Reverberations of the Kabbalah in Modern French Thought

32 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 REVERBERATIONS OF THE KABBALAH IN MODERN FRENCH THOUGHT by Charles Mopsik Charles Mopsik is a charge de recherche (research fellow ) at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scholarly Research). His publications include Les grands textes de la cabale: les rites qui font. Dieu (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993), Le secret du mariage de David et de Bethsabee (paris: L'Eclat, 1994), and an annotated translation, Le side du sanctuaire de Moise de Leon (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1996). The Kabbalah has been a subject of interest to French thinkers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, for different reasons in the course of the twentieth century. By "thinkers," I mean not only professional philosophers , historians of philosophy, teachers, and researchers. I also include the grey area made up of authors whose knowledge has been acquired either inside or outside the university, and who offer a vision of the world either personal in nature or inspired by an authoritative tradition. While it is true that the French university throughout the twentieth century has been reluctant to teach Jewish thought in any form whatsoever , the subject has nonetheless been transmitted, studied, and researched in settings outside the university, such as community institutions and private classes. The Kabbalah is no exception to this rule. But no doubt because of the impact it had in certain sectors of society in earlier centuries, it has awakened more curiosity and interest than other aspects ofJudaism. The following pages sketch an overview of the approaches to this particular corpus of Jewish doctrine, which from the Renaissance onwards has elicited not only the curiosity but at times the sustained attention of Western intellectuals. I shall limit my inquiry to France, or rather, to the French-speaking sphere, since the language in which an Reverberations of the Kabbalah in Modern French Thought 33 author expresses him- or herself can be more important than national boundaries. We must immediately distinguish between two different approaches to the Kabbalah. The first is characteristic of a set of intellectuals who are Jews in the full sense of the term, who intend their work for a Jewish audience. Their relationship to the Kabbalah is bound up with their general view of Judaism, the tendency within Judaism to which they subscribe, and their most fundamental training. A second set of thinkers consists of Jews as well as non-Jews, who encountered the Kabbalah somewhat accidentally, who approached it through secondary sources, and whose interest in it often concerns no more than marginal aspects. Sometimes, the distinction is hard to establish: certain French thinkers whose work bore mainly upon philosophy, who were read and appreciated mostly for their philosophical writings and ideas, were themselves Jews involved in the interpretation and study of Judaism. They were able to accord a more or less central place to the Kabbalah in their twin capacities as philosophers interested in the metaphysics and mysticism of the Kabbalah, and as Jews eager to promote their more or less formal theology of Judaism. As Frenchmen and as Jews, they had a dual relationship to the Kabbalah, which sometimes became a means of connecting their Frenchness and their Jewishness, a space where their attachment to French thought could be expressed through their identity as Jews. Before considering the present century, it is essential to recall a few figures who played an important role in the introduction of the Kabbalah as an intellectual concern in France. Without going back to those who championed a Christian Kabbalah during the Renaissance, the views that French intellectuals held about the Kabbalah are well illustrated , in the Enlightenment, by the article devoted to it in the Encyclopedia of d'Alembert and Diderot. This groundbreaking work represented the sum of knowledge that men of breeding were expected to possess. The opinions expressed in it formed a kind of substratum for the ideas of the several generations that would be influenced by it. The authors' intentions were to approach all subjects in a critical fashion and thereby counter obscure beliefs and dubious information. Thus it is of interest for us to see in what form and from what point of view the Kabbalah was...