Modelo para la calidad interna y externa

1. Continuities in Ecstatic Kabbalah in Italy

The kabbalistic writings of Abraham Abulafia and Menahem Recanati did not simply survive in manuscripts, copied in a servile manner in the following generations. In fact they excited interest in the various forms of Jewish mystical lore among later generations of Kabbalists in several centers of Jewish culture, especially in Italy and the Byzantine Empire, though almost not at all in the Iberian peninsula. These two corpora were continued while also appropriating other forms of speculative literatures, kabbalistic or philosophical. Thus, although there was no pure school of either Abulafia or Recanati that continued their teachings in their pristine form, both thinkers exerted substantial and distinctive

influences upon other Kabbalists. In the case of Recanati both the numerous manuscripts of his writings surviving in Italy and his family’s preservation of his oeuvre indicate his centrality in the development of Kabbalah in this Jewish center of culture.

We have already seen that elements of theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah were introduced from Spain beginning in the fourteenth century and were adopted in Italy, mainly through the wide influence of the anonymous early-fourteenth- century Sefer Ma‘arekhet ha-’Elohut, written in Catalonia. In Recanati’s family there is solid evidence of an interest in theosophical Kabbalah, although his descendants did not echo his views in their kabbalistic treatises.¹ In contrast, Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah strongly influenced a significant number of Kabbalists not only in Italy but also in the Byzantine Empire and the land of Israel. Here we shall be concerned only with its repercussions in Italy.

We noted at the end of chapter 2 the existence of kabbalistic treatises whose views strongly echo Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah. So closely do these books resemble one another that even as great an expert on Kabbalah as Gershom Scholem concluded that they were Abulafia’s own writings, and it required a sus-tained philological effort to demonstrate that this was not the case but rather that, given the conceptual and terminological diversity conspicuous in these writings, we must assume the existence of more than one anonymous Kabbalist who com-posed these works.² With the exception of R. Nathan ben Sa‘adyah Harar’s Sefer Sha‘arei Tzedeq, which is evidently the work of a direct student of Abulafia’s, we do not know whether the Kabbalists who wrote two of the most important ecstatic writings, Sefer Ner ’Elohim³ and Sefer ha-Tzeruf ⁴—among other anonymous ecstatic treatises—were direct disciples of the founder of ecstatic Kabbalah. I assume the possibility that these works were written in the early fourteenth century in Italy, perhaps in Sicily. Sefer ha-Tzeruf survives in two different versions and was quite widely available, if we are to judge by the substantial number of manuscripts in which they are extant. It was translated into Latin in the fifteenth century by Flavius Mithridates and was studied by and influential on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.⁵ In the manuscripts in which this work survives there are also a variety of anony-mous short treatises that I identify as either Abulafia’s or as belonging to the ecstatic school; these still await a full analysis.

Although we may discern a strong Abulafian influence in some of the works discussed below, we must also consider to what extent those Kabbalists were going beyond Abulafia’s distinctive Aristotelian-Maimonidean blend of perspectives. In my opinion, they reflect a process of differentiation within ecstatic Kabbalah, and the nature of this diversification will be one of the major preoccupations of this chapter. In any case, it should be pointed out that by its nature, ecstatic Kabbalah

is a more open form of knowledge than the theosophical-theurgical one. Whereas in some of the schools belonging to the latter trend the focus was on oral or written conceptual transmission, with key concepts being handed down from master to student, in ecstatic Kabbalah transmission was understood as more practical, focusing on initiating students into the manner of practicing techniques that would allow them to pursue a variety of directions on their own.⁶ As we saw earlier, Abulafia himself praised his student Joseph Gikatilla for adding to his own knowledge from Abulafia’s.⁷ Elsewhere Abulafia wrote that “whatever is transmit-ted concerning this lore constitutes a ‘head of chapter,’ and this is why it needs the intellect, and it is called intellectual Kabbalah⁸ because it is not like the other sciences, namely the propaedeutic ones, which are transmitted alone. . . . But this lore, known as Kabbalah, is impossible to transmit in toto in an oral manner, and not even in written form, even over [a period of] thousands of years. And whatever a Kabbalist attempts to interpret, everything is a hint and a ‘head of chapter.’ ”⁹ The affinity between the creative and the intellectual Kabbalah is quite important, and, as we shall see immediately below, creativity and speculation are also connected to each other in other cases in ecstatic Kabbalah.¹⁰

2. On Death by the Kiss in Ecstatic Kabbalah

A common denominator of Sefer ha-Tzeruf and of R. Nathan’s Sefer Sha‘arei Tzedeq is the presence of Neoplatonic terminology, which is marginal in Abulafia’s authentic writings. However, both Sefer ha-Tzeruf and Sefer Ner ’Elohim retain his strong emphasis upon the experiential aspects of Kabbalah in presenting techniques for achieving mystical experiences. This more Neoplatonic proclivity may be the result of the anonymous ecstatic Kabbalists’ absorption of kabbalistic material that was either not known to Abulafia or not accepted by him.

Before analyzing the topic of ecstatic death—a motif that had a great impact on the Renaissance in Italy—as found in some of the anonymous Kabbalists who followed Abulafia’s path, we need to understand the shift from a more Aristotelian to a more Neoplatonic orientation. Let me start with a relatively early anonymous passage, apparently authored by a Geronese Kabbalist, where strong Neoplatonic terms and ways of thought are conspicuous. Dealing with the legend of the four sages who entered the mystical Pardes, the unknown Kabbalist writes about the first of these sages:

“Ben Azzai looked and died.”¹¹ He gazed at the radiance of the Shekhinah like a man with weak eyes who gazes into the full light of the sun, and his eyes are dimmed, and at times he is blinded by the intensity of the light that overwhelms him. Thus it happened to ben Azzai: the light overwhelmed

him, and he gazed at it because of his great desire to cleave to it and to enjoy it without interruption, and after he cleaved to it he did not wish to be separated from that sweet radiance, and he remained immersed and hidden within it. And his soul was crowned and adorned, and [possessed] that very radiance and brightness to which no man may cling and afterward live, as is said, “for no man shall see Me and live” [Exodus 33:20]. But ben Azzai gazed at it only a little while, and then his soul departed and remained [there] and was hidden away in the place of its cleaving, which is a most precious light. And this death was the death of the pious, whose souls are separated from all concerns of the lowly world, and whose souls cleave to the ways of the supernal world.¹²

This passage does not reveal any special concern with theosophical Kabbalah, although I assume that the author was acquainted with this form of thought. It seems rather that the author may have drawn upon a philosophical source. In one of the epistles of Ikhwan al-Safa, an important collection of treatises belonging to the Shi’ite sect known as Ismailis, the spiritual development of the soul is described as follows: “When the soul awakens from the sleep of negligence and the slumber of foolishness . . . and is cleansed from material habits . . . it escapes and experi-ences its resurrection, it becomes luminous, and its substance is brilliant and its gaze is sharpened. It then beholds the spiritual forms, contemplates the eternal substances of light, and beholds the hidden things and secret mysteries. . . . Having contemplated these hidden things, it clings to them, even as the lover clings to the beloved. It becomes one with them, as light unites with lights, and remains eternally with them in bliss.”¹³

The vision of light while in the ecstatic state at the time of death is similar to what is found in a text probably belonging to the cluster of treatises related to Sefer ha-‘Iyyun, or Book of Contemplation. A passage appearing in several manuscripts belonging to this cluster asserts: “From the time that the righteous person departs to his eternal home, he sees the light of the sphere of the intellect, and immediately he departs, as if the Holy One, blessed be He, has created it and made it known to the eye. And Moses saw the light of the [supernal firmament called]

Zebul, and immediately died. And why all this? Because the body has no strength to withstand it.”¹⁴

In contrast, Abulafia’s contemporary active in Spain, R. Isaac ibn Latif, writes in a more Aristotelian vein: “When the human intellect actually cleaves to the intel-ligibilia, which are the Agent Intellect, [the leaving] is [in the] the form of the kiss.”¹⁵ Here the intellect rather than the soul is the subject of the mystical experi-ence. Similarly, the much later R. Moshe Narboni quotes from a commentary on

Averroës’ On the Possibility of Conjunction, which describes the “preparation” to cleave to the Agent Intellect: “Let Him kiss him with the kisses of His mouth, and let him receive the agent intellect in the light of his soul which rises upon her.”¹⁶

Whereas Abulafia himself was much more inclined toward an Aristotelian expres-sion of the mystical death, his followers and R. Menahem Recanati adopted Neoplatonic expressions for explaining this experience. I did not find any evidence that Recanati’s discussions of death by the kiss influenced Abulafia’s followers,¹⁷ but I assume that the short treatise from the circle of Sefer ha-‘Iyyun had arrived in Italy, since it is found in at least two Italian manuscripts. There it influenced the perception of the mystical death in an ecstatic treatise, the anonymous Sefer ha-Tzeruf:

When the soul is separated from the body, she has already apprehended the purpose of [all] purposes and has cleaved to the light beyond which there is no other light, and takes part in the life that is the bundle of all life and the source of all life, and he is like one who kisses something that he loves utterly, and he is unable to cleave to it until this time. And this is the secret of the kiss spoken of regarding the patriarchs, of whom it is said that they died with the kiss: that is, that at the moment that they departed they attained the essence of all apprehensions and above all degrees, because the inter-ruptions and all the obstacles that are in the world left them, and the intel-lect returned to cleave to that light which is the [Agent] Intelintel-lect. And when he cleaves to truth, this is the true kiss, which is the purpose of all [spiritual]

degrees.¹⁸

In the other version of this book we read:

Know that when the sphere of the intellect is turned about by the Agent Intellect, and man begins to enter it and ascends into the sphere that revolves upon itself, as in the image of the ladder, and at the time of ascent, his thoughts will be indeed transformed, and all the images will change before him, and nothing of all that he previously had will be left in his hands; there-fore, apart from the change in his nature and his formation, [he will be]

as one who is translated from the power of sensation to the power of the intellect, and as one who is translated from the tellurian process to the pro-cess of burning fire. Finally, all the visions shall change, and the thoughts will be confounded and the imaginative apprehensions will be confused, since in truth this sphere purifies and tests.¹⁹

The subject of the experience is described as a soul, the object of its cleaving as the sphere of intellect. These features and the image of light are all much more common in Neoplatonic literature than in Aristotelian thought. In the latter, the

soul does not cleave to anything but the intellect. Moreover, the intellect cleaves to the Agent Intellect and not to the sphere of intellect, a locution that stands for the idea of the empyrean, the highest heaven.²⁰ In the two passages, which comple-ment each other as they describe different experiences of the sphere of intellect, Neoplatonism and Aristotelian terminology are combined.

From Italy this understanding of ecstatic death had an impact on a classic of Kabbalah composed at the end of the fourteenth century in the Byzantine Empire;

the anonymous author of Sefer ha-Peliy’ah drew a connection between the passage from the circle of Sefer ha-‘Iyyun and the image of the kiss:

Know that at the time that the righteous person departs to his eternal abode, he sees the light of the sphere of the intellect, and his soul immediately departs and leaves the body. And know that he is shown it in accordance with the level of that righteous person and his cleaving to that light, and he immediately cleaves [to it], for there is no strength in the body to withstand the soul’s longing when it sees that light; and Moses, as soon as he saw the light of the dwelling of the supernal Zebul, immediately cleaves there. And the vision of the light that is visible to the righteous whose soul is there is called the kiss.²¹

Here, as in Sefer ha-Tzeruf, death is the cause of ecstasy, and not vice versa. If my conjecture is correct about the existence of the small treatise from the literature clustered around Sefer ha-‘Iyyun in Italy and its influence on Sefer ha-Tzeruf, we have an example of the transmission of Kabbalah from Spain to Italy and then to the Byzantine Empire, with ecstatic Kabbalah being instrumental in this mediation.

Although Abulafia’s disciples generally accepted his system, they seem to have been unaware of the subtle but important distinction between literal and mystical death. Thus, even while basing themselves upon Abulafia, they repeated Maimonides’ formulations regarding the separation between the body and the soul. Mystical death becomes an ideal, projected onto ancient heroes. So, for example, an anonymous Kabbalist, plausibly writing in Italy, and perhaps related to Abulafia’s thought,²² substitutes ben Azzai for R. Akiva as the one who died by the kiss. The statement survives in a unique manuscript, Ms. Vatican 441: “Ben Azzai likewise desired the secret and went beyond the bounds to seek it, and he died by the kiss.”²³ Such a substitution is attested later in Abulafia’s school. In R. Yehudah Albotini’s sixteenth-century Sullam ha-‘Aliyah we find the following description of the moment of pronouncing the divine name:

Without doubt, at the moment when he departs from the realm of the human and enters into the realm of the divine, his soul becomes separated [from

matter] and refined, cleaving to the root of the source from which it was hewn. And it happens that one’s soul becomes entirely separated at that moment of separation, and he remains dead. Such a death is the most elevated one, as it is close to death by the divine kiss, and it was in this man-ner that the soul of ben Azzai, who “gazed and died,” left this world, for his soul rejoiced when it saw the source whence it was hewn, and it wished to cling to it and to remain there and not to return to the body. Of his death it is said: “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his pious ones” [Psalms 116:15]. Some of the masters of Wisdom and those who have engaged in such acts have said that one who does not wish his soul to separate itself from him during that vision ought to make his soul swear an oath, by a curse or by the Great and Awesome Name, prior to the act but while still in his own domain and in his human condition, so that at the time of the vision and the appearance, when he is no longer under his own volition, his soul shall not separate itself and cling to its source, but return to its container.²⁴ Here again the impact of Neoplatonic views is visible in a classic of ecstatic Kabbalah. The soul is preexistent, “hewn from the source,” and mystical death is tantamount to the return to the source. This is the reason for the double aspect of ecstasy—the fullness of human experience, on the one hand, and death, on the other.

Such a complex attitude reappears elsewhere in the writings of Abulafia’s disciples. In a passage preserved in two manuscripts containing material from ecstatic Kabbalah we read: “And he explained [the verse] ‘by the mouth of God’²⁵ as follows: this is compared to the kiss, and it [refers to] the cleaving of the intellect to the object of its intellection so closely and intensely that there is no longer any possibility for the soul [to remain in] matter, and that intense love called the kiss is a rebuke to the body, and it remains alone, and this is the truth.

And on the literal level, [it means that] there was none of the weakness of the elements or any element of chance but the edict of God, may He be blessed.”²⁶

One of Abulafia’s disciples, the anonymous author of Sefer ha-Malmad, designates those who receive the true Torah as “the seekers of the kiss” (mevaqshei ha-neshiqah). He conceives the kiss as one of the greatest secrets of the Torah, an emphatic description that points to the ecstatic understanding of religion as dealing not only with the revelation in hoary antiquity, but also as an ideal that may be achieved in the present by a small elite:

Indeed Moses received the Torah at Sinai and gave it over to those who sought the kiss, and this is a great secret; there is no discussion in the entire Torah that arouses the soul to its initial thought like this. And this is the

secret of the seekers of the kiss—that they may be cleansed of the

secret of the seekers of the kiss—that they may be cleansed of the