Kabbalah in Print , livre ebook

Kabbalah in Print
Kabbalah in Print
The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity
Andrea Gondos
Cover: Thomas Wyck (ca. 1616–ca. 1677), A Scholar in His Study Hallwyl Museum, Stockholm, Sweden.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Gondos, Andrea, author.
Title: Kabbalah in print : the study and popularization of Jewish mysticism in early modernity / Andrea Gondos, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479712 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479736 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I dedicate this book to the memory of my
Grandmother, Dr. Julianna Gál (z˝l)
whose love of books and thirst for knowledge
inspired my own intellectual quest
A book is like a magic garden carried in your pocket.
—Chinese Proverb
I MUST Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s;
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.
—William Blake, Jerusalem
What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!
—Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull , Confidence Man
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Print Technology and Its Impact on Religious Consciousness
Chapter 2 Cultural Agency and Printing in Early Modern Ashkenaz
Chapter 3 Kabbalistic Abridgments and Their Cultural Impact
Chapter 4 Zoharic Customs in a Halakhic Framework
Chapter 5 Constructing a Zoharic Lexicon
Chapter 6 The Plain Meaning of the Zohar: An Anthological Approach
Chapter 7 The Influence of Kabbalistic Study Guides and Concluding Remarks
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Figure 3.1 Yissakhar Baer, Pit ḥ ei Yah (Prague, 1609), fol. 1a, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 3.2 Yissakhar Baer, Pit ḥ ei Yah (Prague, 1609), fol. 14b, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 3.3 Samuel Gallico, Assis Rimonim (Venice, 1601), fol. 23a, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 3.4 Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimonim (Krakow, 1592), fol. 39b, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 4.1 Yesh Sakhar , Title Page (Prague, 1609), from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 4.2 Yesh Sakhar (Prague, 1609), fol. 2a. “Laws of Rising in the Morning,” from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 4.3 Index of Laws, Yesh Sakhar (Prague, 1609), fol. 78a, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 5.1 Yissakhar Baer, Imrei Binah , Title Page (Prague, 1611), from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 5.2 Catalog of zoharic stories in Imrei Binah (Prague 1610), fol. 33a, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 5.3 “Song and Praise of Rashbi” in Imrei Binah (Prague, 1610), fol. 4b, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 6.1 Recanati, Commentary (Venice, 1523), from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 6.2 Page Layout in Meqor Ḥ okhmah (Prague, 1610), fol. 2a, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Figure 7.1 Zohar (Sulzbach, 1684) with Imrei Binah printed at the bottom of the page, from the Scholem Collection, National Library of Israel.
Acknowledgments
The preparation of this book benefited from the indispensible support of several organizations and individuals. The Canadian Graduate Scholarship awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) allowed me to develop much of my research between 2006 and 2009. A postdoctoral fellowship (2014–2016) granted by the Azrieli Foundation made it possible for me to conduct extensive research in Israel at the National Library in Givat Ram, especially in its important repository of mystical texts, the Scholem library. I thank the librarians who have aided my research on a daily basis, Dr. Zvi Leshem and Yuval de Mala ḥ , as well as the always gracious staff. My research questions and methodological paradigm were informed by two academic workshops I participated in 2009: the annual workshop on The History of the Jewish Book at the Herbert D. Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Pennsylvania and the workshop on Reading across Cultures: The Jewish Book and Its Readers in the Early Modern Period, organized at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. I am grateful to the workshop directors for the financial assistance and the scholarly opportunities these workshops afforded in my professional development.
Over the years I have benefited from conversations with a number of scholars, whose insights and guidance were invaluable to the development of my own work: Daniel Abrams, Adam Afterman, Yossi Chajes, Avriel Bar-Levav, Bernard Dov Cooperman, Rachel Elior, Iris Felix, Jonathan Garb, Yehudah Galinsky, Pinchas Giller, Matt Goldish, Zeev Gries, Gershon Hundert, Boaz Huss, Moshe Idel, Yoed Kadary, Maoz Kahanah, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, Yehudah Liebes, Haviva Pedaya, Elchanan Reiner, Biti Roi, Moshe Rosman, David Ruderman, Bracha Sack, Adam Shear, Norman Stillman, Steven Weitzman, and Elliot R. Wolfson.
I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their suggestions and careful reading of the manuscript, which significantly improved the final work. Thank you also to Diane Ganeles and the editorial team at SUNY for their assistance in preparing the work for publication.
The supervisor of my doctoral work, Ira Robinson, was so much more than a mentor; I owe him my deepest gratitude for the countless hours that we spent on working through difficult passages and texts and for providing an intellectual space for developing my own voice. Similarly, my research as an Azrieli postdoctoral fellow in Israel under the supervision of Ronit Meroz at Tel Aviv University was invaluable in both shaping the arguments of this book as well as charting new paths for my future research. I am grateful for everything I learned from her during our weekly discussions as she drove us from Mevaseret Z.ion to Tel Aviv University. The hours and minutes during our conversations, like the discourses of the zoharic rabbis during their many peregrinations, just collapsed into the space of inventing and discovering ḥ idushim .
I would like to express gratitude to two special friends and mentors, Professor Norma Joseph and Rabbi Howard Joseph, for all the wonderful study sessions we engaged in over the course of many years, raising questions and debating theological issues, which were always complemented by outstanding food, thus feeding both body and soul.
I thank my parents, Dr. George and Dr. Csilla Gondos, who supported my intellectual pursuits throughout my life. They taught me the value of hard work and kindness in all things I undertake.
My deepest gratitude is saved for my husband, Dr. Csaba Nikolenyi, who gave me strength when I was weak and who aroused me when I slumbered. Many of the ideas in this book were formed in the crucible of our walks and night vigils when mind embraced mind and the boundary between I and Thou silently dissipated.
Introduction
This book sets a new direction for the study and development of Kabbalah in the early modern period by understanding the printing, reorganization, and transmission of kabbalistic knowledge and textual practice. First, I seek to refocus attention on the profile and unique characteristics of Kabbalah in East-Central Europe—Poland, Moravia, and Bohemia—in early modernity, geographical areas largely understudied in contemporary academic scholarship. 1 Second, I move the methodological emphasis from the theosophical and symbolic understanding of kabbalistic works to the cultural, intellectual, and pedagogic concerns that informed their composition and textual organization. I argue that the democratization of knowledge spurred by printing impelled new authors—the secondary elites—in Ashkenazi lands to reframe the Zohar, and other foundational works of Kabbalah, in new and creative ways making them more accessible for a lay reading audience or those less versed in this lore.
Shifting the methodological focus from the semantic to the structural and didactic characteristics of kabbalistic texts can help us understand better the proliferation of kabbalistic study guides in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in East-Central Europe, Italy, and Safed, as well as the role secondary elites played as cultural intermediaries in this process. The kabbalistic study guide, a new genre in the Jewish literary canon, appeared for the first time shortly after the printing of the classical works of Jewish mysticism in the late sixteenth century and sought to popularize and render previously esoteric knowledge exoteric. Thus, these reference tools, which were meant to create greater ac