As Light Before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist (review)

Eitan Fishbane's As Light Before Dawn is a pleasure to read. It is lucidly clear in an area in which the material and most scholarship on the material is remarkably opaque. In addition, the book is well conceived and well written. Fishbane divides his book into three parts. Part One presents a survey of scholarship and the historical background to his key figure, Isaac of Akko. Part Two deals with the tension between Kabbalah as a transmissive system and Kabbalah as a source of innovation and creativity. Part Three deals with the nature of theurgical praxis and the techniques used by Isaac of Akko. Given the relative unfamiliarity with Kabbalah in the interdisciplinary areas of spirituality, this review will focus on some of the more basic issues potentially significant to the study of Christian spirituality.

Fishbane opens Part One with a historical introduction that gives a biographical reconstruction of the life of Isaac of Akko. Isaac lived in Akko when that city was the chief port of the Christian empire. All the spiritual trends of the time existed in Akko and Isaac grew up in this ferment. The conquest of the city by Saladin and the violent destruction that followed proved traumatic for the Jewish and Christian communities, even as it proved triumphant for the Muslim world. After the destruction, Isaac fled along the European littoral of the Mediterranean, arriving in Spain. Fishbane narrates well the situation in Spain where there existed a Kabbalah of Castille and a Kabbalah of Aragon. He also notes the Sufi influence on Isaac in the Holy Land, during his travels across Europe, and at the end of his life, in Morocco. For readers unfamiliar with Isaac of Akko, perhaps even with the diverging spiritual trends amidst this historical period and location, Fishbane's work invites deeper investigation into specific texts and associated practice in historical and contemporary view.

Part Two contains three chapters devoted to a discussion of the sources of Kabbalistic writing, an area of scholarly inquiry in spirituality studies perhaps less familiar to readers of this journal. As a reminder, Kabbalah is a Hebrew word that means "receipt" or "reception." It is used in modern Hebrew in the sense of "receipt," like the one given out by cashiers, and also as a "reception," as in wedding reception. Kabbalah is used in a religious sense to denote "any tradition that is received on good authority" and can be used in legal settings as well as exegetical or philosophical or mystical settings. In a narrower sense, Kabbalah is used to denote the Jewish mystical tradition that is usually dated from about 200 C.E. until the present. In its narrowest sense, Kabbalah is used to refer to the Zoharic stream of the Jewish mystical tradition; that is, to the theurgical tradition that reaches its apex in the book called the Zohar, written around 1293 C.E. in Spain. We have, thus, concentric circles of meaning: receipt or reception, a received tradition of any kind, the Jewish mystical tradition and, within that, the Zoharic stream of Jewish mysticism. (See the now classic, two-volume work: Blumenthal, ed., Understanding Jewish Mysticism. [New Jersey: Ktav Publishing, 1982])

Chapter Three of Fishbane's book proposes that: "Kabbalah is more a transmittive (sic) and educative process than it is purely a phenomenon of distinctive doctrine . . . authentication is the ability to posit a reliable source in the unbroken chain of masters and disciples" (52-53). Isaac of Akko spent a great deal of his energy in collecting and reporting these traditions as, incidentally, was common among medieval authors in law, philosophy, mysticism, exegesis, etc. Chapter Four notes that, despite the strict adherence to reporting legitimate traditions, Isaac of Akko also wrote: "I was contemplating a passage from our Rabbis of blessed memory, and I saw in it a secret that was correct in my eyes"(87). He often commented: "I, the author of...