Saruk

The name Saruk — which Hebrew sources most often transliterate as Sarug (שרוג, sometimes שרוק) — belongs to the vast Séfarade onomastic corpus, that world of surnames born around the Mediterranean basin following the Iberian expulsions of 1492 and 1497. The form of the name, its graphic variants (Sarug, Saruk, Saruk, Saruq) and its roots in the communities of North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire bear witness to the characteristic fate of Jewish families driven from the Iberian Peninsula: a dispersion across three continents, a communal reconstitution around the great centres of rabbinic study, and a remarkable intellectual mobility from one seat of learning to another [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Sarug »].

If the Saruk lineage is known to Jewish intellectual history, it is above all through one figure: Israël Sarug (Saruk), a kabbalist active in the last third of the sixteenth century and the very beginning of the seventeenth. He was the principal disseminator in Europe — singularly in Italy and the Netherlands — of a particular version, known as "Sarugian," of Lurianic Kabbalah, that is to say of the esoteric teaching of Isaac Louria (the Ari, 1534–1572) of Safed [Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The present work aims to retrace, with the caution imposed by fragmentary documentation, what can be established, inferred or merely transmitted regarding the Saruk lineage. It deliberately distinguishes between what belongs to the archive, what belongs to scholarly hypothesis, and what belongs to transmitted Memory — for the history of Israël Sarug is precisely that of a man whose legitimacy was contested during his lifetime and whose legacy has long oscillated between admiration and suspicion.

The patronym Saruk / Sarug belongs to the constellation of Sephardic names whose etymology remains disputed. Several hypotheses circulate within the Jewish onomastic tradition. The first connects the name to a toponymic root — a place of Iberian or North African origin whose memory has been lost. The second, more widespread in family memory, evokes the Hebrew root s-r-g (שרג), associated with the idea of "interweaving" or "braiding," an image not without resonance with the kabbalistic vocation of its most illustrious bearer. These readings belong, however, to transmitted tradition rather than to demonstrated etymology, and should be presented as such [tradition onomastique séfarade].

What is better established is the geography of the name. Families bearing this patronym appear in the Sephardic communities of the eastern Mediterranean — Egypt, the Holy Land, the Ottoman Empire — as well as in the reconstituted western diasporas of northern Italy and the United Provinces at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This distribution corresponds exactly to the routes of the Sephardic exile after 1492, and to the role played as hubs by cities such as Venise, Mantoue, Ferrare, and later Amsterdam, where an open Jewish life was reconstituted.

A fundamental methodological caveat must be stated here: the name Saruk does not necessarily designate a single, genealogically continuous lineage. As with many Sephardic patronyms, bearers with no established kinship may share the name. The "Saruk lineage" of this book is therefore less a documented family tree than a constellation of bearers connected by a common name and by the influence of their most prominent representative.

Israel Sarug is a figure whose biography remains, on many points, uncertain — to the extent that scholars long debated the exact nature of his connection with Isaac Luria. According to the tradition he himself claimed, Sarug was said to have been a direct disciple of the Ari in Safed. This claim is precisely the crux of his story: Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism, strongly doubted this direct filiation, holding that Sarug had probably not studied under Luria in person, but had appropriated and reformulated his doctrine from writings that had reached him [Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Sarug"].

This thesis was subsequently nuanced by later research. The work of Ronit Meroz, in particular, reopened the case and reassessed Sarug's place among the transmitters of Lurianic Kabbalah, suggesting a more complex relationship — and perhaps a less fraudulent one — to the circles of Safed than Scholem's severe judgment had implied [Ronit Meroz, studies on Lurianic Kabbalah]. The debate is not settled, and it is important to present it as an open question in historiography rather than as an established fact in either direction.

What can be established with greater confidence is Sarug's Western itinerary. From around the 1590s onward, he traveled to Europe and undertook an activity of dissemination and teaching throughout Italy, then in the communities of the north, particularly the Netherlands. His death is believed to have occurred in the early seventeenth century. Regarding the precise dates of his birth and death, as well as his exact place of origin, the sources remain cautious, and any dating must be put forward with the qualifier "according to" [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

To understand Sarug's role, we must recall the context of the source from which the doctrine he disseminated originated. In the sixteenth century, the small town of Safed, in Galilee, became the most extraordinary center of mystical creativity in Judaism, gathering masters such as Moïse Cordovero, Joseph Caro, Salomon Alkabetz and, above all, Isaac Louria Ashkenazi, surnamed the Ari ("the Lion"). In just a few years before his premature death in 1572, Louria elaborated a metaphysical system of considerable scope and originality [Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism].

Lurianic Kabbalah is distinguished by three major notions that have become classical: the tsimtsoum (the "contraction" by which the divine Infinite withdraws to make room for creation), the shevirat ha-kelim (the "breaking of the vessels," which scatters sparks of divine light throughout the material world), and the tiqqoun (the cosmic "repair" in which humanity participates through the fulfillment of commandments and directed prayer). This doctrine gave Judaism a powerful myth of exile and redemption, in deep resonance with the historical experience of the Sephardic dispersion [Gershom Scholem].

Yet Louria himself wrote almost nothing. His doctrine was transmitted by his disciples, foremost among whom was Hayyim Vital, whose writings long served as the authoritative "official" version of the master's teaching. It is within this very space — that of the transmission of an essentially oral doctrine, through competing writings variously disseminated — that another version could emerge: the one that would bear Sarug's name [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Gershom Scholem]. The plurality of transmissions is therefore not an anomaly: it is constitutive of the history of Lurianic Kabbalah.

The specificity of Sarug's teaching — what is known as the "Sarugian" version of Lurianic Kabbalah — lies in the way he systematized and speculated upon the doctrine of the Ari. Where the branch transmitted by Hayyim Vital favored an exposition more directly tied to the writings of Safed, Sarug's version introduced philosophical developments of its own, sometimes inflected with a more abstract vocabulary, concerning the processes preceding the tsimtsoum and the first divine emanations [Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Sarug"].

One work is regularly associated with this dissemination: the Limmudei Atsilut ("Teachings of Emanation"), a text setting forth Lurianic doctrine in its Sarugian coloring. The precise attribution of this writing has been the subject of scholarly debate — some regard it as a work of Sarug's school rather than of his hand alone — and it is appropriate to acknowledge this uncertainty of attribution rather than to resolve it [historiographical discussions on the Limmudei Atsilut]. Likewise, Sarug is associated with speculative conceptions concerning the malbush, the primordial "garment" woven from the letters of the Torah before creation, an image that aptly illustrates the more theoretical character of his rereading.

This reformulation explains in part the mixed reception Sarug encountered. To his supporters, he brought a philosophical understanding of the Ari's doctrine, capable of attracting European scholars steeped in speculative thought. To his detractors — and Scholem's posterity counted itself among them — he "Europeanized" a doctrine of Safed beyond what was warranted, or even usurped an authority of transmission he did not possess. Between these two readings, the modern historian tends to recognize in Sarug the role of a creative mediator: neither a purely faithful disciple nor a simple impostor, but an active reformulator of a tradition in motion [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Ronit Meroz].

It was in Northern Italy that the Sarugian dissemination achieved its most brilliant success, through Sarug's encounter with one of the great figures of Italian rabbinics of the period: Menahem Azariah da Fano (1548-1620), rabbi, Talmudist and kabbalist of the first rank, active notably in Ferrare, Reggio and Mantoue. Da Fano was a patron and a central actor in the penetration of Lurianic Kabbalah into the Italian Jewish world [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Fano, Menahem Azariah da"].

Tradition reports that da Fano had first acquired, at great cost, Lurianic writings transmitted through the branch of Hayyim Vital, before being profoundly marked by Sarug's teaching when the latter reached Italy. This episode, in which the transmitted Memory of Italian kabbalistic circles and the scholarly documentation on da Fano's work meet, well illustrates an intersection: the legend of the itinerant master and the archive of intellectual influence speak to each other and partially confirm one another [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Gershom Scholem].

The importance of this consecration cannot be underestimated. Through the authority conferred upon him by his stature, Menahem Azariah da Fano legitimized the Sarugian version in the eyes of a wide learned public, and helped make it one of the major pathways by which the Kabbalah of the Ari gained Europe. Italy thus became a decisive relay, from which the doctrine spread to other centers. Sarug's dissemination was therefore not a marginal phenomenon but a structuring vector of the Europeanization of Lurianic Kabbalah at the dawn of the Baroque age [Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism].

Beyond Italy, Sarug's wanderings led him, according to the sources, toward the communities of northern Europe, and singularly toward the Netherlands, where a free Sephardic Jewish life was then reconstituting itself in Amsterdam, formed in part by former Marranos who had returned to open Judaism. This milieu, at once cultivated and hungry for spirituality, offered fertile ground for the reception of Kabbalah [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Sarug »].

Sarug's influence there was carried forward by disciples and scholars who extended his teaching. Tradition associates with his circle of influence in particular the figure of Abraham Cohen de Herrera, a Sephardic thinker of the United Provinces whose work, written in Spanish, endeavored to articulate Lurianic Kabbalah with the Neoplatonic philosophy of the Renaissance. Through this channel, the Sarugian version — already more speculative than that of Vital — found a remarkable philosophical continuation, which later contributed to knowledge of Kabbalah in the learned Christian circles of Europe [Encyclopaedia Judaica ; Gershom Scholem]. These filiations should be presented as probable, as the documentation on networks of transmission remains partial.

Thus, from Italy to Holland, Sarug's trajectory traces a genuine geography of diffusion: a man who came from the Mediterranean Orient, bearer of a reformulated doctrine from Safed, traveling through the western Sephardic communities and depositing there an intellectual seed whose effects extended long after his death. It is in this that the Saruk lineage occupies a singular place in the History of Jewish ideas: not through a dynasty of rabbis or notables, but through the propagating wave of a thought [Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism].

At the end of this journey, the Saruk lineage appears less as a genealogy in the classical sense — a tree of documented ancestors and descendants — than as an intellectual trajectory embodied by a dominant figure, Israël Sarug. His name, Sephardic in every fiber, is inscribed within the great movement of dispersion that followed 1492; his work, within the exceptional moment of Safed and the adventure of its European transmission.

Three lessons emerge. First, the story of Sarug reminds us that great doctrines are always transmitted through intermediaries, and that these intermediaries are never mere copyists: they reformulate, inflect, sometimes usurp. Next, the historiographical debate — from the severity of Scholem to the rereadings of Meroz — shows that Sarug's status remains an open question, and that intellectual honesty demands that we not decide beyond what the archive allows. Finally, the role of the Italy of Menahem Azariah da Fano and the Netherlands of Amsterdam attests that Lurianic Kabbalah was, thanks to men like Sarug, a European phenomenon as much as an Oriental one [Gershom Scholem ; Encyclopaedia Judaica ; Ronit Meroz].

The Saruk lineage thus bequeaths to the Jewish world and its history of ideas an exemplary testimony: that of the fecundity of the margins, of the transmitters and the reformulators, whose contested legitimacy was the very price of their influence.