Search Results

During the thirteenth century, Akko was a cosmopolitan port city at the northern end of Haifa Bay where international commerce was bustling and ethnic diversity flourished as Christians, Muslims, and Jews interacted on the street on a daily basis. The city also served as the main gateway for immigration and pilgrimage from Christian Europe to the Holy Land. However, the bloody battle of 1291 between the Christian rulers of the city and the Mameluk Muslim invaders led to the fall of Akko and the collapse of its vibrant Jewish community. These events were pivotal in the life of Isaac ben Samuel of Akko, a mystic who journeyed from the Land of Israel westward through Aragon and Castile and learned new ideas and practices along the way. He escaped during the Muslim reconquest of Akko in 1291 and renewed his adherence to the Kabbalah of Nahmanides under the influence of Solomon Ibn Adret in Catalonia.

Central to kabbalistic behavior is the conduct of the mind, as reflected in the marked emphasis of the texts of medieval Kabbalah on concrete instruction and prescription. Because Isaac ben Samuel of Akko was indebted to the meditative posture of eastern Kabbalah, this characterization is highly applicable to his two works, Me'irat 'Einayim and 'Ozar Hayyim. Isaac's attempt to instruct his reader in the ways of mystical practice as he himself has received them, and as he understands them, gives rise to a distinct genre of Jewish mystical literature characterized as the rhetoric of prescription. This chapter presents a typology of contemplative practice that can be discerned in Me'irat 'Einayim and 'Ozar Hayyim, focusing on the movement, journey, and pilgrimage of consciousness through the divine sefirot; binary concentration and the nature of fixed intention (kavvanah); and visualization of the sefirotic realm and contemplation of the divine name. It also examines Isaac's notions of divided consciousness and intention, as well as two main modes of devotional contemplation advocated by him: one centered on Binah, and the other on the du-parzufin.

Central to Isaac ben Samuel of Akko's writings, and one of the main defining components of medieval Kabbalah, is theurgy—the power of human action and intention to affect the divine realm. Isaac's approach to the contemplative life is founded on the framework of prayer and other related paradigms of devotion. Kabbalistic approaches to the liturgy and the event of prayer were an integral feature of early Kabbalah, from Jacob the Nazirite and Abraham ben David to Judah ben Yaqar, Joseph Gikatilla, and Menahem Recanati. The term kavvanah (intention) serves as an orienting rhetorical axis to understand the complex dynamics of contemplation—as well as its theurgical underpinnings. This chapter explores contemplation, theurgical action, and the presence of God in the writings of Isaac ben Samuel of Akko. It analyzes the dialectic between separation and unification within divine reality, the capacity of human action to augment existing divine energy and vitality, and the place of theurgical empowerment in Isaac's 'Ozar Hayyim.

A recurring theme in Isaac ben Samuel of Akko's writing is his repeated emphasis on the need for the kabbalist to transcend the realm of physical sensation for the sake of mental attachment to the intellective dimensions of the spirit. Isaac argues that the extrapolation of muskalot meaning from murgashot perception was part and parcel of a necessary transcendence of corporeal sensation. The intellective dimensions ultimately give rise to disembodied contemplation—a mode of mystical perception in which physical sensation is replaced by an interior, spiritualized vision of Being. The lived spiritual practice of Isaac certainly involved intense forms of asceticism, and he probably conceived of devequt as a state that ought to be attained after one overcomes the inhibiting forces of passion and desire. By subduing and transforming the murgashot, it is possible to become attached to the muskalot. In order to reach the climax of the devotee's connection to Divinity, the contemplative act of training the mind on the divine muskalot is necessary.

Isaac ben Samuel of Akko's Me'irat 'Einayim, a supercommentary to Nahmanides' Commentary on the Torah, reflects an eclectic and anthological approach in which he attempts to bridge the diverse opinions and views espoused by predecessors and contemporaries in the kabbalistic arts of interpretation. The idea of eclecticism has mainly been interpreted by intellectual historians based on two perspectives: one on ancient Greek philosophy and the other based on the arguments expressed by Denis Diderot in his 1755 Encyclopédie. Both models can be used to understand Isaac's specific cultural role as an eclectic thinker. For the kabbalists, what makes something “Kabbalah” has everything to do with the reliability and authority of the transmissional source. This chapter examines the terms and modes of authoritative transmission in Isaac's writings. After looking at several intriguing antecedents and earlier models in medieval kabbalist literature, it contextualizes the concerns found in Me'irat 'Einayim and 'Ozar Hayyim. It also considers the ideal of harmonization and hermeneutical reconciliation that underlie rhetoric and hermeneutics in Me'irat 'Einayim.

In the late thirteenth century, one of the greatest periods of creativity in the history of Judaism, both the Kabbalah of Nahmanides and the Castilian Kabbalah flourished. Although numerous examples of prescriptive mysticism can be found among the kabbalistic writings of Aragon and Castile, these pale in comparison to the writings of the eastern thinkers. Isaac ben Samuel of Akko served as a bridge between these two relatively distinct modes of Kabbalah. His work reflects the dominant influences of both the Nahmanidean Kabbalah of sefirot and the Jewish-Sufi/Abulafian-inspired Kabbalah of the East, a unique blend evident in his putative metacommentary to Nahmanides' Commentary on the Torah: Me'irat 'Einayim. This book probes the thought of Isaac ben Samuel of Akko in the context of religion and knowledge. In examining this kabbalist's creativity, the book hopes to clarify the more general nature of religious thought and practice.

In his Me'irat 'Einayim, a metacommentary on Nahmanides' work Commentary on the Torah, Isaac ben Samuel of Akko interprets meaning as unfixed or flexible, but does not assert the full autonomy of the individual reader/interpreter. Rather, he argues that the legitimacy of each reading is determined by its reception from a reliable source, the “intention” of which should be clear to the recipient. Thus, despite the persistent argument for the instability of kabbalistic meaning on Isaac's part, he highly values “authorial” or “transmissional” intent. Me'irat 'Einayim is considerably taken up with the process of establishing Nahmanides' authorial intent with respect to a host of esoteric exegetical issues. The authenticity of Isaac's role as transmitter is contingent on his ability to theorize Nahmanides' real authorial intention. This chapter explores authorial intentions and meaning, as well as the self-perception of authorship and the act of writing in Me'irat 'Einayim.

Compared to Me'irat 'Einayim which is characterized by authorial self-awareness and the use of the first-person voice, Isaac ben Samuel of Akko's 'Ozar Hayyim features a testimonial mode that assumes an entirely new level of maturity and development as well as a pronounced shift away from the eclecticism of tradition-collection to the rhetoric of individuality and innovation. There is a substantial difference in the manner and extent to which Isaac allows his own persona to rise to the surface of the discourse in 'Ozar Hayyim, thus reflecting a remarkably new use of first-person testimony and autobiography in the communication of kabbalistic wisdom. In addition to the stimulative power associated with waking from sleep and ritual practice, Isaac ben Samuel of Akko often frames new interpretive insight as the product of an encounter with the natural world.

This book has explored Isaac ben Samuel of Akko's intellectual persona, as well as the content and style of his literary creativity and the role of transmission and creative process in the construction of kabbalistic culture. Based on Isaac's writings, it has examined medieval Kabbalah in the context of the sociology of knowledge, the dynamics of contemplative intention, and the phenomenology of religion. In Me'irat 'Einayim and 'Ozar Hayyim, Isaac instructs his readers on the use of the sacred texts (in particular, the liturgical texts) as symbolic maps for the ascent of consciousness through the divine world. He exhorts the devotee to focus on both root and branch elements of the divine sefirotic tree, to visualize configurations of the divine name as a mandalic focal point for contemplation of Divinity itself, and to reject the physical world in order to ascend to celestial heights. These specific models and techniques for mystical contemplation were predicated on theurgy.