Front Matter (PDF) - Stanford University Press

probably continuingto have a larger followingthan did Kabbalah.
century,
of the Zohar also reached Italy, the Byzantine lands of the eastern
Manuscripts
and the Holy Land duringthis period.
Mediterranean,
was after the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492 that the in¯uence of
It
entered a period of rapid growth. Various explanations have been
Kabbalah
for this increased interest in the mystical tradition. Some have attrib-
offered
it to the sufferingand despair that visited this once proud group of Jewish
uted
in the period between 1391 and 1492. The devastation of the age,
communities
it is said, caused Jews to seek out deeper resources of consolation than those
so
by the typically optimistic worldview of the philosophers. Others claim
offered
the growth of Kabbalah came as a response of a different sort to the
that
expulsion. Jews throughout the Mediterranean world, including many
Spanish
exiles, were shocked and disgraced by the high numbers of Spanish
Spanish
who converted to Christianity in the course of the ®fteenth century. Once
Jews
the blame was placed partly at the door of philosophy, the intellectual
again
of Spanish Jewry havingsupposedly led to a laxity in religious
sophistication
and a relative indifference to the question of religious identity. Yet
observance
view attributes the growth in Kabbalah's in¯uence to the new home
another
in which former Iberian Jews found themselves. Ottoman Turkey, with
cultures
closed millet systemÐin which each faith community held fast to exclusive
its
and total denigration of all outside in¯uencesÐwas a hospitable
truth-claims
for precisely the closed-minded Zoharic view of the outside
environment
rather than the Aristotelian quasi-universalism of the philosophers,
world,
had served the needs of a very different age.
which
the reason (and a combination of the above factors is most
Whatever
we begin to see new kabbalistic works written and old ones distributed
likely),
explicated in the early sixteenth century. The Zohar and other works of the
and
tradition are especially prominent in this period. Perhaps typical is
Castilian
®gure of Rabbi Meir ibn Gabbai, a Turkish kabbalist who tells us that he
the
born in Spain in 1481 and left as a child amongthe exiles. Ibn Gabbai's
was
opus, Avodat ha-Qodesh (Venice, 1567), is a grand systematization of
magnum
and a defense of it against philosophy. Typically of the sixteenth
Kabbalah
Ibn Gabbai knows a great many earlier texts and seeks to harmonize
century,
with one another. But the great source of kabbalistic truth is the Zohar,
them
he quotes on virtually every page as ``the Midrash of Rabbi Shim'on son
which
Yoḥai.'' of
kabbalistic conventicles of Safed, which ¯ourished in the late sixteenth
The
also accorded to the Zohar top place as the authoritative source of
century,
truth. Clearly, the choice of Safed as a place of settlement for Jews
kabbalistic
to the kabbalistic legacy had much to do with its proximity to Meron,
attached
supposed burial place of Rabbi Shim'on son of Yoḥai. His tomb had been a
the
of pilgrimage for local Jews long earlier, but with the growth of the Safed
site
Introduction
lxxii
community it became a truly important shrine. Both Rabbi Moses Cordovero