Kabbalah and the Mystical Currents

The earliest forms of Jewish mysticism go back to late Antiquity: Merkavah mysticism (the "chariot" of Ezekiel) and the Hekhalot texts (the celestial "palaces").

The brief and enigmatic Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Creation"), of disputed dating, sets forth a cosmology through letters and numbers.

Kabbalah proper emerges in Provence and Catalonia (Girona) in the 12th-13th centuries. Its masterwork, the Zohar ("Splendor"), a mystical commentary on the Torah in Aramaic, is disseminated in Castile at the end of the 13th century; the attribution to Moïse de León is widely accepted by scholarship.

The doctrine of the ten sefirot (divine emanations) takes shape there.

After the expulsion from Spain, the small town of Safed, in Galilee, became in the 16th century an extraordinary mystical center, around Moïse Cordovéro and then Isaac Louria (the Ari).

Lurianic Kabbalah — tsimtsoum (the divine withdrawal), the shattering of the vessels, tikkoun (repair) — offers a cosmic reading of exile and redemption.

In the 18th century, the Baal Shem Tov founded Hasidism, which popularized kabbalistic insights within a piety of joy and devekut (cleaving to God). The movement spread into numerous courts and dynasties.

Kabbalah has also nourished, by indirect paths, modern thought — from Gershom Scholem, its great historian, to literature.

Studying the Kabbalah means following a long chain of transmission, cautious about what is established and respectful of what remains an enigma.

Gershom Scholem turned it into a scholarly discipline; Zakhor preserves its trace as one of the great currents of the Jewish spirit.