Jewish Mysticism

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Jewish mysticism is the long succession of traditions within Judaism that sought a knowing or experience of God beyond what law and ordinary prayer provide — not a single school but a family of currents, separated by centuries and sharply different in method, held together by the conviction that the God of Scripture can be approached directly. The phrase covers far more than Kabbalah, the strand that became its best-known form.

The earliest layer, attested from roughly the first centuries of the Common Era, is the literature of Merkabah (“chariot”) and Hekhalot (“palaces”). Its texts describe the ascent of the visionary through a series of heavenly halls toward the throne-chariot that the prophet Ezekiel had seen, past dangerous angelic gatekeepers who demand the right seals and names. What the practitioners actually did to induce these ascents — whether they fasted and chanted toward a real altered state, or whether the journeys are wholly literary — is debated and unresolved; the texts give instructions but no neutral witness survives.

From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in Provence and then in Spain, the tradition takes the form for which it is most remembered: Kabbalah. Its central book, the Zohar, presents the hidden God unfolding into ten sefirot, the emanated powers through which the infinite becomes a world that can be known and addressed. Here Jewish mysticism becomes a full theosophy — a map of the divine inner life, in which a Jew’s observance of the commandments is held to act upon the upper worlds, mending a fracture within God himself.

A third great wave is Hasidism, the popular revival movement that began in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe around the figure remembered as the Baal Shem Tov. It took the elaborate theosophy of the earlier Kabbalists and turned it toward the inner life of the ordinary worshipper, teaching that God could be served in joy, in song, and in attachment of the mind to the divine throughout the most common acts.

Modern scholarship, which effectively created the field in the twentieth century, is careful about the unifying term: these are distinct phenomena, and treating them as one continuous “Jewish mysticism” can flatten what the sources keep separate. The resemblance to mystical currents in other faiths — the ascents and divine names that echo Gnostic and Hellenistic material, the emanationist architecture shared with Neoplatonism, the disciplines of nearness that recall Sufism — is real and much studied, and just as often a sign of shared late-antique soil as of any borrowing. What recurs across all three waves is a single insistence: that behind the revealed text and the binding law there is a hidden God, and that the hidden God can be reached.

→ In the library: Sepher Yetzirah (Westcott, 1911) · The Zohar (partial, de Manhar, 1914)

→ Related: Kabbalah · Torah · Old Testament · Emanation · Sufism · Gnosis