic Kabbalah, “a peculiarly imbecilic and pious Middle Ages only now began for Judaism”, at a time when in the European world, only the last traces of those horrors remained to be seen.”²³ Nevertheless, Graetz had obviously studied the teachings of Lurianic Kabbalah well – in the following detailed account of Isaac Luria’s thought, stretching over five full pages of the volume, Graetz demonstrated once again his scholarly method concerning Kabbalah, wherein theological rejection has little influence on either the length or depth of the description of kabbalistic doctrine. Luria is even praised for his attempt to bring systematic unity and consistency in the abstruseness of the Zohar, a project which was but necessarily doomed to fail, as Graetz believed. Many concepts, though, listed here faithfully by Graetz, that were rather a minor matter in the Zohar, now turned into essential features of Lurianic Kabbalah. It is in this context, after all, that Graetz used the term Lügenbuch (book of lies) for the Zohar, a characterization later often quoted out of context for proof of Graetz’s strong bias against Kabbalah in general.²⁴ Within context – including the context of the present study – it seems very likely that Graetz was not referring to the contents of the Zohar as lies, but, again, to the lying of the actual au-

 All quotes, Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 410 – 411.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 410. See for example Boaz Huss, “Admiration and Disgust: The Ambivalent Re-Canonization of the Zohar in the Modern Period” in: Howard Kreisel (ed.) Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, Beer Sheva, 2006, p. 203 – 238, “book of lies” on p. 207. All this goes back to Scholem, of course, (Major Trends, p. 191, 228) who leaves it open, as it is his usual way of taking the thin line between knowing the truth and suggesting something different.

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thor of the work regarding the purported authorship of R. Shimon bar Yochai, as Graetz saw it.²⁵ It would not make much sense anyway to assume Graetz had called the content of the Zohar dishonest. He might have believed that the Zohar basically contained “useless irrational fantasies,” but not lies, because for lies the corresponding truths would then be missing in this assumption – since even Graetz did not believe that there was only one ‘true’ interpretation of the Torah. And even if he did, Moses de Leon could still have honestly believed himself that his mystical exegeses was this one “true” reading of the Bible. Most helpful for understanding Graetz’s language, it seems, is to view him within the nineteenth-century paradigm of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its attempt to establish ‘neutral historical facts’ about its subjects, largely by clearing away layers of untruth.²⁶ One such fact is the true authorship of the works of Jewish literary history. Concerning the Bible, the supposedly neutral position would be to identify the true, original version of a verse – and indeed, after he finished his eleven-volume History in the 1870s, the heretofore conservative Graetz surprisingly began to write several works of Biblical criticism, amending the text of some Scriptural books according to what he held was the Urschrift version.²⁷ With a high level of precision, Graetz identified in his account in the ninth volume of his History the original, new elements in Lurianic Kabbalah, compared to the Zohar, and described them comprehensively. He declared the teachings about metempsychosis (‫ )גלגול נשמות‬to be the heart and focal point of Lurianic Kabbalah, always struggling to maintain a neutral, almost unbiased tone, with just the technical details being presented. Compared to Graetz’s earlier scholarly account of the content of the Zohar itself (as discussed above), he succeeded in this endeavor only partially, however, probably because in Luria he indeed found a curious mixture of interesting, sometimes original theosophical thought on the one hand, but also a real figure of a “decided apparitionist and necromancer” on the other hand.²⁸

 A few pages later Graetz writes about the “Trugschrift (book of deception) of Moses de Leon that was deified in Safed in the same way as the Book of Laws of Moses ben Amram” (Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 415) which seems to point in the same direction: the deception in the Zohar comes from the author, not the content.  If there was a connection between date and importance for Graetz at all, as Biale assumed, then Graetz believed that it was the wrong date, that downgraded the Zohar in worth, not the young date. (Biale, Scholem, p. 23.)  Graetz published textually-amended versions of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs (1871), the Psalms (1881– 1883) and Proverbs (1884).  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 414.

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This ambiguity shaped his view of Luria in general. While Geiger and Jost before him held that the maleficence of Lurianic Kabbalah began only after the death of its originator, Graetz’s analysis of Luria sees shades of that maleficence mixed with more positive elements even within the thought of Luria himself. Graetz described Luria as being one who was both “prosaic and sophistic, introducing talmudic casuistics into Kabbalah”, but who also actively raised messianic hopes and believed that he possessed a messianic mission. Although this latter aspiration of Luria was not discussed by Graetz in detail, it obviously raised the eyebrows of the historian who generally regarded personal claims to higher spheres with great suspicion. In addition, Graetz had in the meantime developed his own very different, sophisticated idea of Jewish messianism, which essentially saw the entire Jewish people as a collective Messiah, based on the notion of God’s suffering servant in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. Nineteenth-century Jewish theology had used Rashi’s idea of interpreting Isaiah’s ‘servant of God’ collectively as the people of Israel – suffering for the atonement of the nations – to develop the idea of Israel as the “messianic people”, a term also used by Graetz in 1864.²⁹ Concerning Luria, and especially his relationship with Haim Vital, Graetz’s opinion is very similar to the one he held concerning Moses de Leon: Graetz is unable to determine if Luria was entirely honest with everything he taught, though regarding Luria’s interaction with Vital, Graetz believed that it is certain that “both unwillingly cheated one another” because they fortified each other in the sense of their mystical mission. When Graetz mentioned en passant that Luria’s favorite place to visit was the gravesite of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai at Meiron, Graetz’s readers already knew how seriously the historian took the attempt to invoke there the spirit “of the fictional author of the Zohar.”³⁰ Consistently, when writing about Kabbalah, Graetz finds it difficult to acknowledge that the kabbalistic figures he described indeed fully believed in their own teachings – because for Graetz those were utter absurdities. For this reason, subtextually he is always in search of an ulterior motive, going even so far as to suggest one if he is incapable of finding it. This predilection of Graetz’s is particularly interesting in connection with Christianity, for example

 Compare here Heinrich Graetz, “Die Entwicklungsstadien des Messiasglaubens”, in: Jahrbuch für Israeliten 11 (1864): 1– 29. This concept would also play a certain role in Graetz’s confrontation with the appearance of Sabbatai Zevi. See the tenth volume of his History, discussed below. For discussion, see George Y, Kohler, “Renewed Messianic Thought in Nineteenth-Century Germany: A Dispute between Moses Hess and Leopold Loew”, in: DAAT: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah 84 (2017), p. V – XXIII, here IX – X.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 416 – 417

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– while according to Graetz, the Renaissance Christian Hebraists were simply misguided in their “childish” attempt to find the dogmas of their faith in kabbalistic teachings, with the kabbalists of Safed, it was different: When Luria came to the city, the local kabbalists had already begun “to imitate the Catholic church in adopting auricular confession and the adoration of martyrs.”³¹ It is not clear if Graetz meant that this imitation was intentional on the part of the kabbalists.³² But since Graetz refused to a large extent to recognize a continuous development of mystical thought in Judaism, from antiquity to Safed and beyond, and he rather seems to have believed that mysticism has always sprung up anew as a spontaneous reaction to other events relating to the theological and social development of Jewish history, Graetz likely assumed, at least in theory, that Kabbalah also drew on Christian sources.³³ Contrary to his earlier description of the Zohar, Graetz concluded his account of Lurianic Kabbalah with a long and very expressive passage on the likely longterm consequences of this phenomenon for the whole of Judaism. It seems that in Graetz’s view, the Zohar was actually written to inspire Luria, and that Lurianic Kabbalah was developed in order to create practical Kabbalah in turn, and that eventually this practical version of the Zohar’s principles, with its gravesite pilgrimages, spirit evocations, and apparitions, was the very ruin of his beloved Judaism. For Graetz, it was not the publication of the Zohar per se, but rather Isaac Luria who ultimately split the Jewish religion into talmudic and kabbalistic branches: Unspeakable is the damage that Lurianic Kabbalah caused to Judaism. It has coated Judaism with a thick moldiness [Schimmelüberzug] that until today has been impossible to entirely remove. Because of Luria, side-by-side with Talmudic-Rabbinic Judaism, a ZoharisticKabbalistic version has emerged. Only through Luria was the book of deception, the Zohar, raised to complete equality with the Bible and the Talmud, if not indeed placed above them.

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 415.  Compare here Peter Schäfer’s well-developed theory that Graetz saw in Luria an incarnation of Jesus, thus transferring Graetz’s open dislike of the former secretly onto the latter, who is then implicitly rejected. (Schäfer, Adversus cabbalam, p. 203 – 204) Schäfer’s textual proof for the parallel is interesting (Sea of Tiberias as a location, Luria’s messianic aspirations only hinted at by himself, etc.), but the theory suffers from its not taking into account Graetz’s general disinclination for esotericism. In fact, telling the truth openly is the scholarly ethos because of which Graetz essentially disliked Kabbalah.  Cf. David Biale for the same conclusion, Biale, Scholem, p. 24.

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Because Luria canonized every single word of the Zohar, Graetz argued, now more than ever this “distortion of the Bible” was deemed to be profound wisdom, and “the most ridiculous shenanigans” was confused with religiosity. Again, this passage is very telling with regard to Graetz’s own ideal version of Judaism, and thus we learn at least as much about the reasons for his rejection of Kabbalah: “Lurianic Kabbalah saw, based on the Zohar, in every bagatelle and triviality something sublime and of universal importance – thus leaving on Judaism the imprint of pettiness, pedantry and nitpicking – to a greater extent than the unscrupulousness of the rabbis had done thus far.”³⁴ Towards a scholarly judgment of Graetz’s rejection of Kabbalah, it seems therefore important to see especially its Lurianic version through his own eyes, not through the eyes of his many critics, who, following Gershom Scholem, read Kabbalah largely in the opposite way: as an escape from the narrowness and constrictions of rabbinical, that is, legally confined Judaism. For Graetz, Lurianic Kabbalah was not a tacit rejection of the yoke of the Law, for Graetz was sufficiently unorthodox, at the time of this writing, to hold his own, independent view of the authority of the Talmud for modern Judaism. He was as critical of the halachic pedantry of the rabbis as he was of the dry rationalism of the philosophers. Probably, even much of the modern misunderstanding of Graetz’s aversion to Kabbalah is based on the orthodox-secular dichotomy that underlies, for example, Scholem’s reading of Graetz, while the historian himself was a lifelong wanderer between the lines, in a permanent search for a middle way between atheism and the strictness of tradition. Graetz saw in Lurianic Kabbalah first and foremost ludicrousness. Suddenly changing to a more personal tone, he admitted: “Luria’s minhagim make me laugh, but also fill me with sorrow about the sublime, reduced so much to a mess of lowliness.” After giving a long list of what he believed to be especially preposterous examples of these customs, he concluded: “Luria made a kind of Brahmanism out of Judaism.”³⁵ This, apparently, was the very opposite of what Graetz believed to be the sublime, edifying, and above all, wholly non-material spirit of the Jewish religion. But immediately after that, as if suddenly reminded of his scholarly ethos, Graetz returned to more balanced language. Deliberately, as it seems, he now works out the positive aspects of Lurianic Kabbalah. True, he wrote, “Lurianic Kabbalah put great emphasis on an aspect that was, strangely enough, thus far neglected within Judaism: on devotion in prayer.” But even this devotion was soon exaggerated and got out of control, Graetz immediately objected to

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 421.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 421.

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himself, “because every word and every syllable of prayer was now to be said devotionally.” Graetz also displayed sympathy for the fact that Lurianic Kabbalah taught cheerfulness and frowned upon all gloom and every boiling up of anger or discontent. But this mystical cheerfulness has also “something nightmarish and scary [about it], like the laughter of a maniac.”³⁶ Following his foray into the semi-positive contributions of Kabbalah, Graetz now provides a detailed if rather ambiguous account of Luria’s radical transformation of certain Jewish holy days, especially the Shabbat, the counting of the Omer, and Hoshanna Raba. Obviously, Graetz is not so traditionalist as to renounce those reforms simply for being innovations. But still, he rejected their introduction for the reason that they “enshrouded everything with the smoke of mysticism.” At the end of this passage, Graetz returns to the decisive disadvantage of all mysticism, as he saw it, and as we have amply noted above: that it corrupted morality [verderblich in sittlicher Beziehung]. The example given here, without sources, was that the kabbalists allegedly very frivolously divorced their wives, because of the Lurianic doctrine that the harmony of the sephirot predestined the union of two suitable souls. Now, when a man was dismayed at the smallest amount of disagreement in their marriages, (“and who wasn’t”, Graetz wryly added) the kabbalists believed they still had to find their harmonious second half, “intended for them by preordination.”³⁷ Graetz himself apparently believed that marriage was a project of give and take, of continuous compromise. In addition to all the above, the ninth volume of Graetz’s History of the Jews contains two long philological endnotes dealing with Kabbalah-related research. This fact alone shows that the historian consistently separated his very distinct theological rejection of Kabbalah from his scholarship concerning historical facts, that is, he separated the subjective evaluation of his findings from the ideally unbiased fact-finding mission itself. In the fifth endnote, Graetz took great pains to reconstruct from several manuscripts a meeting between Joseph Karo (1488 – 1575), the editor of the Shulchan Aruch, and the Portuguese mystic Salomon Molcho (1500 – 1532), which likely took place in the early 1520s in Adrianople (Edirne) in Turkey. Graetz prided himself on having brought to light, as he wrote, the proof of their acquaintance – amounting to “an important moment in the history of the development of kabbalistic and rabbinic Judaism.” Apparently, he saw both streams as still united at this time, at least in the symbolism  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 422.  All quotes: Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 423. However, in vol. 10 Graetz delivered subsequently the example of Haim Vital himself, who, according to his autobiography “speculated on the death of his wife”, see Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 127.

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of the meeting between one of the most influential halakhists and the kabbalistic pseudo-messiah Molcho. If so, this would make his previous claim, namely that it was Isaac Luria who eventually divided Judaism irreversibly, all the more dramatic. Graetz then claimed that, probably as a consequence of his continuing discourse with Molcho, Karo’s kabbalistic visions must have begun already during his time in Turkey, and not only after he arrived in Safed. Without judgment, Graetz noted that “Karo took credit in having first discovered Molcho [erkannt], and in drawing public attention to his relevance,” and then continued to trace Molcho’s life on the basis of manuscript evidence until his death at the stake in 1532.³⁸ In the ninth endnote, Graetz examined in detail the different sources for the exact year of Luria’s arrival at Safed, (eventually determined to be 1568), the number of Luria’s disciples, and the kabbalistic works that Luria left behind. Graetz agreed with the traditional view that Haim Vital did not write tracts of his own, and that therefore, every manuscript and everything published in Vital’s or in Luria’s name was in fact authored by Luria. The large amount of those writings can be divided into five general groups, Graetz continued, and proceeded to list each group with a few lines of explanation and a few sample titles of books. In concluding the endnote, he argued that the seed for the future development of Kabbalah, from which “emerged first Sabbateanism and later Hassidism – both hostile to rabbinism – lay already in Luria’s teachings.”³⁹ Presupposing that his readers knew Graetz to be a fierce opponent of both movements, this is a scathing verdict for Lurianic Kabbalah, in addition to the wellknown accusation of anti-Talmudism. Subsequently progressing to describe the Sabbatian movement in the tenth volume of his History, Graetz once more returned to a more general account of kabbalistic theory. The tenth volume appeared in 1868, that is, five years after he had for the first time devoted more extensive attention to kabbalistic subjects while describing the origin of the Zohar in volume seven. Those five years might be called Graetz’s most fruitful period of research into Jewish mysticism, for, despite the pejorative language he generally used to describe the different forms of Kabbalah, the considerable amount of scholarship he invested in the subject is unmistakable. The fifth chapter of the tenth volume opens with a short summary of the 3,000 years of Jewish literary history, using the widespread core-shell metaphor: About the middle of the seventeenth century, Judaism, for Graetz, looked like “a

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 445 – 47.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 570 – 73.

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precious core [edler Kern] which is covered by crusts, one layered above the other – by fossilized debris and repugnant coatings, so that it was entirely mantled and concealed, discernable only by very few people.” The core of Judaism, for Graetz, was the “central ideas of Sinai and the Prophets”, with the first layer around them made from Mishnah and Talmud, several other coatings from the different national and regional traditions, and finally comes “an ugly crust, from a fungoid fabric, surrounded by a film of mold, the Kabbalah…” Almost no one asked anymore what was taught at Sinai, or what was important about Judaism for the Biblical Prophets, Graetz argued, for now religiosity was determined by the Shulchan Aruch, this being the final authority, overruling even the priorities of the Talmud. And above all came Lurianic Kabbalah, “like a parasitic plant” overgrowing the religious life of the Jews. From the Polish shtetl to educated Amsterdam, no one was free from its influence, Graetz complained. Kabbalah initially began ruling the Jewish mind in the fourteenth century, after it had defeated science, but since Luria, it had made enormous advances, or rather, it had caused such “enormous devastation” that there was no remedy against it. The “Lurianic sham” found more and more followers, and, secure of its victory, “tainted judgement and hardened the souls.”⁴⁰ After a detailed account of some of the leading seventeenth-century European kabbalists, Graetz nevertheless found some signs of opposition against Kabbalah, first in Modena’s Ari Nohem, later in the private writings of Joseph Delmedigo during his younger years.⁴¹ Although Graetz complained that Geiger’s biography of Delmedigo (discussed above) was too benign, he still believed that Delmedigo’s anti-Kabbalah epistle, which Geiger had published in 1840, was authentic and reflected Delmedigo’s true opinion on Kabbalah. A later work by Delmedigo, publicly defending the teachings of Kabbalah, including the antiquity of the Zohar, Graetz interpreted as an attempt on the part of Delmedigo to escape the accusation of heresy, and “to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses”. Delmedigo’s published Kabbalah apologia still contained enough hints for the intelligent readers, according to Graetz, to realize that in actuality Delmedigo only defended the “kabbalistic nonsense” out of necessity.⁴² Here again we find a striking expression of Graetz’s apparent inability to acknowledge that a rational, intelligent Jewish thinker could seriously believe in his own kabbalistic teachings.

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, Leipzig 1868, p. 124– 125.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 154– 155.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 159 – 160.

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Later in the same volume, Graetz returned to a description of kabbalistic doctrine itself, and especially its messianic element. It is not surprising, Graetz argued, that the self-proclaimed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi was “a deeply-initiated kabbalist”. Ardent messianic expectations were at the very heart of the younger Kabbalah, Graetz wrote, and indeed all of Luria’s disciples were expecting an imminent eschaton; their very own work towards salvation would directly precede and accompany the coming of the kingdom of heaven. Interrupting his lengthy biographical account of Sabbatai Zevi, Graetz inserted here a short and strikingly neutral description of the Lurianic theory of messianism – again not only demonstrating his erudition in kabbalistic thought, but also his pronounced skill at differentiating between subject matter and its evaluation.⁴³ As we saw before, here as well it is not the doctrine of messianic Kabbalah itself that seems to be the object of Graetz’s aversion, but Sabbatai Zevi’s false pretense of being the Messiah. What Lurianic mysticism is accused of by Graetz, in the worst case, is that it can cause “frenzies and raptures in such confused minds as possessed by the sapling from Smyrna.”⁴⁴ Messianism as an important notion of Jewish theology, and with it the universalistic Lurianic idea of tikun olam, was very dear to Graetz, as it was to the vast majority of nineteenth-century Jewish theologian in Germany. Once liberated from its irrational and mystical notions, but also from its particularistic, national elements, Jewish messianism would even become one of the columns on which a modern, attractive Judaism was to be built.⁴⁵ One of the last, but also one of the most revealing passages in Graetz’s multivolume History concerning the author’s relation to Kabbalah is the detailed biography Graetz gives of Moshe Haim Luzzatto (1707– 1746). From the earliest beginnings of the discussions about Kabbalah and kabbalists within the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Luzzatto’s life and thought played an important role for the clarification of the function of mysticism for the Jewish religion – as we saw in the studies on Luzzatto by Moritz Freystadt and Isaak Markus Jost in 1839 and 1840.⁴⁶ Although he was a confirmed kabbalist, Luzzatto garnered great sympathy from Graetz – and it is this insoluble tension that makes Graetz’s account so complex and interesting. Ironically, now even himself

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 208.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 208.  For the modern renaissance of Jewish messianism in Jewish Reform theology in detail see my (German) introduction to a collection of messianic texts from 19th-century Germany: George Y. Kohler, Der jüdische Messianismus im Zeitalter der Emanzipation – Reinterpretationen zwischen davidischem Königtum und endzeitlichem Sozialismus, Berlin 2013.  See above, p. 47– 49.

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using kabbalistic notions, Graetz wrote that in Luzzatto “the soul of Yehuda Halevi was reincarnated, only more sublime, more mature, and more delicate.”⁴⁷ His readers knew well enough how much Graetz venerated Halevi (1057– 1141).⁴⁸ Like Abraham Geiger, Graetz unreservedly counted Halevi among the most important medieval Jewish thinkers, even more elevated in that status than Maimonides.⁴⁹ That is basically because Halevi was a celebrated poet, besides being a religious philosopher, while the author of the philosophical Guide of the Perplexed was in addition a rather dry halakhist. Graetz, like so many of his fellow scholars of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums personally adhered to a more spiritual and edifying version of the Jewish religion, as opposed to a cold talmudic legalism and “soulless” Aristotelian syllogisms. It is probably here that we find the only small hint to a more positive view of Kabbalah in Graetz’s thought, to wit, the connection between the “windy fantasies” of Kabbalah and the best intuitions of poetry, both of which base their imageries on associative techniques. But while this connection might have remained only subconscious even at this point, Graetz began enthusing about the “highly sensitive soul [zartbesaitet] of the poet” possessed by the young Luzzatto, about Luzzatto’s poetic genius, “showing vigor and sweetness at the same time”, and even about his “abundance of imagination and richness of metaphors”, bordering on the same language Graetz had used before to describe Kabbalah.⁵⁰ Eventually, however, Luzzatto “sacrificed his life” to the dreams that the dazing Kabbalah had aroused in him, and would at least allegorically “bleed to death from the wounds he had so inflicted on himself” – as Graetz wrote, probably animated by the poetry of his protagonist. But the highly talented and inspired Luzzatto was also a victim of his time, according to Graetz, because the first half of the eighteenth century was a period when “the unwholesome fluids injected into Judaism in the course of time now came to the surface as an ugly rash,” obviously referring again to Kabbalah. “This spoilage had also infested the noblest organs”, Graetz continued the metaphor, then suddenly turning to  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 370.  In 1861 Graetz had published a comprehensive and rather euphoric summary of the major philosophical work of Yehuda Halevi (1075 – 1141), the Sefer ha Kuzari, in the sixth volume of the History. See for discussion my “Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari and the Wissenschaft des Judentums (1840 – 1865)”, in Jewish Quarterly Review, forthcoming 2019.  Obviously criticizing Maimonides and his school, Graetz wrote that while others who “bent their knees before Aristotle, and valued philosophical knowledge of God and his relation to the world almost above Holy Scripture” did violence to the Biblical verses until they achieved the intended philosophical meaning, it was Yehuda Halevi who alone “had the courage to assign to human thought its natural limits.” (Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 6, Leipzig 1861, p. 150).  All quotes: Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 370.

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plainer language: under “normal circumstances” Luzzatto could have been an adornment for Judaism, and thus Graetz cannot resist a melancholy feeling when seeing “this lovable youth with his ideal aptitudes” get so confused that he would almost end up on the same level as the common, tainted, kabbalistic rabble. Apparently touched by what Graetz held to be the tragic fate of Luzzatto, he added here one of the most personal statements he is able to muster in regard to a kabbalist: “If one execrates the Kabbalah [verwünschen] that has created such unspeakable delusions within Judaism, and if one bears a grudge [grollen] against the Kabbalah’s originators and cultivators, even the honest ones among them (Abraham ben David from Posquieres, Nachmanides, and Isaac Luria), and justifiably so” – then this obviously very personal fury at all the damage caused by Kabbalah should be all the stronger in the case of Luzzatto, who as a result of the dangerous allure of Kabbalah “chased after shadows and in so doing threw himself into the abyss.”⁵¹ This entire statement, but especially the “justifiably so” offers a rare glimpse into Graetz’s thought vis a vis making value assertions concerning the historical phenomena he described. His personal anger about what Kabbalah allegedly did to promising young Jewish intellectuals in the seventeenth century is here no longer hidden behind attempts at unbiased ‘objectivity’ – making it clear that Graetz was convinced that, in cases where fully justified, the historian is free to ‘execrate’ and resent any elements of his account he so chooses, like all other human beings. The rational justification is unquestionably an important precondition, but in the case of Kabbalah, and the damage it caused in his view to Judaism, Graetz is very confident that he had already stated his argument clearly by this stage of the development of the historical picture. Thus, the ‘justified resentment’ is definitely based on the theological views of Judaism Graetz held, views he interestingly did not believe to be open to much discussion. This is even more surprising since those views, best described by the formula of ‘ethical monotheism’, are actually new, and originated in Jewish thought only in nineteenth-century Germany. Neither the Talmud, nor even medieval Jewish philosophy lent themselves completely to an interpretation of Judaism where the oneness of a transcendent God would demand and guarantee the moral education and development of human society. Therefore, to reject Kabbalah so fundamentally and so vigorously on theological grounds has in fact little support in the Jewish literary tradition, despite all of Graetz’s assurances that mysticism and anthropomorphism were not to be

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 369. The other tragic case mentioned by Graetz here was the one of Salomon Molcho, discussed above.

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found in talmudic literature. Here again, the solution would be that Graetz did not so much reject kabbalistic doctrine itself, but rather the ‘suicidal’ consequences of this doctrine in otherwise talented Jewish thinkers. He himself nowhere in his works refrained from detailed descriptions of the very content of even complex kabbalistic theory, which should be attributed not only to Graetz’s love for historical correctness and integrity, but in light of the above-quoted statement, also to an educational intention to warn of the inherent dangers hidden in the commitment to mysticism. At any rate, by this point in his History – if not much earlier – it seems crystal clear that Graetz was completely open and honest in his historical writing, and never tried to hide or deliberately neglect ‘embarrassing’ Jewish irrationalism from Gentile eyes in order to facilitate emancipation for himself and his modern fellow Jews in Germany. He might have felt shame and fury on the evidence of what he saw as Moses Luzzatto’s eventual religious failure, but he was not embarrassed – because he believed he knew both the reason and the remedy for this failure. Luzzatto was the victim of self-deception, Graetz argued. Most of the time, Luzzatto read into the Kabbalah the beautiful thoughts he had in his own head, because they were not to be found in the Zohar or in Luria’s writings. He deceived himself into believing that divine inspiration had opened to him deep insights into Kabbalah, while in fact he simply brought order to the kabbalistic chaos by transposing his own systematic thought onto it. His was a double deception: Luzzatto confused what his own reason had produced with being Kabbalah, Graetz wrote, and he consequently believed that only through Kabbalah could the existing, disfigured Judaism become explicable, and the historical sufferings of the Jews be justified. More plainly than before, Graetz implied in his account of Luzzatto that for himself, there was no ‘autonomous’ Kabbalah. Kabbalistic doctrine, for Graetz, was nothing but a cluster of empty formulas and meaningless phrases. Graetz entered into a lengthy and serious explication of Luzzatto’s religious thought – as if he had not before declared it to be an intellectual failure, a suicide project, or a deep abyss into which this thinker’s delusions had led him. In order to explain the current form of Judaism, Luzzatto “spun a cobweb of a system”, which nevertheless could be described as a consistent train of thought, according to Graetz. Not kabbalistic speculations but only his vanity, caused by his poetic ability to easily imitate the language of the Zohar, made Luzzatto eventually think he was the Messiah, the one who had been called upon to redeem the world.⁵²

 Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 374.

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The last time Graetz mentioned Kabbalah in a more detailed way in his work of history is in connection with the infamous controversy over Sabbateanism between the rabbis Jacob Emden and Jonathan Eibeschütz, which originated in Altona but soon spread all over Jewish Europe in the mid-eighteenth century.⁵³ Just as in the case of the Christian humanist Johannes Reuchlin and his conflict with the Church, here too, Graetz firmly believed that the main cause for the outbreak of the heated, internal Jewish dispute was not the jealousies of two rabbis, as commonly believed, but much more so it was connected to the “excesses of Kabbalah”.⁵⁴ Graetz began as usual, only slightly amending the metaphors: “The slough that had accumulated within Judaism since science [Forschung] was banned and its foe, the Kabbalah, had been victorious, was increasingly stirred up, such that it besmirched [besudeln] the pure and the impure equally.”⁵⁵ But while Kabbalah so far had never really succeeded in penetrating traditional talmudic Judaism, this very danger now loomed large in the person of Rabbi Eibeschütz, a respected Talmudist who dealt at the same time in kabbalistic amulets. Given the fact that Rabbi Emden’s penchant “for smelling heresy everywhere” was the actual trigger of the dispute, Graetz’s conspicuous partisanship for the Emdenites in the controversy can only be explained by his dislike of mysticism in general and of kabbalistic amulets of all sorts in particular.⁵⁶ Towards the end of his detailed account of the episode, where Graetz summarized the content of Emden’s tractate ‫שפת אמת‬, he wrote that the author recounts in this work the history of the Sabbatian movement and tells his readers everything about the nefarious deeds of this sect. “This way, many people realized,” continued Graetz without any transition, “that the sole purpose of the Sabbatian heresy was to dethrone the God of Israel and to destroy [auflösen] Judaism by means of kabbalistic delusions.”⁵⁷ Remarkably, in analyzing Emden’s aggressive claims, there is not the slightest indication of a scholarly distance in Graetz’s style at this point. Intentionally or not, Graetz seems to be in full

 For the controversy itself, see Jacob Joseph Schacter, Rabbi Jacob Emden (unpublished Harvard Dissertation, 1988), and still also Mortimer Cohen, Jacob Emden, Philadelphia 1937.  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 384.  Ibid. One is amazed at Graetz’s ability to find ever new images for his aversion towards Kabbalah.  Interestingly, this assessment was indirectly confirmed when Gershom Scholem claimed with even less restraint that Eibeschütz belonged to the “outstanding representatives of the Sabbatian Kabbalah”, which Scholem thought (with some relish) was of “heretical character”, without, however, explaining according to which theological standards. (Cf. Major Trends, p. 321.)  Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 10, p. 410.

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agreement with the controversial rabbi about the intended deicide and the lifethreatening consequences of Kabbalah for nothing less than Judaism itself. While Graetz in his frequent and detailed descriptions of kabbalistic doctrine often used indirect speech, here he did not even try to report those kabbalistic dangers in the name of Emden. There is, in his History of the Jews, probably no stronger example of Graetz’s true thought about the effects of Kabbalah on Judaism than this last one.

Abraham Geiger’s Last Word on Kabbalah (1871) Abraham Geiger came a long way in his evaluation of Jewish mysticism. Beginning with youthful enthusiasm, he was the one of the very first Jewish thinkers to thoroughly analyze the phenomenon of religious mysticism in Jewish culture – only to become, later in life, the only German Jewish scholar to openly discourage the academic study of Kabbalah. Thus, in 1835, Geiger was still optimistically developing a detailed research plan for Kabbalah studies within the Wissenschaft des Judentums. In 1840, he provided what is arguably the most profound nineteenth-century account of the relation between Kabbalah and rational philosophy. Nonetheless, by 1853, Geiger already believed that not only did Kabbalah find its origin outside of Judaism (as many of its opponents claimed) but that it had nothing original to contribute to Jewish thought (as only very few held). Later, Geiger completely rejected Kabbalah. From the 1850s on, Kabbalah for him did not even serve to spiritually balance cold Aristotelian rationalism, because it never possessed a justification of its own. As such, it was nothing more than an eclectic accumulation of the waste left over by true philosophy. And, even worse, dealing in mysticism ruined the morality of human relations. It did so by leading to elitist individualism instead of to a healthy society of men because it focused on the capturing of imaginary worlds instead of improving the existing world. This view was only reinforced when Geiger turned to the subject for the last time in the early 1870s while lecturing in Berlin on the intellectual history of Judaism. In September 1865, Samuel David Luzzatto (Shadal, born 1800) passed away. Luzzatto was a close friend of Geiger’s, with whom he had corresponded for decades, exchanging views and manuscripts. In the first 1866-issue of his new journal Jüdische Zeitschrift Wissenschaft und Leben (1862– 1875), Geiger published a long obituary on Luzzatto, referring in its course to his strong anti-Kabbalah opinions. “Although Luzzatto was very much driven by feelings and imagination, he was still no friend of Kabbalah,” Geiger wrote there. This was because Luzzatto nevertheless possessed a “healthy mind” [gesunder Sinn], which must necessarily be opposed to Kabbalah, according to Geiger’s view, because Kabbalah was not a true expression of spirituality but rather “stilted, artificial, external and empty mysticism”. Luzzatto’s critical thinking thus resisted the lure of Kabbalah. He even demonstrated anew that, given its content and language, Kabbalah must have been of a much later origin than had been previously assumed.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-018

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From that point on, however, Geiger remarked, concluding this section of the obituary, Luzzatto left the field of mysticism simply untouched.¹ To “leave untouched” also seems to be the final conclusion of Geiger’s own lifelong examination of Kabbalah. In the winter of 1870 – 71, Geiger, at that time living in Berlin, delivered a series of ten lectures on Judaism and its History – the third and last of such series. The first two were held in Frankfurt between 1863 and 1865 and published immediately afterwards in Breslau.² The whole enterprise of his history lectures remained unfinished; Geiger’s passing in 1874 prevented a sequel beyond the Middle Ages, a period that in his view ended in Judaism only with the appearance of the Shulchan Aruch in Safet and in Cracow in the sixteenth century.³ During the last series of his lectures in Berlin, Geiger also referred briefly to the mystical tradition of Judaism. The series title notwithstanding, the lectures treat rather exclusively the intellectual and cultural history of Judaism. Even Geiger, then, appeared to acknowledge that concerning material and political history, his arch-rival Heinrich Graetz was not to be surpassed.⁴ Judging from its title, Geiger devoted a full lecture of the 1871 series to the subject of mysticism. In fact, however, much of this lecture covers the legacy of the influential Bible commentator Nachmanides (1194 – 1270), whom Geiger saw as a pioneer (himself ‘innocent’ of the consequences) for the intra-Jewish success of mysticism. Already in the first lecture of the Berlin series, which had provided a rough overview of the topic from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Geiger had assigned to Kabbalah a certain role in the history of Judaism. This role was not entirely negative, at least not in its historical consequences. Kabbalah emerged in the thirteenth century as a sign of the oppression of free thought, Geiger argued here again: When the political persecution of the Jews increased, Jewish intellectual activity turned inward, onto itself. At this time, “the letter was no longer the servant of the thought, but became a spiritual power of its own”. In Geiger’s view, this metamorphosis stood at the core of all mysticism, with mysticism defined by him here as “a wandering in the twilight”

 Abraham Geiger, “Samuel David Luzzatto”, in Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben 1, 1866, p. 1– 22, here p. 19. Geiger refers to Luzzatto’s work Vikuach al hochmat ha-Kabbalah, Gorice 1852, see p. 106, note 23 above.  Abraham Geiger, Das Judentum und seine Geschichte, Breslau 1863 (vol. I) and 1865 (second edition of vol. I, and vol. II).  Abraham Geiger, Das Judentum und seine Geschichte, vol. III, Breslau 1871.  For the relation between Graetz and Geiger, see in detail: Michael A. Meyer, “From Combat to Convergence: The Relationship between Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger”, in: Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience, ed. Brian Smollett and Christian Wiese, Leiden 2014, p. 145 – 161.

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and as “a fumbling in the labyrinth.” In Judaism, mysticism became known as “Kabbalah” and soon gained enormous influence. “Poor souls and longing hearts escaped into this imaginary wisdom” [erträumte Weisheit]; but also “ambitious enthusiasts made use of it, in part to fool themselves, in part to fool others and to acquire power over them.”⁵ Unsurprisingly, though, Geiger saw the influence of Kabbalah outside of Judaism, “on the whole of humanity,” as even greater than its influence on Judaism itself. This is because “the noblest and most daring minds of educated Christianity” allowed themselves to be controlled by this Jewish mysticism. Here, Geiger was obviously referring to figures like Pico and Reuchlin, who believed, according to him, that Kabbalah was the safest path to “supposed secrets of a hidden truth.” Nevertheless, in this way, the much-despised mysticism now became itself a “preliminary stage for a new elevation of the mind” [Erhebung des Geistes], because, Geiger claimed, mysticism gave birth to the Christian Reformation. In a classical Hegelian move, Geiger made Kabbalah, actually “the refuge of the weary intellect,” into the motive force behind fundamental social change: “From the struggle against rigid rules, a struggle that is inherent also in mysticism, the liberation of the human intellect springs forth,” Geiger exclaimed, referring, however, only to the Christian Church and society. Judaism did not immediately profit from the Reformation, in his view, because Judaism had already achieved what Protestantism brought to Christianity: the abolition of priesthood and a biblical exegesis according to the literal sense.⁶ Thus, in this short passage, Geiger managed to accommodate large parts of his own theology: Half-pagan Christianity was in need of an alien, irrational, imposed-upon byproduct of Judaism in order to at least reach a theological level that the Jewish religion, in its purer form, had long reached. Whatever the harmful influences of Kabbalah on Jewish thought might have been, Geiger seems to say here, Judaism will always be superior to the Christian religion, for which even Kabbalah, harmful as it was for Judaism, was welcome theological assistance. In the fifth of his ten Berlin lectures, Geiger returned to his idea that Kabbalah was not a vital reaction to dry medieval Jewish philosophy (as argued by so many scholars of his generation) but only the refuge of the weary intellect after this great period of philosophical thought came to an end by itself with the death of Gersonides.⁷ In a long metaphoric passage at the beginning of the lecture, Geiger restated his view of what happens when the human mind works

 All quotes: Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 14.  All quotes: Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 15.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 63 – 64.

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while the eyes are closed – his habitual depiction of Kabbalah. The mind is thus disconnected from reality, he seems to say, and thereby probably also from rationality, which is in permanent need of being tested against the real world. Such blind thought leads to irrationality. Grotesque trains of ideas without inner coherence soon emerge, while the secluded mind believes itself to have found the truth. It creates an inner twilight of its own that manipulates and transfigures the objects its shines upon. This is how mysticism works, Geiger wrote: it merely “takes up stale remnants of thought, leftovers of previous intellectual movements.” Those contradictions mysticism is unable to solve it “overcomes with a bridge from mist, it dives in the deep sea of the invisible to build for itself imaginary ground.” The ultimate outcome, Geiger complained, is that the law of reason eventually vanishes without a trace: “Now arbitrariness becomes the rule, imagination the legislator, the miracle becomes commonplace.” While mysticism itself is believed to have lifted the veil, in fact, a heavy veil has covered everything.⁸ In addition to its immorality, Geiger identified another harmful effect of mysticism, at least in the context of his own ideal of a perpetual reform of Judaism in accordance with historically changing social and cultural circumstances. Thus, he argued that “As soon as the healthy mind or the trained movement of thought comes to contradict positive tradition, mysticism intrudes in order to deny the contradiction and to obliterate it by secret wisdom.” Geiger must certainly have felt this perceived opposition of Kabbalah to all religious reform as outright hostility, a direct repudiation of all that he valued in Judaism. Here again, Geiger’s deep religiosity provides the background for an understanding of his rejection of Kabbalah. Secular scholars could take (secret) pleasure in Kabbalah’s nihilistic antinomianism. Geiger’s reform project, by contrast, aimed to preserve and not to destroy Judaism. As such, Kabbalah’s attempts to efface contradictions between the rational and the outdated hindered religious development and made Jewish mysticism a mortal foe. If this notion has merit, then we have identified another rather theological reason for Geiger’s rational deprecation of Kabbalah that is wholly unrelated to the fear of embarrassment in nonJewish eyes.⁹ To support his theory of Kabbalah as hostile towards reforms, Geiger offered the examples of the mysticism around the Chariots of Ezekiel as emerging at the end of the intellectually fruitful period of the Pharisees and even more distinctly the appearance of Neoplatonic mysticism at the end of the heyday of Greek phi-

 Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 65 – 66.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 66.

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losophy.¹⁰ According to Geiger, the Sefer Yezirah, written at the beginning of the ninth century, was a product of the latter decline of speculation into mystical thought. As noted above, Geiger agreed with the late dating of the work by Zunz and David Joel and rejected the assumption of Franck, Jellinek and Graetz that the Sefer Yezirah was antique. Here, Geiger entered into a detailed, largely unbiased description of the content and major doctrines of the book. Remarkably, and in line with the view of many of Wissenschaft scholars before him, he still regarded Sefer Yezirah as more “valuable” mysticism than later productions of this genre, even independent of the dating.¹¹ Only at the end of the descriptive part did Geiger return to his previous judgment of the Yezirah: In this mystical train of thought [Gedankenreihe], all law of reason was abandoned, all causality was destroyed – pure arbitrariness ruled. Particularly disturbing for Geiger was that Kabbalah completely blurred the boundary between the bodily and the spiritual, formulating a new, hallowed dialectic relation between human limbs and the human intellect that was purportedly superior to common morality. Once again, we see thinly veiled criticism of the immoral effects of Kabbalah: For Geiger, ethical behavior begins with the strict distinction of the carnal and the spiritual in human beings.¹² But for the support of one important historical figure and the influence of this thinker on the theology of Judaism, says Geiger, “a perverse direction of thought” [verkehrte Richtung] like Kabbalah would never have found wider appreciation in Jewish circles. This figure was Nachmanides, a man “whom we all joyfully show great respect but who also often drives us crazy, because in him clarity and effusive delusion are blended in the strangest way.”¹³ The following poetic account of Nachmanides’ life and thought, however, hardly even discussed mysticism, and only after mentioning Nachmanides’ death did Geiger return to this subject, transitioning now to Moses de Leon. “Immature or at times even impure spirits quickly latch onto [unfrei, unreif, unrein] the hems of the coats of great men”, Geiger claimed, playing with the German words. Nachmanides’ greatness paved the way for a wave of kabbalistic enthusiasm, because pious fancy is always more appealing than consistent thought. But still, the philosophers could ignore this new group of authors, that “eagerly intruded into the

 Geiger had shocked the Christian world with his counter-historical claim that Jesus was a Pharisee. See on that Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, Chicago 1998.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 67– 71.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 71.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 71.

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systemless system of Kabbalah” – until one man eventually succeeded “to proceed with much more skill than all the others”.¹⁴ Moses de Leon is a difficult figure for Geiger to portray. On the one hand, Geiger is too honest to ascribe the great success of the Zohar only to the “lucky idea” of attributing the work to Shimon bar Yochai. On the other hand, despite all that Geiger had written on Kabbalah and its worth, Moses de Leon was still a presumptuous pretender with only “spindly insights”. Geiger is not willing to follow some of his nineteenth-century German colleagues in seeing the Zohar as a composition of different texts and layers, possibly only edited and not authored by Moses de Leon. He was to be the sole author of the work, apparently because he was to serve as the personal subject for Geiger’s criticism of Kabbalah. But Geiger also stood in awe before the richness and style of the Zoharic text and can hardly hide his appreciation, at least for the enormous effect it had on Judaism [ungewöhnliches Aufsehen]. Thus, following Geiger’s involuntarily ironic account in this Berlin lecture, the Zohar appeared suddenly, like an apparition; almost in a mystical manner, out of nothing. The language of the Zohar was “skillful, compelling and flaunty”, Geiger wrote; the style was daring [kühn] and shaped by great self-confidence. The allegories are “superb”, “sharply-worded” and “imaginative”.¹⁵ Only when he got back to a more critically scientific approach did Geiger remember that the Zohar itself, here and there, disclosed its true period of origin, and that the Aramaic language it used sometimes revealed its younger age in some failed expressions. Concerning the attribution to Shimon bar Yochai, Geiger, like Graetz before him, was not willing to decide “if Moses de Leon indeed committed outright fraud [nackter Betrug], or if he was so confused in his thought, if his delusion had so blinded him, that he truly believed that he was communicating with the old Sage.” This hesitation of both scholars is interesting. It seems to imply that Geiger and Graetz alike doubted (probably unconsciously) that the emergence of work as great and influential as the Zohar could be explained solely by such base motives as greed or thirst for fame. Who knows how to draw the line between deception and fantasy anyway, Geiger asked, thus concluding his lecture. While the Zohar soon won many admirers, this first success was rather insignificant compared to what happened two hundred years later, he wrote, obviously referring to Lurianic Kabbalah: “At a time when the intellect had sunken even lower, and the free power of thought almost completely fell asleep, this book would reign supreme – a reign that was ruinous

 Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 73 – 75.  All quotes: Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 75.

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to the highest degree.” The pernicious rule of the Zohar over Judaism continued until the first half of the eighteenth century, according to Geiger, and in many dark regions until today. Here, in Germany, however, in the 1870s, Geiger claimed, almost nonchalantly and with the assurance of victory, “it is forgotten” [verschollen].¹⁶ Before Geiger discussed Lurianic Kabbalah itself in the tenth and last of his Berlin lectures, he gave a short and compelling account of Christian Kabbalah in the ninth lecture, referring mostly to Johannes Reuchlin. Importantly for Geiger, during the Renaissance, first in Italy and later in Germany, Christian thinkers were unable to identity what was truly meaningful in Jewish thought. According to Geiger, “authentic” [echt] Judaism was represented by the biblical prophets. Christian Hebraists, however, preferred the “excess” [Auswuchs], that is, kabbalistic mysticism.¹⁷ There was an outright hunting and chasing [rennen und jagen] after kabbalistic works among the Christian elites, Geiger wrote. This was an odd phenomenon that had no equivalent on the Jewish side, where those works actually came from. To the contrary, the Jewish teachers of the Christian Renaissance kabbalists were themselves “committed opponents of Kabbalah”, Geiger emphasized. Like Graetz before him, he cited Eliah Delmedigo – who “in a beautiful small tractate had refuted Kabbalah with clear arguments” and Leo Abarbanel, who had “hardly ever mentioned” Kabbalah.¹⁸ Thus, for Geiger, it is in spite of the Jewish influence on them that both counts Pico of Mirandola (uncle and nephew) “were completely dominated by Kabbalah and devoted all their intellectual powers to it.”¹⁹ In Germany, the excitement about Kabbalah was even more intense. Johann Reuchlin, the German Hebraist who Geiger praised at the outset of his account as the “unsurpassed champion of the Wissenschaft” of his time, “nevertheless [dennoch] found the highest aim of his intellectual [wissenschaftlich] activities in the knowledge [Erkenntnis] of Kabbalah, and in his praise of Kabbalah, directed at his contemporaries.” The above-mentioned absurdity, in Geiger’s view, reappears

 Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 77.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 129.  Ibid., referring to Delmedigo’s work Bechinat ha-Dat.  Giovanni’s six years younger nephew Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1470 – 1533) wrote a detailed biography of his more famous uncle, published in 1496. Probably Geiger calls him a kabbalist because of his opinion on witchcraft, which Gianfrancesco believed was a real phenomenon. His best know work Dialogus Strix (1523) was especially dedicated to this purpose. See Peter Burke “Witchcraft and Magic in Renaissance Italy: Gianfrancesco Pico and his Strix”, in: The Dammed Art – Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo, London 1977, p. 32– 52.

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here: None of Reuchlin’s Jewish teachers showed any affinity towards mysticism; one of them even discouraged Reuchlin from continuing his kabbalistic studies. The conclusion Geiger reaches is telling: Through Kabbalah, “modernity was influenced by Judaism in a peculiar way [eigenthümlich], without even being touched by Judaism’s deepest and innermost content.”²⁰ Geiger’s triumph here is again twofold and fully in accord with his own view of Europe’s religious history: Inferior Christianity could not be modernized without superior Judaism’s influence, but what it absorbed was precisely the foreign element of the Jewish religion, its non-essential, excessive aspects – thus effectively perpetuating Christian inferiority even during the modern age. Geiger added that the (in itself) already very peculiar Kabbalah took under the treatment of the Christian Hebraists an even more curious shape, especially when they tried to turn it into the “deeper Wissenschaft of Christianity.” Bordering on schadenfreude, Geiger explained how Reuchlin attempted to construct, with the use of Kabbalah, ancient Hebrew roots for the eternal truth of the Christian religion. All the absurd kabbalistic feats, the twisting of letters and the play with numbers, are administered for the justification of Christianity. The result of this endeavor “…is as preposterous as the results of the Jewish kabbalists.” As an example, Geiger offered Reuchlin’s reading of the first verse of Genesis – a “mystical child’s play” as Heinrich Graetz had called this same exegesis a few years earlier: The Hebrew word ‫( ברא‬create) is taken apart into ben (son), av (father) and ruah (spirit), thus positioning the Trinity at the very beginning of the Bible.²¹ It is self-evident, concluded Geiger, that this utilization of Kabbalah for Christian purposes had no positive influence on Jewish thought. It did not increase the worth of Kabbalah for the Jews when Christians exploited it this way. On the contrary, it made Kabbalah even more suspicious in their eyes.²² Whether this final assertion was wishful thinking or not, we see once again how far Geiger is from any attempt to curry favor with his own Christian contemporaries in the nineteenth century by repudiating irrational Jewish Kabbalah. Indeed, he condemned the Christian theologian Johannes Reuchlin even more severely than the Jews for falling into the mystical trap. Eventually, in the last lecture of the last lecture series he ever held, Geiger arrived at his discussion of Lurianic Kabbalah. Again, this new wave of mystical thought is explained here as the product of oppression. The expelled Jews from  All quotes, Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 130.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 131, for Graetz (even quoting this in Reuchlin’s original Latin, apparently to convince the reader that this was meant seriously) see his Geschichte der Juden, vol. 9 (3rd, Leipzig 1891), p. 84, note 6.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 131.

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Spain brought with them “a sinister and bent spirit”, but the sight of the Holy Land, the ruins of former greatness, blinded them and “made them only shudder in pious memories” instead of freeing their minds. So, enthusiasm was awakened, and the sober learning of the law was not sufficient for the longing of their hearts. As a result, “the old mysticism, which had emerged two hundred years earlier, now reached full power,” but without that the new mystics would have really changed it. Mysticism, Geiger clarified here again, “is not the sickness itself but its symptom”. The sickness is older, and Kabbalah is only the response to the fatigue of the mind and the desire of the heart for something unattainable. In this way, said Geiger, Kabbalah now spread through the orient, too.²³ If, indeed, one can extrapolate from the impact and expansion of a religious sect to the tribute that must be paid to the sect’s founder, then all the admiration that Isaac Luria’s proponents showed him was well deserved, Geiger averred. He himself, however, did not belong to this group – compared to Graetz and before him Jost, Geiger’s opinion of Luria is less favorable. Luria possessed a blurred mind, which was only natural, given the obscure direction of thought [Geistesrichtung] he followed. In Geiger’s view, he had failed to master the many influences that affected him. That he never wrote anything of his own, Geiger was unwilling to attribute to modesty or mystical wisdom. Rather, he ascribed Luria’s lack of literary output to an inability to harmonize and to form [einen und gestalten] thoughts, which is the precondition for the communication of ideas. Luria remained in a state of vague confusion, surprising his surroundings by sudden flashes of inspiration [Geistesblitze] that soon expired again.²⁴ Luria’s time was in such need of a captivating personality, Geiger explained, that he was turned into a saint precisely because each of his disciples could interpret his bare hints in his own way. Far from clarifying our knowledge of Luria, the many legends of his miracle-working serve to make him disappear into the mist of history. His actual teachings are difficult to determine, Geiger wrote, because his disciples’ ascriptions of him are highly contradictory. Indeed, Geiger curtailed his attempt to re-construct the main lines of Lurianic Kabbalah after writing only a single paragraph. Instead, he noted, again appreciatively, the influence it had on Jewish liturgy, a subject that was close to Geiger’s own interests as a community rabbi.²⁵ The Lurianic addition of a ‘Kabbalat Shabbat’ to the

 Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 149 – 150.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 151.  Geiger authored an influential reform prayer book that was used for many decades throughout Germany – combining Hebrew and German, as well as old and new in a very balanced way.

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prayer book Geiger found to be “not without all justification”; the hymn of Lecha Dodi had, “although no content, still a certain intimacy” and inspired composers to this day to probe their talents. Still other prayer texts, which intruded into Jewish liturgy in the wake of Lurianic Kabbalah, “stand there in the background and gape at us eerily” [gespenstisch], Geiger felt, because they are full of the most baroque superstition.²⁶ Geiger’s conclusion to this section serves at once as his final word about Kabbalah during his lifetime and his précis of it. After Luria, Kabbalah gained mastery over Jewish minds and circulated widely. Soon, it also conquered the Slavic lands, where it reigns until this day. But, as though Geiger could not end his account of Kabbalah in an entirely negative way, he conceded that in Eastern Europe, “as a remedy to torpidity” [Erstarrung], Kabbalah had indeed a certain justification. Interestingly, here Geiger suddenly seems to say that a preoccupation with mysticism was preferable to the meaningless Eastern European method of technical Talmud study, which he abhorred. While this thought is not further developed, it is in line with Geiger’s recurrent metaphor for Kabbalah, which concerns sickness and medicine: Where the sickness itself is cured – that is, obviously, in his native Germany – Kabbalah must give way, because it has become useless. The sickness, it is now clear, is this very torpidity, the inability or the refusal for development. The only remedy that would not only treat the symptoms but entirely uproot torpidity is Wissenschaft. It is only where Wissenschaft is not admitted that mysticism spreads irresistibly.²⁷ Here, Geiger has finally explicated the precise reason for his rejection of Kabbalah in terms of its hampering of what he perceived as the potential of Judaism to develop. Natural and healthy development was the very elixir of life for Judaism. Only by its continuous adaptation to the progress of humanity will the Jewish religion survive and inspire its followers. Kabbalistic mysticism, with its inherent opposition to all true and critical Wissenschaft, stood in the way of natural development because it offered its own alluring answer to the torpor of tradition. Kabbalah would not resolve the contradictions but perpetuate them through mystification; based as it is on a nihilistic unworldliness, it would inevitably and irreconcilably separate religion and Wissenschaft. For Geiger, however, Judaism is not a metaphysical entity, standing beyond and above history. Instead, it is a worldly, daily, social activity, leading to moral behavior See for Geiger’s approach to liturgy: Ken Koltun-Fromm, Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority, Bloomington 2006, p. 30 – 37.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 152. In addition Geiger mentioned the custom, introduced by Lurianic tradition, of tikun leil hoshanah raba – although in a rather unbiased fashion.  Abraham Geiger, Judentum III, p. 153– 154.

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and spiritual edification. Thus, it is not the adoration of rationality that made Geiger into such an ardent opponent of mysticism, but, first and foremost, his concern for living religion.

Ludwig Philippson and Leopold Stein (1864 – 1877) Rabbi Ludwig Philippson of Magdeburg was one of the leading representatives of the Wissenschaft des Judentums who dealt with theology almost from the beginning of his scholarly career. Already in the 1840s, he published a widely read commentary on the Hebrew Bible that was informed by the latest historical research and a series of theological lectures on what he called “The Development of the Religious Idea” in the three monotheistic faiths. Often underestimated today, Phillipson has been considered a mere journalist because he founded and then edited for more than half a century the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, the preeminent German Jewish newspaper.¹ In fact, Philippson was a true theologian. Many of the influential editorials of the AZJ, particularly those dealing with religious problems, were written by Philippson himself. The Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums appeared weekly, and to a large extent, kept its promise to be an “Impartial Organ for the Entire Jewish Interest,” with Philippson himself steering a harmonizing middle course between the disunited streams of German Jewry of his time.² In the 1860s, Philippson, like some other leading German reform rabbis, published a comprehensive theological system of Judaism in several volumes.³ It is here that we find Philippson’s most profound thoughts on Judaism and the demands the modern era made on this religion. Philippson was not a technical rationalist in the strict sense. His monotheism, although always ‘pure’ and distinguished from all other religions, was nevertheless still a supernatural one – the product of divine revelation, not the result of human speculation. This was notwithstanding the fact that Philippson firmly believed that the monotheistic conception of religion conformed to the requirements of human reason.⁴ Only in 1864, when he published the third and last volume of his monumental Israelitische Religionslehre (The Doctrine of the Israelite Religion), did Philippson men-

 Cf. for example, Hans Otto Horch, “‘Auf der Zinne der Zeit’ – Ludwig Philippson, der ‘Journalist’ des Reformjudentums,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Institutes 86 (1990), p. 5 – 21.  For Philippson, see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 108.  Ludwig Philippson, Die Israelitische Religionslehre, 3 vols. Leipzig 1861, 1862, 1865. Leopold Stein, from Frankfurt, is another influential Jewish theologian who published his ideas only a few years later. Stein was the antagonist of Samson Raphael Hirsch. His complex concept of Kabbalah will be discussed below.  For monotheism as a product of revelation, see Philippson, Die Entwicklung der religiösen Idee, Leipzig 1874 (2nd edition, first 1847), p. 34; later also Philippson, Religionslehre II, 27. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-019

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tion, very briefly, mysticism and Kabbalah. The volume is entirely devoted to a discussion of the moral conduct of man, as required by Judaism. It is divided into two long sections on “The Sanctification of Man” [Heiligung], first in relation to himself and then in relation to his fellow man; mysticism is discussed in the first section, significantly under the title “Superstition and Unbelief” [Aberglaube und Unglaube]. Philippson makes it clear that, in his view, mysticism constitutes a classic case of superstition. While in an earlier passage of the book he had conceded that even “the bizarre aberration of Kabbalah” held the right Jewish opinion about the relationship of man and nature, that is, a middle path between the atheistic belief in materialism and the complete rejection of natural science for dogmatic reasons, a few pages later Kabbalah is hit by the full force of his criticism.⁵ Like Geiger and others before him, Philippson found a psychological explanation for the emergence of mystical tendencies within Judaism. This was “the human desire to see the supernatural in corporal forms, to assume behind the world of reason another, hidden world of the secret, the desire to take possession of this world, to know the future, to take possession of what we require by those means and arts that conquer the supernatural. When all this comes together with a lively imagination that avoids the rule of reason, then mysticism, with all its monstrosities, is not far away.”⁶ Superstition and mysticism, however, Philippson continued, are no trifling matter. Whoever indulges in them, whether societies or individuals, are in real danger of the inevitable consequences of those menacing twins sisters. “Never say this or that superstition is harmless,” he exclaimed, never say superstition can probably be permitted for those simple minds who find no other satisfaction. “Where mysticism and superstition creep into the lives of individuals, they often lead to loss of property, happiness or even life.” Philippson blamed a whole range of phenomena on the belief in mysticism, “from human sacrifices in antiquity down to witch trials and the stakes of the inquisition in Spain, still burning until the second decade of our own century.”⁷ Let us recall, Philippson continued, that during the Middle Ages “…this sinister reign of superstition spread its gloomy yoke over all peoples on earth” and that “…the Jews during this time lived incarcerated in the narrow alleys of the ghetto”. Such recollection should help to explain how there “…emerged and was accepted within Judaism a religious philosophy that, continuing the super Ludwig Philippson, Die Israelitische Religionslehre, vol. III, (“Der Lebenswandel”), Leipzig 1865, p. 71. In German: abenteuerliche Verirrung.  Philippson, Israelitische Religionslehre III, p. 79 [mit all seinen Missgeburten].  Philippson, Israelitische Religionslehre III, p. 79 – 80.

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stitious sayings of the Talmud, was built on phantasmagories and used magical ceremonies – the Kabbalah.” In light of this explanation for the superstitious nature of Kabbalah, it is no surprise that Philippson saw Bildung as the only effective means to force back its dangerous influence: With the introduction of a regular school system and the participation in the life of society, this superstition quickly disappeared from Judaism, and “today’s youth knows hardly anything about this popular belief,” Philippson remarked in notable relief. Nevertheless, from the dark, mystical past of Judaism, he derived nothing less than “a religious duty to fight superstition in every form with all our might”, because truth, Bildung and enlightenment would take for granted their eventual victory and thus underestimate superstition as their nemesis. ⁸ What is interesting about this account is that for Philippson, too, the deeper motive for his open rejection and even his pronounced struggle against Kabbalah and its consequences was, first of all, religious in nature – it stemmed from his personal understanding of Judaism. It is not simply that mysticism contradicts reason. It contradicts a reasonable Judaism, in Philippson’s opinion, a Judaism that harmoniously combined an enlightened worldview with the belief in only one absolute, supernatural power. Kabbalah thus makes only a brief appearance in the three heavy volumes of Philippson’s systematic theology not due to embarrassment but to the firm conviction that it was nothing but a “bizarre aberration”, a dispensable share of the Jewish religion. That it appears at all has to do with Phillipson’s view of the perceived dangers connected with superstitious mysticism and the consequent urgency for the religious individual to drive it back. When the Frankfurt Reform Rabbi Leopold Stein (1810 – 1882) began to publish his own major theological work in 1872, his opinion of Kabbalah was no more favorable than that of Philippson, but he devoted much more space to his pronounced rejection of all Jewish mysticism. Stein, one of the most prominent figures of the pre-1870 Reform Movement, presided in 1845 over the second Reform Rabbinical Assembly in his hometown, and his own very moderate reforms led a few years later to the first Austritt, the famous split of the Frankfurt Jewish community from 1849 on.⁹ While the orthodox separatists hired Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in 1851, Stein remained the rabbi of the majority of the Frankfurt Jews until he finally left office in 1861, disappointed over a dispute about his speech on the occasion of the opening of the new Frankfurt synago-

 Philippson, Israelitische Religionslehre III, p. 82.  See for this, Matthias Morgenstern, From Frankfurt to Jerusalem: Isaac Breuer and the History of the Secession Dispute in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy, Leiden 2002.

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gue, which had been erected at his initiative. In 1872 and 1877, Stein published the first two volumes of a work that was supposed to be nothing short of an “Epitome of the Whole of Judaism” [Inbegriff des gesammten Judenthums]; the third volume was edited posthumously by Cäsar Seligmann and appeared only in 1910. The complete, hefty work was published under the title Die Schrift des Lebens, a German translation of ‫תורת חיים‬.¹⁰ The first volume of Stein’s theology is devoted to “The Doctrine of God and Man”, and it was in his discussion of Judaism’s teachings of Divine incorporeality that Stein dedicated a chapter to a short account of Kabbalah and the Zohar. Necessarily, the entire theology was written in ongoing argument with modern Christianity, from which Stein clearly saw an urgent need to demarcate his views concerning the philosophical essence of Judaism. By the 1870s, Jewish Reform theology was already quite developed. Nonetheless, in his view, it was still important to make this distinction because many Jewish Reform theologians were acutely aware that their modernized approach to Judaism came very close to contemporary forms of cultural Protestantism. This was especially true concerning the emphasis on morality as an expression of religiosity but also in the general project of the de-mystification of all religious expressions. Stein had always been an ardent Maimonidean, defending, for example, the Guide’s controversial teachings on the biblical sacrifices as a clear anticipation of Reform-Jewish thought. This was quite similar to a position held on this issue by Philippson.¹¹ Earlier, Philippson had argued that Maimonides’ view that the sacrificial cult of the Torah was a mere concession to pagan custom must be understood as a critique of the spiritual life of humanity in the ancient era, that is, as a critique particularly of mysticism, which finds its ground in the imagination and its expression in the symbol.¹² In his periodical Der Israelitische Volkslehrer, Stein added to this argument that, in this sense, the traditional liturgical request to re-institute sacrifices was a concession to mysticism and thus

 Leopold Stein Die Schrift des Lebens – Inbegriff des gesammten Judenthums, vol. 1 Mannheim 1872, vol. 2 Straßburg 1877, vol. 3 (ed. C. Seligmann), Frankfurt 1910. I am not aware of any scholarly discussion of this comprehensive work, except for a few passages in Andreas Gotzmann’s Jüdisches Recht im kulturellen Prozess, Tübingen 1997, p. 195 f.  Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, III:32, for a general discussion of the use made of this celebrated passage in German Jewish theology, see George Y. Kohler, Reading Maimonides, passim.  This is what Philippson said on the rabbinical conference of 1845, according to the protocol of the debate about the subject, see: Protokolle und Aktenstücke der zweiten Rabbinerversammlung, Frankfurt 1845, p. 117.

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“constitutes a regression that we cannot expect from God’s wisdom, which let Israel keep the sacrificial law only in its childhood years.”¹³ Therefore, it is not surprising that Stein opened his account of Kabbalah with an eulogy on Maimonides, instead of with the usual criticism of his ‘dry Aristotelism’ that we find with almost all of the other German Jewish Wissenschaft scholars writing on Kabbalah, including Geiger, Graetz and Jost. We are eternally obliged to Maimonides that he banished all corporal perceptions of God from Judaism, Stein wrote, which was “urgently necessary at his time when the old, sinister Kabbalah, opening the door to the embodiment of God, dared to come out of its hiding places and increasingly attempted to estrange Judaism from its noncorporal teachings of God.” Even its self-declared secrecy was seen by Stein as a non-Jewish element of Kabbalah. He contrasted this secrecy with the concept of revelation, containing the “pure doctrine of Moses”, and meaning, in a philosophical sense, a “generalization of thought”.¹⁴ Additionally, in the field of religion, Kabbalah privileged single individuals or special peoples, which is a typical feature of paganism. In the Bible, not the remotest sign of a younger, secret doctrine of Judaism was to be found, according to Stein – except in the Book of Daniel, which was “the first to make the mistake of wrapping opinions in dark expressions and hiding them from the un-initiated.” Classical Judaism knew nothing of this technique, which originated in Alexandria with its Neo-Platonic ideas. Only at later stages did Judaism and Christianity compete for the questionable honor of adopting this foreign child.¹⁵ Stein, too, set out what he believed to be the dangers of the mystical doctrine. While he knew that even the kabbalists, more often than not, rejected corporal perceptions of the divine, it was their (adopted) theory of emanation that caused the theological problem. Everywhere, in Pagan, Christian and Jewish mystical thought, the immaterial source of emanation disappeared at some point “in the greatest remoteness”, and what remained to dominate religion was only the material symbolization of the divine instead of the divine itself. This false belief in the symbol, however, soon “paved the way for thaumaturgy and spiritual swindle” [Betrug].¹⁶ As did others before him, Stein called the Zohar “the Bible of the secret doctrine”, emphasizing its perceived holiness for the kabbalists, almost or even truly

 Leopold Stein, “Die Autorität der Torah und die fragliche Dauer der Opfergesetze”, in: Der Israelitische Volk1slehrer, No. 5, 1857, p. 141.  German: Offenbarung, containing the word offen = open. (Offenbarung in German is literally laying open.)  All quotes: Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. I, p. 117– 118.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. I, p. 119.

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comparable to the word of God itself. For Stein, the Zohar was indeed a collection of older mystical material, “which assumed its current form in the twelfth century” – and it is hard to know here if this dating is mistaken or intentional. In any event, and despite his earlier praise of Maimonides, Stein viewed Zoharic Kabbalah as a reaction to the scholasticism of the time, but surprisingly also as an inter-religious phenomenon. Beginning from the Zohar’s open allusions to a Triune god until the Frankist movement many centuries later, for Stein, Kabbalah and Christianity “had enough points of contact”.¹⁷ This did not elicit sympathy from the Jewish Reform theologian, who stressed his own religion’s pure, incorporeal monotheism as a distinguishing feature counterposed to the still-dominant Christian majority position. Only in the second volume (1877) of his major Schrift des Lebens did Stein provide a more detailed theological analysis of Kabbalah and the Book of Zohar. This volume, published five years after the first, dedicated more than 450 pages to the problem of the religious law of Judaism from a Reform perspective. It is thus one of our most important sources for information on the first generation of Reform rabbis’ position towards this difficult question – and it demonstrates decisively that their view was the opposite of antinomianism, as is sometimes insinuated. Stein’s legal theology is a genuine and authentic struggle with the long legislative tradition of Judaism, that is, with its complex literal and intellectual history. At the same time, it is a quest for modern criteria for a reform of the law – in accordance with what Stein saw as the essence of Judaism and emphatically less according to what he might have perceived as the zeitgeist. Discussing in this volume all written sources of the Jewish religion, not only the purely legal ones, Stein included after Talmud and Karaite literature, but before his extensive account of Maimonides’ thought, two longer chapters on Kabbalah and the Zohar, respectively. Thus, despite Stein’s rejection of the contribution of mysticism to what he perceived as essential Judaism, he clearly makes no attempt here to suppress the mystical tradition within literary Jewish history. “In order to complete the conception of the history that we felt obligated to present to the reader of this work concerning the development of Jewish-religious life”, Stein wrote at the outset, Kabbalah, too “had to be given an in-depth evaluation” [tiefer eingehende Würdigung].¹⁸ As we have seen with many other Wissenschaft scholars, Stein believed that there were sufficient theological and moral reasons to reject Kabbalah from a religious point of view and that he did not need to re-

 Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. I, p. 120.  Leopold Stein, Die Schrift des Lebens – Inbegriff des gesamten Judenthums, vol. II (“Vom religionsgesetzlichen Leben”), Straßburg 1877, p. 285.

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sort to its concealment before the eyes of his readers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Thus, for Stein, Kabbalah is not a reaction to the rational excesses of medieval Jewish Aristotelianism, but it rather “originated in a deeper need of the soul,” the need for the internalization [Verinnerlichung] of religious life. It better ought to be contrasted to the Karaite view on Judaism, he argued: While the Karaites built on the scaffold of human reason, the kabbalists built on the scaffold of the imagination; while the Karaite view remained on the surface of the biblical meaning, the kabbalists dove into the dark depths of religious matters. But for Stein, too, the exegetical method of Kabbalah is “a misreading of the Bible that confuses the senses and produces forms and formulas, which invoke beguiling apparitions, following the call of the infatuating or also himself infatuated summoner”. Hence, Stein here added his name the list of aforementioned scholars who were unwilling to weigh in on the question of intentional kabbalistic deception. While for the Karaites, rabbinic law contains too much, for the kabbalists it contains too little, Stein said. Rabbinic exegesis derived from the words and letters of the Hebrew Bible religious laws; kabbalistic exegeses derived, instead, religious thoughts and symbols. Therefore, the rabbis are theologically content with the mere external practice of Judaism: “Done it, means done with it” [getan, abgetan]. The kabbalists, for their part, rather demand “profound devotion” [‫]כוונה‬, without which the intended effect on the higher worlds cannot be achieved.¹⁹ It seems, then, that Stein espoused a stance that we have met before: The appreciation of Kabbalah itself and its literary expressions combined with sincere concerns about its consequences and its (almost inevitable) misuse. “Too bad”, Stein exclaimed, “that when the mind descended into those depths, it fell prey to a lightless occultation [Verfinsterung], when the dark powers of superstition and deceit played their game with it for many centuries.” The same German word-pair “Aberglaube und Betrug” (superstition and deceit) was used by the vast majority of Wissenschaft scholars in connection with Kabbalah, pointing to the deeper reason for their general rejection of Jewish mysticism. This observation is true almost regardless of the degree of sympathy a scholar might have had for Kabbalah. It was no matter if he saw it merely as a deceptive literary invention of the Middle Ages or as a very old, in fact even biblical, Jewish tradition, as did Stein, for whom it was “going back to the Mishnah, the beginnings of Christianity, to the Alexandrians, the Essenes, probably even back to Daniel and Ezekiel”. But a scientific history of Kabbalah could only be written, he con-

 All quotes: Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 286.

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cluded, after the mystics were forced by social circumstances, like the rabbis were before them, to put their oral teachings into writings.²⁰ Stein designated the Sefer Yezirah and the Zohar as the “two basic writings of Kabbalah”. Unlike in the first volume (and unlike others before him), however, he would no longer declare the latter to be the “Bible’ of the kabbalists. Instead, apparently based on the outer structure of the Sefer Yezirah, he now saw the relation between the two works as akin to the relation between the Mishnah and Talmud. What follows is a lengthy and balanced account of the contents of this book, stretching over several pages and explaining especially the work’s excessive treatment of number-mysticism.²¹ Stein went beyond his self-imposed scientific neutrality only at a single point in this whole explication: While explaining the number three. Here, the temptation was too great not to refer to “the Christian enthusiasts [Schwärmer] for whom Kabbalah became dear and valuable”. As an educated German Jew, Stein has his (anti-Trinitarian) quote from Goethe ready, which, in his eyes, sealed the issue: All ages have been taught the matter — By Three and One, and One and Three, Error instead of Truth to scatter.²²

Stein critically analyzed the language of the Yezirah, less with the intention to disprove the alleged [untergeschoben] authorship of the biblical Abraham (which he apparently did not deem worth the effort) than to liberate the spiritual message of the work from the “kabbalistic haze” [Dunst] wherever this message can be truly appreciated. So, he explained rather appreciatively the symbolism of the first Hebrew letter aleph as the divine breath, creating the entire world, but criticized the example given: the word aver, meaning air. The Talmud adopted this root from the Greek aer, while classical Hebrew only knew the word ruach for breath, which does not begin with aleph at all. Thus, in the Yezirah, “the Creator made the air from the Greek”, Stein concluded, rather cynically.²³ But, after all, the Sefer Yezirah is a book, “always peculiar, but rich in ideas”. Stein asks his reader to forgive him for devoting so much space to the work, but he hoped “that this small kabbalistic tract, that kept so many minds busy and delighted” pro-

 Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 287.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 288 – 295.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 289. Cf. Goethe’s Faust, Part one, Witches’ kitchen (transl. Bayard Taylor) German: Es war die Art zu allen Zeiten, durch drei und eins und eins und drei, Irrtum statt Wahrheit zu verbreiten.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 292– 93.

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duced some interest. For him, it further attests that “when man indefatigable stands before the eternal question mark, what the searching mind discovered in all the would-be answers are only always new riddles.”²⁴ The next chapter of Stein’s theology is devoted entirely to the Zohar. Although he argued that Isaac the Blind and his students were the “originators of actual Kabbalah”, it was Moses de Leon who wrote the Zohar at the end of the thirteenth century. That he was the true author Heinrich Graetz has proven beyond doubt in the 12th endnote (dedicated to that subject) to the seventh volume of his History, Stein claimed. And although the Zohar “was written with admirable ingenuity [bewundernswerter Geschicklichkeit], it betrayed in some places its younger age nevertheless.” This fact, however, had no influence on the “divine reputation” the Zohar had gained with its admirers far into the present time. That the Zohar could not have been authored by Shimon bar Yochai is demonstrated, first of all, by the very choice of the Aramaic it was written in, Stein argued. This language is used in talmudic literature for exactly the opposite of Kabbalah’s claim to ‘highest wisdom and deepest secrets’: it is used in Talmud and Midrash for the more vulgar passages like fables and legends, spells and charms. The angels spurned Aramaic, the sages did not think it suitable for prayer – and then Rabbi Shimon wrote his most secret doctrine in this despised language? Stein asked rhetorically. “It is almost as if the pure and virtuous Hebrew, the language in which the Prophets have handed down the divine truth in its clarity to the whole of humankind, was ashamed to lend expression to delusion and infatuation.” To “invoke the kabbalistic ghosts”, Aramaic was much more suitable, in Stein’s view.²⁵ Strikingly, here the ethical and rational ideas of the Reform Movement are contrasted with Jewish mysticism even on the level of language: the Reformer’s affection for the biblical prophets and their social message is represented by their classical Hebrew, while the dark, ghostly Kabbalah is represented by the mediaeval Aramaic of the Zohar. Stein takes a less neutral tone, then, in his chapter on the Zohar than he takes in his account of the Yezirah. Although he also provided a detailed and erudite description of the main ideas of the Zohar, this depiction features a fair amount of pejorative language: “The Zohar had the astonishing effrontery to claim to know and to be able to explain all the mysteries between heaven and earth”, Stein objected. As a good Maimonidean, that annoyed him: in the Guide, famously, the ‘divine essence’ is held to be inexplicable even to the bib Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 295.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 297 (R. Yochanan said: When one petitions for his needs in Aramaic, the Ministering Angels do not heed him, for they do not understand Aramaic – BT Shabbat 12b).

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lical Moses himself.²⁶ But the author of the Zohar presumed to outrank Moses by far more than that; he even knows exactly what God does “at every hour of the day and of the night.”²⁷ In his continuous attempt to distinguish his own Reform Judaism from modern Protestantism, Stein especially resented the Zohar for inserting into Judaism “the heresy of the original sin”, the idea of ‘soul trading’ [Seelenmesse] (that is, returning of certain souls from hell) and other “foreign, Christian concepts” – not to mention the completely pagan notion of metempsychosis that Kabbalah made domestic within Judaism.²⁸ Despite this wide-ranging critique, Stein is obviously fascinated by the poetic strength of the Zoharic language and by the audacity of the book’s exposition. Moreover, he did not attempt to hide this fascination. Quoting from the text at length, he strove to demonstrate the “forceful lyricism” of the Zohar, even if his readers would “feel deep disgust at the anthropomorphization of the Most High that exceeds all limits” when confronted with the quoted passage.²⁹ After paraphrasing the Zohar for two full pages, Stein asked: Is this text not on the same cultural level as the poetic myths [dichterische Sagen] of the Romans and the Greeks? How is it possible that men of upright religious disposition could fail to be impressed by this literary artistry and turn to the Zohar in true belief and fervor? In the metaphoric reply to his own and for his time rather uncommon questions, we find something like a definition of Kabbalah, one as positive as Stein was able to formulate: Kabbalah is the presumptuous answer given to the curious questions of the child in all of us. In the face of the unknown, higher world, he argued, we all are inquiring children who love to listen to fairytales. The more boldly the Kabbalah turned to the human imagination in these matters, rather than turning to the ‘disobedient’ human understanding, the more it could count on devout acceptance by its followers.³⁰ Stein appears to take the golden mean here. His theological rejection of a mystical approach to religion, based on his strong conviction that belief and reason occupy a large overlapping area of human culture, (a conviction shared by all Reform theologians), is essentially disconnected from his appreciation of the aesthetical

 Cf. Guide I, 54. Maimonides used the verse from Ex 23, 18 ‫ב ֶדָך‬ ֹ ‫ ְכּ‬-‫ ַה ְרֵא ִני ָנא ֶאת‬to claim that this request of Moses was not granted, while Moses was allowed to understand “God’s ways”. God’s glory, however, that is for Maimonides, God’s essence was inexplicable to humans.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 299.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 300. Stein is aware, however, that some of those ideas can already be found here and there in talmudic literature. Nonetheless, he complains, only with Kabbalah have they have gained authority in the Jewish religion.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 301.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 303 – 304.

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value of kabbalistic literature, of the sheer beauty of its allegories and the richness of its language. We have seen many German Jewish thinkers of the nineteenth century choose this path of direct confrontation of those two elements. Yet, only a very few managed, like Stein, to avoid taking sides, that is, to tolerate the apparent contradiction and thus avoid the consequent need to decide between ratio and beauty. With all of Stein’s appreciation of kabbalistic language, he leaves no doubt that, on the rational side, Kabbalah has brought nothing but turbidity [Trübung] to the world, as eventually do all human attempts to penetrate divine secrets. And it is always at these points that Stein compared Jewish mysticism with Christian theology, as if to show their common irrational nature that true Judaism must reject. He ridicules the kabbalistic adam kadmon, referring to it as a little “Herrgottlein”, reminiscent of the Christian notion of incarnation, but, in fact, identical to the Alexandrian logos and the New Testament’s “In the beginning was the word” – which Stein glossed with the statement: “Words and just more words…”.³¹ Here again, he offers an apt Goethe quote, enlisting the enlightened pantheist for his cause: But only shun too over-sharp a tension, For just where fails the comprehension, A word steps promptly in as deputy. With words ’tis excellent disputing; Systems to words ’tis easy suiting; On words ’tis excellent believing; No word can ever lose a jot from thieving.³²

This is an excellent example of the well-known nineteenth-century Jewish adoration of the “great classical writers” of German literature, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.³³ Here, the German poet Goethe comes to the rescue of a modern, cultured rabbi – against the impositions of Jewish mysticism. Such adoration has often been interpreted as a certain Jewish eagerness to imitate those Christian authors’ aesthetics, ethics, and lifestyle in order to demon-

 Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 305.  Cf. Faust, part one, The Study (transl. Bayard Taylor), German: Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen, da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein. Mit Worten läßt sich trefflich streiten, mit Worten ein System bereiten, an Worte läßt sich trefflich glauben, von einem Wort läßt sich kein Iota rauben.  Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, Oxford 1979; Wilfried Barner, Von Rahel Varnhagen bis Friedrich Gundolf. Juden als deutsche Goethe-Verehrer, Göttingen 1992; J. Reinharz, Walter Schatzberg (eds.) The Jewish Response to German Culture, Hanover 1985.

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strate Jewish readiness for acculturation and acceptance into general German culture and society. However, none of this holds water, and even a cursory study of contemporary sources reveals that the Jewish elites of Germany often were rather the forerunners in comprehensive knowledge and deep understanding, and sometimes even in the academic research of Goethe’s and Schiller’s works.³⁴ Enlightened German Jewry did not venerate Goethe and Schiller out of an aspiration to think like Christians, but because German Jews believed that those famed writers thought like good and faithful Jews ought to think.³⁵ This is the sole reason that Stein recruits Goethe against Kabbalah: He believed in the supra-religious consensus of human reason and ethical values. In what follows, Stein offers an account of the development of Kabbalah in Jewish life and thought that features the standard, well-discussed decline of mysticism towards Lurianism, Sabbateanism and Hassidism. The descent of Kabbalah, the increasing ignorance of the “deeper thoughts of the secret doctrine” in favor of trivial play with numbers and names, with “empty externals”, eventually led to its misuse by enthusiasts and outright impostors, the most prominent among them being Sabbatai Zevi.³⁶ For Stein, however, the impact of Kabbalah on Judaism was much greater than for most other Wissenschaft scholars who discussed this decline. Kabbalah has fascinated deeply religious men, he emphasized, mentioning Nachmanides alongside Pico de Mirandola, Isaac Luria and his student Haim Vital, who “helped Kabbalah to gain the highest regard, to spread all over Europe and to heavily influence Jewish liturgy.” Stein deplored practical Kabbalah, with its talismans, self-chastisement and even flagellations, which for him was absolutely “contrary to Bible and Talmud”; the kabbalistic introduction of “sacrilegious play with divine names” into Jewish prayers; but also that Kabbalah made out of the “sublime Book of Psalms an apothecary shop”, with different psalms used to heal different sicknesses. Kabbalah thus penetrated all parts of Jewish religious life, exactly as rabbinic law had done centuries

 See for a convincing claim of Jewish superiority in questions of Bildung during the 19th century: Götz Aly, Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden?: Gleichheit, Neid und Rassenhass – 1800 bis 1933, Frankfurt 2011, p. 37– 48.  The best example is certainly that of Michael Bernays (1834– 1897), the son of the hacham Isaak Bernays of Hamburg. Bernays was considered one of Germany’s leading experts on Goethe during the second half of the 19th century. Although he converted to Christianity, Rabbi Caesar Seligmann (who studied Goethe with him in Munich) reports in his autobiography that the conversion was triggered by “his unrequited love for the daughter of a protestant pastor”. (Caesar Seligmann, Erinnerungen, Frankfurt 1975, p. 68 – 69.)  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 308.

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earlier, wrote the Reformer Stein. The difference, however, was that Kabbalah was still more adverse to the Bible than even the Talmud.³⁷ From Stein’s point of view, that of a modern Jewish theologian, Kabbalah is thus a sort of punishment for talmudic Judaism and the rabbinic misinterpretation of the natural meaning of the Bible. Although Kabbalah pretended to be faithful to the Talmud, the kabbalists soon declared their own reading of the Bible to be the deeper exegesis. Kabbalah claimed to possess the truer tradition (Kabbalah) and for them, Talmudism remained forever at the surface, providing only a superficial exegesis of Torah. “Under the mask of a friend, thus, the secret enemy threatened to be much more dangerous to the rabbis”, Stein explained. If once the Talmud could claim that the oral law that it pretended to transmit was the “pet of God” [Schooßkind], now Kabbalah presumed to state that dealing with its secret doctrine would by far exceed the study of rabbinic law, and that it was, in fact, the only way to achieve God’s grace. If this is so, Stein concluded cynically, then there was no longer any need for anything but kabbalistic studies, and “the whole of the rabbinical arrogance to know all and everything” [Dünkel der rabbinischen Alleswisserei] passed over to the kabbalists.³⁸ This, of course, showed only that both streams of Orthodox Judaism have to be replaced by his own reformed version of the Jewish religion, Stein seems to argue here. Remarkably, while many of his fellow Wissenschaft scholars still clearly preferred talmudic Judaism to Jewish mysticism, Stein viewed both streams as ultimately doomed.³⁹

 Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 307.  Stein, Schrift des Lebens, vol. II, p. 307.  See, for example, the above-discussed account of Heinrich Graetz, who usually tried to defend the Talmud against Kabbalah.

Kabbalah in Jewish Textbooks By the 1870s and 1880s, knowledge of kabbalistic thought and familiarity with the printed literary works of Kabbalah had reached such a level among German Jewry that many authors devoted much space between the covers of their new Jewish textbooks to this subject. Jewish Wissenschaft, in general, had produced an enormous amount of new knowledge about the material and intellectual history of Judaism. The abundance of academic studies on specific subjects of Jewish history and thought now culminated in a wave of textbooks that comprehensively presented the cumulative achievements of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Several such works appeared during the 1870s and 1880s, taking the new academic knowledge from elite circles to larger groups of interested laymen, but also to the new Jewish schools that were founded mainly in the 1860s and suffered initially from a severe lack of teachable Jewish material. One of the first of such textbooks was David Cassel’s Lehrbuch der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur (Textbook for Jewish History and Literature, 1879).¹ In this work, Cassel had the Jewish teacher in mind, but also all those “who are interested in learning about Jewish history and literature but are unable to consult longer, strictly scientific studies.”² Although ordained as a rabbi in 1843 by Zacharias Frankel, Cassel (1818 – 1893), never accepted a rabbinical position, instead becoming an eminent scholar of Wissenschaft des Judentums. In 1853, he published the first academic edition of Yehuda Halevi’s Sefer haKuzari, including a German translation and commentary.³ Cassel was among the first lecturers at the liberal Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, beginning his tenure there in 1872.⁴ His 1879 textbook followed his earlier “Leitfaden für den  About the same time Moritz Kayserling (1829 – 1905) published under the title Handbuch der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur (1879, 7th edition 1900) a completely revised version of a Jewish history work for the school, originally authored by Emanuel Hecht as Israels Geschichte von der Zeit des Bibelabschlusses bis zur Gegenwart (1855) – confusingly, from the 8th edition on, Kayserling’s work was again revised by Adolf Biach and Max Doctor and now published under exactly the same title as Cassel’s work: Lehrbuch der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur (8th edition Leipzig 1909, 9th Leipzig 1914). To make the confusion complete, also the Nuremberg rabbi Moritz Levin (1843 – 1914) had published in 1877 a Lehrbuch der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur (Nürnberg 1877, 4th Berlin 1908). But except for Cassel’s textbook (to be discussed below) none of these works contained any substantial account of Kabbalah.  David Cassel, Lehrbuch der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur, Leipzig 1879, p. v.  Cf. George Y. Kohler, “Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Rediscovery of Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari (1840 – 1865)”, Jewish Quarterly Review, forthcoming 2019.  Founded in 1872 by Abraham Geiger, Ludwig Philippson and others, the institution was in fact a liberal rabbinical seminary with a strict academic approach to Judaism. It was also an effective https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-020

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Unterricht in der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur” (1868), his first attempt to support Jewish teachers with a textbook on a scientific basis. The Leitfaden saw five new editions within ten years. German Jewish teachers in the second half of the nineteenth century either ran Jewish village schools under catastrophic conditions or taught religious instructions at non-Jewish schools in the larger cities, where Jewish pupils were often embarrassed to take these extra classes.⁵ In both scenarios, the teachers were in urgent need of German-language Jewish history books, written by Jewish authors, books that enabled them to teach Judaism not only with a high level of knowledge, but also with the amount of self-confidence necessary for the fight against religious indifference. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “Societies for Jewish History and Literature” (Vereine für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur) sprang up all over Germany. They were often found in small towns and villages, but also in the big cities, where the local Jews met to attend public lectures, and to read and discuss works of Jewish Wissenschaft. In 1893, the umbrella organization of those societies was founded with 29 members; by 1914, this number had climbed to 230. Increasingly, the societies also addressed the non-Jewish public in an attempt to spread knowledge about and appreciation of Judaism among the German Bildungsbürger.⁶ Given the literature studied in these Societies, we might assume that Kabbalah was at least a side issue at the meetings. Cassel’s eponymous textbook, at any rate, contains several lengthy passages on this subject. Already in the introduction, Cassel had asked to be recognized for his attempt “to treat his subjects as objectively as possible,” doing so independently of his personal views of Judaism. No doubt his writing on Kabbalah was also judged by this standard. Cassel located the beginnings of Kabbalah in the eighth century with the Sefer Yezirah, countering Graetz and others who saw no connection between earlier Jewish mysticism and its medieval variant in the Zoharic literature. Cassel clarified pseudo-epigraphy for his student readers, but he did so in a complete neutral tone, avoiding all language of lies and deceit. The Yezirah, which, he stated, showed gnostic influences, was “a source of deep and rich knowledge” [Er-

response to the persistent refusal of German authorities, during the nineteenth century, to establish Jewish Wissenschaft at the university, which Geiger, Philippson and Leopold Zunz tried before (see for this: Alfred Jospe, “The Study of Judaism in German Universities before 1933”, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 27, 1982, p. 295 – 319).  Cf. for teachers at Jewish schools in the 19th century: Andreas Brämer, Leistung und Gegenleistung, Göttingen 2006.  See: Geschichte des jüdischen Alltags in Deutschland: vom 17. Jahrhundert bis 1945, ed. Marion A. Kaplan, München 2003, p. 326 – 27.

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kenntnis]. Only concerning the “extreme anthropomorphisms” of other works, such as the Shiur Qoma, did Cassel write of the “tastelessness” that the unlimited imagination of the authors sometimes reached. In this, he referred for support to the criticism of the same phenomenon already in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari that he knew so well.⁷ Cassel devoted a short chapter, six pages long, to the Zohar. Like many of his fellow Wissenschaft scholars, he accounted for the success of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century with the search for a middle ground between scholastic formulas and blind belief in revelation on the great questions of the relation of God to the world, the nature of infinity and the origin of evil. For those “whose disposition is dominated by feelings and fantasy,” Kabbalah offered a better answer to these questions, because the highest wisdom to be found in the Bible must also have deeper, secret expression, lying beneath the legal and the instructive one. Cassel is very careful about historical facts; the influence of oriental theosophy on Kabbalah is “difficult to determine”, pseudo-epigraphy clouded the temporal origin of many works, the emergence of the Sefer Bahir remains a secret, how Kabbalah came to the Provence lies in the dark. Eventually, however, Cassel, too, would remark that the pseudonymity of the kabbalistic authors “in some cases served selfish and egomaniacal purposes”.⁸ The idea of attributing one’s own work to the Jewish intellectual giants of the past held a hint of deceit for almost all Wissenschaft thinkers, and was indeed anathema for the scientific ethos of the nineteenth century. After listing dispassionately all then known authors and works of pre-Zoharic Kabbalah in the thirteenth century and repeatedly referring in this long list to almost all of his Wissenschaft predecessors who actually compiled it (Joel, Jellinek, Graetz, Steinschneider and more, discussed above), Cassel turned to the Zohar itself. Only when he discusses Abraham Abulafia, who “led a vagabond life”, was governed by “a rampant fantasy and obscure thought” but was still “more prolific” than all the others kabbalists before him, did Cassel diverge from his tenor of neutrality.⁹ Moses de Leon, however, Cassel called “notorious” [berüchtigt] because he was “with all likelihood the author, or at least the editor [Redacteur] of the Zohar”, a work which itself claims to have been divinely revealed to R. Shimon bar Yochai. Moses de Leon knew the philosophy of the Middle Ages, written in the centuries before him; he read and made use of Ibn Gabriol, Halevi and Maimonides, Cassel claimed, substantiating his assertion by  Cassel, Lehrbuch, p. 229. For the Kuzari, he mentioned chapter IV, 3, referred to his own edition.  Cassel, Lehrbuch, p. 290 – 91.  Cassel, Lehrbuch, p. 292

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citing Michael Sachs, Jellinek and his own Kuzari commentary. Despite this philosophical knowledge, Moses de Leon “is far from giving a structured presentation of his secret doctrine; the work consists rather of loosely connected Neoplatonic, gnostic, Aristotelian and haggadic interpretations that, although rendered in great emphasis, hardly bespeak only one clear thought.” The revelation of great secrets is announced in the Zohar “in bombastic language”, but the expectations thus aroused are never fulfilled, Cassel objected. And, he continued, “incomprehensible platitudes and inconceivable mysteries veil the meaninglessness” of this book.¹⁰ Summarizing nineteenth-century assessments of the Zohar, Cassel wrote that the Aramaic language of the text is flawed (giving a new example of his own), that the Zohar is at times hostile towards the Talmud (referring to Graetz) and that even some tendencies towards Christian dogma, especially to the Trinity, can be detected therein. With respect to the latter, he strategically referred to the Protestant theologian August Tholuk (1799 – 1877) and his work Wichtige Stellen des rabbinischen Buches Sohar (Berlin 1824).¹¹ The following long passage gives the Jewish student a rough outline of the Zohar and, in fact, the main doctrines of kabbalistic thought in general. For the introduction to this section, Cassel adopted (without attribution) the opening sentence that Graetz had used: “The basic lines of thought of the kabbalistic system, if it is a system at all, can be summarized thus…”¹² In this, we see the degree to which, for both scholars, rational, systematic thought was the unquestioned condition for the worth of a religious work. For Cassel, too, only the main parts of the Zohar were written or edited by Moses de Leon – the supplements are of unknown age and authorship. In the conclusion to his chapter, Cassel again recapitulated all known arguments for a medieval origin of the main parts, as if in doubt that not all Jewish pupils and teachers, addressed by his book, were convinced that Rabbi Shimon’s authorship was now out of the question. Only at the very end does Cassel openly espouse the majority opinion of nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship concerning the Zohar: Its influence on Judaism has caused manifold damage, he claimed; “it has produced superstitious, appalling customs, endorsed the belief in evil spirits, distorted rational exegesis of Scripture, and, in certain respects, had immoral effects [entsittlichend].”¹³ With this appeal against the alleged immorality of mysticism, Cassel finally presents himself as a classical proponent of ethical monotheism, holding it to be the actual ‘essence of Judaism’.    

Cassel, Cassel, Cassel, Cassel,

Lehrbuch, p. Lehrbuch, p. Lehrbuch, p. Lehrbuch, p.

293. 293 (notes). 294. Cf. Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 7, second edition, Leipzig 1873, p. 232. 296.

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When Leo Baeck, the scholar who would eventually dedicate an entire monograph to this essence, was only five years old, his father, the rabbi of Lissa, published a 500-page volume called Die Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes und seiner Litteratur vom babylonischen Exile bis auf die Gegenwart (History of the Jewish People and its Literature from the Babylonian Exile to the Present). This was another comprehensive summary of Jewish Wissenschaft produced in the late 1870s. Rabbi Dr. Samuel Baeck (1834– 1912) studied oriental languages and philosophy in Vienna, receiving his doctorate at the University of Leipzig in 1856, at the aforementioned heyday of German-Jewish oriental studies there, with a comparative analysis of Hebrew and old Indian culture. In 1864, he was hired by the celebrated community of Lissa, where he divided his time between his duties as a community rabbi and his scholarship in Jewish theology and history. His 1878 volume on Jewish history was republished in 1894 in a second edition, now supplemented with an extensive reader of original Jewish sources, translated into German, including a short passage from the Zohar. ¹⁴ In the main work, Samuel Baeck discussed briefly medieval Spanish and, in a later section, also Lurianic Kabbalah. He promised in his preface to present a work on Jewish history that addressed the non-academic reader but was itself written on a scientific basis. Like Cassel, Baeck carefully noted that he had sought to be “clear and reasonable” in his presentation, but also “impartial and objective”. In the spirit of Leopold Ranke (and his student Heinrich Graetz), he proposed to not only record historical events but also to find the inherent laws of the chain of events, and to deliver “sharp portraits of the moving agents” of history, meaning historical personalities. Specifically, Baeck recommended his book to the Jewish teacher. Although “Jewish history is today one of the most important subjects for the Jewish high school student”, Baeck emphasized (and had thus obviously replaced talmudic training), students at modern religious schools depend on their teachers’ knowledge of Judaism. Those teachers, however, often lack the time to study multivolume histories, Baeck pointed out, doubtlessly referring to Graetz. For the purpose of the teacher, his own one-volume history was “absolutely sufficient”.¹⁵ For Baeck, Kabbalah is a real alternative to the “tepidity” [Lauheit] of medieval Jewish philosophy, “the excesses of which had both refined rational exegesis, but also volatilized it”. Mysticism, in contrast, “allowed the pious hearts to delve deep into the divine word” and, Baeck added without irony, it “strength-

 Samuel Bäck, Die Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes und seiner Litteratur vom babylonischen Exile bis auf die Gegenwart, Frankfurt 1878, here quoted after the 2nd edition from 1894. The supplement is called Proben der jüdischen Litteratur, Frankfurt 1894, the Zohar passage is on p. 59.  Bäck, Geschichte, preface, p. IV-V.

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ened the faith.”¹⁶ Ruthless philosophical interpretations of the Bible had caused indifference towards religion and lenient observance of the commandments. As such, Kabbalah – with its idea “to sanctify every letter of the law” – found followers among those who preferred religious inwardness. Baeck, too, then enumerated earlier kabbalists and their works, including “Isaac the Blind, who created for himself an interior world of light” and the enthusiast Abulafia, “who believed he was the Messiah” but who also knew Latin, in addition to Arabic and Hebrew. All this culminated in the Zohar, “attributed to Moses de Leon”, a work that surpassed all previous kabbalistic literature in prestige and influence. But with the Zohar came the Kabbalah’s attack on the Talmud. This was an effect that Rabbi Baeck seems to have appreciated much less than the actual purpose of Jewish mysticism, namely, in his words, to “find deeper meaning in the observance of the commandments through greater inwardness”. Now, with the Zohar, there was a certain danger that one would “get lost in the mystical veil of mist.”¹⁷ Still, Baeck’s account of the content and doctrine of the Zohar is more positive than those of most of the authors who had previously summarized the work. For him, the Aramaic is “rich in similes, written in a style that strongly moves the imagination”; the book had an “exotic [fremdländisch], dark, mysterious” aspect, but this appearance is precisely “what has captivated [gefesselt] deeply religious men, also in the Christian world, at all times.” Very carefully, Baeck wrote that the Zoharic assumptions of a “God-begotten primordial man (adam kadmon), of the creating word seen as a divine being, or of the lauded sanctity of the triad” would at least sound familiar to the Christian ear, avoiding the direct claim of Christian influences on the book. In his summary, Baeck also listed all the known arguments in favor of a medieval origin of the Zohar, but he closed his account with the unproven claim that “the theosophical perceptions therein are decidedly older.”¹⁸ Concerning Lurianic Kabbalah, Baeck acknowledged that, by its time, mysticism had long been victorious over philosophical speculations, and that therefore all brilliant Jewish thinkers, lacking choice, were inevitably led by their talents “into the arms of the Kabbalah”. The “deeply religious men” from his chapter on the Zohar reappeared here as the typical adherents of Lurianic Kabbalah because they, more than others, were “mightily attracted by the peculiar twilight into which Kabbalah wrapped its sayings, by the view Kabbalah promised to open into hidden depths.” With Isaac Luria and his disciple Vital, Kabba-

 Bäck, Geschichte, p. 344– 45.  Bäck, Geschichte p. 348.  Bäck, Geschichte, p. 348 – 349.

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lah became a power that ruled over the whole Jewish world, Baeck argued. Kabbalah now penetrated the entire religious life of Judaism and influenced all customs and regulations – regulations, “as it was believed, [that] received only through Kabbalah true consecration and holy virtue”. As we saw in some previously mentioned accounts of Lurianic Kabbalah, Baeck held that Luria himself still possessed an “immaculate disposition” and “purity of heart”; it was only his “fascinating appearance” and his “dark and outlandish” ways that turned him into a miracle-worker in the eyes of many of his contemporaries.¹⁹ Soon, new kabbalists with the reputation of holiness appeared throughout the Jewish world. However, even at this point, Baeck is not prepared for outright criticism. “Only the most brilliant among them descended into the depth of Kabbalah in order to breathe warm life into religion,” he wrote, whereas “many played only the external game of numbers and moved around the letters of the divine name, many also abused Kabbalah, and in the minds of many [critics] Kabbalah thus woke a poisonous enthusiasm and threatened the spirit of Judaism with great dangers.”²⁰ It is notable that, given his overall positive evaluation of Kabbalah, Baeck’s last word on the subject of mysticism was danger. It is likely that this word choice was made unconsciously, but it certainly was indicative of his actual views, hidden behind a rather religiously motivated desire for objectivity in writing tone. Clearly, he, too, appreciated the elitist, theosophical aspect of earlier Kabbalah, while he despised, like most nineteenth-century authors, the later decline of Kabbalah into a practice that allegedly included the ability to work miracles [Wunderkraft verleihende Wissenschaft].²¹ The literary historian Gustav Karpeles (1848 – 1909) belongs to a new, second generation of Wissenschaft scholars.²² He studied at the first modern institution for the training of rabbis, the Breslau Theological Seminar, and in 1869 earned a doctorate from Breslau University with a celebrated study on “Heinrich Heine and Judaism”.²³ Supporting himself as a journalist, it took Karpeles more than  Bäck, Geschichte, p. 453.  Bäck, Geschichte, p. 454.  Bäck, Geschichte, p. 454.  On Karpeles, see Andreas Kilcher, “Jewish Literature and World Literature: Wissenschaft des Judentums and its Concept of Literature”, in: Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness; Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, Leiden 2007, 299 – 325.  Gustav Karpeles, Heinrich Heine und das Judenthum, Breslau 1868. Cf. Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Rückwirkende Assimilation : Betrachtungen zu den Heine-Studien von Karl Emil Franzos und Gustav Karpeles”, in: Von Franzos zu Canetti – jüdische Autoren aus Österreich; neue Studien. ed. Mark H. Gelber et al., Tübingen 1996, p. 163 – 188.

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seven years to compile the material for what he called “the first-ever general portrayal of the history of Jewish literature”, published in two volumes in 1886 as Die Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur. ²⁴ The work was an immediate success. Adolf Jellinek, David Cassel and many others wrote very positive reviews, and soon, Karpeles’ volumes were translated into English, French, Russian, Hebrew and other languages. Karpeles was the driving force behind the founding of the above-mentioned popular Societies for Jewish History and Literature. He became the chairman of the umbrella organization of the many local societies and edited the Societies’ yearbook. Karpeles was still in his thirties when he published Die Geschichte. This path-breaking book sought to incorporate Jewish literature into world literature “as one of its oldest building blocks”, Karpeles wrote in the preface to the first volume. But literary history, for Karpeles, was not the history of books, but the history of ideas – this was the maxim of his work. He hoped, however, that of the zeitgeist of his own era, which still did not belong to history, “not even a tinge would be discernible in the book”.²⁵ In the general introduction to the two volumes, one quickly notes that despite Karpeles’ orientation toward literature and his interest in language as a writer and journalist, Kabbalah played at best a minor role in his view of the literary history of Judaism. He divided this history into six general periods, with the fifth period stretching from Maimonides to Mendelssohn – a period with “no distinct character” during which Kabbalah gained influence only because of the “dismal times” [trübe Zeitläufe].²⁶ Kabbalistic literature itself is covered at the beginning of the second volume in a discussion that spans more than twenty pages. In the introduction to this volume, Karpeles, too, presents the standard arguments of the Wissenschaft des Judentums for the success of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century, albeit in more elegant, literary German than one reads in his colleagues’ writings. At this time, he wrote, philosophy was not yet strong enough to reform Judaism’s religious views and tradition eventually prevailed in the struggle over the legacy of Maimonides. This was a fateful victory, because if the intellect is denied rational speculation, it will carve its escape route through theosophy right into mysticism, Karpeles argued. In his words: “The twilight of sentiment [Empfindung] provides sweet repose in faith, and such a gratification in the stormy times that the ice-region of philosophy is never able to provide.” Karpeles is nonetheless optimistic: “Mysticism is but an asylum for the intellect,

 Gustav Karpeles Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur, 2 vols., Berlin 1886. A second edition was published in 1909, reference is made here to the second edition.  Karpeles, Geschichte, preface first edition, p. V.  Karpeles, Geschichte, vol. 1, p. 11.

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exhausted from great wars – the intellect will seek and find in Kabbalah a resting place, and it will collect itself and steel itself there for new fights.”²⁷ Karpeles’ account of kabbalistic literature begins with the Sefer Yezirah, which was the “bedrock of the entire genre”. Its theosophical ideas were so attractive that many of the greatest minds could not resist the “mystical immersion” in its theories, including Bahya, Yehuda Halevi and Ibn Gabriol. Only Maimonides was ever-hostile to Kabbalah, Karpeles claimed. But after his death, Kabbalah “…swelled to become a mighty stream, soon flooding all Jewish literature and causing great devastation”. At length Karpeles, in turn, explained how Kabbalah was a reaction to the over-rational degeneration of Jewish philosophy after Maimonides, a theory amply developed by many Wissenschaft scholars, whose views Karpeles obviously summarized here. Somewhat more original is Karpeles’ insistence that exactly the same development took place at the same time within the Christian world: there are “analogous phenomena with identical signs of the sway of mysticism that shaped Christianity during the thirteenth century.²⁸ But where this spiritual force [geistige Macht], called Kabbalah, came from, nobody has as yet been able to explain historically, Karpeles wrote. It appeared in Provence suddenly, both within Judaism and as a counter-reaction to scholastic Christian thought. This ex nihilo, thirteenth-century Kabbalah must be carefully distinguished from the theosophy of the Yezirah, Karpeles argued, because this book had at least a rational foundation [Unterlage].²⁹ In Spain, however, medieval Kabbalah faced stronger resistance when it tried to conquer Jewish literature. Hence, the burgeoning of pseudo-epigraphy, Karpeles speculated, a method that met with great success. His account of the dissemination of Kabbalah on the Iberian peninsula reads like it was copied out of Graetz’ most critical passages: “A host of semi-intelligent men [Halbwisser] swamped the country with the most bizarre ideas and books, as if a frenzy of faithful delusion had come over all those who, educated in the tradition of pure thought, now suddenly indulged in the lust of mystical revelations.”³⁰ Nevertheless, Karpeles, too, provided an extended list of medieval Spanish kabbalists and their works before the Zohar, culminating, as usual, in a more detailed account of Abraham Abulafia (two full pages) who had obviously fascinated him. Abulafia had finally “emancipated the Kabbalah form all its philosophical pre-conditions and placed it completely in the field of the miraculous and the visionary.” And, while, of course, Abulafia’s opposition to the Talmud and Mishnah is also    

Karpeles, Karpeles, Karpeles, Karpeles,

Geschichte, vol. Geschichte, vol. Geschichte, vol. Geschichte, vol.

2, 2, 2, 2,

p. 14. p. 58. p. 59. p. 68.

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mentioned, Karpeles, in fact, saw Abulafia’s mysticism as no longer belonging to Jewish thought itself. Considered separately, his views and ideas come closest to those of contemporary Christian mystics, Karpeles stated. Exactly like Bonaventura (1221– 1274), Abulafia strove for the immediate seeing and experiencing of the divine, using the biblical word “only as a station on the way to the conjunction with God”. Like the Seraphic Doctor, Abulafia believed that mystical contemplation was the highest good on earth. With Abulafia, Karpeles concluded, Kabbalah had finally assumed the inheritance of philosophy: mediation between the two streams was now no longer possible.³¹ It was at precisely this moment that the Zohar appeared, a book that must be considered the “canon of Kabbalah”. Today, Wissenschaft generally holds that the author of this work was Moses de Leon, Karpeles wrote, but until the eighteenth century nobody dared to doubt its Tannaitic origin. The nineteenth century then “conducted a triumphant campaign against this forgery” [Fälschung], Karpeles continued, again in the spirit of Graetz, who himself was an essential part of this campaign. After offering a synopsis of the arguments against the antiquity of the Zohar, Karpeles rejected outright the compromise theory, first brought forward by Jellinek and Ignaz Stern, according to which Moses de Leon was merely (or mostly) the editor of much older material that found its way into the Zohar, material that he collected and complemented. “It would be inconceivable that such traditions had been left unknown for almost a millennium to all men of Wissenschaft”, Karpeles countered.³² The argument now takes an unexpected turn. When reading the Zohar, Karpeles continues, is it clear why this book had such an influence at this time – it impresses by the “magic of the secretive” and by the “solemn tone of the Aramaic”.³³ Especially because often “mystery replaces thought”, and the Zohar in general “defies any logic and any system” it is “impossible to describe to the un-initiated a picture of the Zoharic world of ideas, even if one tried to be faithful and precise” Karpeles stated, apparently counting himself as one of the initiated. He then tried to do exactly that, taking more than two full pages to portray what he called the “fundamental doctrines of Kabbalah” that are still further expanded and ornamented in the Zohar. Nonetheless, he concluded that the Zohar is essentially one enormous contradiction. It teaches at the same time the purest truth and the deepest superstition; it stands on Jewish ground but at the same time attacks the tradition of Talmud and Mishnah.³⁴    

Karpeles, Karpeles, Karpeles, Karpeles,

Geschichte, vol. Geschichte, vol. Geschichte, vol. Geschichte, vol.

2, 2, 2, 2,

p. 71– 72. p. 73. p. 73. p. 76.

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As a true man of letters, Karpeles cannot but give his readers a taste of Zoharic style, tone and imagery – he would not leave his description to pure theory. For that purpose, he translated a lengthy passage into German and included it in his chapter on Kabbalah. The chosen text discusses the creation of wisdom and understanding, as if Karpeles intended to salvage at least some of the Zohar’s reputation. It is a book, he wrote, “that was so important for the history of religion and for the development of Jewish literature”³⁵. This was probably also meant in an aesthetic sense. The style of the Zohar, Karpeles commented on the translated passage, is as contradictory as is the content. It “blended the sublime with the lowly” and “the gentlest poetry with the darkest prose”. Overall, however, Karpeles’ summary of the chapter is rather prosaic. Kabbalah philosophically replaced Judaism’s inherent dualism of God and nature with “the absolute unity of cause and substance”, and Kabbalah’s play with ideas and concepts, with words and numbers. It ousted all Wissenschaft because it “replaced the bright day of the upsurge of thought with the dark night of superstition.”³⁶ Considering that Karpeles saw himself as a representative of Jewish Wissenschaft, this eventual full rejection is hardly unexpected, and considering the enormous influence his work had on the cultural education of German Jewry in Jewish literature, the rebellion of the Scholem school in the twentieth century against this view is even less surprising. The most extensive account of Kabbalah in more popular Jewish literature from the 1880s is found in Jacob Hamburger’s Realencyclopädie für Bibel und Talmud – Wörterbuch für Gemeinde, Schule und Haus (Encyclopedia of Bible and Talmud – A Lexicon for Community, School and Home), published in 1883. Hamburger’s dense language, the wealth of information he provides, but also his strictly scientific way of presenting the material, make this thus-far completely ignored opus one of the best nineteenth-century examples of the academic knowledge of Jewish mysticism. What others promised, Hamburger, probably forced by the genre he chose, delivered: largely unbiased analysis and factual knowledge. It is easy to see why George Eliot based Daniel Deronda, her “Jewish” novel, on the information and commentary provided in this work. Hamburger is the father of all later Jewish lexicography; he single-handedly forged this field of Jewish Wissenschaft. The result was not only gigantic in scope (1330 pages); it is an outstanding piece of scholarship. Hamburger did much more than collect events, ideas, facts and books – he provided his own insights together with the lexico-

 Karpeles, Geschichte, vol. 2, p. 76.  Karpeles, Geschichte, vol. 2, p. 77.

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graphical material. Moreover, at least those insights that pertain to mysticism and Kabbalah are new and original. This alone, after more than sixty years of Jewish scholarship on the issue, is a remarkable achievement. Interestingly, Hamburger’s encyclopedia contains three different entries for Jewish mysticism: one for “Secret Doctrine”, another for “Mysticism” and a third for “Kabbalah”. That is because he distinguished three phases of the Jewish mystical tradition: mystical texts in the Bible, Talmud and Midrash, during the gaonic period and eventually the actual Kabbalah, beginning in medieval Spain. He leaves no doubt, however, that each period builds on those which precede it. The interconnection of all Jewish mysticism seems to be an established fact for Hamburger, countering many others, among them Heinrich Graetz. In the entry on “Mysticism”, one reads that this term refers to what Hamburger called the “connecting link between talmudic secret doctrine and medieval Kabbalah,” stretching from the year 500 until the eleventh century.³⁷ This Jewish mysticism originated [entspringen] in the former period and issued into [münden] the latter. Surprisingly, Hamburger did not indicate any foreign influence. To the contrary, in order to metaphorically describe the supernatural and the metaphysical, prekabbalistic Jewish mysticism used the literary form of “the immeasurable, the enormous” – that is, the exact opposite of Greek philosophy, which used the infinitesimal, that is, the negative for the same purpose. This positive Jewish expression, in numbers of unthinkable, and for humans incomprehensible, magnitude, “seems to contain nothing harmful and dangerous for Judaism”, Hamburger explained, at least if used carefully. But soon, this method began to distort the “pure teachings of Bible and Talmud of God and His essence”, as already Maimonides knew, because it placed its own view above those of Bible and Talmud and thus disconnected itself from its source.³⁸ Arguably, as far as it goes Hamburger provided here the sole defense of anthropomorphisms in Jewish mysticism of the nineteenth century. The anthropomorphism of the Bible, used as a concession to the language of the people, as Hamburger argued, and approved by the Talmud in a limited way, received within mysticism its widest and most unlimited expression. In Babylon, “the homestead of mysticism and its literature,” Judaism suffered less from the “Palestinian sectarianism” [Sektiererwesen] – a nineteenth century term for the talmudic obsession with legal detail – and thus the “serious consequences of such secret teachings” were less realized there. In this way, Jewish mysticism  Jacob Hamburger, Realencyclopädie für Bibel und Talmud, Strelitz 1883. Biblical and talmudic secret doctrine is discussed for over twenty pages in the entry “Geheimlehre”, p. 257– 277.  Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 816, referring to Maimonides’ Guide I, 61– 62 and many other passages in Maimonides.

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could “develop without censorship and could progress in its unfolding without disruption.” The idea of mysticism was, according to Hamburger, “to permeate the entire doctrine of Judaism and to transform all its laws and dogmas to building blocks of its own system.”³⁹ The long remainder of the entry on mysticism is dedicated to a categorization of the content of mystical literature according to subject matter, but also to a list of known instances of rabbinical resistance against what Hamburger, too, called the degeneracy [Ausartung] of mysticism, like thaumaturgy and overstated angelology. This entry is notable for the rich detail in which Hamburger presented his material, probably the result of many years of study.⁴⁰ Hamburger’s knowledge of Jewish mysticism, however, was particularly evident in his entry on “Kabbalah,” stretching over no fewer than 45 pages of the encyclopedia. Jewish mysticism was first called Kabbalah in the tenth century, Hamburger explained (again referring to Jellinek). The term denotes a secret doctrine of medieval Judaism in which the anthropomorphism of pre-kabbalistic Jewish mysticism was blended with speculative mysticism. Kabbalah, however, was to be sharply distinguished from philosophy, Hamburger contended, because the latter operated preconditionsless, while the former was built on certain preconceived ideas: mystical philosophemes of God, world, man, revelation and Torah [Gesetz]. Unambiguously, for Hamburger, theosophical Kabbalah “developed from the bosom of Judaism” [aus dem Schooße] and was directed against the degenerating influence of medieval Jewish philosophy, which Kabbalah came to supersede. The kabbalists attributed their traditions to the biblical prophets, which was shown to be wrong by modern Wissenschaft. Kabbalah, Hamburger claimed, when it turned speculation into the fundament of religion, rejected every anthropomorphic concept of God and transformed the anthropomorphic ideas of earlier Jewish mysticism into allegorical representations of the deity. Thus, Kabbalah for him was not a counter-reaction to ‘shallow’ philosophy but, in fact, a refined answer to the crude sensory imagination of the mysticism of the gaonic period.⁴¹ From this point on, Hamburger explicated the central doctrines of Kabbalah in great detail, beginning with the kabbalistic view of God.⁴² In his footnotes, we find reference to his source-texts, overwhelmingly to the Zohar, which he seems to have studied thoroughly. His dense account of the concept of God according to  Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 817. Cf. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 29 who speaks of the “transformation of halacha into a sacrament, a mystery rite” at the hand of the kabbalist.  He refers several times to Jellinek’s publications of mystical manuscripts in Beit haMidrash.  Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 558.  Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 559 – 561.

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the Kabbalah amounts to a serious, unbiased and sophisticated theological discussion, which finds almost no parallel in the nineteenth century. Although in the end, for Hamburger, too, the “Jewish philosophemes of Neo-Platonism” are essentially “non-Jewish,” [unjüdisch] because they are beyond the theological standards of the Bible and Talmud, his path to this final assessment is much more complex than those taken by others. It is not justified simply because Kabbalah held anthropomorphic concepts of God. To the contrary, Kabbalah is less anthropomorphic than biblical, talmudic and earlier Jewish mysticism, for it transformed the older, figurative-material conception of God into the en sof, or the first sephirah that has no attributes at all. But the necessarily involved division of the divine into two parts, on the one hand, attributes of unknowable infinity, and on the other hand, the creator and ruler of the world, the God revealed in this world – such a twofold God Hamburger would not accept.⁴³ The next concept explained is that of the Sephirot, also here Hamburger substantiated his presentation with several references to the Zohar and some other kabbalistic works.⁴⁴ Sephirot are intermediate beings, the assumption of which was necessitated by the strictness of the separation of the deity, as shown above, in material and spiritual aspects. Here the Kabbalah is closer to the Biblical view, compared to Philo and Neoplatonism: Sephirot are also seen in Kabbalah as the original substances of creation, Hamburger asserted; thus, there is no need for a ‘primary matter’ – although Kabbalah itself is undecided about how the Sephirot themselves came into being. Entering into a detailed discussion of the differing kabbalistic views on this point, Hamburger referred not only to the Zohar and the Yezirah, but also – and wholly neutrally – to the later views of Isaac Luria and even to Sabbatai Zevi.⁴⁵ Importantly, Hamburger wholeheartedly rejected the oft-repeated claim that the Zohar contains trinitarian views that are reminiscent of Christianity or at least of Christian influences on the book. Moreover, he devoted to this rejection a longer passage with several textual examples. Against the opinion of many other Jewish scholars who wrote in the nineteenth century on Kabbalah, Hamburger is not willing to identify in the mention of a threefold deity in the Zohar the Trinity of Christianity, with which “it has nothing to do, as much as it might sound similar.”⁴⁶ When the Zohar talks about Father, Mother and Son (or chochmah, binah and da’at), the reference is never to what Hamburger called “Gott an sich”, but always merely to the revealed God of Kabbalah, to the Keter,    

Hamburger, Hamburger, Hamburger, Hamburger,

Realencyclopädie, Realencyclopädie, Realencyclopädie, Realencyclopädie,

p. p. p. p.

560 – 61. 562– 571. 564 and 569 respectively. 569.

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which is but the material aspect of the deity itself. In Christianity, however, God an sich is trinitarian; Christ is part of this trinity, Hamburger argued, and not in himself threefold, as in the comparable concept of the Zohar. It is very important to him to emphasize this qualitative difference, he continued, because of the many previous misunderstandings in this respect. At most, it can be said that Kabbalah teaches the trinity of the first sephirah, which is identical with the demiurge of the Gnostics, and which both Abulafia and Sabbatai Zevi claimed to have personified.⁴⁷ Regarding several kabbalistic concepts that almost all of Hamburger’s predecessors thought originated outside of the Jewish tradition and that were adopted by Jewish mystics in the course of time, Hamburger made careful theological distinctions between the foreign original and the form of the Jewish adoption. So, with respect to the first sephirah: Although it would be appealing to see in it the logos of Philonian philosophy, the two are distinct ideas. All sephirot, even the first, he argued, are strictly dependent upon God; their existence and activity are exclusively caused by divine emanation, while nothing of the like can be said about the logos or the gnostic demiurge. Thus, while the actual idea might have been born in Alexandria, for its use within kabbalistic thought it had to be transformed, “judaized”, as Hamburger called the process.⁴⁸ Significantly, these theories are presented in a strict encyclopedic style, with no sign of ideology or the judgmental language of rationalism. A third, longer subsection is devoted to the names of God and their use in Kabbalah.⁴⁹ Consigning the discussion of thaumaturgy to a separate entry, Hamburger explained here only the theosophical use of divine names, again based on several Zoharic passages and again decisively dismissing the claim that the Zohar presented a trinitarian God: “Exactly the opposite is the case”, Hamburger wrote, insisting that the Zohar “firmly emphasized monotheism.”⁵⁰ Eventually, in a fourth subjection Hamburger discussed the kabbalistic concept of creation.⁵¹ It is here that the Kabbalah developed its full independence [ganze Eigenthümlichkeit] from both gnosis and Alexandrian philosophy for Hamburger, after it had “judaized” the concepts of these systems, and thus assumed a clearly “Jewish character” [Gepräge]. As similar as Philo’s ideas might have been to those of Judaism, Philo was unable to uphold within his systematic thought an important

    

Hamburger, Hamburger, Hamburger, Hamburger, Hamburger,

Realencyclopädie, Realencyclopädie, Realencyclopädie, Realencyclopädie, Realencyclopädie,

p. p. p. p. p.

569 – 570. 571. 571– 573. 573. 573 – 574.

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basic concept – precisely the concept that the Zohar eventually returned to: the idea of creation ex nihilo. ⁵² In the historical part of his entry on Kabbalah, Hamburger proposed the original theory that the three aforementioned waves of mysticism in Judaism were the fruit of a struggle with the superior influence of foreign philosophy on Jewish thought. Jewish mysticism, according to Hamburger, was always a retreat of the Jewish intellect into secrecy, in order to recover and preserve its own theosophies.⁵³ Hamburger expounded this theory in great detail, based on his wideranging historical knowledge: first the Greek, later the Islamic and eventually the medieval-Aristotelian intellectual onslaught on Judaism produced Jewish mysticism in its different (but interlocking) forms.⁵⁴ He included a lengthy analysis of the Sefer Yezirah and praised Nachmanides for returning to pure theosophy, but he condemned Abulafia, with whom Kabbalah “relapsed into the period of gaonic mysticism”. Hence, Hamburger’s comprehensive account also serves as a superb history of major ideas and works of Jewish mystical literature and its rabbinical opponents. Hamburger is able to give this account because of the intensive work of his predecessors in the Wissenschaft des Judentums but also because of his own spectacular ability to methodically prioritize complex kabbalistic phenomena.⁵⁵ The Zohar itself Hamburger called unspectacularly, “the chief work of Moses de Leon,” [Hauptwerk] after listing some previous kabbalistic writings of the same author. Conspicuously, for Hamburger the Zohar is not the ‘Bible’ of Kabbalah, as it was for many other nineteenth century Jewish scholars (as we saw), but the “encyclopedia of the secret doctrine” – collecting and editing “all previous achievements” of Jewish mysticism. The Zohar was the zenith of Kabbalah, and in a certain way also its completion and perfection, he claimed. All further development of Jewish mysticism was “but a commentary on the Zohar”. Without any fanfare, Hamburger stated that the book itself mentions the talmudic Rabbi Shimon as its author, “a procedure that is neither new nor rare for mystical literature.” In this manner, he circumvented any argument about the worth of pseudo-epigraphy.⁵⁶

 Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 573. The same difference to other systems of thought Hamburger later detected in the kabbalistic theories of evil.  Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 576.  Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 576 – 593.  For references to his predecessors, see especially the notes on p. 583.  Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 594. In countless places, Hamburger makes reference to a separate entry on “Sohar, der” in his encyclopedia, but I was unable to find it.

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Nonetheless, in his elaborate discussion of its reception history, Hamburger agreed that the Zohar soon became something like the “Talmud of the kabbalists”. At this point, we finally hear Hamburger refer to the “devastations” [Verheerungen] that the Zohar and Kabbalah subsequently caused, at least concerning the Mosaic and talmudic branch of Judaism. He presents a long list of accusations: distortion of the pure biblical idea of God through the doctrine of emanation; complete renunciation of the belief in the unity of God through the assumption of the sephirot as being a real part of the deity; the call to direct prayers to the sephirot; the undermining of the authority of religious law through its allegorical interpretation; the priority of studying Kabbalah, compared to Torah study – and of causing the spread of crude superstition. All those points, Hamburger wrote in an attempt at neutrality, were brought forward against the Kabbalah by its opponents, of which he presented seven names and works, written until the end of the fifteenth century.⁵⁷ Subsequently continuing the line of kabbalistic ideas and authors themselves, Hamburger eventually arrived at the Christian Kabbalah of the fifteenth century. As opposed to Graetz, who believed that Johannes Reuchlin’s brave defense of the Talmud against his own church was motivated (as we saw) by his interest in Kabbalah, Hamburger saw in Christian Kabbalah first and foremost a rejection of the Talmud and practical Judaism. Kabbalah attracted the attention of Christians scholars because of the anti-talmudic attacks in works like the Sefer ha-Kana, as well as the Iggeret ha-Sodot by the Jewish apostate Paulus de Heredia of Aragon (1405 – 1486). Paulus had ascribed his mystical work to the Mishnaic teacher Neḥunya ben ha-Ḳana, who was then made to admit the chief mysteries of Christianity. The cases of Pico de Mirandola and Reuchlin were a different story, however. About their discovery, after intense studies, of the dogma of Christianity in kabbalistic teachings (more than anywhere else), Hamburger is prepared to say that in their work “Christianity was celebrating its reconciliation [Versöhnung] with Judaism through Kabbalah”. Notably, he chooses here the very same German word that Graetz had used in 1866.⁵⁸ Not unexpectedly, describing the further course of events around Kabbalah, Hamburger, too, agreed to the general Jewish theory of the decline of Jewish mysticism the closer we come to the present. When the kabbalists became preoccupied with messianic calculations, probably under the pressure of antisemitic persecution, but could not fulfill the expectations thus generated, Hamburger wrote, “the sad consequence” was that many Jews converted to Christianity. Such

 Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 595.  Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 597. Cf. Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 9, p. 177, and p. 197 above.

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events, in turn, revived “the better among the Jews, those who remained free from kabbalistic mystifications” and brought them to new energetic resistance – mentioning among others Elijah Delmedigo.⁵⁹ In his choice of the word “better” here, Hamburger seems to reach the very limit of the personal judgment he is ready to show when discussing Kabbalah. Such circumspection distinguishes him from the majority of the previous Wissenschaft scholars writing on the subject – although it does not necessarily hint at greater neutrality; it could simply reflect the demands of writing an encyclopedia. In the sixteenth century, Kabbalah returned for a particular period to more theoretical discussions, and even Isaac Luria seems to be part of this development, according to Hamburger. Luria caused a “revulsion and reshaping” in theory and practice of Kabbalah that is still normative among kabbalists today. After prolonged study, Luria “found and closed the gaps in the Zohar” and thus brought Kabbalah to a certain perfection [Abrundung]. The most important of those gaps, as Hamburger had explained before, concerned the emergence of the sephirot from the infinite God an sich. Here Luria filled in his idea of zimzum, of God’s self-contraction. Moreover, what Hamburger called “the ethics of Kabbalah” was for the first time compiled and systematically developed by Isaac Luria.⁶⁰ In the following detailed description of Luria’s thought, Hamburger avoided all judgment or evaluation, even when he hinted at Christian allusions in Luria – which by now we know were not to Hamburger’s liking. But his reference to both ‘original sin’ in Luria’s theology and even to personal, auricular confession of sins within the circle of the Safed kabbalists did not provoke Hamburger to comment in the negative, or at all.⁶¹ When it reached with Luria its ‘golden age’ [höchste Blüte], Kabbalah finally and ultimately separated from talmudic Judaism, Hamburger claimed. Lurianic Kabbalah, with all its phantasms, has buried, “avalanche-like”, the pure biblical idea of God and with it Mosaic Law. The kabbalistic cloud “cast over the clear horizon of the Jewish sky” became increasingly darker until the appearance of Sabbatai Zevi and the emergence of Hasidism, Hamburger continued.⁶² Especially later in Poland, where “eminent Talmud scholars tried again to forge a close union [Verschwisterung] between Kabbalah and Judaism”, Judaism suffered badly from this union and lost much of its earlier straightforwardness. Now, Hamburger hardly tried to hide his own, apparently highly negative views of

   

Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 598. Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 598 – 99. The entire account of Luria is on p. 598 – 600. Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 601.

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mysticism behind his account and his praise of several among the Jews “who indefatigably and emphatically protested Kabbalah and its innovations,” mentioning Modena, Joseph Delmedigo, Jacob Emden and the Vilna Gaon.⁶³ All in all, Hamburger’s Real-Encyclopädie from 1883 is an exceptionally erudite work, distinguished by a serious attempt at impartiality towards Jewish mysticism. Hamburger was a master of his material, both the original sources, especially the Zohar, and also the research literature about the subject, produced by his predecessors of the Wissenschaft movement. This is rather astonishing since the history of Judaism itself, not only kabbalistic thought was the actual subject of the voluminous work. Hamburger’s encyclopedia might be considered the quintessential synopsis of the first sixty years of Jewish research into Kabbalah and mysticism. This research was but a small fraction of the Wissenschaft project, but this is reasonable, given the overall volume of Jewish texts, events and thought that were to be treated critically for the first time. What is certain is that Kabbalah was neither neglected nor intentionally ignored; not for ideological or theological or political reasons, not by Hamburger and not by the Wissenschaft des Judentums in general.

 Hamburger, Realencyclopädie, p. 602.

Epilog – the Years 1894 – 1907 At the turn of the twentieth century, Kabbalah research by the Wissenschaft des Judentums took a different form. This change was driven by two main phenomena. The first was the coming of age of the second generation of German-Jewish Wissenschaft scholars, who had themselves studied at the modern rabbinical seminaries in Breslau (from 1854) or in Berlin (from 1872). In many cases still forced to earn their living as community rabbis, those scholars, however, could build their work on a secure foundation of research results achieved by the Wissenschaft pioneers during the nineteenth century. In addition, many young and promising Jewish thinkers from Eastern Europe headed for Germany (or Austria) and its universities, often bringing with them extensive rabbinical knowledge but less critical methodology. The change was primarily driven, however, by the different ideological and theological background of this research. While there was still a large group of ‘ethical monotheists’ among the young German Jewish intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, influenced by Kant and later by the Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842– 1918), who himself belonged to this second generation, a growing number of young scholars were shaped by other, sometimes antithetical influences – among them Spinoza, Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. In addition to all that, the very existence of the rabbinical seminaries in Breslau and Berlin (and from 1877 also in Budapest) produced a new generation of professional Jewish scholars who were eventually able to devote most of their time to research, a fact which had a decisive influence on their scholarly approach. No longer driven by the need to combine scholarship with living Judaism, those seminary professors continued successfully the tradition initiated by Leopold Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider in the previous generation, namely, to do research into Jewish thought and history exclusively for the sake of Wissenschaft. The first among the few Kabbalah scholars to be mentioned here belonging to this new generation is Rabbi Prof. Philipp Bloch (1841– 1923), if only because he is the anti-hero of one of Gershom Scholem’s famous anecdotes. In what is sometimes even referred to as a miniature portrait of Bloch, Scholem tells the readers of his autobiography of a “great moment” in his life when Bloch, one year before his death, admitted to the young Scholem that he had not read all the kabbalistic manuscripts in his possession, and allegedly even referred to them as rubbish [Quatsch].¹ What is usually not quoted in the many re-narrations  See Gerschom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, Frankfurt 1977, p. 190. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-021

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of this anecdote is that Scholem called Bloch there “the authority on Kabbalah in the generation before me, although certainly an authority in the spirit of Graetz”.² This would accurately describe Bloch as a second-generation representative of the classical Wissenschaft approach to Kabbalah: while theologically rejecting its ‘worth’ for modern Judaism, it was nevertheless deemed worthy of extensive scholarship – what makes all the difference is the spirit. Bloch, who had studied under Graetz at the Breslau seminary, had indeed published several monographs on kabbalistic literature. Bloch worked for more than half a century as a rabbi in Posen, producing his extensive scholarship during his leisure time. Interested both in medieval Jewish philosophy and mysticism, Bloch translated parts of Saadia’s and Hasdai Crescas’ works into German and published in 1908 one of the first major research essays on Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. ³ Given this mixed scholarly interest and his outstanding position in the Wissenschaft movement, Bloch thus became the ideal author for the chapters on Jewish Mysticism, Kabbalah and Religious Philosophy in the celebrated three-volume compendium “Die jüdische Literatur seit Abschluss des Kanons” (Jewish Literature after the Completion of the Canon), edited by August Wünsche (1838 – 1912), a leading Christian scholar for Jewish literature, and Rabbi Jacob Winter (1857– 1940).⁴ Bloch’s entry was separately published in 1894 as a monograph of 160 pages, providing in the first half of this volume a dense overview of all known mystical works of Judaism, from the Shiur Qoma until Isaac Luria.⁵ In his introduction, Bloch predictably agreed with Graetz that there existed no connection regarding content and doctrine between older Jewish mysticism and medieval Kabbalah. Kabbalah itself was a system of speculative knowledge, although its theories are built on “strange flights of fancy” [wunderliche Phantastereien]. Not lacking a certain consequence, kabbalistic thought would deal basically with its own musings instead of with the real world. According to Bloch, most curious was the kabbalistic tendency to “evaporate its own teach-

 Ibid, Italics in the original.  Philipp Bloch, “Charakteristik und Inhaltsangabe des Moreh Nebuchim”, in: Moses ben Maimon – sein Leben, seine Werke und sein Einfluss, ed. Jacob Guttmann et al., vol. 1, Leipzig 1914, p. 1– 62; discussed in Kohler, Reading Maimonides’ Philosophy, p. 103 – 109, 303 – 306.  Philipp Bloch, in: Die jüdische Literatur seit Abschluss des Kanons – Eine prosaische und poetische Anthologie mit biographischen und literargeschichtlichen Einleitungen, ed. Jacob Winter and August Wünsche, 3 vols., Berlin 1897, here vol. 3, p. 219 – 286. See also the short entry by Wilhelm Bacher (1850 – 1913), an important linguist and professor at the Budapest rabbinical seminary, in the second volume of this compendium, dealing with mystical exegesis of the Bible (vol. 2, Berlin 1897, p. 319 – 326).  Philipp Bloch, Geschichte der Entwicklung der Kabbalah und der jüdischen Religionsphilosophie, Trier 1894.

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ings in supernatural, inconceivable abstractions”, and at the same time to use crude sensual metaphors to exemplify those teachings.⁶ Bloch identified eight fundamental theorems of Kabbalah that he listed and explained carefully before entering into the historical part, where the description of works and authors was entirely unbiased and factual in nature. In 1905, Bloch published a small booklet of 45 pages, titled “Die Kabbalah auf ihrem Höhepunkt und ihre Meister” (The Climax of Kabbalah and its Masters). This publication was based on a public lecture of the same title he had given in December 1904 before the general assembly of the Society for the Support of Wissenschaft des Judentums (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums), an influential society that Bloch had helped to found one year earlier.⁷ As the epigraph of the brochure, Bloch chose a quote from Joseph Delmedigo: “A little Kabbalah adorns man, but too much of it burdens man – those who deal in it too deeply will neglect other sciences.” This is probably a good summary of the Jewish Wissenschaft’s overall treatment of the subject.⁸ In the printed version, Bloch added to the script of his lecture a large apparatus of footnotes, including in several places extensive quotes from unpublished Hebrew manuscripts – probably those that the young Scholem saw in Bloch’s library. Notable in this lecture is Bloch’s explicit defense of Haim Vital against the “injustice” that his teacher Graetz had done to this kabbalist. Vital never had mean interests or impure motives, Bloch countered Graetz, here at last.⁹ But actually the very fact that Bloch was invited to deliver a lecture on Lurianic Kabbalah before the general assembly of the Society for the Support of Wissenschaft des Judentums already shows that Jewish mysticism was never really excluded from the project of modern academic research into the Jewish intellectual past. Salomon Rubin (1823 – 1910), born and raised in Galicia, became famous for his Hebrew translation of Spinoza. This work granted access to the thought of the Dutch philosopher to generations of east European Jewish intellectuals. Among Rubin’s countless Hebrew-language books, two works that dealt with Kabbalah were translated into German when Rubin lived in Vienna during the 1890s. Kabbalah emerged in ancient Palestine, but from pagan sources, he claimed in a

 Bloch, Geschichte, p. 2.  Cf. Leopold Lucas, “Zum 25jährigen Jubiläum der Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums”, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 71, 1927, p. 321– 331, recently: Henry C. Soussan, The Gesellschaft Zur Förderung Der Wissenschaft Des Judentums in Its Historical Context, Tübingen 2013.  Philipp Bloch, Die Kabbalah auf ihrem Höhepunkt und ihre Meister, Preßburg 1905, p. 9.  Bloch, Die Kabbalah, p. 26.

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work titled Heidenthum und Kabbala (Paganism and Kabbalah).¹⁰ Mosaism itself is nowhere of mystical character, Rubin believed; mysticism had entered Jewish thought through Neoplatonism and the sect of the Essenes. He devoted two different studies within the same work to an extensive proof of this theory. One study was strictly historical and the other, much more detailed one, compared Jewish mystical ideas with those of ancient Greek, Egypt, India and Persia. Notably, in his book, Rubin refers to the research of the entire range of German Wissenschaft authors who wrote on Kabbalah, namely, Zunz, Jost, Jellinek, Graetz and others. At about the same time, Rabbi Mordechai Marcus Ehrenpreis (1869 – 1951), secretary to Theodor Herzl during the preparations for the First Zionist Congress in 1897, wrote a serious German-language book on Kabbalah. Ehrenpreis was born in Lemberg, studied at the University of Berlin and the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, and later held several important rabbinical positions, including the chief rabbinate of Bulgaria and Sweden. Based on his dissertation, Ehrenpreis published in 1895 a thorough study titled the Development of the Doctrine of Emanation in Kabbalah, which amounts to a short history of Jewish mysticism itself. Ehrenpreis clearly belonged to the group of scholars who saw in Kabbalah an inherently Jewish phenomenon. As a Zionist (at least at the time of writing this), his affirmation of the interrelatedness of all Jewish mysticism is even less surprising than Bloch’s rejection of Kabbalah as building on older mystical traditions of Judaism. Ehrenpreis held that Kabbalah was “in its essential elements the very own [ureigen] product of Jewish thought” because he saw it as a “coherent system” of metaphysical, ethical and religious ideas. Kabbalah had developed historically in relation to all other collective forms of the life of the Jewish people [jüdisches Volksleben]. Anticipating Scholem’s later assessment, Ehrenpreis complained that Jewish Wissenschaft had either “completely neglected” Kabbalah thus far, or “treated it from the heights of dubious rationality as something absurd.” In his view, Adolph Jellinek is “almost the only one who tried to do justice” to Kabbalah

 Salomon Rubin, Heidenthum und Kabbala: Die Kabbalistische Mystik, ihrem Ursprung wie ihrem Wesen nach, gruendlich aufgehellt und populaer dargestellt, Wien 1893. This is a translation of his “Yesod Mistere ha-’Akkum we-Sod Ḥokmat ha-Ḳabbalah” (1888). In another German language study from 1895, Rubin attempts to find parallels and describe the relation between the allegorizing aggadah and the metaphysics of the Kabbalah, see: Salomon Rubin, Kabbala und Agada in mythologischer, symbolischer und mystischer Personification der Fruchtbarkeit in der Natur, Wien 1895.

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in his “serious and objective studies”.¹¹ He himself intended to use previously neglected manuscripts to draw a complete picture of all kabbalistic doctrine and to establish an uninterrupted line of kabbalistic thought from the mystical parts of the Talmud until the Hasidism of his own period. “Those who deny this coherence”, Ehrenpreis concluded the preface, “sacrifice the heart of the matter to petty philological pedantries.”¹²At the end of the book, he summarized his findings in an even more dramatic way. Kabbalah, he wrote, was the answer to the longing of the human intellect for a monistic construction of the universe. God was to be transcendent and immanent at the same time; only such a solution would “bring peace to the soul,” even if it comes at the price of giving up Jewish religious traditions. For this reason, the kabbalists are for Ehrenpreis “unflinching heroes of the intellect” [Geisteshelden], declaring war on all that was holy within Judaism. In fact, however, Ehrenpreis cared less for the fate of the Bible and Talmud than for Kabbalah winning the war against the overwhelming influence of rational philosophy. This was the war of “imagination against reason, of the ideal perspective against the unemotional deduction”. Which side Ehrenpreis took in this war of Kabbalah against philosophy is obvious: “history has vindicated the former”, he declared unambiguously. And, while Jewish rationalism “vanished into thin air”, it was the kabbalistic worldview that “penetrated deep into the consciousness of the masses”. Today, after almost a thousand years, orthodox [rechtgläubig] East European Jewry is entirely shaped by the kabbalistic weltanschauung, Ehrenpreis claimed on the last page of his book. Kabbalah was the regulative of the practical religious life in Eastern Europe; it was the very foundation of the authentic [urwüchsig] and independent Jewish culture.¹³ Thus, towards the end of the nineteenth century, European Judaism was strictly divided along the lines of Kabbalah. While many German Wissenschaft scholars believed the influence of mysticism was almost entirely contained, as we have seen, thinkers from Galicia held the opposite view and declared Kabbalah’s historical victory at about exactly the same time. In 1896, Moritz Steinschneider, now eighty years old, reviewed Ehrenpreis’ book for the renowned Deutsche Literaturzeitung. This short review is something like Steinschneider’s legacy, his last word on Kabbalah in general. As such, it is worth discussing here – it can almost be seen as a clash of scholarly generations. Philological pedantries were Steinschneider’s specialty, and consequently he poured all his abhorrence of kabbalistic thought out on Ehrenpreis and his  Marcus Ehrenpreis Die Entwickelung der Emanationslehre in der Kabbala, Frankfurt 1895, p. III.  Ehrenpreis, p. IV.  Ehrenpreis, p. 48.

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study. Jewish Kabbalah, Steinschneider first explained to the uninitiated German readers of the review journal, was born in the thirteenth century “under the pretense to have existed previously as a secret doctrine”, thus rejecting Ehrenpreis’ overall historical thesis in his very first line. Imagination and literary deceit nursed Kabbalah, “blind belief in authority and the absence of free thought” still keep it alive, especially under the “dark pressure” of Eastern European Jewish circumstances. It was probably not by chance that during the sixteenth century the “excesses of a Palestinian mysticism, degenerated down to absurdity, seized some Jewish ascetics”, while at the same time and in the same place, “rabbinical ceremonial has been codified” as well, Steinschneider speculated. He and Ehrenpreis, then, alluded to the same war, but with reverse preferences. Here, the essential agreement of spirit between Shulchan Aruch and Lurianic Kabbalah in the person of Joseph Karo, that is, the apparent likeness of empty fantasies and empty ceremonial, stands against free thought and thus, against Wissenschaft. ¹⁴ “Kabbala is diametrically opposed to critical scholarship”, restated the aged Steinschneider, encapsulating the entire nineteenth century German-Jewish approach to the subject. This incompatibility is what Jellinek (who had passed away three years before) experienced when he tried to apply the latter to the former, Steinschneider claimed, and was thus never able to finish his announced monograph on Kabbalah. While we might here be re-encountering Steinschneider’s overall pessimism about the possibility of a critical, academic approach to Kabbalah in general, this pessimism seems to be motivated by exclusively methodological concerns and not by emotions or even the hope for political benefits. Only in the last third of his review did he actually pull Ehrenpreis’ book to pieces, concluding with a sharp rejection of his declaration of the historical victory of the imagination over reason. Kabbalah was not a weltanschauung and Eastern European Jewry was not rechtgläubig; it had no culture, let alone an authentic one. In the allegation history has vindicated Kabbalah, Steinschneider suggested at the end, the word history was to be replaced by the author’s name in order to do justice to Ehrenpreis’ book.¹⁵ Other Eastern European scholars soon joined the ranks of the Wissenschaft authors who wrote about Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1892, Adolf Neubauer (1831– 1907) from Hungary, later the Jewish librarian at the Bodleian Library and reader in Rabbinic Hebrew at Oxford

 Moritz Steinschneider, in: Deutsche Literaturzeitung 8, 22. 2.1896, p. 230.  Steinschneider, ibid., p. 231.

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University, wrote a long essay on the Sefer Bahir for the newly founded Jewish Quarterly Review, taking issue with the alleged antiquity of the work. Neubauer published a medieval manuscript he had found that was supposed to prove that the Bahir was written in the thirteenth century.¹⁶ Abraham Epstein (1841– 1918) from Volhynia published German, Hebrew and French essays on the Sefer Yezirah, dating it (as Scholem did later) as early as the second century CE.¹⁷ The most extreme dating of the same book is found in the detailed introduction to Lazarus Goldschmidt’s (1871– 1950) text-critical edition (and annotated German translation) of the Yezirah. Goldschmidt, who at the same time began to translate the entire Babylonian Talmud into German, claimed that the Sefer Yezirah was a product of the second century BCE and was mentioned already in the Talmud. Goldschmidt’s introductory essay takes into account and discusses all previous research on the work. In it, he completely rejects not only Graetz’ late dating, but also his theory that the Yezirah contained gnostic elements.¹⁸ One of the most outstanding contributions to modern Kabbalah research was eventually made in 1907 by David Neumark.¹⁹ Neumark (1866 – 1924) was born in the Ukrainian Szczerzec and came to Berlin in 1892. He studied at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and earned a doctorate from Berlin University. While still a student, he caused a sensation in Jewish circles by publishing a Hebrew article on the thinking of Nietzsche. Ordained rabbi in 1897, he officiated until 1904 in Rakonitz (Bohemia). In 1907, he accepted a call to Cincinnati to become professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew Union College. His largescale project of writing a comprehensive History of Jewish Philosophy never materialized. Neumark conceptualized a nine-volume work that he still thought to be possible in 1907. He managed to publish the first volume upon his departure from Germany, and the first half of the second volume later in Cincinnati (1910). The second half of the second volume, which ends with a discussion of Ibn Ga-

 Adolf Neubauer, “The Bahir and the Zohar”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 4, No. 3, Apr., 1892, p. 357– 368.  See Abraham Epstein, Mi-kadmoniyot ha-Yehudim (Beiträge zur Jüdischen Altertumskunde). Vienna, 1887 [in Hebrew]; “Studien zum Jezirah-Buche”, in: Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 1893, p. 266 – 269 and 458 – 462; Recheche sur le Sefer Yecira, in: REJ 1894, p. 94– 108 and 1895, p. 61– 78.  Lazarus Goldschmidt, Das Buch der Schöpfung, Frankfurt 1894. (On dating p. 12, on gnosis, p. 17.)  Neumark’s treatment of Kabbalah certainly deserves to be discussed in a separate essay, which I plan to publish soon – if only for the fact that he was selected by Scholem as the second Wissenschaft scholar (next to Graetz) to be attacked for the “total failure” of his theory of the origins of Kabbalah. See Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, (transl A. Arkush), New York 1990, p. 7– 11.

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briol, was published in 1928 by Reuben Brainin, four years after Neumark’s death. Given this nature of his project, Neumark was above all interested in the precise relation between Kabbalah and medieval Jewish philosophy. Diverging from common procedure, Neumark structured his history of Jewish philosophy not according to thinker but according to subject matter. This made it necessary to clearly demarcate mystical thought from philosophical ideas. Thus, while many before him saw Kabbalah as a reaction to Jewish Aristotelianism, Neumark was less interested in historical sequence than in differentiating the two methods of thought from each other in terms of substance. Neumark held that this line was not easily drawn, which is a view that makes his opinion on Kabbalah rather original. On the formal level of thought, he wrote, there are both philosophically minded kabbalists and philosophers whose creative and systematic mastery of their subjects was less than convincing. Therefore, one must focus on specific doctrines for a decision – but which doctrines are decisive here? Is there an essential difference between Neoplatonism and Kabbalah, Neumark asked, criticizing Adolphe Franck, David Joel and Jellinek, who in their works had rather blurred the boundaries between the two. Only by taking into account both aspects, the formal and the doctrinal, can one arrive at a final answer, Neumark concluded here.²⁰ In an effort to provide this answer, Neumark developed a sophisticated and somewhat abstract theory, based on his historical claim that Jewish philosophical thought emerged precisely at the moment that an independent, speculative doctrine of abstract ideas [Ideenlehre] broke forth from the half-mystical talmudic teachings of the Merkava. When much later, during in the thirteenth century, mystical energies were re-activated within Judaism, they found themselves almost naturally back at their historical and substantial origin, to a time “when mystical elements still played a role in the conceptualization of philosophical thought.”²¹ Kabbalah must be explained, according to Neumark, “from the conditions of the philosophical movement”. Thus, he not only placed medieval kabbalistic thought in an older tradition, he situated it in a wider one as well, one that included rational speculation. Turning Ibn Gabriol, for example, into a kabbalist is too easy, Neumark complained about his Wissenschaft predecessors, because it ignored the fact that Kabbalah and Neoplatonism sprung from a single source. The kabbalistic movement was “a latent parallel” to the philosophical,

 David Neumark, Geschichte der jüdischen Philosophie des Mittelalters, Berlin 1907, vol. 1, p. 46 – 48.  Neumark, Geschichte, p. 180.

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for Neumark.²² But Kabbalah, in all its forms, must not be called theosophy, because it was too arbitrary for that term, and its ideas are too “wildly combined”; Kabbalah had neither engaged in nor solved philosophical problems. True, it was the mysticism of the talmudic era that had first produced philosophical thought in Judaism, Neumark declared. There is a difference, however, between the emergence of light in dark pathways and, conversely, “abandoning the light to become intoxicated by the magic of the dark.”²³ The return to mysticism in the thirteenth century is an intra-Jewish process for Neumark; to call Neoplatonism the decisive force of Kabbalah would ignore the specific formal aspects of how kabbalistic thought emerged [formale Gedankenbildung]. On the formal level, it was Kabbalah’s homiletics, its symbolizing method of scriptural exegesis, which caused all the non-philosophic arbitrariness of Kabbalah in the first place.²⁴ Thus, Neumark’s treatment of Kabbalah defies all categorizing (as used by the present study), except for his general outlook on the “worth” of the critical, academic study of Jewish mysticism. In that respect, Neumark’s opinion could even stand as the credo of more than 80 years of German-Jewish scholarship: “It makes no sense to condemn Kabbalah – historical developments must be understood within their own qualifications.”²⁵

 Neumark, (183)  Neumark,  Neumark,  Neumark,

Geschichte, p. 181. This common source was, in practical terms, the Sefer Yezirah. Geschichte, p. 207. Geschichte, p. 209. Geschichte, p. 208.

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Moritz Steinschneider, Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century, London 1857. Ignatz Stern, “Versuch einer umständlichen Analyse des Sohar”, in: Ben Chananjah 1858 – 1862 (several instalments). Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte des Judenthums und seiner Secten, vol. 3, Leipzig 1859. Heinrich Graetz, “Die mystische Literatur in der gaonäischen Epoche”, in: Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1859, three instalments: 67 – 78, 103 – 118, 140 – 52. Moritz Steinschneider, Zur pseudoepigraphischen Literatur, Berlin 1862. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 5, Leipzig 1860. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 7, Leipzig 1863. Leopold Löw, Die neueste Geschichte der Kabbala, in: Ben Chananja 1863 (reprinted in: L. Loew, Gesammelte Schriften, (ed. I. Loew), vol. II, Szegedin 1890, 1 – 55. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 8, Leipzig 1864. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 9, Leipzig 1866. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 10, Leipzig 1868. Abraham Geiger, Das Judentum und seine Geschichte, Breslau 1863 (vol. I) and 1865 (second edition of vol. I, and vol. II.) Ludwig Philippson, Die Israelitische Religionslehre, vol. 3, Leipzig 1865. Leopold Stein, Die Schrift des Lebens – Inbegriff des gesamten Judenthums, vol. 2, Straßburg 1877. Samuel Bäck, Die Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes und seiner Litteratur vom babylonischen Exile bis auf die Gegenwart, Frankfurt 1878. David Cassel, Lehrbuch der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur, Leipzig 1879. Jacob Hamburger, Realencyclopädie für Bibel und Talmud, Strelitz 1883. Gustav Karpeles, Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur, 2 vols., Berlin 1886. Salomon Rubin, Heidenthum und Kabbala: die Kabbalistische Mystik, ihrem Ursprung wie ihrem Wesen nach, gruendlich Aufgehellt U. populaer dargestellt, Wien 1893. Salomon Rubin, Kabbala und Agada in mythologischer, symbolischer und mystischer Personification der Fruchtbarkeit in der Natur, Wien 1895. Marcus Ehrenpreis, Die Entwickelung der Emanationslehre in der Kabbala, Frankfurt 1895. Philipp Bloch, entry on Jewish Mysticism, Kabbalah and Religious Philosophy in: Die jüdische Literatur seit Abschluss des Kanons – Eine prosaische und poetische Anthologie mit biographischen und literargeschichtlichen Einleitungen, ed. Jacob Winter and August Wünsche, vol 3., Berlin 1897. Philipp Bloch, Geschichte der Entwicklung der Kabbalah und der jüdischen Religionsphilosophie, Trier 1894. Lazarus Goldschmidt, Das Buch der Schöpfung, Frankfurt 1894. Ignaz Ziegler, Die Geschichte des Judentums von dem babylonischen Exile bis auf die Gegenwart: ein Familienbuch, Prag 1900. Phillip Bloch, Die Kabbalah auf ihrem Höhepunkt und ihre Meister, Pressburg 1905. David Neumark, Geschichte der jüdischen Philosophie des Mittelalters, vol. I, Berlin 1907.

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269

Weiss, Stephane, “Wissenschaft des Judentums und Kabbala”, in: Kabbala und Romantik, ed. Eveline Goodman-Thau et al., Tübingen 1994, 307 – 330. Zadoff, Noam, Gershom Scholem. From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back, Waltham 2017.

Index Abraham ben David of Posquieres 44, 179, 208 Abulafia, Abraham 61 – 63, 67, 92, 99, 102, 125 – 127, 134, 150, 166, 171, 238, 241, 244 – 245, 250 – 251 Adler, Abraham 60, 69 f., 72, 76, 78, 153, 197 Adler, Samuel 69 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius 144 Albo, Joseph 172, 190 Almanzi, Giuseppe 107 Anger, Rudolf 68 Azriel ben Menachem of Gerona 108, 111 – 113, 126, 150, 170 Azulai, Haim Joseph David 107 Baeck, Leo 13, 74, 240 Baeck, Samuel 240 – 242 Bahya Ibn Pakuda 132, 244 Beer, Bernhard 107 f., 116 – 119, 122 f., 130, 182 Beer, Peter 26 f., 29, 31 Ben David, Lazarus 26, 36 Bernary, Franz Ferdinand 40 Bloch, Philipp 24, 83, 255 – 258 Boeckh, August 79 Bonaventura 245 Brainin, Reuben 21, 262 Buber, Martin 14, 110 Cassel, David 3, 236 – 240, 243 Chorin, Aaron 82 Cohen, Hermann 1, 14, 18, 55, 109, 169, 180, 210, 255 Cordovero, Moses 53, 153 Delmedigo, Elijah 47, 172, 194 – 195, 218, 253 Delmedigo, Joseph Solomon 47, 49, 53 – 55, 205, 254, 257 Dillmann, August 157 Eger, Akiva

83

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623963-023

Ehrenpreis, Mordechai Marcus 258 – 260 Eibeschütz, Jonatan 28, 173, 210 Elazar of Worms 126 Eliot, George 1, 246 Emden, Jacob 28 f., 52, 123, 145, 172 – 174, 210, 254 Epstein, Abraham 261 Ewald, Heinrich 157 Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht 64 Formstecher, Salomon 56 – 59, 61, 95, 97, 187 Franck, Adolphe 64 – 72, 75, 78 – 81, 84, 86 f., 95, 101, 117, 119, 122, 174, 216, 262 Frank, Jakob Joseph 66, 79, 171 Frankel, Zacharias 39, 82, 108, 116, 128, 236 Freystadt, Moritz 36, 39 – 42, 44 f., 47 – 49, 206 Fürst, Julius 45 f., 55, 61, 64 f., 81 Geiger, Abraham 1 – 3, 11, 19, 39 – 41, 44, 46 f., 49, 51, 62, 76, 83, 101, 110, 112, 116, 128, 130, 135 f., 153, 155, 157, 162, 166, 180, 188, 190, 192, 207, 212 – 221, 236 Geiger, Ludwig 26, 42, 49, 130 Genesius, Wilhelm 45 Gersonides (Levi ben Gerson) 214 Gikatilla, Joseph 196 f. Ginsburg, Christian D. 7, 147 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 230, 233 f. Goldenberg, Samuel 54, 128 Goldschmidt, Lazarus 261 Graetz, Heinrich 1 – 3, 5 – 9, 13 – 17, 21 – 24, 32, 37 – 39, 42, 52, 54, 62, 71, 76 f., 80 f., 83, 97, 99, 101, 108, 110, 116, 122 f., 126 f., 129, 136, 139 – 141, 146 – 148, 156 – 183, 186 – 210, 213, 216 – 220, 227, 231, 235, 237 – 240, 244 f., 247, 252, 256 – 258, 261 Guicciardini, Francesco 162

Index

Habillo, Elijah ben Joseph 126 Halevi, Yehuda 43, 77, 110, 132, 144, 173, 177, 207, 236, 238, 244 Hamburger, Jacob 1, 3, 246 – 254 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 26, 45, 79 Heinemann, Jeremias 36 Herbart, Johann Friedrich 39 f. Herzl, Theodor 258 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 46, 76 f., 223, 225 Hirsch, Samuel 56, 187, 192 Hoogstraaten, Jacob van 195 Ibn Ezra, Abraham 68, 127, 174, 177 Ibn Gabriol, Salomon 21, 79, 92, 111, 132, 174, 177, 238, 244, 262 Isaac Satanow 174 Isaac the Blind 170, 179, 192, 231, 241 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 39 f. Jellinek, Adolf 1 f., 9 f., 20, 24, 45, 52, 63 – 71, 75, 79, 86 f., 94, 96, 99 – 128, 130 f., 134 f., 137, 141, 143, 149 f., 156, 169, 171, 174, 193, 216, 238, 243, 245, 248, 258, 260, 262 Joel, David 2, 79, 83 f., 90, 93, 117, 141, 216, 262 Joel, Manuel 83 Joseph ibn Shem-Tov 172 Jost, Isaak Markus 1, 6, 26 f., 31 – 35, 37, 47 f., 61, 67 f., 81, 91, 105, 116, 120 – 125, 128, 130, 148 – 155, 190, 197 f., 200, 206, 220, 227, 258 Kant, Immanuel 26, 63, 68, 185, 255 Karo, Joseph 113, 203 – 204, 260 Karpeles, Gustav 3, 242 – 246 Kierkegaard, Søren 255 Kirchheim, Raphael 76, 130, 192 Kunitz, Moshe ben Menachem 173 f. Landauer, Meier Hirsch 1 f., 21, 60 – 63, 65, 67, 75, 79, 91 f., 98, 100, 102, 105, 114, 117, 141, 143, 150 f., 169, 171, 174 Leon, Moses de 2 f., 10, 16, 23, 29, 46, 52, 55, 79, 91, 98 f., 102, 104 – 108, 113 f., 119, 122, 127, 130, 134 f., 137 f., 141, 143, 146, 150, 161 f., 165, 167, 171 – 175, 177,

271

179, 183, 199 f., 216 f., 231, 238 f., 241, 245, 251 Lilienthal, Max 60 f. Loew, Leopold 1, 7, 139 f., 147, 164, 177 – 190, 200 Luria, David 171 f., 174, 178 Luzzatto, Moses Haim 47 – 49, 107, 206 – 209 Luzzatto, Samuel David 106 – 107, 122, 131, 134, 212 – 213 Maimonides, Moses 14 f., 18, 26, 28, 38, 45, 49 f., 68 f., 76 f., 82 – 84, 101, 103, 107 – 109, 112, 114, 118, 121, 126, 131, 133, 158 – 160, 162 – 167, 171, 173, 179, 181 – 183, 185, 188, 191, 207, 226 – 228, 232, 238, 243 f., 247, 256 Mannheimer, Isaac Noah 66 Marr, Wilhelm 39 Mendelssohn, Moses 26 f., 68, 77, 243 Modena, Leon de 46, 55, 135 – 138, 172, 205, 254 Molcho, Salomon 203, 208 Molitor, Franz Joseph 65, 123 Munk, Salomon 108, 117 f. Nachmanides, Moses 44, 62, 79, 126, 150, 208, 213, 216, 234, 251 Neubauer, Adolf 260 f. Neumark, David 21, 24, 261 – 263 Nietzsche, Friedrich 255, 261 Paulus de Heredia of Aragon 252 Philippson, Ludwig 55, 60, 82, 223 – 226, 236 Philo of Alexandria 31, 42, 50, 144, 184, 249 f. Pico della Mirandola 47, 65, 140, 194 f., 214, 218, 234, 252 Plato 145 Pythagoras 145 Ranke, Leopold 4, 16, 161 f., 240 Rapoport, Solomon Judah Loeb 64, 106, 192 Rashi 68, 200 Reggio, Isaac Samuel 47, 126, 131

272

Index

Reuchlin, Johannes 3, 61, 65, 168, 195 – 197, 210, 214, 218 f., 252 Rosenroth, Christian Knorr von 40, 65 f. Rosenzweig, Franz 14, 110 Rubin, Salomon 257 f. Saadia Gaon 84, 103, 126, 165, 181, 191, 256 Sabbatai Zevi 82, 172, 192, 200, 206, 234, 249 f., 253 Sachs, Michael 52, 64, 79, 91, 174, 239 Sachs, Senior (Schneur) 128, 131, 174 Salomon ben Abraham Aderet 92 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 39, 66, 111, 115 Scheyer, Simon 69 Schiller, Friedrich 233 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 79 Scholem, Gershom 8 – 12, 14, 17 f., 20 – 24, 33, 38, 41, 52, 71, 77, 96, 100, 103 f., 110, 122, 140, 151, 159 f., 162, 170 f., 173, 176, 188, 192, 198, 202, 210, 246, 248, 255, 257 f., 261 Schorr, Josua Höschel 130, 133, 136 f.

Simon bar Yochai 10, 47, 52, 102, 104, 123, 151 Skreinka, Lazar 81 – 83, 92 Spinoza, Baruch 45, 111, 255, 257 Stein, Leopold 1, 223, 225 – 235 Steinheim, Salomon Ludwig 56 Steinschneider, Moritz 1 f., 6, 9, 16, 23, 38, 60, 62, 64, 68, 71, 94 – 100, 105 – 107, 116, 119 f., 128 – 130, 163, 174, 187, 238, 255, 259 f. Stern, Ignaz 2, 6, 139 – 147, 178, 245 Tholuk, August 65 f., 239 Thomas of Aquinas 126 Vital, Haim

154 f., 200, 203 f., 234, 241, 257

Widmanstadt, Johann Albert Winter, Jacob 256 Wünsche, August 256

61

Zunz, Leopold 6, 9, 26, 36 – 39, 42, 45 f., 54, 67, 81, 98, 107, 117, 120, 129, 131, 139, 144, 152, 155 f., 187, 197, 216, 237, 255, 258