Rapture and Rupture: Kabbalah and the Reformation of Early Modern Judaism

From a recondite discipline in the Middle Ages, the province of a thin band of European intellectuals, Kabbalah evolves in the early modern era into world Jewry's predominant theological and ethical doctrine, permeating the religious life of all strata of society. This sea change is the subject of two recent books. Dweck's The Scandal of Kabbalah approaches this historical development from the perspective of one of its prime antagonists, the Venetian rabbi Leon Modena and his anti-kabbalistic polemic Ari nohem (The Roaring Lion). Weinstein's Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity tackles the issue frontally, seeking to explain Kabbalah's conquest of early modern Jewish thought and praxis. Both works are predicated upon the methodological assumption that analyzing historical developments in the Jewish ambient requires situating them within the wider cultural context. What we have, then, is a pair of studies that deploy a particular methodology to address a particular historical process.

Attempts to explain Kabbalah's rise to near hegemony in the early modern era are not without antecedent. Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars viewed the concentration on Kabbalah (along with Talmud) among Ashkenazic Jewry in the early modern era as symptomatic of a narrowing of cultural horizons and characterized this period as one of ignorance and superstition, and hence of stagnation and decline. They attributed the downturn in the range and nature of cultural activity to the continuing violence visited upon European Jewry from the late Middle Ages to their own day.

Gershom Scholem saw the rise of Kabbalah as the result of a spiritual process set in motion by the Spanish expulsion. Messianic expectations were the core of this process, and the kabbalistic doctrine of the redemptive potential of human theurgic activity captured the imagination and propelled the Jews toward Sabbateanism. The power of Kabbalah to explain the wide acceptance of Sabbatai Sevi's messiahship has since been called into question, but the link between the Spanish expulsion, the messianic agitation that followed, and the spread of Safedian Kabbalah continues to offer an approach to the problem.¹

More recently, Robert Bonfil has situated the diffusion of Kabbalah in the broader context of the European Baroque. For Italian Jews, Bonfil argues, the age of "shadow and mystery" with "a diminution of clear perception and certainty," was a period of crisis on both the social and cultural planes. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, Counter Reformation pressures against religious minorities resulted in the Jews' expulsion from one Italian territory after another, as well as in increasing ideological pressure in the form of book burning, censorship, forced sermons, and conversionary measures. At the same time, a growing gap between the rank and file and the economic and intellectual elites tested the cohesion of Jewish society and led to increasing alienation from the communal leadership. The kabbalistic theory of tikun (repair) energized religious activity by endowing the performance of the commandments with soteriological potential on both the cosmic and human planes. This granted the entire constituency the sense of participation in the drama of redemption, empowering them at a time when political and social turmoil bred an atmosphere of chaos and a chilling sense that order and control were being lost.

The argument that Kabbalah was a crucial agent in the transition to the modern era is another element in Bonfil's interpretation. The spread of Kabbalah was accompanied by innovations in Jewish praxis, primarily in the liturgical realm, which took root because the kabbalists' claim that their ideas were traditional went largely unquestioned. This exemplifies Bonfil's more abstract argument that Kabbalah was able to nudge Jewish society in the direction of secularization and modernity because its innovative elements were articulated in the language of traditional concepts and terms. Similarly, the devotional confraternity was a new religious...