History of the Jews (47 page)

As in earlier periods, the effect of calamity was to reinforce the irrational and apocalyptic elements in Judaism and in particular to make Jews hypersensitive to signs of a messianic deliverance. The rationalist optimism of the twelfth century reflected in the works of Maimonides had largely disappeared by the end of the fourteenth century, as Jewish communities almost everywhere came under pressure. Among the Jewish upper classes, kabbalistic mysticism strengthened its grip. The destruction and scattering of the great Spanish community from the 1490s reinforced the trend towards irrationalism in two specific ways. First, it democratized the kabbalah. From being an esoteric science taught orally among an educated elite, or through secretly circulated manuscripts, it became public property. Large numbers of manuscripts containing portions of the
Zohar
or kabbalistic anthologies circulated in Jewish communities everywhere. The rise of the Jewish press had a loudspeaker effect. In 1558-60, two complete versions of the
Zohar
were printed competitively in Cremona and Mantua. Further printings followed all over the Jewish diaspora, in Leghorn and Constantinople, in Smyrna, Salonika, and especially in Germany and Poland.
⁵⁰
In its popular versions, the kabbalah mixed with the folk-superstitions and vulgarized aggadic tales which had always constituted a great part of the everyday religion of ordinary Jews. After a generation or two, it was impossible to separate one tradition from the other: they merged in a glutinous mass of magic-mystic lore.

Secondly, the Spanish expulsions made the kabbalah itself dynamic by adding an eschatological element concentrated on the notion of Zion and the coming of the Messiah. The kabbalah and its growing volume of superstitious accretions ceased to be just a mystic way of knowing God and became an historical force, a means to accelerate Israel’s redemption. It moved to the very centre of Judaistic belief and took on some of the characteristics of a mass movement.

The process was assisted by the drift of exiled Jews to Palestine and the growth of a school of kabbalistic studies at Safed in northern Galilee. Its first notable scholar was David ben Solomon ibn abi Zimra, who moved to Safed from Egypt, and was known as Radbaz. Moses ben Jacob Cordovero, or Remak (1522-70), provided the first complete and systematic theology of the kabbalah. But the real genius of the new movement was Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534-72), known as ha-Ari, the Lion. His father was an Ashkenazi from east-central Europe who went to Jerusalem and married a Sephardi girl. So in the transmission of kabbalistic culture, Luria acted as a bridge between the two communities. He himself was brought up in Egypt by an uncle who was a tax-farmer. He went into trade, specializing in pepper and corn. Luria was a splendid example of the Jewish tradition that business is not incompatible with the intellectual life, or even the most intense mystical speculation. He traded and studied all his life. It was a sign of the democratization of the kabbalah that he absorbed its legends as a child. But as a young man he became expert in orthodox, non-mystic halakhah. One of his gifts was to reconcile and move easily between the two. He wrote very little. His only known book is a commentary on the ‘Book of Concealment’ in the
Zohar
. He only moved to Safed towards the end of his life, after spending the years 1569-70 pondering the
Zohar
on an island in the Nile. But once in Safed he had a mesmerizing effect on the wide circle of pupils he gathered round him. They memorized his teaching and later wrote it down (like the philosopher Wittgenstein’s pupils in the 1930s). He radiated not only holiness but power and authority. Some thought he might be the Messiah himself. He seemed to understand the language of birds. He often talked to the prophets. He would walk around Safed with his pupils, pointing out from intuitive knowledge the unidentified graves of holy men. Then he would get back to the export-import trade. He made up his last set of accounts only three days before he died. His early death produced tales that he had ascended to heaven, and miracle-stories quickly attached themselves to his name.
⁵¹

Luria won his initial influence by teaching his pupils how to achieve intense states of meditation by concentrating entirely on the letters of the Divine Names. Like most kabbalists, he believed that the actual letters of the Torah, and the numbers which they symbolized, offered means of direct access to God. It is a very potent brew once swallowed. However, Luria also had a cosmic theory which had an immediate direct bearing on belief in the Messiah, and which remains the most influential of all Jewish mystical ideas. The kabbalah listed the various layers of the cosmos. Luria postulated the thought that Jewish
miseries were a symptom of the breakdown of the cosmos. Its shattered husks, or
klippot
, which are evil, none the less contain tiny sparks,
tikkim
, of the divine light. This imprisoned light is the Exile of the Jews. Even the divine
Shekinah
itself is part of the trapped light, subject to evil influences. The Jewish people have a dual significance in this broken cosmos, both as symbols and as active agents. As symbols, the injuries inflicted on them by the gentiles show how evil hurts the light. But as agents they have the task of restoring the cosmos. By the strictest observance of the Law, they can release the sparks of light trapped in the cosmic husks. When this restitution has been made, the Exile of the Light will end, the Messiah will come and Redemption will take place.

The attractiveness of this theory to ordinary Jews was that it enabled them to believe they had some hand in their destiny. In antiquity they had fought the gentiles and evil—and lost. In the Middle Ages they had accepted passively the wrongs inflicted on them—and nothing had happened; their predicament had grown worse. Now they were told, in effect, that they were potent actors in a cosmic drama, for the greater the catastrophes which involved the Jews, the more certain they could be that the drama was reaching crisis. By their very piety, they could accelerate and resolve the crisis, generating a great wave of prayer and devotion on which the Messiah would sweep in to triumph.

All the same, the spread of kabbalistic messianism among the Jewish masses took more than a century. One of the reasons why Maimonides was so opposed to active speculation about the Messiah, and sought to present the Messianic Age itself in rational, almost humdrum terms as a time when all Jews would take to intense scholarship, was that he feared that what he termed ‘the rabble’
⁵²
would be swept by a wave of excitement into hailing a false Messiah, and then lapse into demoralized disillusionment. His apprehensions proved justified. The 1492 expulsions were seen as the birthpangs of the Messiah. In 1500-2 in north Italy Rabbi Asher Lemlein preached an imminent Coming. Messiahs of a sort duly appeared. In 1523 a plausible young man, probably a Falasha Jew from Ethiopia, arrived in Venice. One of his tales was that he was descended from King David. Another was that his father was a certain King Solomon, and his brother King Joseph, ruler of the Lost Tribes of Reuben, Gad and half-Manasseh. Hence he was known as David Reubeni. He took in many Jews and, for a time, some Christian princes. But he ended up in a Spanish prison. His tales inspired another claimant, Solomon Molcho, to proclaim himself the Messiah at Rome in 1530. He was burned alive two years later.
⁵³

These fiascos—and there were others—discouraged learned men
from using kabbalistic method to discern signs of Redemption. Joseph Caro, who went to Safed, deliberately ignored the kabbalah in both the academic and the popular versions of his code, and he did nothing to increase messianic speculation. But he also wrote a mystical diary, in which a miraculous mentor or
maggid
—the personified Mishnah—makes an appearance.
⁵⁴
Most rabbis were cool towards messianism, since it was not at all clear what part, if any, the rabbi would play in the Messianic Age. Luria’s greatest pupil, Hayyim Vital (1542-1620), certainly made no effort to bring his master’s theory to the masses. He spent the latter part of his long life concealing most of the lessons Luria taught him. However, in his
Book of Visions
, which he compiled 1610-12, an autobiographical work recording nearly half a century of dreams, he makes it clear that he believed Luria was worthy to have become the Messiah and that he himself might be called. One dream recounts: ‘I heard a voice saying out loud: “The Messiah is coming and the Messiah stands before me.” He blew the horn and thousands and tens of thousands from Israel were gathered to him. He said to us: “Come with me and you shall see the avenging of the destruction of the Temple.”’
⁵⁵
Moreover, by the 1630s most of Luria’s teaching, as revised by Vital and the Master’s other leading pupil, Joseph ibn Tabul, was in print and widely read.

From Safed, Lurianic kabbalah spread gradually to Jewish communities in Turkey, the Balkans and eastern Europe. In Poland, where Jewish printing presses existed in Lublin and elsewhere, its impact was strong and wide. By the end of the sixteenth century, it was regarded there as a normative part of Judaism. Rabbi Joel Sirkes ruled in a
responsum
that ‘he who raises objections to the science of the kabbalah’ was ‘liable to excommunication’. During the first half of the seventeenth century, in the teeming Jewish
shtetls
and ghetto-quarters of Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine, this form of Judaism, ranging from highbrow mysticism and ascetic piety at one end of the spectrum, to idiot superstition at the other, became the essential religion of the community.

Much of the superstition in the ghetto was very old. Though the Bible itself was remarkably free, on the whole, of angel-devil material, it began to penetrate Judaism during the early rabbinic period and acquired official status in the aggadah. The miraculous tales told about Luria had circulated about the early sages too. Hillel, like Luria, could understand what the birds were saying to each other—and all the animals, and even the trees and clouds. The sages dealt in moral fables of all kinds. It was said that Hillel’s pupil, Johanan ben Zakkai, ‘knew the parables of laundrymen and fox fables’. The Rabbi Meir
was reckoned to have known 300 fox fables. It was the sages who let the devils into Judaism. The difficulty was, of course, that despite the Bible’s condemnation of sorcery (e.g. ‘Thou shalt not tolerate a sorceress’—Exodus 22:18), and despite the Judaic belief that all actions were willed by God alone, ruling out any kind of dualism, some relics of ancient black and white magic lingered on in the texts and were given a kind of inferred sanction. Thus the bells worn on the robes of the high-priest were designed to combat devils. So, it could be argued, were phylacteries, one of the most honoured devices of responsible Jewish piety. There were not many devils in the Bible, but they did exist: Mevet the death-god, Lilith the child-stealer (sometimes an owl), Reshev the plague-god, Dever, another sickness-god, Belial, a sort of devil-commander, Satan, leader of the anti-God forces, Azazel, the scapegoat-god of the wilderness.
⁵⁶
So the invasion of Judaism by devils over the period 150
BC
to 300
AD
had some precedents. Needless to say, Hillel could understand devil language too. Devils varied greatly, though according to Isaac of Acre they all lacked thumbs. Some, like Satan and Belial, were formidable, serious. Some were evil or unclean spirits, called
ru’ah tezazit
in the Talmud. They entered an individual, possessed him, spoke through the mouth. Kabbalistic literature written by Luria’s disciples was full of stories about these disgusting creatures, which in the ghettos of Ashkenazi Jewry, especially in Poland, came to be known as
dybbuks
. The literature also taught how they could be exorcised by a learned, holy man, or
ba’al shem
, who redeemed the possessed soul by using one of Luria’s ‘sparks’. There were also poltergeist-devils, called
kesilim
or
lezim
, who threw things and, for instance, hit people who left holy books open. There were she-devils also, in addition to Lilith, one of them being the Queen of Sheba. Ghetto Jews believed it was dangerous to drink water at the change of the seasons because that was when devil-women dropped evil menstrual blood in wells and streams.

To combat these devils, an army of angels came into existence. These too had Biblical sanction in some cases. Angels like Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Metatron had special alphabets, derived from ancient cuneiform writing or obsolete Hebraic scripts, the letters often containing small circles which looked like eyes. These letters were put on amulets and other charms to magic away devils. Or they could be driven off by pronouncing special combinations of letters. One such was the name of the devil in Aramaic, which was given as
abracadabra
; another was
shabriri
, after the devil of blindness.
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Letter combination magic, performed by using the secret names of God and the angels in special formulae, was known as ‘Practical Kabbalah’. In
theory only men of great sanctity could, let alone should, exercise this white magic. In practice, protective charms were mass produced and circulated freely in the ghetto. There was also black magic, invoked by manipulating ‘the unholy names’. According to the
Zohar
, the sources of this forbidden magic were the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis. The fallen angels Azael and Aza taught it to sorcerers who journeyed to the Mountains of Darkness to study. Virtuous kabbalists had a right to acquire such arts but only for theoretical purposes. In practice, harmful spells were also cast in the ghetto.

The most stupendous piece of magic was the creation of a
golem
, an artificial man into which a
ba’al shem
, or Master of the Name, could breathe life by pronouncing one of the secret divine names according to a special formula. The idea derives from the creation story of Adam, but the actual word occurs only once in the Bible, in a mysterious passage in the Psalms.
⁵⁸
However, talmudic legends accumulated around the
golem
. Jeremiah was said to have made one. Another was made by Ben Sira. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries the notion gathered force, so that the ability to make a
golem
was attributed to any man of outstanding sanctity and kabbalistic knowledge. The
golem
was brought to life to perform a variety of tasks, including defending Jews from their gentile enemies. In theory, a
golem
came to life when God’s secret name, with the letters arranged in the correct order, was put into its mouth; it was deactivated by reversing the name. But a
golem
occasionally got out of hand and ran amok—thereby generating a new layer of terror-tales.