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The Vilna Ga’on, an extraordinary Talmudic scholar, inspired in his disciples a sense that he was a supernatural phenomenon, with a messianic mission to redeem the Jewish nation by disseminating the true knowledge of Torah and by settling the Land of Israel. Although he himself never succeeded in immigrating to the Land, many of his disciples did so. They had a profound sense that the End of Days was approaching, and they developed the doctrine that redemption was not contingent on repentance but would come at its appointed time no matter what; repentance bore only on how it was to come about and on whether it might be accelerated. They likewise regarded as no longer applicable the prohibition in the “Three Oaths” against efforts on Israel’s part to hasten the End (“ascending the wall”). Rejecting the traditional emphasis on passivity, they held that the awakening above (i.e., God’s redemptive actions) could be triggered by the awakening from below (human actions directed toward hastening redemption), such as settling the Land of Israel and rebuilding it in order to “raise the Shekhinah from its ashes”.

This chapter uses Ari Nohem to document the transmission of Kabbalah from Safed to Venice and looks at Modena's indictment of this transfer of knowledge and practice. The three sections of the chapter trace different components of Modena's response to Safed Kabbalah. The first part charts Modena's rejection of stories about the magical and theurgic powers of Isaac Luria and other kabbalists from Safed that circulated in Venice. The second section concentrates on Modena's attempt to dissociate Kabbalah from philosophy, a response to and rejection of the thought of Israel Saruq—one of the most important kabbalists to travel from Safed to Venice in the late sixteenth century. Finally, the third section traces Modena's response to Cordovero's Pardes Rimonim, a work that systematically examined a central doctrine of theosophical Kabbalah—the sefirot or the ten hypostases of the divine being.

This chapter examines Modena's outrage at the appropriation of Kabbalah by Christians, particularly Pico della Mirandola. It looks at Modena's effort to separate Christian Kabbalah from Jewish theology and to redefine Kabbalah as a uniquely Jewish realm of thought. Modena objected to Christian Kabbalah for a variety of reasons similar to his opposition to Jewish Kabbalah: it was a recent innovation, and the attempt to argue for its antiquity defied both reason and textual evidence. In the very same passages, however, Modena objected to Christian Kabbalah for the simple fact that it was Christian. Ultimately, in criticizing Christian Kabbalah as a perversion of a specifically Jewish set of esoteric secrets, Modena adopted a protectionist and proprietary attitude toward a form of knowledge and set of practices he had spent considerable energy criticizing and had otherwise rejected.

This chapter examines the place in Eliade’s historical and fictional works of a variety of currents: Christian Kabbalah, Neo-Alexandrian hermetism, Renaissance “magic,” “spiritual” alchemy, Paracelsian and Neo-Paracelsian forms of philosophy of nature, Theosophy (Jacob Böhme and his followers), Rosicrucian literature and associations, and the so-called Occultist current. Eliade’s reasons for underplaying certain among these are linked, in part, to the fact that a “philosophy of nature” clearly present in most of these currents did not really tally with his idea of what the essentials of “religion” are or should be. Such traditions—as speculative discourses permeated by a sense of historicity—were not really congenial to Eliade’s program of transhistorical religious anthropology.

Sharʾabi's principal innovation in the development of his prayer intentions was to utilize a particular composition in the Lurianic canon, the “Gate of Names” which recast the entire kabbalistic mythos in terms of the development of sacred names. The actual texts of the Beit El kavvanot consist of sacred names of God to be meditated upon as the adherent's lips recite the prayer service. The traditions that underlie these sacred names are very ancient and in some respects predate the development of classical Kabbalah. The sacred names encompass a number of traditions: numerical coefficients, rewriting, substitution, and other linguistic strategies. Names are thought to represent aspects of the sefirotic mythos. Ultimately, the effect of the name traditions is to engender a kind of obscurantism, in which the technical construction and contemplation of the names overwhelms any other possibilities for noetic experience.

The Beit El kabbalists root their practice in Sharʾabi's theoretical writings, which are uneven and call for much interpretation. Sharʾabi produced a number of mystical prayers and also formalized penitential rituals of self‐mortification. Much of the literary activity of the Beit El kabbalists is devoted to resolving the desiderata and discrepancies remaining in Sharʾabi's writings, The most widely known evidence of Sharʾabi's activity is “his” prayer book, the Siddur ha‐RaShaSh, which was compiled posthumously by many hands. As a result of these factors, there are many versions and editions of the prayer book. In order to reinforce Sharʾabi's authority and spiritual hegemony, the Beit El kabbalists continued the Lurianic limitations of the kabbalistic canon.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Kabbalah. A Hebrew term one can render as “tradition” or “reception.” Kabbalah referred to a mode of reading, a library of texts, a series of concepts, and a range of practices. As a mode of reading, Kabbalah encompassed a set of interpretive assumptions adopted by an initiate in the course of approaching a sacred text. Kabbalists assiduously applied these methods of exegesis to the most sacred of texts, the Bible, and relied on mystical symbolism to uncover its theological content. The term Kabbalah also encompassed a series of ritual practices. For the religious adept, however, Kabbalah also referred to something beyond these rituals of practice, modes of exegesis, bodies of literature, and new theological concepts. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the term Kabbalah referred to a putative tradition of esotericism, to secrets that God had revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai.

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 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 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 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.

Rabbinic commentators repeatedly debated not only the correct formulation of the blessings but also when and how to say them. Moses Maimonides and Moses Cordovero exemplify the opposing perspectives of rationalists and Kabbalists. Abraham ben Maimon, Maimonides son, took the extreme position that one could not recite the three blessings without seeing a representative of the other. In the Kabbalah, the boundaries between the self and the three dimensions of the other are threatened nightly as the soul ascends and returns. Solomon ben Samson of Worms, writing for the pietistic Hasidei Ashkenaz, insisted on proper recitation but for entirely different reasons than the rationalists. The normative recital of the Menahot blessings in the synagogue was part of the daily “social construction of reality” by and for the individual. Not only was his own daily existence and identity renewed, but the social setting where this identity was privileged was renewed as well.

This chapter demonstrates that Philo of Alexandria considered the Work of the Chariot and the Work of Creation (i.e. Ezek 1 and 10, and Gen 1) to be domains of esoteric knowledge that must be concealed. This claim, if proven, has significance for two central areas of research in Jewish studies. First, in respect of research in Jewish mysticism, it is argued that the rabbinic statements concerning the esoteric nature of the Work of Creation and the Work of the Chariot rest upon an ancient tradition that preceded Philo of Alexandria. Second, this claim will help to substantiate research in which connections have been discovered between Philo, the most prominent representative of Hellenistic Judaism in Egypt, and rabbinic literature, and will even establish the teachings of Philo as continuous with Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah.

The tradition of prisca theologia and the Corpus Hermeticum are Pico della Mirandola instrumental in revival of preexistence. Real flowering is under the Cambridge Platonists, especially Henry More, along with Anne Conway and Kabbalists, who often combined the idea with theosis or deification. Thomas Traherne was the most prolific poet of the idea. Poets reworked Milton's great epic, to restore what they saw as occluded references to human preexistence.

This chapter examines Spiritualist writings about health and the body. For a movement that was otherworldly in its focus, Spiritualists were extremely interested in medicine and many, including Andrew Jackson Davis, worked as healers and country doctors. In an epoch when bloodletting and heroic measures were still common, a spiritual or philosophical explanation for ill health was often preferable to mainstream authority. Spiritualists embraced the idea of the Grand Man from Swedenborg, where the microcosm of the human body reflected the macrocosm of the universe as a whole. Resembling the Kabbalah’s articulation of Adam Kadmon and tracing its roots to Plato’s Timaeus, this construction of the body as the cosmos in miniature did not distinguish between the material and spiritual worlds but rather saw them as united parts of the divine.

The epilogue to the book clarifies that this book took the opposite direction from the ongoing project of exposing the existence of Jewish mysticism and of subjugating Kabbalah and Hasidism to this category. Instead of assuming the universality of mysticism, and presupposing that Kabbalah and Hasidism are Jewish forms of mysticism, the book exposed how these assumptions were formed and the way they shaped the research and practice of Kabbalah and Hasidism. The book explored the historical contexts and discursive processes that shaped the construction of Jewish mysticism uncovered the political and theological presuppositions underlying the academic study of Jewish mysticism and showed how the theological paradigms of the academic discipline have defined the borders of this field, directed the creation of scientific knowledge, and determined the symbolic value of the researched data. The epilogue suggests that relinquishing “mysticism” as the major category for the conceptualization and study of Kabbalah and Hasidism may disengage the research field from theological presuppositions. This can open up the study of social, political, and economic aspects of Kabbalah that scholars of Jewish mysticism have neglected, enable a research of new historical and cultural contexts that were not taken hitherto into consideration, and encourage the study of Kabbalistic movements that were rejected by scholars as insignificant or inauthentic.

This essay considers the possible resonances between contemporary physical cosmology and the kabbalistic tradition of Jewish mysticism. Matt begins by suggesting that common views of science and religion as distinct or separable are themselves limited in not suggesting possibilities for fruitful interaction. Religion, for example, gives science wonder, and science gives religion a view of knowledge as provisional, thus leading to humility in light of realities such as the nature of God. Matt then recapitulates the scientific theory of the Big Bang; yet perhaps in the Big Bang one can recapture mythic depth and meaning, as the Big Bang indicates that we are made out of the same stuff as all creation. Kabbalah and physical cosmology, in fact, make parallel statements as to the singularity of the origin of the universe and its resultant unfolding. Other physical theories such as broken symmetry find kabbalistic parallels, in spite of their widely differing methodologies, and suggest that science and spirituality are complementary. Matt argues that utimately, this fractured world needs mending, and that God needs us to mend it — God being best understood as infinite and hidden, yet as close to us as is our connection with the Big Bang.