Print Culture, Kabbalah, and Popularizing Jewish Mysticism
Avraham Oriah Kelman on Andrea Gondos' Kabbalah in Print
Kabbalah scholarship is perhaps the most ahistorical branch of Jewish Studies. The writings of mystics in general, and kabbalists in particular, tend to blur the gap between past, present, and future. Pseudepigraphic writings, prophetic visions, vast accounts of reincarnations, mythic conceptions of cyclical time, and
messianic aspirations—all of these served to create a spiritual world in which the past is mingled in the present and the present is entangled with the future.
The kabbalistic self-portrait of atemporality, and modern perceptions of mysticism as timeless, have contributed to a highly polarized scholarship and a disciplinary distinction between historiography and the study of Kabbalah. Scholars of Jewish mysticism often study Kabbalah as an autonomous body of knowledge, or perhaps strictly within the sturdy silo of “Jewish thought,” and scholars who address the historical developments of kabbalistic traditions generally separate Jewish mystical sources from other literatures and from the various social and cultural frameworks in which they developed. Andrea Gondos’ intervention in Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism seeks to deal with this balkanization.
Gondos challenges the distinction between the study of Kabbalah and history, showing the importance of studying Jewish mysticism with an eye to its many local and chronological contexts. By doing so, she claims, we can use the vast kabbalistic literature to gain a deeper understanding of Jewish cultural history and to enrich our understanding of the kabbalistic texts themselves.
Andrea Gondos, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. pp. $34.95 (paperback)
Four main themes are constantly dealt with in Kabbalah in Print: the rise of a secondary elite; the formation of new literary genres; the popularization of Kabbalah; and the influence of print and “print culture” on early modern Kabbalah. With these wide themes and questions in mind, Gondos intentionally chose not to deal with well-known kabbalists in her study. Rather, she takes as a test case a much less celebrated central European scholar, R. Yissakhar Baer ben Petahyah Moshe (ca. 1580 – ca. 1629). In two years, 1609–1610, Yissakhar Baer published four kabbalistic works: an abridgment to Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim, a halakhic code that provides zoharic interpretations, a dictionary of the zoharic-Aramaic words, and a zoharic anthology.
Gondos dedicates to Yissakhar Baer’s writings four out of the seven chapters of Kabbalah in Print. She takes these books as an example of an evolving early modern literary genre: learning aids to the study of Kabbalah, books that sought to make Kabbalah more accessible to a wider audience, beyond the intellectual elite. Scholem already stated that Kabbalah became much more popular in the early modern era, a statement that is now almost common knowledge. However, and despite the important work of a handful of scholars who dealt with this area (such as Joseph Avivi, Zeev Gries, Jacob Elbaum, Agata Paluch, Jean Baumgarten, and Morris Faierstein, to name some of them), we still have much to learn about the dissemination processes of early modern Ashkenazi Kabbalah, their social mechanisms, and the actors who were involved in them. These processes, Gondos reminds us, often involved cultural agents which were very different from the classic “great men” of early modern Kabbalah. Zooming in on the processes that made Kabbalah widespread is a crucial contribution Gondos’ book provides to the study of early modern Kabbalah.
Kabbalah in Print treats seriously questions of literary genres. Yissakhar Baer’s books cover four different genres: abridgment, legal code, dictionary, and anthology, each of which is discussed by Gondos. She provides Jewish and Christian literary contexts for each of these, both diachronically, by exploring medieval precedents, and synchronically, by exploring contemporary or near-contemporary similar literary projects. In this classification of learning aids into sub-genres, Gondos is inspired by Ann Blair’s decisive study, Too Much to Know, in which Blair examines and classifies various early modern European literary techniques to cope with the overload of information. Kabbalah in Print could also be read as a study of early modern Jewish knowledge management, another overlooked domain of research in Jewish studies.
Gondos rejects the notion that Kabbalah enjoyed an undisturbed, linear transmission of knowledge from the elite to the masses through print. Gondos’ attempt to shift the scholarly focus from ideational content to literary format and genre allows us to consider new aspects of the spread of early modern Kabbalah, so we are called to consider not only the attractiveness of certain kabbalistic ideas, but also how they were packaged for a wider audience. While the new printing technology made kabbalistic writings physically accessible, this new readership needed more guidance to understand these complicated texts. (Grasping the symbolic meaning of the Zohar, for example, requires tutelage; that, in addition to grappling with its extraordinary and odd Aramaic.) Yissakhar Baer’s books, argues Gondos, are examples of techniques developed to cope with the advent of printed kabbalistic texts, with the reality of what Blair might call “too much Kabbalah to learn.”
Gondos adopts here Elizabeth Eisenstein’s paradigm of “print culture,” that the printing press challenged the old religious hegemony of the church in Christian Europe, and she argues that it functioned similarly in the Jewish context. The invention of the printing press permitted the spread of previously esoteric texts to a much wider audience despite rabbinic protestations. Her contentions about print coalesce with her claims about the secondary elite, the lower-tier scholars used print technology to disseminate Kabbalah and hence challenged the rabbinic elite. This is, of course, a legitimate historiographical claim based on the work of a highly influential scholar. But Gondos could have taken the opportunity to address some of the critiques levied against Eisenstein’s claims (for example in Adrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book, David McKitterick’s Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, or Betty A. Schellenberg’s Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture). Taking these into consideration would have produced an even richer, multidimensional vocabulary to describe the sophisticated processes of publication and popularization depicted so well in Gondos’ book. Her work is an open invitation for scholars to explore the history of what we might call “kabbalistic print cultures,” examining the different strategies by which early modern Jews tried to cope with the explosive printing of esoteric texts in the second half of the sixteenth century, which brought mystical books and teachings to new readers.
So who were these secondary elites? According to Gondos, rabbinic elites were communal rabbis, heads of yeshivot, or leaders of rabbinic courts, whereas their secondary comrades worked in lesser jobs as preachers, scribes, and teachers (melamdim). Unlike the inherent prestige and relatively secure incomes of the rabbinic elite, the secondary scholars gained their social capital and eked out their living by printing books. Gondos argues that while elite scholars acquired kabbalistic knowledge by “in-depth study” of its classical sources, often with the aid of “oral explication of a kabbalistic master,” the early modern secondary elite had neither the time for such scholarship nor access to teachers. Instead, they relied mainly on printed books to acquire kabbalistic knowledge and hence needed to develop “learning aids” to help them assimilate this knowledge from books. These learning aids, consumed also by lay readers, were mass-printed, and scholars of the secondary elite thus came to serve as mediators of kabbalistic knowledge to a much wider audience.
Thus, Gondos revives the debated argument that the early modern controversy over printing Kabbalah was actually a class struggle between the conservative rabbinic aristocracy and the secondary elite. The rabbinic scholars underscored the importance of studying with a master and objected to the consumption of kabbalistic abridgments, while the secondary elite composed and promoted such learning aids. Scholars of the secondary elite, because they studied from printed books, were much more flexible in their interpretations and had a higher degree of “authorial autonomy” than scholars of the rabbinic elite. All of these arguments set the stage for Gondos’ declaration in the concluding chapter: that secondary elites like Yissakhar Baer “embodied an alternative voice to elite hegemony, which came under attack in the dissemination of printed matter.” Yissakhar Baer, claims Gondos, “epitomizes the cultural agent among Ashkenazi secondary elites.” But why should we think of him as a secondary elite?
We know almost nothing about Yissakhar Baer’s life. Gondos suggests that this lack of information proves his secondary status, but we have similarly scant biographical knowledge about some of the greatest scholars of his generation. We do know, however, that Yissakhar Baer’s contemporary, R. Shlomo Dresnitz, proclaimed him the reincarnation of the R. Isaac Luria Ashkenazi, the most admired kabbalist in the early modern era. This is an extraordinary compliment by any measure. Yissakhar Baer is also referred to with glowing accolades on the title pages of his books, with honoring pronouns such as “ha-‘aluf h-torani,” “he-ḥakham ha-shalem,” and “moreinu ha-rav.” The last term implies that Yissakhar Baer received rabbinic ordination (semikhah), which, although was not a rare thing among early modern Ashkenazim, testifies to a certain degree of social prestige and scholarly background. These pronouns as a whole might imply that Yissakhar Baer was an honorable member of the learned elite, even if he did not serve as a communal rabbi or scholar (which, in fact, he may have).
Gondos’ suggestion that secondary elites created a very different type of literature also requires nuance. Learning aids were written also by prominent figures of the intellectual elite. Gondos herself mentions Moshe Cordovero’s ’Or Ne‘erav (Venice, 1587) as an example of a Jewish learning aid, and Johann Reuchlin’s works on Hebrew grammar as a Christian example. Indeed, composing such aids requires one to be well-versed in the field of knowledge they wanted to make more accessible, an achievement unlikely for those lacking the economic means to dedicate significant time to their studies. And such digests, compendia, and abridgments may have appealed also to scholars of the first rank. The learned rabbinic elites might have been more interested in these books than their counterparts of the secondary elite. (Who, after all, does not need some help decoding the complexities and ambiguities of texts like the Zohar?) Many early modern scholars felt detached from and devoid of authentic kabbalistic traditions. The problem was perhaps particularly acute in early modern Ashkenazi realms, where Kabbalah was not part of the classical curriculum. The printing of kabbalistic texts presented elite Ashkenazi scholars with an urgent hermeneutical problem: how does one interpret new mystical texts that claim theological authority but whose meaning is quite opaque? Learning aids like those Yissakhar Baer wrote could have helped them decipher the meaning of these complicated and inaccessible books.
Gondos offers a superb glance into the social, cultural, and material considerations behind the formation of Kabbalah in early modern Ashkenaz. Kabbalah in Print succeeds in confronting the problematic ahistorical approach to the study of kabbalistic literature, shifting our attention away from famous luminaries such as Cordovero and Luria and toward marginal figures like Yissakhar Baer, who played a key role in disseminating kabbalistic literature. Her attention to genre and format enables us to consider how early modern Jews tried to cope with the overwhelming surge of printed kabbalistic literature in the second half of the sixteenth century, which brought mystical books and teachings to new readerships. Gondos’ work encourages us to examine kabbalistic literary forms both across space and time and within their historical context, paying mind to the role of discrete social and material phenomena. Her insistence on early modern “print culture” and the rise of the secondary elite as powerful explicatory principles, could perhaps be complemented by an additional focus on the unique place of Kabbalah in the world of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Ashkenazi Jews.
In a time when so much of the depth and intricacy of Jewish and other mystical lores are seemingly unlocked by countless modern abridgments, translations, commentaries and technologies, Kabbalah in Print reminds us that accessible knowledge is never a given. Rather, it is always a product of great efforts, carried out by devoted cultural agents who are often invisible to most of us. Kabbalah in Print takes us on a journey through the techniques of knowledge transmission and dissemination among Ashkenazi Jews, but the book also allows us to rethink the broader relationship between genre and content, and between mystical life and literary activity. It does all this in a clear, engaging, and concise way, and will surely remain a touchstone for further investigations of the intersections of the social history of Ashkenazi Jewry, Kabbalah, and the history of the book.
Avraham Oriah Kelman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University.
