Secrecy and Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature

Jonathan Dauber

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781512822762
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Secrecy and Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature examines the strategies of esoteric writing that Kabbalists have used to conceal secrets in their writings, such that casual readers will only understand the surface meaning of their texts while those with greater insight will grasp the internal meaning. In addition to a broad description of esoteric writing throughout the long literary history of Kabbalah, this work analyzes kabbalistic secrecy in light of contemporary theories of secrecy. It also presents case studies of esoteric writing in the work of four of the first kabbalistic authors—Abraham ben David, Isaac the Blind, Ezra ben Solomon, and Asher ben David—and thereby helps recast our understanding of the earliest stages of kabbalistic literary history.The book will interest scholars in Jewish mysticism and Jewish philosophy, as well as those working in medieval Jewish history. Throughout, Jonathan V. Dauber has endeavored to write an accessible work that does not require extensive prior knowledge of kabbalistic thought. Accordingly, it finds points of contact between scholars of various religious traditions.

Chapter 1 Secrets and Secretism

It has by now become a refrain in numerous scholarly analyses that secrecy should primarily be studied as a type of social interaction. The content of the secret, the argument goes, is ancillary to the social function of the very claim of secrecy. This conception builds on the seminal early twentieth-century work of the sociologist Georg Simmel, who was more interested in the social dimensions of secrecy than in the ideational content of secrets. In a highly influential 1906 essay, Simmel argued that the importance of secrets lies chiefly in the sense of exclusivity that the knowledge of secrets brings: “The substantial significance of the facts concealed often enough falls into a significance entirely subordinate to the fact that others are excluded from knowing them” (“Sociology of Secrecy” 464).¹ Developing this insight, scholars have argued that secrecy is best examined as a tool that can be employed to establish group identity and prestige. In this analysis, what is important about secrets is that they are what my group possesses and your group lacks. The content of the secret is of little significance in this dynamic.

Hugh Urban has been especially influential in developing this model of secrecy in numerous studies. As he puts it: “I would suggest that we make a shift from the ‘secret’ as simply a hidden content and instead investigate the strategies or ‘games of truth’ through which the complex ‘effect’ (to use Bruce Lincoln’s phrase) of secrecy is constructed. That is, how is a given body of information endowed with the mystery, awe, and value of a ‘secret’? Under what circumstances, in what contexts, and through what relations of power is it exchanged? How does possession of that secret information affect the status of the ‘one who knows’?” (Economics 20).

Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic capital,” Urban suggests that secrecy “is a discursive strategy that transforms a given piece of knowledge into a scarce and precious resource, a valuable commodity, the possession of which in turn bestows status, prestige, or symbolic capital on its owner” (“Torment” 210). It is, thus, the very claim that a particular piece of knowledge is secret, rather than the contents of the secret, that is decisive. Accordingly, the contents of the secret itself, while “not, of course, entirely arbitrary or meaningless” (“Adornment” 17), have little bearing on the analysis: “What is important about secrets is not primarily the occult knowledge they profess to contain, but rather, the ways in which secrets are exchanged, the mechanisms of power through which they are conferred, and above all, the kind of status and ‘symbolic capital,’ which the possession of secret information bestows upon the individual” (17).

Paul Johnson, whose work has also been influential, coined the term “secretism”: “Secretism I define as not merely reputation, but the active milling, polishing, and promotion of the reputation of secrets. Secretism is freely and generously shared. Secretism does not diminish a sign’s prestige by revealing it, but rather increases it through the promiscuous circulation of its reputation; it is the long shadow that hints of a great massif behind. It is through secretism, the circulation of a secret’s inaccessibility, the words and actions that throw that absence into relief, that a secret’s power grows, quite independently of whether or not it exists” (3).²

“Secretism” describes the mechanism of promoting a secret’s value as a commodity. It is the act of advertising the secret to make it seem increasingly valuable. The secret is dangled before the public but never fully revealed. The value of the secret derives from its public absence, not from its content. Indeed, for secretism to be effective, whether the secret has any value or whether there is any secret at all is beside the point.

Urban has employed this model of secrecy, which, for convenience’s sake, I will refer to as Urban’s model, in studying colonial Bengal and, more recently, new religious movements. Johnson, for his part, has applied it to the Brazilian Candomblé. This model has also influenced scholars working in fields as disparate as ancient Mesopotamia (Lenzi), China during the early imperial era (Campany), Jews in the early Roman Empire (Andrade), and early modern Europe (McCall and Roberts 2–4; Jütte 10–11), to name just a few examples.

Secretism in Kabbalistic Literature

Numerous kabbalistic texts provide good examples of secretism, even in cases where there are no actual secrets. Harley Lachter has shown that this type of secretism was rife in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century kabbalistic texts: “The admonitions scattered throughout these texts to conceal such secrets serve more as a mechanism to mark the value of the kabbalistic conception of Judaism rather than as a reflection of a practice of restricting access to kabbalistic ideas” (28). As Lachter explains, the rhetoric of secrecy is used not to conceal actual information but to create a sense of empowerment in the face of both an aggressive Christian majority culture and the inroads of rationalist philosophy in Jewish culture.

Rather than rehearsing the compelling examples that Lachter provides, I will offer an example from a somewhat later period, which can profitably be compared to a particular case of secretism described by Urban. One trick of secretism is to create a sense of an alluring secret, while always deferring its revelation, so that the novice is continuously drawn in by the hope of what is still to come but what never arrives because it does not really exist. As Urban argues, this approach is clear in The Secret Doctrine, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875.³ In the opening of the book, Blavatsky proclaims that her work “though giving out many fundamental tenets from the SECRET DOCTRINE of the East, raises but a small corner of the dark veil. For no one, not even the greatest living adept, would be permitted to, or could—even if he would—give out promiscuously, to a mocking, unbelieving world, that which has been so effectually concealed from it for long aeons and ages” (xvii, emphasis in original). This proclamation, however, is followed by a voluminous and detailed work, which does not hold back. As Urban suggests, we have here “the quintessential example of ‘secretism’ ” (“Secrecy and New” 70). There is a rhetoric of secrecy with no secrets.

Blavatsky’s proclamation may be compared to a statement of Ḥayyim Vital, the sixteenth-century Safedian Kabbalist and disciple of Isaac Luria who had a decisive influence on the subsequent history of Kabbalah through his extensive recordings of Luria’s teachings. The statement appears in the introduction to ‘Ets Ḥayyim, the work that came to be regarded as the canonical articulation of Luria’s thought: “If my intention was to write all that I received from my teacher (Luria), of blessed memory for life in the world to come, the leather of all of the rams of Nebaioth would not suffice, as is known by some, and by those who listen to me in my circle. Rather, my desire is to record in this book some of the most necessary premises that I have been given permission to record and still then with great brevity, like ‘peering through the cracks’ ” (‘Ets Ḥayyim 22).

The idea that no amount of parchment could possibly encompass all the teachings that Vital heard from his teacher is a prime example of secretism rather than an actual attempt to conceal secrets. Despite the genuine restrictions that Vital put on the dissemination of his work, which I will discuss in Chapter 2, Vital was an extremely prolific writer who left a large corpus of writings. It is quite possible that out of real concerns of esotericism, he left limited teachings out of his writing. The implication, however, that he omitted large swaths of Luria’s teachings is analogous to Blavatsky’s claim that she will reveal only a fraction of her actual wisdom. Moreover, anyone who is familiar with ‘Ets Ḥayyim—a highly detailed work—realizes that the idea that Vital composed it with “great brevity” borrows rhetorically from a trope of esoteric writing without actually being an example of it. This is a trope, which, in Chapter 2, I will term “allusive writing,” which involves writing in a clipped and cryptic fashion that only alludes to ideas without fully describing them.

It is also useful to compare certain kabbalistic texts to the “books of secrets” that were widely printed in sixteenth-century Europe and consisted of “secret” recipes for crafts or medicines. These books were widely distributed and secret in name only. As William Eamon, in his exhaustive study of these works, demonstrates, there is nothing arcane or mysterious about these books (4). Commenting on Eamon’s conclusion, the historian of science Koen Vermeir remarks: “To understand such phenomena, it is important not to be misled by the actors’ categories and not to take the rhetoric of secrecy at face value. There is nothing paradoxical, per se, in the dissemination of secrecy or the values of secrecy, and many of the secrets transmitted in the books of secrets were ‘open secrets’ that were already widely known and applied” (180).

In kabbalistic literature, we find parallels in the hundreds, if not thousands, of texts or subsections of texts, many of which are still in manuscript, with titles like the “secret of sacrifice” or the “secret of the Sabbath.” For the most part such texts make no effort to conceal the secret meaning of sacrifice or the Sabbath. On the contrary, they typically reveal the secrets quite openly. These texts, that is, adopt a rhetoric of secrecy without actually concealing any information.

On a more micro level, individual kabbalistic texts use the term “secret” (sod) ubiquitously to indicate that an object or biblical verse symbolically represents one of the ten manifestations of God known in kabbalistic literature as sefirot. For example, in Sha‘arei orah, Joseph Gikatilla, the thirteenth-century Castilian Kabbalist, refers to the fact that the “sea” symbolically represents the tenth sefirah: “This is the secret (sod) of ‘All the rivers flow into the sea’ (Eccles. 1:7)” (61). Similarly, another thirteenth-century Castilian Kabbalist, Moses de León, writes: “Know that Rachel is the secret (sod) of the shekhinah (divine presence), the shekhinah is the dimension of west, and Reuven is the secret (sod) of the dimension of south” (Tishby, Studies 40). In other words, the matriarch Rachel symbolically refers to the tenth sefirah, known as the shekhinah. Her nephew Reuven refers to the “dimension of south,” that is, the fourth sefirah, ḥesed. In these instances, and in countless others, the word “secret” serves as a hermeneutical key to alert the reader to decode the word that follows “secret” as a reference to a sefirah.

On the one hand, it might be argued that in such examples, the term “secret” has no connection to a “secret” defined as intentionally concealed information. Rather, it functions as a kind of technical term to signify that it is not the ordinary meaning of the object or verse that is intended but one based on its deeper meaning. If so, this use of the word “secret” is not relevant for our purposes. On the other hand, I do not think that such semantic hairsplitting is relevant to the experience of most readers. As Kabbalists were surely aware, it is hard for a reader to ignore one of the standard meanings of “secret” when he comes across the word in a kabbalistic text. Whatever its primary meaning in a particular text, the reader who encounters this word is likely to come away with the sense that the text deals with hidden information. This would certainly be the case for a non-Kabbalist reader, but I would venture to say that even a kabbalistically knowledgeable reader, who understands the primary meaning of “secret” in this context, cannot entirely escape the full semantic range of the term. In other words, these examples function as cases of secretism, wherein the reader is drawn in by an atmosphere of mysteriousness when, in fact, nothing is concealed.

In all, then, a “rhetoric of secrecy,” even when there are no real secrets, is quite prevalent in kabbalistic literature. I would argue, however, that this prevalence should not obscure the fact that many kabbalistic texts do conceal real secrets. And these real secrets are put into sharp relief when seen in the context of the ubiquity of the rhetoric of secrecy.

Content Drives Social Function

Even when dealing with real secrets, it is surely correct that not only the contents of secrets but also the social effect of their exchange should be studied. Yet it seems that, in many cases, these two aspects of secrecy are intertwined, that the “rhetoric of secrecy” is not merely “rhetoric,” and that, in fact, the content regulates the social impact. In contrast, as we have seen, scholars following Urban’s model of secrecy have often presented the two as separable and have advocated for a focus on the latter rather than on the former. In the words of scholar of religious studies Kocku von Stuckrad, “As scholars we have to focus less on the content of secret knowledge but on the very fact that this knowledge is claimed” (Locations 56).⁴

The analysis of these scholars strikes me as accurate in situations in which the motivation for keeping secrets is to burnish one’s reputation. It seems less applicable, however, when secrecy is resorted to for different reasons. Among others, which I will discuss shortly, let us consider self-defense. Heterodox ideas or practices often need to be kept secret from those in authority who might feel challenged by them. This is a type of secrecy that Strauss famously described in Persecution and the Art of Writing and that Arthur Melzer, in his masterful work on secret writing in the Western philosophic tradition, terms “defensive esotericism” (127–59; cf. Schwartz, Contradiction 15). Urban, too, describes a similar type of secrecy when he notes that “secrecy is by no means always a matter of advertisement, adornment, or displaying one’s possession of secret knowledge. On the contrary, it is just as often a matter of camouflage, of concealing one’s knowledge and practices from those who might threaten and/or be threatened by them. Secrecy is in fact a key strategy of social and political resistance to, dissent from, and critique of the dominant social and political order” (“Secrecy and New” 73).⁵ I would argue that in this type of “defensive esotericism,” the content of the secret and its social function are deeply intertwined insofar as it is the particular content of the secret that triggers the need for secrecy.

Kabbalists, at times, engage in “defensive esotericism” when they conceal ideas that are heterodox or that at least might be perceived as such by outsiders. If these ideas were made public, Kabbalists might be subject to persecution. For example, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, Moses de León chooses to conceal certain matters because “his ideas would seem strange in the eyes and ears of other people when they would hear them.” He goes on to say that he must keep his secrets so “that those who have toiled in [studying] them all their days will not become a target of an arrow” (141). Similarly, as I will explain at length in Chapters 3 and 6, Abraham ben David and Asher ben David were worried, with good reason, that should the idea that divine unity is contingent on the sexual union of male and female sefirot become public, Kabbalists would be regarded as heretics. I note parenthetically that this is not because these Kabbalists viewed themselves as heretics but because they were worried that this idea would be misunderstood by an uninitiated public.

In these examples, the content of the secret drives the social function of secrecy to keep Kabbalists safe from outsiders. Moreover, without understanding the content of the secret, one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations of Biblical Verses
• Introduction. The Writing of Secrets
• Chapter 1. Secrets and Secretism
• Chapter 2. A Typology of Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature
• Chapter 3. Abraham ben David as an Esoteric Writer
• Chapter 4. Isaac the Blind’s Literary Legacy
• Chapter 5. Ezra ben Solomon of Gerona as an Esoteric Writer
• Chapter 6. Esotericism and Divine Unity in Asher ben David
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index