The Politics of (Un)Conversion: The "Mixed Multitude" ( Erev Rav ) as Conversos in Rabbi Hayyim Vital's Ets Ha-Daat Tov

Where there is no narrative, there is no history.

Benedicto Croce

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more important than the facts.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

The historian's function must be to understand myths that people live by, because these myths have often a tenuous link to reality, though they are placed within reality.

George Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism

New Historicism and the Study of Kabbalah: An Introduction

While Much Has Been Written on the nature and history of Jewish biblical exegesis, less has been done on the nature and agenda of the kabbalistic interpretation of Scripture, especially after the Middle Ages.¹ I make a distinction here between kabbalistic hermeneutics more generally and the more focused enterprise of scriptural commentary. The first refers to the way kabbalists read and interpret all texts; the second to how the kabbalists as biblical exegetes offer new and sometimes daring readings of biblical narratives through the lens of their metaphysical and cosmological systems. At stake here is not simply how kabbalists interpret Scripture as an intellectual or spiritual exercise but also how this interpretation functions as a critical tool to address issues and events in their contemporary world. This article will address the extent to which biblical exegesis by one kabbalist is used as a vehicle to convey a stance on a contemporary cultural and religious issue in the sixteenth century. I will explore an early and largely unexamined work entitled Ets ha-daat tov by Rabbi Hayyim Vital (Calebrese) of Safed (1543–1620).² Vital is most widely known as the disciple of the mystic R. Isaac Luria (d. 1572), whose kabbalistic system became canonical in postmedieval Judaism. Before meeting Luria, Vital, then a student of the kabbalist R. Moses Corvodero (d. 1570), authored numerous works, including a commentary to the Torah, Psalms, and various rabbinic dicta. This work was later collected and published under the title Ets ha-daat tov.³ Given Vital's later compilation of Lurianic Kabbalah collected in Ets ha-hayim and the "Eight Gates," it is likely that the title of this earlier work is a play on Vital's later writings, the former viewed in retrospect as a prelude to the latter.

Here I will focus on one trope in Vital's early commentary to the Torah; his understanding of the erev rav or "mixed multitude" (the Egyptians who accompanied the Israelites out of Egypt, Ex 12.38) who became, in the rabbinic and later zoharic imagination, a thorn in Israel's side throughout the desert narrative. I argue that Vital's idiosyncratic depiction of the erev rav, essentially advocating their case and defending them against classical Jewish tradition, is intended as a biblical mirror of the conversos who were immigrating, or had recently immigrated, to Safed during the first third of the sixteenth century in hopes of being re-absorbed into the Jewish community. Vital's portrayal of the erev rav as simultaneously problematic for the Israelites yet ultimately necessary for redemption uses the erev rav to make a case for re-absorbing the conversos back into the Jewish community at a time when the hope of redemption was heightened.

As is the case with most kabbalistic and exegetical works, Ets ha-daat tov does not mention the conversos or any contemporary issue. My assertion, therefore, is based on a literary reading of the text within a particular context, coupled with Vital's own likely relationship to the converso community. My speculative leap linking textuality and history, or what Walter Cohen calls "[a] commitment to arbitrary connectedness,"⁴ is based on three factors, two literary and one methodological. The first is that the erev rav appear in Vital's text in peculiar places. One would expect to find...