Search Results

This chapter reconstructs the competing efforts of a group of scholars in the early nineteenth century, including Isaac Reggio, Solomon Rosenthal, and Julius Fürst, to print the first edition of Ari Nohem. In the 1830s, Isaac Reggio and Solomon Rosenthal both prepared editions of Ari Nohem. Meanwhile, in an act of scholarly theft that infuriated them both, Julius Fürst printed Rosenthal's edition under his own name at Leipzig in 1840. Reggio, Rosenthal, and Fürst all looked to Modena and his criticism of Kabbalah as a model for their own opposition to the contemporary mystical revival in Hasidism. A decade and a half after Ari Nohem was first printed, however, kabbalists Elijah Benamozegh and Isaac Haver Wildmann subjected it to searing criticism; both tried to combat Modena's arguments against the antiquity of Kabbalah.

This chapter traces the circulation of Ari Nohem in manuscript, from its composition through its first appearance in print. The different stages in the reception of Ari Nohem in manuscript offer an alternative history of Kabbalah in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that has largely been told through the histories of Sabbatianism and Hasidism. The manuscript transmission of Ari Nohem was typical rather than aberrant for texts written by early modern Jewish intellectuals on a variety of subjects: polemical writings on Christianity, esoteric kabbalistic treatises, and epistolary campaigns against the mystical messiah Sabbatai Zevi and his followers. The evidence of these manuscripts, combined with repeated citation of and allusion to Ari Nohem in letters, diaries, treatises, responsa, and compendia composed between 1639 and 1840, indicate that Jews and Christians continued to read Modena's text in nearly every generation between the death of the author and the printing of his book.

This chapter posits Leon Modena's writing practices within the context of early modern Venice, capital of Hebrew printing and center of manuscript production. The circumstances of Modena's life as well as the cultural world of early modern Venice offer some context for why Ari Nohem (The Roaring Lion, 1840) did not appear in print in the seventeenth century. As a work of criticism, Ari Nohem reflected upon the transmission of Jewish tradition, particularly the transmission of esoteric information and the principles of Jewish law. Modena argued that the printing of legal and kabbalistic books had effected a radical change in the transmission of Jewish tradition, a change that he decried in no uncertain terms at several points. Ari Nohem polemicized against one medium, print, in the form of another, manuscript.

This chapter examines Modena's attempt to reclaim Maimonides from his kabbalistic critics and admirers. It argues that Modena's reading of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed informed most of his important positions in Ari Nohem—his understanding of tradition, his rejection of kabbalistic theology, and his attack on kabbalistic hermeneutics. Indeed, Modena quoted, paraphrased, defended, or alluded to Maimonides on nearly every page of Ari Nohem. He mentioned Maimonides explicitly on more than forty occasions in a treatise that consisted of thirty chapters; in addition, he often cited Maimonides without mentioning his name and engaged Maimonides' critics at great length. The chapter then connects Modena's discussion of two crucial issues in his criticism of Kabbalah to his reading of Maimonides: the history of esoteric secrets and the distinction between Kabbalah and philosophic knowledge.

This chapter argues that Modena's criticism of the Zohar's origins had little to do with its theological contents. It emerged as a reaction to the elevated status of the work among his Jewish contemporaries and immediate predecessors; Jews had begun to treat the Zohar as a source of legal authority rather than a collection of stories and biblical glosses. Modena's critique constituted a denunciation of these larger trends in contemporary Jewish life rather than a rejection of the Zohar as a work of exegesis. As such, Ari Nohem offers a case study of how an early modern intellectual worked to prove that a text was pseudepigraphic. It also presents a wealth of information on attitudes toward the Zohar among Jews in Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Ultimately, Modena rejected the status ascribed to the Zohar in contemporary Jewish life, denied the work's ostensible antiquity, and reflected on the deleterious impact of its packaging as a printed book.

This epilogue argues that the failure of Ari Nohem was manifold. Modena failed to convince his immediate audience, and by extension the Jewish community of Venice, and by further extension Jewish communities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, to abandon their embrace of a new Jewish theology that masqueraded under the guise of tradition. This was hardly surprising: no critic, no matter how stinging or how subtle, can convince people to change their beliefs or to abandon their practices. Modena had also failed to convince other scholars and other critics—the very people who might have been most receptive to his argument. To describe Ari Nohem as a failure is neither to indict the book nor to celebrate it. It is an attempt to understand it as a work written by an author constrained by the limits of his own particular moment in history.