False Messiahs, Part 2

Yesterday we started looking at some of the predictions about the Jewish Messiah appearing in the 12th century. The 13th century had its own claimants as well. Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia was one.

Born in Aragon in 1240, he was taught the Torah and Talmud by his father after the family moved to Navarre. When Abulafia was 18, his father died, and the young man began wandering the world, eventually deciding to go to Israel and find the Ten Lost Tribes. Unfortunately, the Crusades had made a journey to Israel dangerous, so he returned to Europe, studied the Guide for the Perplexed of Maimonides, and started having visions.

He studied Kabbalah, and immersed himself in the Sefer Yetzirah, finding in it the path to perfection for a human being. In 1280 he went to Rome to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism. Hearing of his intention, the pope gave orders to burn the heretic as soon as he arrived. Before Abulafia reached Rome, however, he heard that Nicholas died of a stroke, so he returned to Messina where he was imprisoned for a month by the Order of Friars Minor.

In Messina he is reported to have declared himself a prophet and the Messiah, which angered the local Jewish congregation. A letter against Abulafia written by the influential Shlomo ben Aderet of Barcelona—who was making it his life's work to speak out against the rise of false Messiahs—helped put an end to Abulafia's career. Up until 1291 he was in Malta and writing his own works on meditation and symbolism, after which he disappears from records.

The other major "Messiah" of this century was Nissim ben Abraham, whom we discussed in the story of Abner of Burgos.

It is interesting that there was enough concern about false Messiahs that Shlomo ben Aderet had a career about denouncing and disproving them. Let's take a look at Shlomo next, the "Rabbi of Spain."

(The illustration is from William Holman Hunt's 1860 "The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple.")

The Christian Kabbalah

Scholars and philosophers of the later Middle Ages became interested in the mysticism found in the Jewish Kabbalah and tried to blend it with Christian concepts of the divine.

Ramon Llull (c.1232–1316), who also wrote of worldly affairs like knighthood, was one of the first known Christians to look at Kabbalah, although his study of it was mostly to develop ways to debate Jews and influence conversion to Christianity. His interest got him in trouble because the concepts he was talking about attracted the attention of the Inquisition.

The conversion of Spanish Jews did bring Kabbalistic concepts to Christian theology, especially in Spain prior to 1492. One prominent converso was Abner of Burgos (c.1270 – c.1347), a Bible and Talmud scholar who had a dream of crosses after he developed religious doubts because of a failed Messianic movement in 1295. He embraced and used Jewish sources to try to prove the validity of Christianity.

Another converso was Pablo/Paulus de Heredia (c.1405), who wrote an "Epistle of Secrets" which is considered the first true work of Christian Kabbalah. Not the scholar that Abner was, Pablo's work misquotes Kabbalah sources and "quotes" sources that are non-existent.

A Christian who adopted Kabbalistic ideas was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), a student of Marsilius Ficino. (The illustration shows Pico in the center with Ficino in red next to him.) Kabbalah was introduced to him by another tutor, Rabbi Johanan Alemanno, whose idea was that the study of magic was the ultimate goal and expression of intellectual and spiritual mastery. Pico became convinced that the Kabbalah was necessary to understand the world and the divine, and had a Jewish convert translate the entire body of kabbalistic literature into Latin for him (now being published in its entirety). Pico's "900 Theses" became a foundation of Western esotericism.

So how exactly does a lifelong Jew decide to convert to Christianity (I mean, when not being forced)? Let's examine Abner of Burgos' personal journey tomorrow, and whether he did it for financial gain.

Jewish Mysticism

The mention of Jewish mysticism likely evokes the Kabbalah, but there were other forms. I suppose you could argue that it begins with Adam, the first man, if the theory that the Sefer Yetzirah was written by Adam were true (but let's look at other options).

In fact, there were many philosophical trends prior to the Common Era (like Prophetic Judaism and Apocalyptic Judaism). The Sefer Yetzirah is judged to have inspired/affected Jewish mysticism in 200-600CE with its ideas on the formation of the world using the Hebrew alphabet and 10 sefirot.

The 11th through 13th centuries saw a rise in named scholars producing works that tried to explain the universe and the relationship of Man to God. This is where we find Isaac Israeli ben Solomon developing Jewish Neoplatonism, along with men like Solomon ibn Gabirol and Abraham ibn Ezra and Maimonides.

Neoplatonism was an attempt to "modernize" the works of Plato—considered a primary utility on intellectual thought but needing more work as new ideas came about in the centuries following his era—by people like John Eriugena and many others. One of its common themes was monism, the idea that all reality c an be tied to and derived from a single principle.

Many of the Jewish scholars promoting mysticism were in Spain, where Muslims had taken over and brought with them Arabic-language versions of texts from Greek philosophers not yet available to the Latin West. Jewish mysticism flourished in Spain until 1492 and the Alhambra Decree that expelled all Jews from Spain.

One of the features of Jewish mysticism we find in the Sefer Yetzirah and in the Kabbalah is the development of the 10 sefirot: the 10 facets or dimensions of the inner self.

1. Keter/Ayin (nothingness),  
2. Hokhma (wisdom)  
3. Binah (understanding)  
4. Hesed (Kindness) 
5. Gevurah (Discipline) 
6. Tiferet (Glory) 
7. Netzah (Victory) 
8. Hod (Splendor) 
9. Yesod (Foundation) 
10. Shekhinah (Divine Presence)

The Sefer Yetzirah was the first work that listed 10 sefirot, but the tenth was called Malkut, which means "Kingdom" or "Queenship." (I am sure that there are countless pages written about why one over the other would be used.) In both the Sefer and Kabbalah the tenth of the sefirot refers to the point where the divine manifests in the real world. That is why (see the illustration) it appears at the bottom of the diagram, because despite its name it is the "lowest point" on the scale, being attached to the material world.

So what about Christian philosophers? What did they think about the Kabbalah? Well, some of them adopted some concepts from Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Let's talk about how that worked next time.

The Sefer Yetzirah

Technically, the title of this post is the same as yesterday's, because Sefer Yetzirah translates as "The Book of Formation." Its author is unknown, its date of composition is widely debated, but it has been studied and annotated more than almost any other work besides the Bible (by scholars such as Nachmanides), and its influence on later Kabbalah was profound.

While there are older Jewish mystical traditions, Sefer Yetzirah is the first book of what might be called proto-Kabbalah, the school of Jewish mysticism that emerged in the 13th century. Sefer Yetzirah has its own sacred structures and ways of understanding the world that differ in significant ways from the kabbalistic understanding, but many of its concepts significantly influenced later Jewish mystical tradition and practice. [source]

It primarily seems to be a linguistic work, because it claims the Hebrew alphabet is the key to understanding how the universe was created. It even distinguishes how letters and words are formed by the mouth:

In contrast to the Jewish grammarians, who assumed a special mode of articulation for each of the five groups of sounds, the "Sefer Yeẓirah" says that no sound can be produced without the tongue, to which the other organs of speech merely lend assistance. Hence the formation of the letters is described as follows:  with the tip of the tongue and the throat;  between the lips and the tip of the tongue;  in the middle ([?]) of the tongue;  by the tip of the tongue; and by the tongue, which lies flat and stretched, and by the teeth (ii. 3). The letters are distinguished, moreover, by the intensity of the sound necessary to produce them, and are accordingly divided ... [Jewish Encyclopedia]

The illustration above (a poster available here) shows each of the letters and explains its importance according to the Sefer. 

And the letters show how they connect to the creation of the universe:

The linguistic theories of the author of the "Sefer Yeẓirah" are an integral component of his philosophy, its other parts being astrological and Gnostic cosmogony. The three letters are not only the three "mothers" from which the other letters of the alphabet are formed, but they are also symbolical figures for the three primordial elements, the substances which underlie all existence. The mute מ is the symbol of the water in which the mute fish live; the hissing ש corresponds to the hissing fire; and the airy א represents the air; while as the air occupies a middle position between the fire which reaches upward and the water which tends downward, so the א is placed between the mute מ and the hissing ש. [Jewish Encyclopedia]

The "32 paths of wisdom" that the Sefer Yetzirah claims God used to create the universe are the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the ten sefirot, later referred to as ten emanations or attributes of God. These sefirot are crucial to later Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Let's next take a look at how Jewish mysticism developed.