Front Matter (PDF) - Stanford University Press

on the liturgy, combined the legacy of the Bahir with teachings
commentary
from Rabbi Isaac the Blind and his nephew Rabbi Asher ben David.
received
read Kabbalah in a Neoplatonic spirit, which is to say that they saw the
They
as an ordered series of emanations, increasingly removed from an un-
se®rot
primal source.
knowable
Catalonian kabbalistic tradition remained fairly close to the original
This
we have suggested for the publication of kabbalistic secrets. Naḥmanides'
purpose
inclusion of openly kabbalistic references in his highly popular Torah
complemented his ®erce polemical attacks in that same work on
commentary
philosophical interpretation of the Torah. Jacob bar Sheshet,
Maimonides'
key Gerona ®gure, also engaged in the battle against the rationalists.
another
neither Rabbi Azriel nor Rabbi Ezra of Gerona is known to have written
While
the realm of Kabbalah, their writings re¯ect signi®cant rabbinic
anythingoutside
learningand show them to belongto the same traditionalist and anti-
circles. Neoplatonism, they found, was a philosophy more amenable
Aristotelian
to the needs of mystics, thus rediscoveringin a Jewish context something
Christian mystics had come to know many centuries earlier.
that
the middle of the thirteenth century, a new center of kabbalistic
Around
became active in Castile, to the west of Catalonia. Soon the writings of
activity
new group, out of which the Zohar was to emerge, overshadowed those of
this
earlier Catalonian circle with regard to both volume and originality of
the
The Castilian kabbalists' writings were not characterized by the highly
output.
rabbinic attitude that had been lent to Kabbalah by such ®gures
conservative
Rabbi Isaac the Blind and Naḥmanides. This circle had its roots more
as
in the Bahir tradition than in that of the abstract language of early
planted
Kabbalah. Mythic imagery was richly developed in the
ProvencËal/Catalonian
of such ®gures as the brothers Rabbi Isaac and Rabbi Jacob ha-Kohen
writings
their disciple Rabbi Moses of Burgos. Their writings show a special
and
with the ``left side'' of the divine emanation and the world of the
fascination
Rabbi Isaac ha-Kohen developed a full-blown mythos in which the
demonic.
of evil were presented as near autonomous powers emanated in an act of
forces
from the depths of divinity. Dependent upon both the divine and
purgation
human for their existence, they exist at the liminal outskirts of the se®rotic
the
and the phenomenal universe, at the very borders of chaos and non-
realm
There they wait in ambush for the Shekhinah and the worlds that She
being.
and nurtures. Thus, to the world picture of divine se®rotic hierarchy
creates
an emanated cosmos, the Castilians add a parallel but antithetical realm of
and
demonic, servingas the source of all that is destructive in the cosmos.
the
conception of the ``left-hand emanation'' is founded on a set of suggestive
This
aggadic statements and biblical verses. In particular, the Castilian kabbal-
imagination was sparked by Rabbi Abbahu's famous dictum: ``The blessed
ists'
One created and destroyed worlds before He created these, saying: ``These
Holy
Introduction
xxxviii
please me. Those did not please me.'' Out of this and other fragments of