The Cabala (Ilustrated and with active table of contents)

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Later in the century, several works by van Helmont, the collaborator on the Kabbala Denudata who resided in England for ten years, were translated into English. Finally, in Seder Olam: By the Age of Reason, the emphasis shifted, as Kabbalah was no longer presented as a serious pursuit, but an historical curiosity of the Jews. Unable to read Hebrew, Basnage relied on Latin sources, especially the Kabbala Denudata , for his discussion of Jewish mysticism, so he misrepresented a distorted version of Kabbalah as an accurate account of the subject.

Unfortunately, Basnage became the source of many English studies of Kabbalah which followed. An extremely popular treatise, the Aesch Mezareph has been reprinted several times: Theosophical Publishing Society, ; New York: During the course of the eighteenth century, several writers included sections on what they believed to be Kabbalah, not only in studies of Jewish traditions, but also in works with theses totally unrelated to the Jews.

In , Thomas Lewis wrote Origines Hebraeae: Finally, into the next century, Rees revised the Cyclopedia entirely, expanding it to a total of thirty-nine volumes, including several devoted to illustrations, some of which were engraved by Blake.

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Translated from the High-Dutch. To which is Added, A Preliminary Preface: While we have no way of knowing whether the two men actually knew each other, were one to speculate, it would be more realistic to assume that Blake learned his Kabbalah from Enfield than from a local rabbi. Thomas Maurice, not interested in the Jews at all, uses the information found in Basnage for his Indian Antiquities: Finally, in Modern Judaism: Even if, as is quite possible, there are other sources of English Kabbalah which have yet to be located, in all likelihood they are like those just surveyed, quite far from the mysticism of the Jews.

The origin of scholarly interest in Kabbalah is closely linked to the Theosophical movement of the nineteenth century which promulgated a universal secret knowledge of which Jewish mysticism was considered only a part. In an attempt to codify this secret knowledge, Theosophists not only wrote their own books, but also translated a number of kabbalistic treatises; given the ignorance of twentieth-century readers, many of these flawed renditions are still accepted today as being accurate.

Achard, ; posthumous ed. Yet, Saurat relies on the Pauly translation for much of his criticism. A second so-called translation of the Zohar is S. Even though Scholem pointed out the shortcomings of Theosophical scholarship a half century ago, Mathers is still being reprinted as though it were a historically accurate text. Philosophical Library ; and in the bilingual edition of , Idra Zuta Kadisha: At the turn of the century, Christian scholars began assessing the history of Kabbalah.

Pioneers in the field, such as Gershom G.

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Horodetzky, were joined by other scholars, including I. Blau and Alexander Altmann in America, to establish the objective principles of historical scholarship from which to evaluate the 6. While the top figure contains the Jewish names for the four worlds, the drawing is not Jewish. To the Jews, there are seven earths, covered by seven heavens, and corresponding to the positive image of the cosmos, seven hells. In this picture, Casway has four hells to correspond to the four worlds, and gives them all a Christian interpretation. In another modification of the Jewish cosmos, here Casway superimposes astrology on Jewish mysticism, having the four worlds corresponding to four planets Asia , the World of Fact, is Earth.

Most English discussions of Kabbalah have sections on Gematria, and most of the sources contain illustrations of these magical processes. Common to virtually any discussion of Judaica, from Hebrew grammars through Kabbalah, is the alphabet chart with the numerical equivalents of the letters.

Since Hebrew uses letters rather than Arabic numerals for counting, it was only natural that kabbalists would substitute words of equivalent values for each other, Gematria at its most basic level, and from there perform any number of mathematical computations to derive wholly ingenious interpretations of the Bible.

This kind of abbreviation, the formation of new words based on the initial letters of words in a phrase, is known as Notaricon. Kabbalah and Counter-History Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, As a result, we now have a significant body of scholarship from which to draw when studying Kabbalah. In view of the history of kabbalistic scholarship, we can make several broad assumptions concerning the English sources against which we measure Blake.

Anything written before was most likely strongly influenced by the Latin kabbalists, and therefore is distorted to make Kabbalah conform to Christianity. The first two decades of the twentieth century witness the vain attempt to sort out the material by scholars relying on flawed secondary sources; and from World War I on, we find more and more historically accurate texts appearing in English. If Blake was likely influenced by the first trend, his critics all reflect their own historical milieus, and therefore, are interpreting from the perspectives of kinds of Kabbalah to which he could not have had access.

While it is true that these works were part of the broader occult movement of the seventeenth century, none reflects the mysticism of the Jews, not even the Conjectura Cabalistica. And I know nothing to the contrary, but that I have been so successful as to have light upon the old true Cabbala indeed. In , Percival uses everything available to him, but with no indication that he can assess the relative value of his sources. New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls Co. Chart, possibly based on Temurah the principle of substituting letters for each other according to magical formulae, like the first for the last, the second for the next-to-the-last, etc.

The English names of the angels are recognizable, as are the names of God, in the columns to the left of the angels, but the rest represent magical permutations of letters with hidden meanings. A chart of Temurah in which the Hebrew alphabet is written out both horizontally, from right to left, and vertically, along the right-hand column. Then, the letters of the rest of the chart are filled into their appropriate places to produce a basis for magical permutations.

Figure A depicts an anagram of the Hebrew alphabet in which the twenty-seven characters are presented in a series on threes. Reading from right to left, the first letter of each block traces the progression of the first nine letters, the middle letter of each block, the second nine letters, and the last letter the last nine letters of the alphabet.

Hachette, ; rev. Kabbalah Publishing Company, ; rpt. A shorter version of the translation, excluding the notes, was published in New Hyde Park, N. He may, of course, have been, as were many eminent Christian divines of his day, a student of the Zohar or other Kabbalistic writing. And James cites no authorities at all. The Hunger Games Trilogy. The Art of War. To Kill a Mockingbird. An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide. The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Quidditch Through the Ages. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

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Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book 2: The Hammer of Thor. The Complete Works Phoenix Classics. The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad. Far from the Madding Crowd. Three Men in a Boat, humorous travelogue. My contributions are, on the whole, neither erudite nor highly specialized, but rather essays; and my hope is that they still interest as snapshots of an exciting moment that has not completely faded. They are also, inevitably, part of a personal bildungsroman , about which I must add a few words. I was born into a German Jewish family that had disintegrated by the time I was nine.

David Hartmann, my grandfather on my mother's side, was a rabbi who received his doctorate in Oriental studies toward the end of the nineteenth century with a dissertation on midrashim to the Book of Ruth. It was clearly indebted to the Wissenschaft des Judentums Science of Judaism movement. He did not serve a congregation but became a teacher of religion at the Frankfurt Philanthropin the oldest secular Jewish school in Germany and used the family's apartment to house a few boys studying at that school.

He died when I was a year old, and I retain his image only through a couple of photos. My mother divorced after eight years of marriage around the time of grandfather's death. I was, as already mentioned, a year old, and so have no living sense of my father either. He never got in touch with me, but from his relatives we know he emigrated to Argentina, married again, had a son, and at some point after the war returned to Germany, settling in Berlin. As was not unusual at that time, my mother had only a passive knowledge of Jewish practices; and her father's death, her divorce, and the necessity to eke out a living in the difficult circumstances of the s left her without a guide in that respect.

Given the disappearance, because of forced emigration, of uncles I had rarely met, I received a bare minimum of Jewish education. I entered the Philanthropin at age six, and one or two years later I was placed in a Stiftung , originally for orphans, but—with what was happening to the Jews in Germany after —also for boys whose parents were imprisoned or had left the country because of the Nazi persecution. I do not recall any regular synagogue visits or Jewish activities, although the increasingly menacing s, including attacks on us on the way to school, made a sense of Jewishness unavoidable.

Looking back, I do have one dreamlike memory. It is of waking in the dark and being brought to a large, festively lighted and richly furnished room, full of books, where Shabbat or something like it was being celebrated. I associate that mental picture with grandfather and an absent Jewish presence. I have a scarcity of memories of the time before my mother left in December a month after the pogrom of Kristallnacht for the United States.

She had assured my safekeeping with the Stiftung and knew I would be evacuated to England with the other boys via a Kindertransport. She planned to bring me to the States as soon as she had the necessary funds and permissions. As expected, I went with the Stiftung to England in March ; but once the war broke out and the submarine menace became too dangerous, I was not allowed to join her in America till the war in Europe ended in My grandmother, ill with diabetes, could not leave Germany: They not only sponsored the transport to England of its twenty or more boys, but maintained all of us and a caregiver family.

We were lodged in the Buckinghamshire countryside at The Cedars, a spacious house in the hamlet of Waddesdon, adjacent to the Rothschild estate with its extensive farms, wonderful park, and famous manor. The Stiftung in Frankfurt was eventually dissolved by the Nazi authorities, and its youngsters and guardians deported to eastern ghettos and concentration camps where they died or "disappeared.

In England we received a respectable minimum of Jewish observance: The situation did not change after my arrival in the States. None of my relatives was particularly observant, and no guide, natural or supernatural, appeared, so I was nourished by the rhythms and locutions of the King James version of the Bible, marveling at its "stories" in the same way as those found in Homer or the large, exotically illustrated volume of Tausend und eine Nacht that is, Arabian Nights I had smuggled out of Germany. My mother worked all day and I was left to my own devices, holding down a part-time job at Gimbels, taking a course or two in literature at Hunter College evening school recently opened to men, so as to absorb an overflow of demobilized GIs , and, finally, having been admitted to CUNY's Queens College, studying there from to for a B.

During that period my Jewish education did not advance. The Hillel organization at the college, with Daniel Thursz as its most active member, was mainly a group of kids offering occasional social aid to urban New York, far from a still bucolic campus. Even during my time from to as a graduate student at Yale, the university's hole-in-the wall Hillel, with a learned but well-sequestered rabbi, frustrated me. But at the end of a Fulbright year in France I spent a month by myself in Israel and absorbed firsthand not only its ancient sites but its incredible mixture of Kibbutzniks, Haredim, Safed mystics, Arabs, and Sabras.

Back at Yale I did start to read the Talmud—in German, for some reason—and I remember puzzling anthropologically over how closely, as recorded in the Tractate Berakhot, the heavens were watched to determine the exact times for saying the Shema, and how the priests' every ceremonial action while the Temple remained standing was detailed. What motivated this ritual precision, and such prayer punctuality in general?

Was it a way of keeping the memory of the Temple alive and so creating a Memory Temple in every detail? I became a star gazer, too, but the "stars" were the central, mysterious Jewish practices themselves, including Shabbat. Several years later, as an instructor at Yale, I gave my first public talk, or sermon, rather, on the Shabbat, exalting it as a liberation from unceasing labor.

In A Scholar's Tale , I outline a further gradual emancipation from ignorance. During my first years as a teacher at Yale, I conceived an impossible project, eventually abandoned: My turn to Judaism, then, was not that of a ba'al teshuvah but motivated by a quiet if persistent intellectual nostalgia.

Winter 1983-1984

I wanted to include in my "History" a Jewish corpus of texts and interpretive methods missing from the academic program of most secular universities. Studying the Book of Job with a Holocaust survivor's help during my army service in Germany , a class in Midrash with Nehama Leibowitz though I barely knew Hebrew or Aramaic while teaching the Romantic poets at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem fall of , a summer course in Talmud at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, lucky to audit a seminar with Judah Goldin at Yale circa , and intense discussions of the Psalms with Marcel Mendelson, my oldest friend from days at Queens College like myself a German refugee who also graduated with a doctorate from Yale but settled in Israel teaching art history , these were modest yet confirmatory steps in my exodus from ignorance.

A second, parallel path, never quite abandoned, came from poetry. I started a poetic drama on the story of Saul and David, and also wrote lyric experiments to revive interest in the midrashic mode of interpretation through a hyperbolic kind of imagistic pastiche. Although I failed to finish the drama, I did publish a book of poetry, Akiba's Children , in ; and still occasionally write in an allusive mode so effective in Yehuda Halevy—whatever became of it in my hands.

Baby steps turned into a leap forward when Bartlett Giamatti, a colleague in the English Department, was appointed president of Yale. In he asked me to head a major fund-raising drive to develop a significant program of Judaic studies. Yale's single professorship or two nontenured positions within religious studies quite obviously did not provide true coverage of a most important and still evolving culture.

Encouraged by many colleagues, including William Hallo in Babylonian studies also the translator of Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption , I accepted the challenge and even added to it by finding support for what was to become the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Over the next six years most of my time was spent in these tasks, which included formulating academic policy and recruiting as well as fund raising—but which also informed me about the extent and depth of the Jewish learning tradition. During that time, indeed for the many years he stayed at Yale, David Ruderman, the first professor to be newly appointed, proved to be an essential and eloquent presence.

I cannot forbear mentioning some of the scholars outside of Yale who helped me to find my way and sometimes to risk losing it: Many of them said they wanted to know more about literary methods of study, and we did have good conversations on that basis. Yet it was I, the 'am ha'aretz , who gained; and the example of Akiva's belated entry into a life of learning, immodestly applied to my own situation, often kept me going. Not all my initiatives were successful. A light-hearted proposal to institute an annual Midrash day on Mayday lasted all of two years. My reason for mentioning these details is that they disclose one significant role of Judaic studies as a new field in the university.

Why should we be excluded from the history and literature of Judaism because the world of our fathers and mothers had become secularized? Or because religious literacy, whatever our faith or community affiliation, was neglected?

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Surely even a belated knowledge of a religious tradition, acquired in the critical, nonsectarian, and nonconfessional atmosphere of the university, is a good thing? Students may not be able to enter the Pardes or Sacred Jungle of biblical interpretation, given its formidable requirements and ecstatic lures. But scholarship is scholarship, and those who would have no trouble finding pleasure and intellectual profit in Western Pagan studies I mean the Classics should have the possibility of learning, by way of Judaic studies, a subject whose history reaches into the contemporary world, and whose text legacy is, in many ways, different from the Hellenic.

There is still room for a field of study with internally so ancient a canon, and externally so varied a people scattered among a multitude of nations in the diaspora and now also building the nation-state of Israel. Most of the legitimation problems Judaic studies faces, the other humanities have also faced. Consider the example of history. There used to be those who went so far as to think, wittily enough, like the educator and literary thinker I. Richards, that "history oughtn't to have happened.

Richards's youthful position might be compared to someone saying today that "the Holocaust shouldn't have happened," hence shouldn't be made into a separate disciplinary field. Indeed, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has emphasized in his book Zakhor how in Jewish communities to this day the liturgical memory is far more important than historiographical knowledge. History is always close to senseless catastrophe; yet the liturgical and collective memory, sustained by the Jewish prayer book, the siddur , can have a restitutive and even a healing function.

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