The Bible Commentaries and Others: Cabala

Cabala

CABALA The fundamental object of Cabala is greater apprehension of the Torah; it is basically a system of exegesis which has also acquired mystical, theosophical, magical, cosmological, cultic, and even political elements. Cabala has no direct expression in the OT text or in early biblical commentary; it was invented in the High Middle Ages. The “Jewish Gnosticism” of late antiquity as well as early medieval texts like the Seper yeṣirah contributed to the growth of cabalist ideas, but the beginnings of Cabala as such awaited the 12th cent. and the Seper ha-Bahir. In the 13th cent., Moses ben Shem Tov de Leon wrote most of the Zohar, the best-known work of medieval Cabala. Isaac Luria (1534-72) and his disciples substantively transformed the Cabala of the Zohar, and it was Lurianic Cabala which provided the foundations for the remarkable messianic movement led by Shabbatai Zevi (1626-76).

Cabala was closed to the Christian West until the late 15th cent. when Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin established a tradition of Christian Cabala which borrowed some of its ideas and techniques (e.g., gematria) from Hebrew sources but rarely touched more than the surface of Zoharic thought. Consequently, any claims for cabalist influence on Spenser or Shakespeare and their contemporaries must be limited to that of the Latin works of Christian Cabalists or to their vernacular imitators. Hebrew learning made sufficient progress in Cambridge and Oxford by the middle of the 17th cent. to have allowed—at least in principle—persons as learned as Milton a greater access to genuine cabalist texts, though claims for the influence of Cabala on Milton’s poetry are no better established now than they were fifty years ago in the works of Denis Saurat. Genuine Cabala became widely available to European, Latin-reading Christians only with the publication of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata between 1677 and 1684.

In 1887 parts of Knorr’s miscellany of texts and polemics were translated into English by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, an associate of William Butler Yeats in the Order of the Golden Dawn; thus, Mathers and Knorr were the main source of Yeats’s acquaintance with Cabala, which made no significant mark on his more important poetry and drama. Moreover, the “Cabala” frequently mentioned by Yeats’s theosophical companions rarely has anything to do with the Zohar or Isaac Luria. Adam Kadmon, a genuine Lurianic figure of cosmic and primal humanity, had already made an indirect appearance in Blake (Milton, 2.6.26), and later appeared more explicitly in Joyce (Finnegans Wake [Viking ed., 1958], 18); Ulysses (Penguin ed., 1968, 43) speaks of “Heva, naked Eve” as “spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon.” Joyce seems to have known as much about Cabala as any major English author. He also mentions such Lurianic themes as Ṣimṣum, the process of contraction away from a center whereby the Creator left room for the universe of space and time, and ‚en sop, the divine Infinite which transcends human comprehension or description (Finnegans Wake, 48, 261, 500-501). Such allusions to Cabala seem superficial, however, even in Joyce.

Until the recent work of Gershom Scholem, Cabala remained an enigma to most readers and writers of English: either part of the linguistically and culturally inaccessible tradition of Jewish esoterica; or, worse, part of the panoply of exotica assembled by Mathers, A. E. Waite, Mme. Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, and other modern occultists.

While not typical of his own learning, Coleridge’s facile allusion to Cabala in “The Rash Conjuror” (48-51) as a mere instance of the incomprehensible is normal for writers of English:

Cabbalists! Conjurors! great and small,

Johva Mitzoveh Evohaen and all.

Had I never uttered your jaw-breaking words,

I might now have been sloshing down Junket and Curds,

Like a Devonshire Christian:

But now a Philistine!

Chaim Potok’s novel The Book of Lights (1981) offers a more engaged modern response. The protagonist, Gershon Loran, is a young rabbi disillusioned following World War II and its horrors, who is attracted to the representation of Cabala by his old professor in which it is “the heart of Judaism, the soul, the core. Talmud tells us how the Jew acts; Kabbalah tells us how Judaism feels.” In this work the structure of the narrative hinges on the cabalistic principles of Ṣimṣum, Shebirath Ḥa-Kelim (“break of the vessels”) and Tikkun (“restoration”)—which for Loran involves going to Jerusalem to study with his old teacher, a character clearly modeled after Gershom Scholem.