Moses Cordovero

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Moses Cordovero — known by the acronym Ramak — was a Jewish mystic of sixteenth-century Safed, the Galilean town that became, under Ottoman rule, the most concentrated center of kabbalistic study the tradition has known. His great work, the Pardes Rimmonim (“Orchard of Pomegranates”), completed around 1548, is usually described as the first systematic theology of the kabbalah: an attempt to take the scattered, allusive, often deliberately obscure teaching of the Zohar and the earlier kabbalists and set it out as a coherent body of doctrine, problem by problem.

The central difficulty he addressed was the relation between the hidden God and the world. Kabbalah holds that the infinite divine — the Ein Sof, “without end,” beyond all name and attribute — unfolds through ten sefirot, graded powers or aspects through which the unknowable becomes active and the world is sustained. The danger in such a scheme is obvious: it can sound as though the one God were ten things, or as though the sefirot stood between God and creation like a row of lesser deities. Cordovero worked to hold the system together. Against any reading that made the sefirot into separate beings, he argued that they are at once distinct and wholly continuous with their source — that the light passing through them remains one light, however many vessels it fills. His formula, that God is “the knowledge, the knower, and the known” at once, was his way of keeping unity and multiplicity in the same breath.

Alongside the great speculative work he wrote Tomer Devorah (“The Palm Tree of Deborah”), a short treatise that turns the doctrine of the sefirot into ethics: because each divine attribute has its human echo, a person is to imitate the qualities of God measure for measure — mercy answered by mercy, restraint by restraint. The book had a long life as a manual of pious conduct well beyond the circle that could follow his metaphysics.

What gives Cordovero his particular place is timing. His synthesis was the fullest the kabbalah had yet received — and then, in the last years of his life, Isaac Luria arrived in Safed with a new and far more dramatic account of creation, divine contraction, and cosmic repair. Luria’s system, spread by his disciples after both men were dead, largely eclipsed Cordovero’s; for later generations the Pardes became the great statement of an older kabbalah rather than the living one. Scholarship has long noted how close his ordered emanations run to the Neoplatonic descent from the One, a resemblance real enough to be worth tracing and not so close as to collapse the two: each speaks its own language, and means something exact by it. Cordovero meant the God of Israel, named through the letters of Scripture, reached by a discipline that was study and devotion at once.

→ In the library: The Zohar (Nurho de Manhar, 1914) — partial English · Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887)

→ Related: Moses De Leon · Emanation · The One · Neoplatonism