The Rape of Jewish Mysticism by Christian Theologians

PREFACE

    Many years ago, a friend returned from Paris with a number of books in French on the topic of the “Magical Kabbalah.” I was especially struck by one illustration which showed Christ as a lamb. The figure was haloed and carried a long cross above which was, in Hebrew letters, one of the 72 names of God. Seeing these names, which are among the most sacred of all elements of Jewish mysticism, in a Christian context was odd and disconcerting. And as I skimmed this text I recalled the dry comment of one historian of modern occultism that the members of many organizations have been sworn to strictest secrecy and then entrusted with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
    Thus, curiosity about one illustration brought me onto a circuitous path of research which has taken almost a decade. The result is my thesis that the western occult movement grew out of medieval attempts of the Catholic church to convert the Jews.
    It is for this reason that I have chosen the assertive title “The Rape of Jewish Mysticism.” I wish to document the fact that the response of Christian scholars, from the twelfth century on, to their encounter with the Kabbalah, which is certainly the essence of Jewish mysticism, has been disingenuously, if not preposterously, self-serving.
How could it have happened, one may ask, that Jews and their religion were detested yet essential elements of their mystical tradition and language were freely embraced as embodying an immutable truth? The answer is found in a remarkable Christian claim that Jewish Kabbalah, which developed slowly out of Merkabah mysticism, from about the sixth through the thirteenth centuries, is not truly Jewish at all, but is derived from an earlier tradition that confirms the truth of Christianity. Perhaps yet more remarkable is the assertion that even the Hebrew language is not unique to the Jewish culture, but is the original language given by God to mankind. The Jews were considered to be merely caretakers of a tradition of Kabbalah and of the “original” Hebrew language (of which they spoke a distorted version), which they could never really understand because these mysteries were truly comprehensible only in terms of Christianity.
    To most Medieval and Renaissance Christians the Jews were simply the hated enemy, whose conversion was a primary goal. It was no less great a Christian of the thirteenth century than Louis IX (later to be canonized Saint Louis), who said that the best way for a layman to debate with a Jew was to run him through with a sword.
    To Louis and to others, harassment of Jews, those held responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, was an act of sincere piety.1 Thus it was an especially sweet victory for Renaissance Christian theologians to find in the most sacred documents of this enemy, the Kabbalah, not only a confirmation of the errors and blasphemy of Judaism, but a proof positive of the truth of Christianity.
    Christians had tried for centuries, from the late Roman period, to find corroboration of the divinity of Jesus in the Old Testament, and they looked hopefully into every complex passage which referred to a messiah with the fresh zeal of medieval thought. But finally it was Renaissance theologians who found, in the texts of Jewish Kabbalah, “indisputable” proof of all aspects of the Christian faith.
    Of course, modern historical biblical research presents a very different picture than that known to earlier Christians. Beyond its value as spiritual teaching, the Bible is no longer viewed as exact history, but rather as an assemblage of mythologies and folk tales, much of which was developed for socio-political reasons. And as Harold Bloom so eloquently expressed it: “Few cultural paradoxes are so profound, or so unnerving as the process of religious canonization by which an essentially literary work becomes a sacred text.”
    But as sacred texts, The Old and New Testaments were the battleground of medieval theology. Christians found in Hebrew biblical texts clear reference to a “messiah” who was to come. And since Christianity was founded in the belief that a messiah had indeed appeared, it was a logical claim that institutionalized Jewish documents such as the Torah and the Talmud, as well as new literature of the Kabbalah, which made reference to a messianic savior of Israel, were talking about Jesus of Nazareth. The Jews obviously disagreed quite passionately.
    But, no matter to what extent Jews may have found offensive the appropriation of their sacred doctrines, the Christian “occult” movement today is the direct result of the manipulation, by Renaissance philosophers, of Hebrew and Greek ideas which were in a state of incubation about the time when Christianity was declared the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Renaissance thinkers believed both streams of ideas to be much earlier than they actually were, and thought that they were in the presence of truths transmitted to man by God at the dawn of civilization. The wonder of this period in history is its sense of invincibility, its faith that it had been vested with all potential for human greatness and human understanding.
    The Renaissance truly believed that its achievements were ultimate, and that it had surpassed the artistic and philosophical creations of the ancient world. It was certainly this somewhat hubristic turn of thought, this assumption of a destiny to triumph, which encouraged a few Christian philosophers of the Renaissance to pursue a distortion of Jewish principles that turned into Christian Kabbalah and set the stage for later ideas. Indeed, the primarily Christian occult movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries are, without apology to Jewish mysticism, dependent upon Hebrew God Names and upon invocations in a little-understood Hebrew language.
    Only a few Christian Kabbalists have been experts in the Hebrew language, and even fewer have been aware of the literary sources of their beliefs. And despite the misinformation which has been promulgated by Christian theologians, the great sense of privacy, if not secrecy, which has characterized Jewish mystical experience seems to have resulted in a tacit silence on these matters from Jewish Kabbalists. Jewish historians have only recently begun to turn their attention to the relationship of Christianity and Judaism during the seminal periods of Kabbalah—the thirteenth through the sixteenth century.
    The pioneering scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, referred critically to the inventions of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Christian Kabbalists, but he held some of the earliest Christian Kabbalists in high regard for their scholarship. More recently, however, Moshe Idel called the work of the great Christian Kabbalist and Hebrew scholar Johann Reuchlin, “historical fiction.” And the English historian Frances Yates described much of Renaissance philosophy as based upon a “huge historical error.”
    It was biblical scholars of the nineteenth century who brought the sacred texts of both Christianity and Judaism into question and whose work finally eclipsed the elegant but spurious claims of Christian Kabbalists. Thus, today, few people have ever heard of Christian Kabbalah, and even fewer might be aware that there was a time when it was the preeminent philosophy of the European Courts.
    The history of Western occultism is a history of attitudes about Jewish mysticism and the incorporation of these ideas into general Western culture. From the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries interest in Jewish Kabbalah had to be justified by its use to convert the Jews, or else studied secretly. But in the seventeenth century Hebrew names and invocations began to be freely, and without an excuse of proselytism, incorporated into “magical” rituals and invocations. It was during this period that a latinization and distortion of many words and names in the Hebrew language appeared, frequently to the extent that the origins of the word were almost lost.
    By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the assimilation of Jewish Kabbalah into Western occultism was complete. There was no longer reference to conversion of the Jews; the “magical” language, its alphabet and god names, became essential to the rituals and invocations of a new occultism, most of whose practitioners today have no idea where the words come from or what they really mean in the Jewish mystical tradition.