'Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia Essay\r'

'It is ordinarily evaluate that the research of the great historian of Jewish mysticism, Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, opened the doors of the academy to kabbala. Far from us the intent of dulling the luster of his prodigious contri stillion in this respect, solely it is a fact that at the date the spring chicken Berlin student set about writing his starting time samples, the little battlefield of the Qabbalah had already make great strides. Moreover, its trail had been partly blazed by Jew scholars who washbasin claim to have played quite a con side of meatrable role, particularly in connection with the important problem of the Zohar, in forming the point of departure of the modem take apart of this discipline.\r\nIndeed, so opulent by characteristic traits and first solutions is their contribution that it would not be an exaggeration to babble out of a â€Å"Jew school” of Qabbalistic studies. Is it not highly noteworthy that the central piece of Qabbalistic literatureâ€the Zoharâ€was twice trans slowlyd on Jew soil, first into Latin by G. Postel in the ordinal century and subsequently into Jewâ€the first into every modem verbiageâ€by the mysterious Jean de Pauly at the informant of this century?\r\nFostered by a congenial mental atmosphere peculiar to the Jew, the study of Jewish esotericism got make to a precocious start in France in comparison to other European countries. The attainments of the humanists and evangelists of the sixteenth and 17th centuries paved the way for the mystical philosophers and Martinists of the eighteenth century, who in turn ushered in the occultists of the nineteenth century. (Sassmitz, 1990)\r\nThe present essay is an attempt to Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia who was a Jewish Sage in the years of his life, his character, and what he believed in and why he believed. Let it be made quite puddle at the first that our concern relates to the historical-critical study of the read/write head an d consequently deals all but incidentally with what A. E. Waite calls â€Å"Kabbalism.”\r\n then the theosophers and mystagogues of all shapes, from Eliphas Levi to A. Grad, not forgetting Papus and C. Suares, leave behind only be of guerrillaary interest to our theme. though in many a(prenominal) respects deserving of attention, their literary activity will be taken into account only to that extent as it had real repercussions on the development of the Qabbalah as an academic discipline.\r\nThat the theosophists and occultists did indeed exert such an influence is undeniable, even if it is solely through the efforts deployed by the scholars to dissipate the veil of confusion with which the former had enshrouded the unanimous question.\r\nIn Jews two periods can be distinguished in the development of this field: on the sensation hand, an historical phase, preoccupied with the question of the antiquity of the Zohar, followed, on the other, by a bibliographical and doct rinal phase.\r\nThe practice of Adolphe Franck (1809-1893) marks the beginning of the first of these two periods, whereas the second was initiated, a century later, by the research of Georges Vajda (1907-1981). The latter, already under the sway of the impulse given to Qabbalistic studies by Abulafia, worked in harmony with both the school of capital of Israel and Alexander Altmann, of Manchester and later of Brandeis University.\r\n but these two tendencies comparablely possess their pre- explanation, and it is first necessary to describe the mannikin within which each of these two schools evolved.\r\nAt the outset of its diffusion in Europe, the Qabbalah was submitted to censure. One could well-nigh claim that from the chronological point of view it is on Jew soil that the critical study of the Qabbalah was born. Indeed, it is in thirteenth-century Provence that the first critical appreciation of the Qabbalah was pen by R. Meir ben Sim’ on of Narbonne (active 1250), wh o, in his Milhemet miswah, vituperates against the polytheistic implications of the sefirotic doctrine. (Sassmitz, 1990)\r\nBut no real analytic debate got underway until the awakening of Christian interest in the â€Å"Cabale” in Renaissance times. Whereas the Platonists believed the secret doctrine of Israel was meant to conceal the primal revelation common to all religions, for the Christian esotericists it prefigured the arcanum of the Trinitarian doctrine, the very foundation of Christianity. In the Qabbalists they perceived the forerunners of the Christians and in Qabbalah, a secret justification of the evangelization of the Jews.\r\nIn tenth-century France, the study of the â€Å"Cabale” occupied a place of honor amongst Christian intellectuals. Mention must above all be made of the orientalist and philosopher Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), to whom we owe the first Latin displacement reaction both of the Sefer yesirah ( capital of France, 1552) and of the Zoha r (unpublished) prior even to the appearance of their printed texts. (Sassmitz, 1990) However, the evangelizing fervor of his compatriots and their theological prejudices hampered any critical perspectives in likeness to the study of the Jewish esoteric tradition.\r\nTowards the end of the seventeenth century, opinions became increasingly diversified. The Qabbalah was thought to have in fact taught an elementary form of Spinozism and pantheism, and the Qabbalists were considered atheists unaware of their declare irreligion.\r\nOf the scholars of this period, the academician Louis Jouard de la Nauze (1696-1773), defender of Newton’s chronological system, stands out as an exceptional figure. Whereas his genesis ingeniously endeavored to demonstrate the Qabbalah’s Christological affinities, De la Nauze upheld in his historic article, â€Å"Remarques sur l’antiquite et l’origine de la Cabale,” that the foundations â€Å"of the Cabale [were] layed by the Saracens at the time the Jews lived in the Orient under their domination. … The Saracens were Cabalists, and so were the Jews.” (Sassmitz, 1990)\r\nAt the beginning of the nineteenth century with the blossoming of the history of ideas, though the critical study of Qabbalah progressed, it stock-still remained profoundly tainted by the spirit of the Renaissance. Depending on which scholar one was reading, the Qabbalah could become anything but Judaism. For Ferdinand Bauer it was an offshoot of Christian gnosis, while J. Kleuker assigned it a Persian origin and Augustus Tholuck pinpointed the preponderant influence of Sufism. (Sassmitz, 1990) A new era in the study of the Jewish mystical tradition was ushered in by the critical investigation of Judaism advocated by the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe, partisans of the Haskalah.\r\nThough in addition to a solid rabbinical and general culture, these masters were possessed of scientific methods, they frequentl y exhibited an irrepressible repugnance towards Qabbalah. With few exceptions, the great scholars, such as L. Zunz, S. D. Luzzato, A. Geiger, H. Graetz, and M. Steinschneider, considered it an alien thorn in the side of the Synagogue, incompatible with the conceptions of the progressive rationalism they were striving to attribute to the genius of Israel. In the era of Aufklarung and the struggle for Jewish emancipation, it was imperative to represent the Synagogue as the standard-bearer of regeneracy and rationality in order to be accepted into modern society.\r\nThe parsimony of references to Qabbalah in Julius Gutmann’s Philosophie des Judentums, published in 1933, still reflects this contempt. For similar reasons, the contribution of German scholarship to this field, despite its abundance, was comparatively thin and narrow in substance and unable(predicate) of casting off the tethers of tendentiousness. These scholars were principally concerned with minimalizing the mag nificence of Qabbalistic influence on Jewish culture and with demonstrating the late composition of the Zohar in order to loosen the handle of its authority and domination, upheld in Europe by the Chassidic camp, considered retrograde.\r\nThe scientific paradigms elaborated by the Wissenschaft des Judentums served as an epistemological framework upon which the Jew â€Å"science dejudaisme” was to build. The first study Jew work specifically devoted to a lucubrate study of the Qabbalah, though not a get offspring of the Wissenschaft, nonetheless partook of this current of investigation. La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des hebreux, by Adolphe Franck, published in Paris in 1843, is a milestone in the annals of Qabbalistic research.\r\nAssuredly, it contributed more to the modern study of Qabbalah than any other single work prior to the labors of Abulafia. In addition to the fact of its having been based on philological, historical, and conceptual criteria, the orig inality of this book resided in the obvious empathy that the author displayed for his subject. Indeed, in contrast to many maskilim, Franck considered the Qabbalah to be an current Jewish phenomenon of major spiritual importance; consequently he affirms: â€Å"It is impossible to consider the Kabbalah as an isolated fact, as an accident in Judaism; on the contrary it is its very life and heart.”\r\n'