Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

«All in all, it may be said that the purpose of this book is not to give a complete historical account of Jewish mysticism but an outline of its principal features in the form of an analysis of some of its most important phases. A comprehensive critical history of Jewish mysticism, with special reference to all the various currents and cross-currents of Kabbalism, would require several volumes. Since these lectures were not intended exclusively for research students in this field but for the much wider circle of those who take an interest in questions of Jewish history and religion, I have laid greater stress on the analysis and interpretation of mystical thought than on the historical links between the various systems. Where it was possible without introducing too much philological detail I have nevertheless sketched the historical connections at least in outline. Only in the lecture on the Book Zohar and its author have I departed from this rule and attempted a more thorough philological analysis.» — declara el alcance del libro y de qué depende: no es un relato histórico completo del misticismo judío sino un esquema de sus rasgos principales bajo forma de análisis de algunas fases. Deriva el énfasis del destinatario —las conferencias no iban solo a investigadores— y por eso carga sobre el análisis del pensamiento místico antes que sobre los eslabones históricos. Con su excepción declarada: la conferencia sobre el Zóhar y su autor, donde sí emprende análisis filológico a fondo

«I should have preferred very much to give an account of the beginnings of Kabbalism as from 1150 to 1250, all the more as it regards a problem having an extraordinary bearing on the history of Judaism. But it appeared in the course of the work that the subject needs a more thorough treatment than could possibly have been given within the framework of these lectures; I propose, therefore, to present the results of my studies in a special publication.» — el límite de cobertura, dicho por él: los comienzos del kabalismo entre 1150 y 1250 —problema que califica de importancia extraordinaria para la historia del judaísmo— quedan fuera porque exigen más de lo que cabe en estas conferencias, y anuncia publicación aparte

«Jewish scholars was that, since the authorized guardians neglected this field, all manner of charlatans and dreamers came and treated it as their own property. From the brilliant misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Alphonse Louis Constant, who has won fame under the pseudonym of Eliphas Lévi, to the highly coloured humbug of Aleister Crowley and his followers, the most eccentric and fantastic statements have been produced purporting to be legitimate interpretations of Kabbalism. The time has come to reclaim this derelict area and to apply to it the strict standards of historical research.» — deriva el estado del campo de un hecho institucional y no de la calidad de los charlatanes: al desatender la Cábala los grandes eruditos judíos del XIX, el terreno quedó como propiedad de soñadores, y de ahí bajan las incomprensiones de Éliphas Lévi y el «highly coloured humbug» de Crowley. De ese diagnóstico saca la tarea que el libro se fija. En la página anterior acota que no descarta a los críticos hostiles del XIX: les reconoce haber visto ciertos factores con nitidez, aunque no —dice— por las razones que ellos mismos daban

«For in its classical form, religion signifies the creation of a vast abyss, conceived as absolute, between God, the infinite and transcendental Being, and Man, the finite creature. For this reason alone, the rise of institutional religion, which is also the classical stage in the history of religion, is more widely removed than any other period from mysticism and all it implies. Man becomes aware of a fundamental duality, of a vast gulf which can be crossed by nothing but the voice; the voice of God, directing and law-giving in His revelation, and the voice of man in prayer. The great monotheistic religions live and unfold in the ever-present consciousness of this bipolarity, of the existence of an abyss which can never be bridged. To them the scene of religion is no longer Nature, but the moral and religious action of man and the community of men, whose interplay brings about history as, in a sense, the stage on which the drama of man’s relation to God unfolds. And only now that religion has received, in history, its classical expression in a certain communal way of living and believing, only now do we witness the phenomenon called mysticism; its rise coincides with what may be called the romantic period of religion. Mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss; on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it proceeds to a quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that will span it. It strives to piece together the fragments broken by the religious cataclysm, to bring back the old unity which religion has destroyed, but on a new plane, where the world of mythology and that of revelation meet in the soul of man.» — sitúa el misticismo como etapa del desarrollo histórico de la religión y no como categoría intemporal: la etapa clásica abre un abismo tenido por absoluto entre el Dios infinito y la criatura, y el misticismo aparece solo cuando esa forma ya cuajó, en lo que llama el periodo romántico de la religión — no niega el abismo, arranca de reconocerlo. El límite va en la línea siguiente: esa unidad reconquistada no se confunde con la unidad mítica anterior a la dualidad

«The attributes of the living God are conceived differently and undergo a peculiar transformation when compared with the meaning given to them by the philosophers of Judaism. Among the latter, Maimonides, in his “Guide of the Perplexed”, felt bound to ask: How is it possible to say of God that He is living? Does that not imply a limitation of the infinite Being? The words “God is living”, he argues, can only mean that he is not dead, that is to say, that he is the opposite of all that is negative. He is the negation of negation. A quite different reply is given by the Kabbalist, for whom the distinction, nay the conflict, between the known and the unknown God has a significance denied to it by the philosophers of Judaism.» — lee el desacuerdo sobre los atributos divinos como divergencia de método: Maimónides responde que decir de Dios que es viviente solo puede significar que no está muerto, negación de la negación; el cabalista responde de otro modo porque para él la distinción entre el Dios conocido y el desconocido pesa lo que la filosofía judía le niega. El límite es que la afirmación es sobre el VALOR que cada lado asigna a la distinción, no sobre su presencia: en la página siguiente rechaza como mala interpretación de los hechos la tesis de que el kabalismo desconozca la diferencia entre el deus absconditus y Dios en su aparición

«The Kabbalists, however, are no friends of mystical autobiography. They aim at describing the realm of Divinity and the other objects of the contemplation in an impersonal way, by burning, as it were, their ships behind them. They glory in objective description and are deeply averse to letting their own personalities intrude into the picture. The wealth of expression at their disposal is not inferior to that of their autobiographical confrères. It is as though they were hampered by a sense of shame. Documents of an intimate and personal nature are not entirely lacking, but it is characteristic that they are to be found almost wholly in manuscripts which the Kabbalists themselves would hardly have allowed to be printed. There has even been a kind of voluntary censorship which the Kabbalists themselves exercised by deleting certain passages of a too intimate nature from the manuscripts, or at least by seeing to it that they were not printed.» — explica una laguna documental por decisión de los propios autores y no por pérdida: los cabalistas rehúyen la autobiografía mística y describen la Divinidad de modo impersonal, quemando sus naves detrás de sí; hubo censura voluntaria de los pasajes íntimos. Propone la causa como conjetura —«I am inclined to believe»— y consigna el costo: la ausencia del elemento autobiográfico es obstáculo serio para cualquier comprensión psicológica del misticismo judío

«My second point was that Kabbalism is distinguished by an attitude towards language which is quite unusually positive. Kabbalists who differ in almost everything else are at one in regarding language as something more precious than an inadequate instrument for contact between human beings. To them Hebrew, the holy tongue, is not simply a means of expressing certain thoughts, born out of a certain convention and having a purely conventional character, in accordance with the theory of language dominant in the Middle Ages. Language in its purest form, that is, Hebrew, according to the Kabbalists, reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world; in other words, it has a mystical value. Speech reaches God because it comes from God. Man’s common language, whose prima facie function, indeed, is only of an intellectual nature, reflects the creative language of God. All creation—and this is an important principle of most Kabbalists—is, from the point of view of God, nothing but an expression of His hidden self that begins and ends by giving itself a name, the holy name of God, the perpetual act of creation.» — la otra mitad de la misma idea: para los cabalistas el hebreo no es convención sino reflejo de la naturaleza espiritual del mundo, y la creación entera es, desde el punto de vista de Dios, expresión de su ser oculto que empieza y acaba dándose un nombre

«It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom. The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts. Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples.» — saca del propio nombre la paradoja de la cosa: Kabbalah significa «tradición», de modo que una doctrina centrada en el contacto inmediato con lo Divino se concibe a sí misma como sabiduría heredada. De ahí distingue dos secrecías, la del contenido y la de la transmisión. El límite viene inmediatamente después: ese cuadro nunca correspondió del todo a la vida, porque en ciertos periodos los propios cabalistas trataron de atraer a círculos mucho más amplios

«as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.”20 Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.» — el camino místico hacia Dios como inversión de la procesión por la que emanamos de Él: conocer las etapas del proceso creador es conocer las del propio retorno, y por eso la interpretación del Maaseh Bereshith es ocupación central del kabalismo. Es donde más se acerca al neoplatonismo

«This Nothing from which everything has sprung is by no means a mere negation; only to us does it present no attributes because it is beyond the reach of intellectual knowledge. In truth, however, this Nothing—to quote one of the Kabbalists—is infinitely more real than all other reality.24 Only when the soul has stripped itself of all limitation and, in mystical language, has descended into the depths of Nothing does it encounter the Divine. For this Nothing comprises a wealth of mystical reality although it cannot be defined. “Un Dieu défini serait un Dieu fini.” In a word, it signifies the Divine itself, in its most impenetrable guise. And, in fact, creation out of nothing means to many mystics just creation out of God.» — muestra cómo la ortodoxia de un término tapa un sentido distinto del original: la Nada de los místicos no es negación —carece de atributos solo para nosotros— y es, dice, infinitamente más real que toda otra realidad, de modo que la creación a partir de la nada pasa a significar creación a partir de Dios, y el dogma se vuelve símbolo de la emanación. Lo encuadra en su tesis previa: lo que al filósofo le parece un malentendido puede ser la abreviatura paradójica de una línea de pensamiento original

«By contrast, the mystic refrains from destroying the living texture of religious narrative by allegorizing it, although allegory plays an important part in the writings of a great many Kabbalists. His essential mode of thinking is what I should like to call symbolical in the strictest sense. This point requires a little further explanation. Allegory consists of an infinite network of meanings and correlations in which everything can become a representation of everything else, but all within the limits of language and expression. To that extent it is possible to speak of allegorical immanence. That which is expressed by and in the allegorical sign is in the first instance something which has its own meaningful context, but by becoming allegorical this something loses its own meaning and becomes the vehicle of something else. Indeed the allegory arises, as it were, from the gap which at this point opens between the form and its meaning. The two are no longer indissolubly welded together; the meaning is no longer restricted to that particular form, nor the form any longer to that particular meaningful content. What appears in the allegory, in short, is the infinity of meaning which attaches to every representation.» — la alegoría como red infinita donde todo puede representar a todo y lo alegorizado pierde su sentido propio para volverse vehículo de otro — frente al símbolo, que conserva su forma y su contenido originales y hace transparente una realidad que no puede aparecer de otro modo

«The danger of theosophical schematism or, as S. R. Hirsch put it,29 of “magical mechanism” is, of course, inherent in such an interpretation of the Torah, and it has more than once raised its head in the development of Kabbalism. There is danger of imagining a magical mechanism to be operative in every sacramental action, and this imagination is attended by a decline in the essential spontaneity of religious action. But then this conflict is inseparable from any and every fulfilment of a religious command, since every prescribed duty is also conceived as assumed willingly and spontaneously. The antinomy is, in fact, inescapable, and can only be overcome by religious feeling so long as it is strong and unbroken. When it begins to flag, the contradiction between command and free-will increases in proportion and eventually gathers sufficient force to become destructive.» — nombra el precio de convertir cada precepto en rito secreto: el esquematismo teosófico que S. R. Hirsch llamó «magical mechanism», donde decae la espontaneidad del acto religioso. Y rehúsa cargárselo a la Cábala como defecto propio: la antinomia es inseparable de cualquier cumplimiento de un mandamiento, y solo el sentimiento religioso la sostiene mientras esté intacto

«This transformation, which has meant a great deal for the true life of the Kabbalist, has become crystallized in the conception of Kawwanah, i.e. mystical intention or concentration, which is its instrument.34 In the words of the liturgy as in the old Aggadahs, the Kabbalists found a way to hidden worlds and the first causes of all existence. They developed a technique of meditation which enabled them to extract, as it were, the mystical prayer from the exoteric prayer of the community the text of which followed a fixed pattern. The fact that this form of prayer was conceived not as a free effusion of the soul but as a mystical act in the strict sense of the term, as an act, that is to say, which is directly linked with the inner cosmic process, invests this conception of Kawwanah with a solemnity which not only approaches but also passes the border of the magical.» — la reinterpretación mística de la liturgia cristaliza en la Kawwanah, intención o concentración, y con ella una técnica de meditación; y porque esa oración se concibe ligada al proceso cósmico interno y no como efusión libre del alma, adquiere una solemnidad que no solo se acerca a la frontera de lo mágico, sino que la pasa

«The fact of the existence of evil in the world is the main touchstone of this difference between the philosophic and the Kabbalistic outlook. On the whole, the philosophers of Judaism treat the existence of evil as something meaningless in itself. Some of them have shown themselves only too proud of this negation of evil as one of the fundamentals of what they call rational Judaism. Hermann Cohen has said with great clarity and much conviction: “Evil is non-existent. It is nothing but a concept derived from the concept of freedom. A power of evil exists only in myth.”36 One may doubt the philosophical truth of this statement, but assuming its truth it is obvious that something can be said for ‘myth’ in its struggle with ‘philosophy’. To most Kabbalists, as true seal-bearers of the world of myth, the existence of evil is, at any rate, one of the most pressing problems, and one which keeps them continuously occupied with attempts to solve it. They have a strong sense of the reality of evil and the dark horror that is about everything living. They do not, like the philosophers, seek to evade its existence with the aid of a convenient formula; rather do they try to penetrate into its depth.» — pone la existencia del mal como la piedra de toque que separa la mirada filosófica de la cabalística, y aquí la confrontación es la afirmación: los filósofos lo tratan como carente de sentido en sí —Hermann Cohen, «Evil is non-existent»—, y los cabalistas, «true seal-bearers of the world of myth», sienten su realidad y en vez de esquivarlo intentan penetrar en su hondura. Concede que puede dudarse de la verdad filosófica del enunciado de Cohen y sostiene que aun concediéndola algo puede decirse a favor del mito

«Philosophy came dangerously near to losing the living God; Kabbalism, which set out to preserve Him, to blaze a new and glorious trail to Him, encountered mythology on its way and was tempted to lose itself in its labyrinth.» — cobra el precio de las dos vías sin absolver a ninguna: la filosofía estuvo peligrosamente cerca de perder al Dios viviente, y el kabalismo, que salió a preservarlo, se topó en el camino con la mitología

«This exclusively masculine character of Kabbalism was by no means the result of the social position of Jewish women or their exclusion from Talmudic learning. Scholasticism was as much exclusively a domain of men as Talmudism, and yet the social position of women in Islam and in Mediaeval Christianity did not prevent their playing a highly important part among the representatives—though not the theoreticians—of Islamic and Christian mysticism. It is hardly possible to conceive Catholic mysticism without them.» — niega que la ausencia de mujeres cabalistas se explique por la posición social de la mujer judía o por su exclusión del estudio talmúdico: la escolástica fue tan masculina como el talmudismo y aun así hubo mujeres decisivas entre los representantes del misticismo islámico y cristiano

«It is of the essence of Kabbalistic symbolism that woman represents not, as one might be tempted to expect, the quality of tenderness but that of stern judgment. This symbolism was unknown to the old mystics of the Merkabah period, and even to the Hasidim in Germany, but it dominates Kabbalistic literature from the very beginning and undoubtedly represents a constituent element of Kabbalistic theology. The demonic, according to the Kabbalists, is an off-spring of the feminine sphere. This view does not entail a negation or repudiation of womanhood—after all the Kabbalistic conception of the Shekhinah has room for the, to orthodox Jewish thought, highly paradoxical idea of a feminine element in God Himself» — en el simbolismo cabalístico la mujer representa no la ternura sino el juicio severo, y lo demónico es descendencia de la esfera femenina — simbolismo desconocido para los místicos de la Merkabah y dominante desde el comienzo de la literatura cabalística. El límite va en la misma frase y es lo que impide leerlo como repudio: la concepción de la Shekhinah da lugar a la idea, altamente paradójica para el pensamiento judío ortodoxo, de un elemento femenino en Dios mismo

«Its essence is not absorbed contemplation of God’s true nature, but perception of His appearance on the throne, as described by Ezekiel, and cognition of the mysteries of the celestial throne-world. The throne-world is to the Jewish mystic what the pleroma, the “fullness”, the bright sphere of divinity with its potencies, aeons, archons and dominions is to the Hellenistic and early Christian mystics of the period who appear in the history of religion under the names of Gnostics and Hermetics.» — fija qué se busca en la primera fase, y lo fija por contraste: el misticismo judío más antiguo es misticismo del trono, y su esencia no es la contemplación de la naturaleza de Dios sino la percepción de su aparición sobre el trono. De ahí la equivalencia funcional que ordena el capítulo: el mundo-trono es para el místico judío lo que el pleroma para los místicos helenísticos que la historia de las religiones conoce como gnósticos y herméticos

«In the early literature, the writers always speak of an “ascent to the Merkabah,” a pictorial analogy which has come to seem natural to us. The “Lesser Hekhaloth”21 emphasize this “ascent”, and the same term recurs in a few out-of-the-way passages of the “Greater Hekhaloth,”22 and in the introduction to the “Book of Enoch”. But for reasons which have become obscure, the whole terminology had in the meantime undergone a change—it is difficult to say exactly when, probably around 500. In the “Greater Hekhaloth,” which are of such importance for our analysis, and from then on in almost all the later writings, the visionary journey of the soul to heaven is always referred to as the “descent to the Merkabah.” The paradoxical character of this term is all the more remarkable because the detailed description of the mystical process nonetheless consistently employs the metaphor of ascent and not of descent. The mystics of this group call themselves Yorde Merkabah, i.e. “descenders to the Merkabah” (and not “Riders in the Chariot,” as some translators would have it),23 and this name is also given to them by others throughout the whole literature down to a late period.» — registra un cambio de terminología que declara no poder explicar: en la literatura temprana el viaje se llama siempre ASCENSO a la Merkabah y después siempre DESCENSO, cambio que fecha en torno al año 500, con su propio «probably», y cuyas razones dice que se han vuelto oscuras. Subraya lo paradójico del término porque la descripción del proceso sigue empleando la metáfora del ascenso — de ahí el nombre del grupo, Yorde Merkabah, descensores a la Merkabah

«It is the soul’s need for protection on its journey which has produced these seals with their twin function as a protective armour and as a magical weapon. At first the magical protection of a single seal may be sufficient, but as time goes on the difficulties experienced by the adept tend to become greater. A brief and simple formula is no longer enough. Sunk in his ecstatic trance, the mystic at the same time experiences a sense of frustration which he tries to overcome by using longer and more complicated magical formulae, symbols of a longer and harder struggle to pass the closed entrance gates which block his progress. As his psychical energy wanes the magical strain grows and the conjuring gesture becomes progressively more strained, until in the end whole pages are filled with an apparently meaningless recital of magical key-words with which he tries to unlock the closed door.» — lee la hinchazón de las fórmulas mágicas como curva de agotamiento y no como ornamento: al principio basta un sello, pero a medida que la energía psíquica mengua la tensión mágica aumenta, hasta que páginas enteras se llenan de palabras-clave con las que el místico intenta abrir la puerta

«Already the oldest documents of all, the “Lesser Hekhaloth”, are full of them; nor is this surprising, for shadowy elements of this kind, so far from being later additions or signs of spiritual decadence—a prejudice dear to the modern mind—belong to the very core of their particular religious system.» — el límite que impone expresamente contra la lectura fácil: los elementos mágicos no son añadidos tardíos ni señales de decadencia espiritual —«a prejudice dear to the modern mind»— sino que pertenecen al núcleo mismo del sistema religioso

«Not only is there for the mystic no divine immanence, there is also almost no love of God. What there is of love in the relationship between the Jewish mystic and his God belongs to a much later period and has nothing to do with our present subject. Ecstasy there was, and this fundamental experience must have been a source of religious inspiration, but we find no trace of a mystical union between the soul and God. Throughout there remained an almost exaggerated consciousness of God’s otherness, nor does the identity and individuality of the mystic become blurred even at the height of ecstatic passion. The Creator and His creature remain apart, and nowhere is an attempt made to bridge the gulf between them or to blur the distinction. The mystic who in his ecstasy has passed through all the gates, braved all the dangers, now stands before the throne; he sees and hears— but that is all.» — marca dónde NO llega esta mística, y con eso la define: no hay inmanencia divina ni casi amor de Dios, y no se halla rastro de unión mística entre el alma y Dios. Persiste una conciencia casi exagerada de la otredad; el que ha cruzado todas las puertas está por fin ante el trono: ve y oye, y eso es todo. Acota que el amor en la relación del místico judío con su Dios pertenece a un periodo muy posterior

«But this resistance to an enthusiasm and a verbiage so different from the classical simplicity and rationality of the fundamental prayers of Jewish liturgy was of no avail. That much is clear not only from the prayers and hymns of the Merkabah mystics, but also from certain important parts of the liturgy proper whose spirit reflects the influence of the Yorde Merkabah. Bloch was the first to point out that the community prayer in its final form, which it received in late Talmudic and post-Talmudic times, represents a compromise between these two opposing tendencies.» — sostiene que la resistencia talmúdica al entusiasmo fue en vano, y lo deriva no solo de los himnos de los místicos sino de partes de la liturgia: siguiendo a Bloch, la oración comunitaria en su forma final es un compromiso entre las dos tendencias opuestas. Y corrige a Bloch en la misma página — algunas de esas oraciones son más antiguas de lo que él creyó

«From the very beginning, the frank and almost provocative anthropomorphism of the Shiur Komah aroused the bitterest antagonism among all Jewish circles which held aloof from mysticism.82 Conversely, all the later mystics and Kabbalists came to regard its dark and obscure language as a symbol of profound and penetrating spiritual vision. The antagonism was mutual, for it is in this attitude towards anthropomorphism that Jewish rational theology and Jewish mysticism have parted company.» — el antropomorfismo del Shiur Komah despertó desde el principio la hostilidad de los círculos judíos ajenos al misticismo, mientras los cabalistas posteriores tomaron su lenguaje oscuro por símbolo de visión profunda; y sostiene que el antagonismo fue mutuo, porque es en la actitud hacia el antropomorfismo donde la teología racional judía y el misticismo judío se separaron

«As is well known, the anti-Jewish gnostics of the second and third centuries drew a sharp distinction between the unknown, “strange,” good God, and the Creator, whom they identified with the God of Israel. It may be that the Shiur Komah reflects an attempt to give a new turn to this trend of thought, which had become widespread throughout the Near East, by postulating something like a harmony between the Creator and the “true” God. A dualism of the Gnostic kind would of course have been unthinkable for Jews; instead, the Demiurge becomes, by an exercise of mystical anthropomorphism, the appearance of God on the “throne of Glory,” at once visible and yet, by virtue of His transcendent nature, incapable of being really visualized.» — propone que el Shiur Komah responde desde dentro del judaísmo al reparto gnóstico entre el Dios bueno desconocido y el Creador: como un dualismo gnóstico era impensable para judíos, el Demiurgo se vuelve la aparición de Dios sobre el trono, a la vez visible y no visualizable de veras. Lo enuncia en condicional —«It may be that…», «If this interpretation is correct»— y de ahí deriva su lectura de las medidas: no serían las dimensiones de la divinidad sino las de su apariencia corporal

«Shiur Komah speculation is already to be found in the earliest Hekhaloth texts and must be counted among the older possessions of Jewish gnosticism. Graetz’ theory that it came into being at a late date under the influence of Moslem anthropomorphic tendencies is entirely fallacious and has confused matters down to our own day.95 If there can be any question of external influence, it was certainly the other way round.» — la especulación del Shiur Komah pertenece al acervo viejo del gnosticismo judío, y objeta la tesis de Graetz de que naciera tarde bajo influencia antropomórfica musulmana: si hay influencia externa, corre al revés. Pone además el límite sobre su propio apoyo, porque el doxógrafo árabe Shahrastani, a quien cita para el paso de esas ideas a círculos musulmanes, le parece testigo no del todo fiable

«There is no such word as Metathronios in Greek and it is extremely unlikely that Jews should have produced or invented such Greek phrase. In Talmudic literature the word is never used in the place of its Hebrew equivalent. On the other hand, the reduplication of the t and the ending ron follow a pattern which runs through all these texts. Both the ending and the repetition of the consonant are observable, for instance, in names like Zoharariel and Adiriron. It must also be borne in mind that on and ron may have been fixed and typical constituents of secret names rather than meaningful syllables. It is quite possible that the word Metatron was chosen on strictly symbolical grounds and represents one of the innumerable secret names which abound in the Hekhaloth texts no less than in the gnostical writings or in the magical papyri.» — retira la etimología corriente de Metatrón sin poner otra en su lugar, y ese es el punto: no existe «Metathronios» en griego. Deriva la forma del hábito onomástico de estos textos —la terminación *-ron* atraviesa toda la literatura, Zoharariel, Adiriron— de modo que el nombre pudo elegirse por razones simbólicas, como vox mystica que reemplaza a Yahoel. Dice de entrada que el sentido «is completely obscure» y llama conjetura a todas las etimologías propuestas

«Here we have one of the most important points of difference between Merkabah mysticism and Kabbalism; the latter is distinguished by renewed interest in purely cosmogonic speculation, whose spirit often enough is entirely Gnostic. In the earlier literature—certainly during the phase represented by the Hekhaloth—theoretical questions have no place; its spirit is descriptive, not speculative» — una de las diferencias más importantes entre la mística de la Merkabah y el kabalismo: éste se distingue por un interés renovado en la especulación cosmogónica, mientras en la fase de los Hekhaloth las cuestiones teóricas no tienen lugar y el espíritu es descriptivo, no especulativo

«Its chief subjectmatters are the elements of the world, which are sought in the ten elementary and primordial numbers—Sefiroth, as the book calls them—and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These together represent the mysterious forces whose convergence has produced the various combinations observable throughout the whole of creation; they are the “thirty-two secret paths of wisdom,” through which God has created all that exists.» — expone de qué está hecho el Sefer Yetsirah: los diez números elementales que el libro llama Sefiroth y las 22 letras del alfabeto hebreo, juntos las fuerzas cuya convergencia produce las combinaciones de toda la creación. Fecha el texto entre los siglos III y VI «probably», advierte que probablemente incluye interpolaciones y deja abierto el sentido de *Sefiroth belimah*, rematando que si el autor quiso ser oscuro lo consiguió más allá de sus deseos. Lectura restituida: la fuente imprime «subject-matters» con guion de corte que la herramienta une

«It can be taken as certain that in addition to the Raza Rabba, which appears to have been a cross between a mystical Midrash and a Hekhaloth text, with a strong magical element thrown in, other similar fragments of ancient writings, with Gnostic excerpts written in Hebrew, made their way from the East to Provence. It was thus that remainders of Gnostic ideas transmitted in this fashion entered the main stream of mystical thought via the Book Bahir, to become one of the chief influences which shaped the theosophy of the thirteenth century Kabbalists.» — traza la vía de transmisión: junto al Raza Rabba pasaron de Oriente a Provenza fragmentos antiguos con excerpta gnósticos en hebreo, y por esa vía los restos de ideas gnósticas entraron en la corriente principal a través del libro Bahir. La identificación del Raza Rabba como fuente del Bahir la presenta como hallazgo propio, apoyado en citas conservadas por místicos del siglo XIII en el sur de Alemania

«It must be emphasized that these tendencies are alien to the spirit of Hekhaloth literature; we find in it none of that symbolic interpretation of the Merkabah which was later revived and perfected by the Kabbalists. Its subject is never man, be he even a saint. The form of mysticism which it represents takes no particular interest in man as such; its gaze is fixed on God and his aura, the radiant sphere of the Merkabah, to the exclusion of everything else. For the same reason it made no contribution to the development of a new moral ideal of the truly pious Jew. All its originality is on the ecstatical side, while the moral aspect is starved, so to speak, of life.» — niega a la literatura Hekhalot lo que se le suele suponer, y de eso deriva su lugar histórico: las tendencias moralizantes le son ajenas, y no se halla en ella nada de la interpretación simbólica de la Merkabah que los cabalistas revivirían después. Su tema no es nunca el hombre, ni siquiera el santo: toda su originalidad está del lado extático y el aspecto moral queda famélico de vida

«the ideal to which the Hekhaloth mystic is devoted is that of the visionary who holds the keys to the secrets of the divine realm and who reveals these visions in Israel. Vision and knowledge, in a word, Gnosis of this kind, represents for him the essence of the Torah and of all possible human and cosmic wisdom.» — el ideal que sí tiene: el visionario que posee las llaves de los secretos del reino divino y revela esas visiones en Israel, para quien la visión y el conocimiento son la esencia de la Torá y de toda sabiduría posible

«The rise of Hasidism was the decisive event in the religious development of German Jewry. Of all the factors determining the deeper religion of that community it was the greatest until the change which took place in the seventeenth century under the influence of the later Kabbalism, which originated at Safed in Palestine. Strictly speaking, it was the only considerable religious event in the history of German Judaism.» — da al jasidismo alemán el rango de acontecimiento decisivo —y en rigor el único considerable— de la historia religiosa del judaísmo alemán. Lo deriva de dos hechos que expone antes: esa judería ignoró casi por completo la disputa entre Platón y Aristóteles por la herencia bíblica, y sobre ese fondo la conmoción de las Cruzadas dejó una impronta que nunca halló expresión filosófica adecuada

«Jehudah the Hasid, whose historical position, according to Baer, is akin to that of his Christian contemporary, St. Francis of Assisi. Baer has also raised anew the problem of the relationship between the social philosophy of Hasidism and its Monkish-Christian environment.8 It is in fact undeniable that certain popular religious and social ideas common to the Roman Catholic West after the Cluniacensian reform also filtered into the religious philosophy of some Jewish groups. According to Baer, this was possible only in Germany, while in Italy and Spain the spread of philosophical enlightenment among the Jews either prevented this infiltration or at least limited its scope by conducting an incessant fight against it. Although Baer describes these tendencies as “stimulants which merely served to hasten a spontaneous development” he goes further than Guedemann who also believed in a connection between the popular Christian mysticism of the period and the Hasidic movement, but makes a reservation in respect of their interdependence by arguing that “there is no need to speak of derivations; similar causes produce similar effects. Mysticism was in the air and its seeds fell on fertile soil both among Jews and Christians.» — consigna las dos posiciones sobre el origen cristiano sin armonizarlas: Baer sitúa a Jehudah el Hasid en posición afín a la de San Francisco y sostiene que ideas del Occidente católico se filtraron en algunos grupos judíos; y frente a él Guedemann, que creía también en la conexión pero hacía reserva sobre la interdependencia — «Mysticism was in the air and its seeds fell on fertile soil both among Jews and Christians»

«It is equally obvious, though less generally realized, that the writings of many Talmudists and Tosafists—the name generally given to the school of Talmudic casuists in Germany and Northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—in so far as they deal at all with religious subjects, are steeped in the same kind of mystical thought. The tradition which ascribes to some of the most famous Tosafists a preference for the study of old mystical tracts, if not the actual practice of mystical rites, is by no means simply a legend. The various testimonies to this effect are quite independent of each other, and for the rest a careful study of their occasional ventures into theology leaves no doubt that they draw their inspiration from mystical ideas on the subject of creation, the Merkabah, and even the Shiur Komah. One of the greatest masters of this school of casuists, Isaac of Dampierre, whom one would be the last to suspect of mystical leanings, was said to be a visionary» — sostiene que el pensamiento místico no fue patrimonio de un partido aparte: los escritos de muchos tosafistas están empapados del mismo pensamiento, y de ahí concluye que la tradición que atribuye a tosafistas famosos predilección por los tratados místicos no es simple leyenda. Lo apoya en un criterio verificable, que los testimonios son independientes unos de otros, y da el caso extremo: Isaac de Dampierre, a quien uno sería el último en sospechar de inclinaciones místicas, pasaba por visionario

«But is it possible to accept this fundamentally antieschatological interpretation of Hasidism? It is not borne out even by the “Book of the Devout,” far less by the other documents of this group, such as, for example, the writings of Eleazar of Worms. If it is true that their religious interest does not center on the Messianic promise in the strict sense, it is no less true that the imagination of these writers is powerfully affected by everything which concerns the eschatology of the soul.» — objeta la lectura de J. N. Simhoni que hace del jasidismo una devoción anti-escatológica aferrada al presente: concede que el interés religioso no se centra en la promesa mesiánica en sentido estricto, pero afirma que la imaginación de estos autores está poderosamente tocada por todo lo que atañe a la escatología del alma. El límite colindante, que él mismo consigna, es que no se escribió ni una apocalipsis en Alemania durante las Cruzadas. Lectura restituida: la fuente imprime «anti-eschatological» con guion de corte que la herramienta une

«Three things above all others go to make the true Hasid as he appears before us in the “Book of the Devout”: Ascetic renunciation of the things of this world; complete serenity of mind; and an altruism grounded in principle and driven to extremes.» — fija el contenido del término y lo separa de su uso talmúdico, mucho más vago: renuncia ascética, completa serenidad de ánimo y altruismo fundado en principio y llevado al extremo. De ahí deriva lo que da carácter al movimiento — ser Hasid es ajustarse a estándares puramente religiosos, independientes del intelectualismo y del saber, de modo que se podía ser Hasid sin entender más que el texto de la Biblia

«According to Eleazar of Worms, there have been since the days of Creation historical forces of opposition, “weeds” as he calls them, which counteract the divine purpose. The verse Gen. III, 18 “thorns and thistles shall the earth bring forth to thee” is to be understood not only in a natural but also in a historical sense, the earth signifying in this context the stage on which man’s history is enacted. “Thorns and thistles” are interpreted, by a process of reasoning based on numerological mysticism, as representations of the profane history which in every generation stands in opposition to the inner sacred historical process.» — la teología de la historia de Eleazar de Worms: desde la Creación hay fuerzas de oposición, «weeds», que contrarrestan el propósito divino, y los cardos y espinas del Génesis se leen en sentido histórico como la historia profana que en cada generación se opone al proceso sagrado interior

«The “heavenly law,” din shamayim, as conceived by the Hasid, i.e. the call to self-abnegation and altruism, in many instances goes far beyond the common law of the Torah as interpreted by the Halakhah. It is not difficult to perceive the latent antagonism between the two conceptions.» — el din shamayim tal como lo concibe el Hasid rebasa con mucho la ley común de la Torá según la interpreta la Halajá, y dice que no es difícil percibir el antagonismo latente entre ambas concepciones: hay cosas permitidas por la ley rabínica y sin embargo castigadas por el cielo

«On the other hand, the element of indifference to praise or blame, the ideal of ataraxy which stands in such striking contrast to this religious radicalism, is nowhere referred to in the theological sources of Hasidism and must have come from outside, that is to say, probably from the Christian environment. Both are equally essential, for it is the paradoxical combination of these two spiritual qualities which makes the Cynic, and it is the ideal of the monkish Cynic which appears before us in a Jewish guise under the name of Hasidism.» — explica el ideal jasídico por la combinación de dos rasgos que no vienen del mismo sitio: el radicalismo está ya en la definición del término dentro de las fuentes propias, y la ataraxia no se menciona en ninguna parte de sus fuentes teológicas y tuvo que venir de fuera. Es la combinación paradójica de las dos la que hace al Cínico. La procedencia externa va enunciada como inferencia —«must have come from outside», «probably»—, no como filiación probada

«To take one example, Jehudah the Hasid, though fully convinced of the effectiveness of magic and other occult disciplines, was sharply opposed to their practice. He appears to have sensed very clearly the contrast between the magician who prides himself on his control of the elements, and the humble Hasid who craves no form of power. But his perception of the danger did not prevent the magical elements in his heritage from gaining the upper hand over his moral ideal. In the legend, he appears as the bearer and dispenser of all those magical powers and attributes which he was at such pains to renounce» — Jehudah el Hasid estaba convencido de la eficacia de la magia y aun así se oponía con dureza a su práctica, porque percibía el contraste entre el mago que se enorgullece de dominar los elementos y el Hasid que no ansía poder alguno; pero esa percepción no impidió que los elementos mágicos de su herencia se impusieran sobre su ideal moral, y ya en vida suya la leyenda lo hizo portador de los poderes que se había esforzado en renunciar

«It is a remarkable fact that both Maimonides and his younger contemporary, Eleazar, preface their codifications of the law by attempts to extend the Halakhah to matters which, strictly speaking, lie beyond its province: in the case of Maimonides, a philosophic and cosmologic preface in which the ideas of Aristotelian enlightenment are introduced as elements of the Halakhah; in the case of Eleazar, a chapter devoted to the entirely unintellectual principles of Hasiduth. The coincidence is hardly fortuitous and throws an interesting light on the significance of the various religious trends in Judaism; nor is it fortuitous that in both cases the attempts failed: The Halakhah was never organically linked with the quasi-Halakhah which preceded it.» — Maimónides y Eleazar de Worms encabezan sus codificaciones con sendos intentos de extender la Halajá a materias que quedan fuera de su jurisdicción; dice que la coincidencia no es fortuita, y que tampoco lo es que en ambos casos el intento fracasara

«There is no mysticism as such, there is only the mysticism of a particular religious system» — su regla de método, y una advertencia contra la comparación fácil: no hay una mística universal de la que las tradiciones sean variantes.

«I shall use the word to express the type of religion which puts the emphasis on immediate awareness of relation with God» — cómo define «misticismo» para uso de estas lecciones, declarando que es una decisión suya.

«Mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss; on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence» — su descripción del punto de partida místico: el abismo entre Dios y el hombre no se niega, se reconoce y luego se busca el paso.

«Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before» — la paradoja que le interesa: la doctrina del contacto personal inmediato con lo divino se llama a sí misma «tradición».

«The favorite formulae of the early Spanish Kabbalists are speculative paraphrases like “Root of all Roots,” “Great Reality,” “Indifferent Unity,”9 and, above all, En-Sof» — los nombres del Dios oculto entre los primeros cabalistas españoles. El «9» es la llamada de nota.

«It signifies “the infinite” as such; not, as has been frequently suggested, “He who is infinite” but “that which is infinite» — la precisión sobre En-Sof, y es gramatical antes que doctrinal: no es «el que es infinito» sino «lo que es infinito». De ahí el carácter impersonal de ese aspecto de Dios.

«the mystic does not even recoil before the inference that in a higher sense there is a root of evil even in God» — hasta dónde llega la inferencia mística cuando los atributos divinos se toman como esferas reales.

«There one also finds the oldest extant recipes for creating the Golem—a mixture of letter magic and practices obviously aimed at producing ecstatic states of consciousness.67 It would appear as though in the original conception the Golem came to life only while the ecstasy of his creator lasted.» — sitúa las recetas más antiguas del Golem en los escritos de Eleazar de Worms y las describe como mezcla de magia de letras y prácticas para producir estados extáticos. De ahí su lectura de la concepción originaria: el Golem cobraba vida solo mientras duraba el éxtasis de su creador — la existencia fuera de esa conciencia es atribución posterior de la leyenda popular

«such as Gematria, i.e. the calculation of the numerical value of Hebrew words and the search for connections with other words or phrases of equal value; Notarikon, or interpretation of the letters of a word as abbreviations of whole sentences; and Temurah, or interchange of letters according to certain systematic rules.70 As a matter of historical fact, none of these techniques of mystical exegesis can be called Kabbalistic in the strict sense of the word. In the literature of the classical Kabbalah, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they often played a very minor part; the few important Kabbalists who made more marked use of them, such as Jacob ben Jacob Hacohen, or Abraham Abulafia, were clearly influenced by the German Hasidim. What really deserves to be called Kabbalism has very little to do with these ‘Kabbalistic’ practices.» — define gematría, notarikon y temurá y acto seguido las desaloja del centro: como hecho histórico ninguna es cabalística en sentido estricto, y en la cábala clásica de los siglos XIII y XIV jugaron un papel muy menor. Es la corrección directa a la ecuación popular cábala igual a gematría

«But while we know a great deal about the external technique of these “mysteries of prayer” as the Hasidim called them, we are in the dark as regards the real meaning, the functional purpose of these mystical numerologies.» — declara el hueco de su propio conocimiento, y es la acotación obligada de lo anterior: se sabe mucho de la técnica externa de los misterios de la oración, y se está a oscuras sobre su significado real y su propósito funcional

«The whole system of penitence, particularly in the codified form given to it by Eleazar of Worms in several of his writings, closely corresponds to the practices prescribed by the early mediaeval Church in its literature on the subject, the “penitentiary books.”79 Among the latter, the Celtic and later the Frankish tracts developed a peculiar system of which the understanding is pertinent to our subject. Penitence is conceived as reparation for an insult to God through a personal act of restitution, the sinner undertaking to perform certain well-defined acts of a penitentiary character—a conception which inevitably led to the establishment of what can only be described as a tariff of penitence.» — adjudica el sistema penitencial hasídico a una correspondencia estrecha con los penitentiary books de la Iglesia altomedieval, y deriva de ahí el rasgo estructural: si la penitencia se concibe como reparación mediante actos definidos de restitución, el resultado inevitable es un tarifario de penitencia

«In its mildest form, penitence simply meant that the opportunity for committing the same sin again was not utilized (teshuvah habaah); but penitence could also amount to a system of voluntary restraints and the preventive avoidance of all occasions calculated to tempt one into committing a certain sin (teshuvath hagader); thirdly, the amount of pleasure derived from committing a sin could be made the criterion of the self-imposed askesis (teshuvath hamishkal); lastly, in the case of transgressions forbidden under pain of death by the Torah, the sinner must undergo “tortures as bitter as death”—often amounting to extravagantly painful and humiliating punishments—in order to obtain divine forgiveness and avoid the “extermination of the soul” which the Torah threatens for certain sins (teshuvath hakatuv).» — las cuatro categorías de teshuvá del Sefer Hasidim, en escala: no repetir el pecado, evitar preventivamente la ocasión, medir la ascesis por el placer obtenido, y tormentos amargos como la muerte en las transgresiones capitales

«Thus we read: “Everything is in Thee, and Thou art in everything; Thou fillest every thing and dost encompass it; when everything was created, Thou wast in everything; before everything was created, Thou wast everything.” Expressions of this sort recur in every kind of Hasidic writing. As Bloch has shown, they are nothing but enthusiastic embellishments of the idea of divine omnipresence as set out in the old Hebrew paraphrase of Saadia’s magnum opus.» — la formulación más terminante de la inmanencia entre los hasidim alemanes, en el Song of Unity. Scholem no la da como hallazgo propio: la remite a Bloch, que la explica como adorno entusiasta de la omnipresencia divina tal como la expone la vieja paráfrasis hebrea de Saadia

«Moses Taku expressed the fear that this pantheistic element in the conception of the divinity might be used as a justification of paganism, since it made it possible for the heathen to argue that “they were serving the Creator with their cult and their idols, seeing that He was omnipresent.”95 And in fact there have always been pronounced opponents of this form of pantheism who refused to permit the “Song of Unity” to be included in the communal prayer although it was included already at an early period in the liturgy. Instances of such opposition are related of Rabbi Solomon Luria in the 16th century and the famous Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, the “Gaon of Vilna,” in the 18th century.» — la objeción viene de dentro: Moses Taku, discípulo de Jehudah el Hasid, teme que el elemento panteísta permita al gentil argüir que sirve al Creador con sus ídolos. Y no queda en el siglo XIII — hubo siempre opositores que rehusaron admitir el himno en la oración comunitaria, Salomón Luria en el XVI y Elías de Vilna en el XVIII

«Their interest belongs not to the mystery of Creation but to that of Revelation. How can God reveal Himself to His creatures? What is the meaning of the frequent anthropomorphisms in the Bible and in the Talmud? These are the questions which the theosophy of German Hasidism undertakes to answer.» — fija qué pregunta contesta esta teosofía y cuál no: no el misterio de la Creación —que a los hasidim no les plantea problema— sino el de la REVELACIÓN, cómo puede Dios revelarse y qué significan los antropomorfismos. Es la acotación que impide leer el Kavod como respuesta cosmogónica

«The glory of God, the Kavod, i.e. that aspect of God which He reveals to Man, is to the Hasidim not the Creator but the First Creation. The idea is derived from Saadia whose doctrine of divine glory was intended to serve as an explanation of the Biblical anthropomorphisms and the appearance of God in the vision of the prophets. According to him, God, who remains infinite and unknown also in the role of Creator, has produced the glory as “a created light, the first of all creations.”100 This Kavod is “the great radiance called Shekhinah” and it is also identical with the ruah ha-kodesh, the “holy spirit”, out of whom there speaks the voice and word of God.» — el Kavod no es para los hasidim el Creador sino la Primera Creación. Lo deriva de Saadia: Dios, que permanece infinito e incognoscible aun como Creador, ha producido la gloria como una luz creada, la primera de todas las creaciones

«Philo thought that the logos, the divine ‘word’ acted as an intermediary in the process of Creation. This Philonic doctrine of creation was developed by these sectarians, who for a long time moved on the fringe of rabbinic Judaism, in a somewhat crude form which, incidentally, had been ascribed already in earlier writings to isolated heretics.117 According to them, God did not create the world directly, but through the intermediary of an angel, whether this latter emanated from Him or was himself a created being. This angel, who thus appears as creator or demiurge, is also defined as the subject of all Biblical anthropomorphisms and as the being which is perceived in the vision of the prophets.» — la doctrina filónica del logos como intermediario, desarrollada en forma más tosca por sectarios al margen del judaísmo rabínico: Dios no creó el mundo directamente sino por medio de un ángel, que aparece así como creador o demiurgo y como sujeto de todos los antropomorfismos bíblicos

«It is by no means impossible that the cherub on the throne was originally nothing but the transformed logos, especially if one takes into account the fact that for the pre-Hasidic mystics—as we have seen in the previous lecture—the appearance on the throne is precisely that of the Creator of the world. Among the Hasidim, who saw no particular problem in the idea of the infinite God as the Creator of the finite things, the angel lost this character; nevertheless, he is given attributes which almost make a second God out of him.» — la hipótesis, enunciada como tal: el querubín del trono pudo no ser en origen sino el logos transformado. El apoyo es interno y el límite también — entre los hasidim el ángel perdió ese carácter, pero se le dan atributos que casi hacen de él un segundo Dios

«To the question how such ideas could have penetrated to the pious German Hasidim, several answers are possible. In the first place, such logos speculations may have become part and parcel of orthodox Jewish Gnosticism already in some Merkabah texts of whose existence the Hasidim had knowledge. Secondly, there is the possibility that the Hasidim came into direct contact with heretical thoughts. Moses Taku mentions such writings which came from the East and wandered in the twelfth century through Russia to Regensburg, at that time one of the chief centres of trade with the Slav countries.121 Moreover, we know from newly discovered fragments of a book whose author was Samuel ben Kalonymus, the father of Jehudah the Hasid, that “among the heretical scholars there are a few who know of something like a reflection of the mysteries [of the Kavod], though not of their substance.”122 Samuel the Hasid himself is known on good authority to have travelled outside Germany for several years and may well have come into contact with Jewish sectarians or heretics and their writings.» — las vías de transmisión, ofrecidas en plural y sin cerrar: que la especulación logoica ya estuviera en textos merkabá conocidos por los hasidim, o el contacto directo con escritos venidos de Oriente que en el siglo XII pasaron por Rusia hasta Ratisbona

«It has been argued that the mystical theology of the Spanish Kabbalists and that of the German Hasidim represent two different schools of thought which have nothing whatsoever in common. The Spaniards, according to this reading of the facts, followed in the footsteps of the Neoplatonists, while the typical Hasidic conceptions go back to oriental mythology.128 This appears to me to be an oversimplification. The fact is that Neoplatonic thought came to be known among both groups, but with the difference that in Spain and Provence these ideas became a potent factor in transforming the character of the early Kabbalism, which was almost entirely a Gnostical system, whereas in Germany the elements of such speculations as they engendered failed to make a lasting impression on Hasidic thought.» — contra la tesis de las dos escuelas sin nada en común, que califica de simplificación excesiva: el pensamiento neoplatónico llegó a los dos grupos, con la diferencia de que en España transformó un kabbalismo temprano casi enteramente gnóstico y en Alemania no dejó huella duradera

«According to this doctrine, every “lower” form of existence, including lifeless things,—“even the wood block” to say nothing of even lower forms of life, has its archetype, demuth.130 In this conception we recognize the traits not only of Plato’s theory of ideas, but also of the astral theory of correspondence between higher and lower planes, and of the astrological doctrine that everything has its “star.”» — la doctrina de los arquetipos que domina La ciencia del alma de Eleazar y que es ajena a Saadia: toda forma inferior de existencia, incluidas las cosas sin vida, tiene su arquetipo. Scholem reconoce ahí tres hebras a la vez — la teoría platónica de las ideas, la correspondencia astral entre planos y la doctrina de que todo tiene su estrella

«A sentence from Isaac Hacohen of Soria (about 1270) illustrates the twin sources recognized by the Kabbalists as authoritative. “In our generation there are but a few, here and there, who have received tradition from the ancients … or have been vouchsafed the grace of divine inspiration.” Tradition and intuition are bound together and this would explain why Kabbalism could be deeply conservative and intensely revolutionary. Even “traditionalists” do not shrink from innovations, sometimes far-reaching, which are confidently set forth as interpretations of the ancients or as revelation of a mystery which Providence had seen fit to conceal from previous generations.» — las dos fuentes de autoridad que los cabalistas reconocen: recibir tradición de los antiguos, o serle otorgada la gracia de la inspiración divina. De que tradición e intuición vayan atadas deriva por qué el kabbalismo pudo ser a la vez hondamente conservador e intensamente revolucionario

«This pseudepigraphy was, in my opinion, based on two impulses, psychological and historic. The psychological stimulus emanates from modesty and the feeling that a Kabbalist who had been vouchsafed the gift of inspiration should shun ostentation. The historic impulse, on the other hand, was bound up with the desire to influence the writer’s contemporaries. Hence the search for historic continuity and the sanctification of authority, and the tendency to lend to Kabbalistic literature the lustre of some great name from Biblical or Talmudic times. The Zohar, or the “Book of Splendor”, is the most famous, but by no means the sole example, of such pseudepigraphy.» — los dos impulsos de la pseudoepigrafía, marcados como opinión suya: el psicológico —la modestia de quien recibió inspiración— y el histórico, el deseo de influir sobre los contemporáneos, de donde la búsqueda de continuidad y el lustre de un gran nombre. El Zóhar es el ejemplo más famoso, pero de ningún modo el único

«I mean the word devekuth, which signifies “adhesion,” or “being joined,” viz., to God. This is regarded as the ultimate goal of religious perfection. Devekuth can be ecstasy, but its meaning is far more comprehensive. It is a perpetual being-with-God, an intimate union and conformity of the human and the divine will.5 Yet even the rapturous descriptions of this state of mind which abound in later Hasidic literature retain a proper sense of distance, or, if you like, of incommensurateness. Many writers deliberately place devekuth above any form of ecstasy which seeks the extinction of the world and the self in the union with God.» — devekuth —adhesión, estar unido a Dios— es el término con que esta literatura nombra lo que en otras se llama unio mystica. La acotación va en la misma frase: muchos autores colocan deliberadamente el devekuth POR ENCIMA de toda forma de éxtasis que busque la extinción del mundo y del yo

«it is only in extremely rare cases that ecstasy signifies actual union with God, in which the human individuality abandons itself to the rapture of complete submersion in the divine stream. Even in this ecstatic frame of mind, the Jewish mystic almost invariably retains a sense of the distance between the Creator and His creature. The latter is joined to the former, and the point where the two meet is of the greatest interest to the mystic, but he does not regard it as constituting anything so extravagant as identity of Creator and creature.» — el límite del éxtasis en la mística judía: solo en casos rarísimos significa unión real con abandono de la individualidad. Aun en éxtasis, el místico judío casi invariablemente retiene el sentido de la distancia entre Creador y criatura

«development of two opposing schools of thought in Spanish Kabbalism, schools which I should like to call the ecstatic and the theosophical. Of the latter I shall have something to say in the following lectures. For all their differences, the two belong together and, only if both are understood, do we obtain something like a comprehensive picture of Spanish Kabbalism.» — la partición que organiza el resto del libro: dos escuelas opuestas del kabbalismo español, la extática y la teosófica, cuyos puntos culminantes —Abulafia y el Zóhar— se escribieron casi simultáneamente. El límite es la tesis: pese a sus diferencias van juntas

«That probably is also one of the reasons why the Kabbalists refrained from publishing them. Very likely they feared that once this technique of meditation, which had a very broad appeal, became publicly known, its use would no longer be restricted to the elect. Certainly the success of Abulafia’s writing made the ever-present danger of a clash between the mystical revelation and that of Mount Sinai seem more real than ever. Thus, the whole school of practical mysticism, which Abulafia himself called Prophetic Kabbalism, continued to lead an underground life. By witholding his writings from the public, the Kabbalists undoubtedly sought to eliminate the danger that people might go in for ecstatic adventures without due preparation and lay dangerous claims to visionary powers.» — por qué los cabalistas no publicaron a Abulafia, dicho como probabilidad: temían que una técnica de meditación de tan amplio alcance dejara de estar restringida a los elegidos. Y el peligro concreto que nombra es el choque entre la revelación mística y la del Sinaí

«During these years of travel, he steeped himself in philosophy and conceived for Maimonides an admiration that proved lifelong. For him there was no antithesis between mysticism and the doctrines of Maimonides. He rather considered his own mystical theory as the final step forward from the “Guide of the Perplexed” to which he wrote a curious mystical commentary.» — la relación de Abulafia con Maimónides, que no es de ruptura: admiración de por vida, ninguna antítesis entre misticismo y doctrina maimonidiana, y su propia teoría concebida como el paso final hacia adelante desde la Guía de perplejos

«In the same way Abulafia tries to connect his theories with those of Maimonides.19 According to him, only the “Guide” and the “Book of Creation” together represent the true theory of Kabbalism.» — la fórmula de esa conexión, en boca de Abulafia: solo la Guía y el Libro de la Creación juntos representan la verdadera teoría del kabbalismo

«These connections of Abulafia’s do not, however, testify to a special inclination to Christian ideas as some scholars have assumed.35 On the contrary, his antagonism to Christianity is very outspoken and intense.36 He sometimes, indeed, intentionally makes use—among many other associations—of formulae which sound quite trinitarian, immediately giving them a meaning which has nothing whatsoever to do with the trinitarian idea of God.» — corrige a los eruditos que leyeron sus contactos con místicos no judíos como inclinación hacia ideas cristianas: al contrario, su antagonismo al cristianismo es declarado. Y explica el equívoco — usa a veces, deliberadamente, fórmulas de sonido trinitario a las que da un sentido que nada tiene que ver

«He says: “I found a strange man with whose writings the contents of the Zohar coincide most accurately down to the minutest details. This fact struck me at once with the first writing of his which came into my hands. But now that I have read many of his works and have come to know his life, his principles, and his character, there cannot exist any longer even the slightest doubt that we now have the author of the Zohar.”43 This seems to me an extraordinary example of how a judgment proclaimed with conviction as certainly true may nevertheless be entirely wrong in every detail. The truth is that no two things could be more different than the outlook of the Zohar and that of Abulafia.» — la adjudicación del Zóhar a Abulafia en las palabras del propio Landauer, seguida del juicio de Scholem: ejemplo extraordinario de cómo un juicio proclamado con convicción puede estar equivocado en cada detalle. Se consigna la hipótesis con su rechazo, ambas citadas

«Abulafia’s aim, as he himself has expressed it, is “to unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it,”45 “All the inner forces and the hidden souls in man are distributed and differentiated in the bodies. It is, however, in the nature of all of them that when their knots are untied they return to their origin, which is one without any duality and which comprises the multiplicity.”46 The “untying” is, as it were, the return from multiplicity and separation towards the original unity.» — el fin declarado por Abulafia: destapar el alma, desatar los nudos que la atan. Desatados esos nudos, las fuerzas internas vuelven a su origen, que es uno sin dualidad

«The “seals,” which are impressed on the soul, protect it against the flood and guarantee its normal functioning. Why is the soul, as it were, sealed up?» — los sellos impresos en el alma no son un defecto sino una protección: la resguardan de la inundación y garantizan su funcionamiento normal

«An object which fulfills all these conditions he believes himself to have found in the Hebrew alphabet, in the letters which make up the written language. It is not enough, though an important step forward, that the soul should be occupied with the meditation of abstract truths, for even there it remains too closely bound to their specific meaning. Rather is it Abulafia’s purpose to present it with something not merely abstract but also not determinable as an object in the strict sense, for everything so determined has an importance and an individuality of its own. Basing himself upon the abstract and non-corporeal nature of script, he develops a theory of the mystical contemplation of letters and their configurations, as the constituents of God’s name. For this is the real and, if I may say so, the peculiarly Jewish object of mystical contemplation: The Name of God, which is something absolute, because it reflects the hidden meaning and totality of existence; the Name through which everything else acquires its meaning and which yet to the human mind has no concrete, particular meaning of its own. In short, Abulafia believes that whoever succeeds in making this great Name of God, the least concrete and perceptible thing in the world, the object of his meditation, is on the way to true mystical ecstasy.» — por qué el alfabeto hebreo y no otra cosa: Abulafia busca un objeto de meditación absoluto, capaz de adquirir la mayor importancia sin tener importancia particular propia, porque todo objeto determinado atrae la atención hacia sí y frustra la purgación mental

«Starting from this concept, Abulafia expounds a peculiar discipline which he calls Hokhmath ha-Tseruf, i.e. “science of the combination of letters.” This is described as a methodical guide to meditation with the aid of letters and their configurations. The individual letters of their combinations need have no ‘meaning’ in the ordinary sense; it is even an advantage if they are meaningless, as in that case they are less likely to distract us.» — hokhmath ha-tseruf, ciencia de la combinación de letras: las letras no necesitan significado en el sentido ordinario, y es incluso una ventaja que carezcan de él, porque así distraen menos

«The science of combination is a music of pure thought, in which the alphabet takes the place of the musical scale. The whole system shows a fairly close resemblance to musical principles, applied not to sounds but to thought in meditation.» — la ciencia de la combinación como música del pensamiento puro, con el alfabeto en el lugar de la escala musical: el sistema se parece de cerca a principios musicales, aplicados no a sonidos sino al pensamiento en meditación

«Articulation, mivta, writing, miktav, and thought, mahshav, thus form three superimposed layers of meditation. Letters are the elements of every one of them, elements which manifest themselves in ever more spiritual forms.» — los tres estratos superpuestos de la meditación —articulación, escritura y pensamiento—, cuyos elementos son las letras, manifestándose en cada uno bajo formas cada vez más espirituales

«the modern reader of these writings will be most astonished to find a detailed description of a method which Abulafia and his followers call dillug and kefitsah, “jumping” or “skipping” viz., from one conception to another. In fact this is nothing else than a very remarkable method of using associations as a way of meditation. It is not wholly the “free play of association” as known to psychoanalysis; rather it is the way of passing from one association to another determined by certain rules which are, however, sufficiently lax. Every “jump” opens a new sphere, defined by certain formal, not material, characteristics. Within this sphere the mind may freely associate. The “jumping” unites, therefore, elements of free and guided association and is said to assure quite extraordinary results as far as the “widening of the consciousness” of the initiate is concerned. The “jumping” brings to light hidden processes of the mind, “it liberates us from the prison of the natural sphere and leads us to the boundaries of the divine sphere.”» — dillug y kefitsah, saltar de una concepción a otra. El límite es lo que hace utilizable la comparación con el psicoanálisis: no es juego libre de asociación, sino paso de una asociación a otra determinado por reglas laxas pero reglas

«In the opinion of Abulafia, his own doctrine of prophetic ecstasy is in the last resort nothing but the doctrine of prophecy advanced by the Jewish philosophers, more especially by Maimonides, who also defines prophecy as a temporary union of the human and the divine intellect, deliberately brought about through systematic preparation. The prophetic faculty, according to this doctrine, represents the union of the human intellect at the highest stage of its development, with a cosmic influence normally domiciled in the intelligible world, the so-called active intellect (intellectus agens). The influx of this active intellect into the soul manifests itself as prophetic vision. Abulafia is concerned to prove the substantial identity of this theory of prophecy, which was widely recognized in the Middle Ages, with his own doctrine.66 These rationalizations cannot, however, obscure the fact that his teachings represent but a Judaized version of that ancient spiritual technique which has found its classical expression in the practices of the Indian mystics who follow the system known as Yoga.» — dos afirmaciones distintas que no hay que confundir: la de Abulafia, que identifica su doctrina con la profecía de los filósofos judíos y sobre todo de Maimónides; y la de Scholem, que la acota — esas racionalizaciones no ocultan que sus enseñanzas son una versión judaizada de una técnica espiritual antigua cuya expresión clásica está en el Yoga

«This spiritual mentor—in Indian terminology the Guru—personifies the intellectus agens through the mythical figure of the angel Metatron, but he is also, according to certain passages, God Himself as Shaddai.72 Of Metatron, the Talmud says “his name is like the name of his master,”73 the Hebrew word for master also signifying “teacher.” Abulafia applies this statement to the relation between the visionary and his Guru, his spiritual teacher. Its significance is seen to lie in the fact that in the state of ecstasy, man becomes aware of his intrinsic relationship with God. Although he is apparently confronted with his master, he is yet in some way identical with him. The state of ecstasy, in other words, represents something like a mystical transfiguration of the individual.» — el mentor espiritual, al que Scholem llama con término indio el Guru, personifica el intellectus agens en la figura mítica del ángel Metatrón, y en ciertos pasajes es Dios mismo como Shaddai

«A man who gains his understanding of the essentials of reality from books is called Hakham, a scholar. If he obtains it from the Kabbalah, that is to say from one who has himself obtained it from the contemplation of the divine names or from another Kabbalist, then he is called Mevin, that is, one who has insight, but if his understanding is derived from his own heart, from reflecting upon what he knows of reality, then he is called Daatan, that is, a gnostic.» — los tres grados del conocimiento según un fragmento inédito de Abulafia: Hakham, el erudito que lo obtiene de los libros; Mevin, el que lo recibe de la Kabbalah; y Daatan, un gnóstico, cuyo entendimiento sale de su propio corazón

«For now he is no longer separated from his Master, and behold he is his Master and his Master is he; for he is so intimately adhering to Him [it is here that the term Devekuth is used], that he cannot by any means be separated from Him, for he is He [“he is He” being a famous formula of advanced Moslem pantheism].» — el extremo de esa doctrina, y los corchetes de la cita son de Scholem y no de Abulafia: él anota dentro del verbatim que ahí se usa el término Devekuth y que «he is He» es fórmula famosa del panteísmo musulmán avanzado. Si se recorta la cita hay que decir de quién son las intercalaciones

«For what he calls the Path of the Names, the ancient Jewish Gnostics, as we have seen, employed another term, namely Maaseh Merkabah, literally translated “The Work of the Chariot,” because of the Celestial chariot which was supposed to carry the throne of God the Creator. Abulafia, with his penchant for playing upon words, introduces his new doctrine as the true Maaseh Merkabah—a term which can also be taken to mean “combination”. The theory of combining the letters and names of God—that is the true vision of the Merkabah.» — la reapropiación del término: lo que Abulafia llama Camino de los Nombres los gnósticos judíos antiguos lo llamaron Maaseh Merkabah, y él introduce su doctrina nueva como el verdadero Maaseh Merkabah

«It remains to be said that Abulafia is far from despising philosophical knowledge. Indeed, he even says in one place that philosophy and Kabbalah both owe their existence to the active intellect, with the difference that Kabbalism represents a more profound manifestation of the spirit and probes into a deeper and more spiritual region.90 At the same time, however, he is definitely of the opinion that certain philosophical problems are meaningless, except insofar as they serve to lead the mind astray.» — Abulafia no desprecia el saber filosófico y dice que filosofía y Kabbalah deben ambas su existencia al intelecto activo. El límite va en la misma frase: sostiene a la vez que ciertos problemas filosóficos carecen de sentido salvo para extraviar la mente

«In countless polemics he condemns magic as a falsification of true mysticism;94 he does admit a magic directed towards one’s own self, a magic of inwardness—I think that is the general name one could give to his doctrine—but none which aims at bringing about external sensory results, even though the means may be inward, permissible and even sacred. Such magic is possible, according to Abulafia, but he who practices it is accursed.» — la distinción que el corpus necesita nítida: Abulafia condena la magia como falsificación del misticismo verdadero, y admite una magia dirigida al propio yo, una magia de interioridad —el nombre es de Scholem—, pero ninguna que busque resultados sensibles externos. Esa magia es posible, dice, pero quien la practica queda maldito

«But this path runs along the border between mysticism and magic, and for all the irreconcilable difference that appears to exist between the two, their interrelation is more profound than is usually taken for granted. There are certain points at which the belief of the mystic easily becomes that of the magician, and Abulafia’s magic of inwardness, which I have just outlined, is one of them. Although he himself escaped the danger of sliding insensibly from the meditative contemplation of the holy names into magical practices aimed at external objects, many of his successors fell into confusion and tended to expect from the inward path the power to change the outer world. The magician’s dream of power and lordship over nature by mere words and strained intention, found its dreamers in the Ghetto also and formed manifold combinations with the theoretical and practical interests of mysticism proper. Historically, Kabbalism presents itself almost invariably as a combination of the two.» — la consecuencia histórica y la afirmación más fuerte del pasaje para esta base: el camino hacia dentro corre por la frontera entre misticismo y magia, su interrelación es más honda de lo que suele suponerse, y históricamente el kabbalismo se presenta casi invariablemente como combinación de ambos

«An anonymous disciple of Abulafia’s wrote a book in 1295, apparently in Palestine, in which he set forth the basic ideas of prophetic Kabbalism.102 Discussing three paths of “expansion”, i.e. of the progress of the spirit from corporeality to an ever purer spiritual apprehension of objects, he has interpolated an autobiographical account. In it he describes very accurately and without doubt reliably his own development, as well as his experiences with Abulafia and the latter’s Kabbalah. He does not name Abulafia, but from the description he gives and the kindred ideas he employs, there can be no doubt to whom he alludes. This book is called Shaare Tsedek, “Gates of Justice.” Four manuscripts of it are extant. But only two of them103 contain this autobiographical account which obviously in the other two has fallen a prey to that previously mentioned self-censorship of the Kabbalists who are adverse to confessions of an all too intimate character concerning mystical experiences, and before whom the author deems it necessary to apologize for his candor.» — el encuadre documental que permite citar lo que sigue sin falsear la voz: un discípulo ANÓNIMO de Abulafia escribió en 1295 el Shaare Tsedek, con un relato autobiográfico interpolado que solo dos de los cuatro manuscritos conservan — en los otros dos cayó víctima de la autocensura cabalística ante las confesiones demasiado íntimas

«The vulgar way is that which, so I learned, is practiced by Moslem ascetics. They employ all manner of devices to shut out from their souls all ‘natural forms’, every image of the familiar, natural world. Then, they say, when a spiritual form, an image from the spiritual world, enters their soul, it is isolated in their imagination and intensifies the imagination to such a degree that they can determine beforehand that which is to happen to us. Upon inquiry, I learned that they summon the Name, ALLAH, as it is in the language of Ishmael. I investigated further and I found that, when they pronounce these letters, they direct their thought completely away from every possible ‘natural form’, and the very letters ALLAH and their diverse powers work upon them. They are carried off into a trance without realizing how, since no Kabbalah has been transmitted to them. This removal of all natural forms and images from the soul is called with them Effacement.» — el primero de los tres caminos de expansión que distingue el discípulo: el de los ascetas musulmanes, que invocan el Nombre y apartan el pensamiento de toda forma natural. Su límite lo pone el propio narrador — son arrastrados al trance sin darse cuenta de cómo, puesto que no se les ha transmitido Kabbalah

«Much rather is this the “Path of the Names”: The less understandable they are, the higher their order, until you arrive at the activity of a force which is no longer in your control, but rather your reason and your thought is in its control.» — la regla que el maestro da al discípulo, dentro del relato: no detenerse en ninguna forma finita por alta que sea, porque en el Camino de los Nombres cuanto menos comprensibles son, más alto su orden

«I set out to take up the Great Name of God, consisting of seventy-two names, permuting and combining it.107 But when I had done this for a little while, behold, the letters took on in my eyes the shape of great mountains, strong trembling seized me and I could summon no strength, my hair stood on end, and it was as if I were not in this world. At once I fell down, for I no longer felt the least strength in any of my limbs. And behold, something resembling speech emerged from my heart and came to my lips and forced them to move. I thought—perhaps this is, God forbid, a spirit of madness that has entered into me? But behold, I saw it uttering wisdom. I said: ‘This is indeed the spirit of wisdom.’» — el episodio del Gran Nombre: al poco de permutarlo, las letras tomaron la forma de grandes montañas, un temblor lo asió y algo semejante a un habla le forzó los labios. La duda va dentro de la propia cita —si no será un espíritu de locura— y se resuelve por el contenido

«But since for this science there is no naturalistic evidence, its premises being as spiritual as are its inferences, I was forced to tell this story of the experience that befell me. Indeed, there is no proof in this science except experience itself … That is why I say, to the man who contests this path, that I can give him an experimental proof, namely, my own evidence of the spiritual results of my own experiences in the science of letters according to the book Yetsirah.» — la declaración epistemológica del relato y la razón que da para contarlo: como esta ciencia carece de evidencia naturalista, se vio forzado a narrar la experiencia — no hay prueba en esta ciencia salvo la experiencia misma

«On this account seclusion in a separate house is prescribed, and if this be a house in which no [outside] noise can be heard, the better. At the beginning it is advisable to decorate the house with fresh greens in order to cheer the vegetable soul which a man possesses side by side with his animal soul. Next, one should pray and sing psalms in a pleasant melodious voice, and [read] the Torah with fervor, in order to cheer the animal soul which a man possesses side by side with his rational soul. Next, one directs his imagination to intelligible things and to understanding how one thing proceeds from another. Next, one proceeds to the moving of letters which [in their combinations] are unintelligible, thus to detach the soul [from the senses] and to cleanse it of all the forms formerly within it.» — la secuencia preparatoria, escalonada por facultades del alma: reclusión, verdor fresco para alegrar el alma vegetal, salmos y Torá con voz melodiosa para alegrar el alma animal, y solo entonces el movimiento de letras ininteligibles

«Its place in the history of Kabbalism can be gauged from the fact that alone among the whole of post-Talmudic rabbinical literature it became a canonical text, which for a period of several centuries actually ranked with the Bible and the Talmud. This unique position, however, was only achieved gradually. It took the better part of two centuries to raise the Zohar from the comparative obscurity of its early beginnings to the foremost eminence in Kabbalistic literature.» — el rango del Zóhar medido por un hecho institucional: solo él, en toda la literatura rabínica postalmúdica, llegó a ser texto canónico y a equipararse durante siglos con la Biblia y el Talmud. El límite es inmediato — esa posición se alcanzó de forma gradual y llevó casi dos siglos

«The Zohar is written in pseudepigraphic form, almost, one might say, in the form of a mystical novel. In itself, this is not a new departure in style, for the pseudepigraphic form had been employed by many previous writers, including Kabbalists. Already the authors of the Book Bahir made use of the device and spoke through the mouths of older authorities—some of them mere names of fiction, such as Rabbi Amora or Rabbi Rehumai. But neither before nor since has any Kabbalist shown anything like the same delight in letting his fancy elaborate upon the details of his mystification. Against the background of an imaginative Palestinian setting, the famous Mishnah teacher, Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, is seen wandering about with his son Eleazar, his friends and his disciples, and discoursing with them on all manner of things human and divine. The literary method employed is modelled on that of the Midrash, that is to say, where possible it avoids theoretical, let alone systematic, disquisition; preference is given to homiletics.» — la forma: pseudoepígrafe, casi una novela mística. No es novedad de estilo —el Bahir ya hablaba por boca de autoridades antiguas—, pero ningún cabalista antes ni después mostró igual deleite en elaborar los detalles de su mistificación

«The more genuinely and characteristically Jewish an idea or doctrine is, the more deliberately unsystematic is it. Its principle of construction is not that of a logical system.» — la generalización con que justifica esa forma: cuanto más genuina y característicamente judía es una idea, más deliberadamente asistemática es, y su principio de construcción no es el de un sistema lógico

«Of the eighteen items which make up the first group and may be said to constitute what is to all intents and purposes the real Zohar, it can be definitely asserted that they are the work of one author. It is neither true that they were written at different periods or by different authors, nor is it possible to detect different historical layers within the various parts themselves. Here and there a sentence or a few words may have been added at some later date, but in the main the distinction—still popular with some writers—between so-called authentic parts and subsequent interpolations does not bear serious investigation.» — afirma que los dieciocho ítems del Zóhar real son obra de un solo autor, sin capas históricas. Concede lo mínimo —una frase puede ser añadido— y descarta lo demás: la distinción entre partes auténticas e interpolaciones no resiste investigación seria

«The Aramaic of the Zohar is a purely artificial affair, a literary language employed by a writer who obviously knew no other Aramaic than that of certain Jewish literary documents, and who fashioned his own style in accordance with definite subjective criteria. The expectation expressed by some scholars that philological investigation would reveal the older strata of the Zohar has not been borne out by actual research. Throughout these writings, the spirit of mediaeval Hebrew, specifically the Hebrew of the thirteenth century, is transparent behind the Aramaic facade.» — el arameo del Zóhar es un asunto puramente artificial, lengua literaria de un escritor que no conocía otro arameo que el de ciertos documentos judíos. Contra la expectativa de que la filología revelaría estratos más antiguos, sostiene que se trasluce el hebreo del siglo XIII detrás de la fachada aramea

«He stretches the meaning of ancient words in an entirely arbitrary fashion and frequently employs them for the purpose of paraphrasing mystical termini technici.51 He also likes to play on double meanings by using ambiguous expressions in which the original and the secondary meaning give an opaque character to the word.52 He is careful to avoid expressions which appear to have too much of a modernistic sound, such as Kabbalah and Sefiroth.» — el procedimiento léxico, y con él el rastro por el que se lo data: estira el sentido de palabras antiguas de modo arbitrario, juega con dobles sentidos, y evita cuidadosamente los términos de sonido moderno como «Kabbalah» y «Sefiroth»

«The Palestine which is described in all its parts is not the real country such as it exists or existed, but an imaginary one. So far from proving that the Zohar originated in Palestine,61 the various topographical and sundry descriptions of the natural background of the miraculous actions and happenings attributed to Rabbi Simeon and his friends provide the most convincing proof possible that the author had never so much as set foot in Palestine and that his knowledge of the country was derived entirely from literary sources.» — la Palestina del Zóhar no es el país real sino uno imaginario, y lejos de probar que el libro se originó allí, las descripciones topográficas son la prueba más convincente posible de que el autor JAMÁS puso el pie en Palestina

«all those parts which I propose to call the real Zohar are to be defined as the work of one author, and that the Raya Mehemna and Tikkunim must be regarded as an imitation of it.» — la conclusión que dice invariable, se ataque forma o contenido: las partes que propone llamar el Zóhar real son obra de un solo autor, y la Raya Mehemna y los Tikkunim deben tenerse por imitación

«Among the writings which must be regarded as his principal sources are the Babylonian Talmud, the Midrash Rabba in its various parts, the Midrash to the Psalms, the Pesiktoth and the Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, and also the Targumim, and Rashi’s commentary to the Bible and the Talmud. Over and above these there emerges a long list of other writings of which use is made more occasionally.74 As Bacher has shown in a brilliant essay on the subject,75 he drew heavily upon the mediaeval Scriptural commentators.» — las fuentes principales, nombradas — Talmud babilónico, Midrash Rabba, Pesiktoth, Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, Targumim y Rashi—; el uso intensivo de los comentaristas bíblicos medievales lo adjudica expresamente a Bacher, no a sí mismo

«The latest ascertainable source of a highly important terminus technicus adopted by the Zohar is Joseph Gikatila’s Ginnath Egoz, the “Nut Garden,” which was written in 1274. This book is the source both of the term used to describe the “primordial point,” or mystical centre, which one encounters in widely separated parts of the Zohar,80 and of the highly original manner in which the conception of the primordial point is linked with that of the primordial Torah conceived as the wisdom of God.» — el dato que fija el terminus post quem: la fuente más tardía comprobable es el Ginnath Egoz de Gikatila, escrito en 1274

«The task is made all the more intricate and amusing because the author not only fails to indicate his real sources but supplies fantastic references to non-existent ones. The whole book is full of fictitious quotations and other bogus references to imaginary writings which have caused even serious students to postulate the existence of lost sources for the mystical parts of the Zohar. But these “quotations” from the Book of Adam, the Book of Enoch, the Book of King Solomon, the Book of Rav Hamnuna Sava, etc.» — dato de método para el corpus: el autor no solo omite sus fuentes reales, suministra referencias fantásticas a fuentes inexistentes. El libro está lleno de citas ficticias y remisiones apócrifas que han llevado a estudiosos serios a postular fuentes perdidas. Una obra citada no es una obra existente

«the idea of a “left emanation,” i.e. of an ordered hierarchy of the potencies of evil, the realm of Satan, which, like the realm of light, is organized in ten spheres or stages. The ten “holy” Sefiroth have their counterparts in ten “unholy” or “impure” ones; the latter, however, are distinguished from the former in that each one has a highly personal character. Each therefore has a personal name proper to itself, while the names of the divine Sefiroth merely represent abstract qualities such as wisdom, intelligence, grace, beauty, etc.» — la emanación de la izquierda: jerarquía ordenada de las potencias del mal organizada como la de la luz en diez esferas, con una diferencia estructural — cada una de las impuras tiene carácter personal y nombre propio, mientras los nombres de las sefirot divinas representan cualidades abstractas

«the individuality of the author is no less clearly expressed in what he omits than in what he emphasizes. To take a particularly striking example, he completely ignores a form of speculation very popular among thirteenth century Kabbalists, namely, the idea of successive periods of cosmic development, each lasting seven thousand years, in which the universal process follows certain theosophic laws, until in the fifty thousandth year, the Great Jubilee, it returns to its source.» — regla de método aplicada al Zóhar: la individualidad del autor se expresa tanto en lo que omite como en lo que subraya. El ejemplo es que ignora por completo la doctrina, muy popular entre cabalistas del XIII, de los periodos cósmicos de siete mil años

«One of the most striking results to which I have been led by a closer analysis of the Zohar is the recognition that the Midrash Ha-Neelam to the first sections (Sidras) of the Torah, and the Midrash Ha-Neelam to the Book of Ruth are the two oldest constituents of the whole work.» — el resultado que él mismo destaca como sorprendente y que invierte la opinión corriente: los dos Midrash Ha-Neelam son los componentes más antiguos del conjunto, y no un añadido tardío

«We have seen that the author was familiar with a group of writings of which the latest was written in 1274. This gives us a definite terminus post quern, the significance of which is enhanced by the general character of the allusions made both in the Midrash Ha-Neelam and in other chapters to contemporary events and institutions. From these allusions it is not difficult to draw the inference that the author was writing at a time when Palestine, after the vicissitudes of the Crusades, was again in the hands of the Arabs.108 There is no lack of polemical references to Christianity and Islam,109 nor of remarks alluding to the moral atmosphere of Jewry which harmonize with what we know of the conditions around 1280. The data can be narrowed down a little further. In several places the author introduces apocalyptical calculations all of which set the end of exile around the year 1300 and the following years.110 In one passage, however, the assumption is made that since the destruction of the Second Temple—in the year 68, according to the Jewish calendar—twelve hundred years of exile have already passed, and that Israel is now living in the darkness which precedes the dawn.111 In other words, he is writing some years after 1268.» — la cadena entera de la datación con sus eslabones nombrados: terminus post quem de 1274, Palestina otra vez en manos árabes tras las Cruzadas, cálculos apocalípticos hacia 1300, y mil doscientos años desde la destrucción del Segundo Templo — de donde escribe algunos años después de 1268

«As late as 1340, Joseph ibn Wakkar of Toledo—almost the only Kabbalist known to us who wrote in Arabic123—warned his readers to exercise caution in using the Zohar as it contained “a great many errors.”» — la crítica temprana, para que la recepción no se lea como unánime: todavía en 1340 Joseph ibn Wakkar de Toledo advertía cautela al usar el Zóhar porque contenía gran cantidad de errores

«Isaac of Acre, who did not himself speak to Moses de Leon’s widow but relates all this as second, or rather third hand information, also speaks of further researches, but unfortunately his account, as quoted by a later chronicler of the fifteenth century, breaks off at the very point where he proposes to disclose what he was told under solemn oath by a pupil of Moses de Leon about “the book Zohar which was written by Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai.”» — la acotación documental que impide usar el testimonio de la viuda como prueba: Isaac de Acre NO habló él mismo con ella y relata todo de segunda o tercera mano, y su relato se interrumpe justo donde iba a revelar lo que un discípulo le había contado bajo juramento

«One thing is certain: the actual relationship between the Zohar and Moses de Leon’s other writings is the reverse of that assumed by Graetz.» — su contra-adjudicación en una línea: la relación real entre el Zóhar y los demás escritos de Moses de Leon es la inversa de la que Graetz supuso, porque el análisis de los libros firmados prueba que presuponen el Zóhar ya terminado

«Pseudepigraphy is far removed from forgery. The mark of immorality, which is inseparable from falsehood, does not stain it, and for this reason it has always been admitted as a legitimate category of religious literature of the highest moral order. The historian of religion in particular has no cause to express moral condemnation of the pseudepigraphist. The Quest for Truth knows of adventures that are all its own, and in a vast number of cases has arrayed itself in pseudepigraphic garb. The further a man progresses along his own road in this Quest for Truth, the more he might become convinced that his own road must have already been trodden by others, ages before him.» — la distinción que este corpus necesita explícita: la pseudoepigrafía está muy lejos de la falsificación y siempre se la admitió como categoría legítima de literatura religiosa del más alto orden moral. De ahí una regla de oficio — el historiador de la religión no tiene motivo para condenar moralmente al pseudoepígrafo

«By theosophy I mean that which was generally meant before the term became a label for a modern pseudoreligion,2 i.e. theosophy signifies a mystical doctrine, or school of thought, which purports to perceive and to describe the mysterious workings of the Divinity» — define «teosofía» deslindándola expresamente del rótulo de la pseudo-religión moderna: doctrina o escuela mística que pretende percibir y describir las operaciones misteriosas de la Divinidad. El deslinde es dato, porque fija en qué acepción usa un término que en otras fichas del corpus significa otra cosa. Lectura restituida: la fuente imprime «pseudo-religion» con guion de corte que la herramienta une

«Theosophy postulates a kind of divine emanation whereby God, abandoning his self-contained repose, awakens to mysterious life; further, it maintains that the mysteries of creation reflect the pulsation of this divine life. Theosophists in this sense were Jacob Boehme and William Blake, to mention two famous Christian mystics.» — y su contenido: la teosofía postula una emanación divina por la cual Dios, abandonando su reposo autocontenido, despierta a vida misteriosa. Teósofos en ese sentido, dice, fueron Jacob Boehme y William Blake

«In the “Book of Creation” from which it was originally taken, Sefiroth simply meant numbers» — en el Libro de la Creación, de donde se tomó, Sefiroth significaba simplemente NÚMEROS; la evolución de la terminología mística lo llevó a significar la emergencia de poderes y emanaciones divinos. En la misma página aparta de paso una etimología falsa: sefirah no tiene relación con el griego sphaira

«The point to keep in mind is that the Sefiroth are not secondary or intermediary spheres which interpose between God and the universe. The author does not regard them as something comparable to, for example, the ‘middle stages’ of the Neoplatonists which have their place between the Absolute One and the world of the senses. In the Neoplatonic system, these emanations are “outside” the One, if it is possible to use that expression. There have been attempts to justify an analogous interpretation of the theology of the Zohar and to treat the Sefiroth as secondary stages or spheres outside of, or apart from the divine personality. These interpretations, which have been advanced above all by D. H. Joel,12 have the distinct advantage of avoiding the problem of God’s unity in the Sefiroth, but it may be said not unfairly that they ignore the crucial point and misrepresent the intention of the author. True, the Zohar frequently refers to the Sefiroth as stages, but they are plainly regarded not as the steps of a ladder between God and the world, but as various phases in the manifestation of the Divinity which proceed from and succeed each other.» — la corrección estructural: las sefirot NO son esferas secundarias o intermedias interpuestas entre Dios y el universo, ni comparables a los grados medios neoplatónicos, que están fuera del Uno. Cuando el Zóhar habla de grados no son peldaños de una escalera sino fases de la manifestación de la Divinidad

«The Torah is conceived as a vast corpus symbolicum representative of that hidden life in God which the theory of the Sefiroth attempts to describe. For the mystic who starts out with this assumption, every word is capable of becoming a symbol, and the most inconspicuous phrases or verses are precisely the ones into which at times the greatest importance is read.14 For the peculiar speculative genius which discovers in the Torah layer upon layer of hidden meaning, there is in principle no limit.» — la Torá concebida como vasto corpus symbolicum de la vida oculta en Dios: para el místico que parte de ese supuesto toda palabra puede volverse símbolo, y las frases más insignificantes son a veces aquellas en las que se lee la mayor importancia

«The Zohar is the first book in which the theory of the four methods of interpreting Scripture, originally developed by Christian exegetes, is taken up by a Jewish author.15 But of the four layers of meaning: the literal, the Aggadic or homiletic, the allegorical, and the mystical, in the last resort only the fourth— Raza, i.e. “The Mystery”, in the terminology of the Zohar— matters to the author.» — dato de filiación: el Zóhar es el PRIMER libro en que un autor judío recoge la teoría de los cuatro métodos de interpretar la Escritura, desarrollada originalmente por exégetas cristianos. Y su límite — de las cuatro capas solo la cuarta, el Misterio, le importa al autor

«The nature of this mystical symbolism is one of the main obstacles to a true understanding of a work of mystical exegesis like the Zohar, and yet this elaborate and often bizarre symbolism is the key to its particular religious world. Even a writer of the distinction of R. T. Herford who has given proof of his understanding of Judaism, speaks of a “symbolism which often appears to be wildly extravagant and sometimes gross and repulsive.”» — consigna la dificultad y la reacción que provoca, con un testigo nombrado: el simbolismo elaborado y a menudo bizarro es a la vez el principal obstáculo y la llave del mundo religioso del Zóhar, y aun R. T. Herford habla de un simbolismo que a veces parece burdo y repulsivo

«The ten Sefiroth constitute the mystical Tree of God or tree of divine power each representing a branch whose common root is unknown and unknowable. But En-Sof is not only the hidden Root of all Roots, it is also the sap of the tree; every branch representing an attribute, exists not by itself but by virtue of En-Sof, the hidden God. And this tree of God is also, as it were, the skeleton of the universe; it grows throughout the whole of creation and spreads its branches through all its ramifications. All mundane and created things exist only because something of the power of the Sefiroth lives and acts in them.» — las diez sefirot como Árbol místico de Dios, cada una una rama de raíz común incognoscible. Pero En-Sof no es solo la Raíz de todas las Raíces: es también la savia del árbol, y todas las cosas creadas existen solo porque algo del poder de las sefirot vive y actúa en ellas

«The simile of the man is as often used as that of the Tree. The Biblical word that man was created in the image of God means two things to the Kabbalist: first, that the power of the Sefiroth, the paradigm of divine life, exists and is active also in man. Secondly, that the world of the Sefiroth, that is to say the world of God the Creator, is capable of being visualized under the image of man the created. From this it follows that the limbs of the human body, to repeat the instance I have already given, are nothing but images of a certain spiritual mode of existence which manifests itself in the symbolic figure of Adam Kadmon, the primordial man.» — el símil del hombre, tan frecuente como el del Árbol: que el hombre fuera creado a imagen de Dios significa que el poder de las sefirot actúa también en él, y que el mundo de las sefirot es visualizable bajo la imagen del hombre creado, Adam Kadmon

«The primary start or wrench in which the introspective God is externalized and the light that shines inwardly made visible, this revolution of perspective, transforms En-Sof, the inexpressible fullness, into nothingness. It is this mystical ‘nothingness’ from which all the other stages of God’s gradual unfolding in the Sefiroth emanate and which the Kabbalists call the highest Sefirah, or the “supreme crown” of Divinity.» — la Nada mística definida como cambio de perspectiva y no como vacío: el arranque en que el Dios introspectivo se exterioriza transforma a En-Sof, la plenitud inexpresable, en nada — y de esa nada emanan todos los demás grados

«In the history of Kabbalism, theistic and pantheistic trends have frequently contended for mastery. This fact is sometimes obscured because the representatives of pantheism have generally endeavoured to speak the language of theism; cases of writers who openly put forward pantheistic views are rare.57 Most of the texts, and in particular the classical writings of the theosophic school, contain elements of both tendencies. The author of the Zohar inclines towards pantheism, a fact made even clearer by the Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon, but one would look in vain for confession of his faith beyond some vague formulae and hints at a fundamental unity of all things, stages and worlds. On the whole, his language is that of the theist, and some penetration is needed to lift its hidden and lambent pantheistic core to the light.» — aviso de lectura que vale para todo el corpus cabalístico: teísmo y panteísmo pugnaron a menudo por el dominio, y el hecho queda oscurecido porque los representantes del panteísmo se esforzaron por hablar el lenguaje del teísmo. El autor del Zóhar se inclina al panteísmo, pero su lengua es la del teísta y hace falta penetración para sacar el núcleo a la luz

«There is only one instance in which the Zohar refers to the relation of a mortal to the Divinity, to be exact, the Shekhinah, in terms of sexual symbolism. The exception is provided by Moses, the man of God; of him and of him alone it is said in a striking phrase that he had intercourse with the Shekhinah.72 Here for once, the continuous relation with the Divinity is pictured in terms of a mystical marriage between Moses and the Shekhinah.» — la excepción única, y por serlo importa: solo en un caso refiere el Zóhar la relación de un mortal con la Divinidad en términos de simbolismo sexual, y es Moisés, de quien y solo de quien se dice que tuvo trato con la Shekhinah

«The ninth Sefirath, Yesod, out of which all the higher Sefiroth— welded together in the image of the King—flow into the Shekhinah, is interpreted as the procreative life force dynamically active in the universe. Out of the hidden depth of this Sefirah the divine life overflows in the act of mystical procreation. The holy sign of circumcision is proof to the Kabbalist that within the limits of the holy law, these forces have their rightful place.» — Yesod, por donde las sefirot superiores fluyen a la Shekhinah, interpretada como la fuerza vital procreadora activa en el universo. Y el límite que el propio Zóhar pone: el signo de la circuncisión es prueba de que dentro de los límites de la ley santa esas fuerzas tienen su lugar legítimo

«Here as elsewhere, an unprejudiced analysis of this phenomenon would be of greater assistance for the understanding of the Zohar than the eloquent denunciation of so-called obscenities which Graetz and other detractors of this “book of lies” have permitted themselves. Charges of this kind simply misconstrue both the morality and the tendency of the Zohar, and are hardly relevant even to the literary form of presentation; but above all they completely ignore the problem presented by the resurrection of mythology in the heart of mystical Judaism, of which the Zohar is the classical representative.» — su respuesta a la acusación de obscenidad, y no la despacha por indignación sino por método: un análisis sin prejuicio ayudaría más que las denuncias de Graetz y otros detractores, que malinterpretan la moral de la obra e ignoran el problema que plantea — la resurrección de la mitología en el corazón del judaísmo místico

«In all the numerous references to the Shekhinah in the Talmud and the Midrashim—I have already referred in the second lecture to Abelson’s work on the subject—there is no hint that it represents a feminine element in God. Not a single metaphor employs such terms as Princess, Matron, Queen, or Bride to describe the Shekhinah. It is true that these terms frequently occur where reference is made to the Community of Israel in its relation to God, but for these writers the Community has not yet become a mystical hypostasis of some divine force; it is simply the personification of the real Israel.» — la búsqueda negativa que él mismo hace en las fuentes antiguas y que sostiene toda la afirmación siguiente: en las numerosas referencias a la Shekhinah del Talmud y los Midrashim no hay indicio de que represente un elemento femenino en Dios, ni una sola metáfora la llama Princesa, Matrona, Reina o Novia

«The introduction of this idea was one of the most important and lasting innovations of Kabbalism. The fact that it obtained recognition in spite of the obvious difficulty of reconciling it with the conception of the absolute unity of God, and that no other element of Kabbalism won such a degree of popular approval, is proof that it responded to a deep-seated religious need.» — y por tanto la Shekhinah femenina fue una de las innovaciones más importantes y duraderas del kabbalismo. El argumento con que lo mide: que obtuviera reconocimiento pese a la dificultad de conciliarla con la unidad absoluta de Dios prueba que respondía a una necesidad religiosa honda

«This fact is further proof, if proof were needed, that, so far from being Christian, the idea originally belonged to the sphere of pagan mythology. In the Gnostic speculations on the male and female aeons, i.e. divine potencies, which constitute the world of the pleroma, the ‘fullness’ of God, this thought assumed a new form in which it became known to the earliest Kabbalists through the medium of scattered fragments.» — la adjudicación de origen, y va CONTRA una filiación cristiana: que ya haya huellas en el Bahir prueba que la idea pertenecía originalmente a la esfera de la mitología pagana, y por la especulación gnóstica sobre eones masculinos y femeninos llegó a los primeros cabalistas

«In fact, moral evil, according to the Zohar, is always either something which becomes separated and isolated, or something which enters into a relation for which it is not made. Sin always destroys a union, and a destructive separation of this kind was also immanent in the Original Sin through which the fruit was separated from the tree, or as another Kabbalist puts it, the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge.105 If man falls into such isolation—if he seeks to maintain his own self, instead of remaining in the original context of all things created, in which he, too, has his place—then this act of apostasy bears fruit in the demiurgical presumption of magic in which man seeks to take God’s place and to join what God has separated.106 Evil thus creates an unreal world of false contexts107 after having destroyed or deserted the real.» — la definición zohárica del mal moral: siempre algo que se separa y aísla, o algo que entra en una relación para la que no está hecho. De ahí un juicio sobre la magia que este corpus debe consignar — ese aislamiento fructifica en la presunción demiúrgica de la magia, donde el hombre busca ocupar el lugar de Dios y juntar lo que Dios separó

«This is true also of the quality of strict justice, rigor and judgment in and by God, which is the fundamental cause of evil. The wrath of God is symbolized by His left hand, while the quality of mercy and love, with which it is intimately bound up, is called His right hand. The one cannot manifest itself without involving the other. Thus the quality of stern judgment represents the great fire of wrath which burns in God but is always tempered by His mercy. When it ceases to be tempered, when in its measureless hypertrophical outbreak it tears itself loose from the quality of mercy, then it breaks away from God altogether and is transformed into the radically evil, into Gehenna and the dark world of Satan.» — el origen del mal en una sefirá: la justicia estricta es la causa fundamental del mal, y cuando deja de estar templada por la misericordia se desgaja de Dios y se transforma en lo radicalmente malo

«It is impossible to overlook the fact that this doctrine, whose fascinating profundity is undeniable, found a highly remarkable parallel in the ideas of the great theosophist Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), the shoemaker of Goerlitz whose thoughts exercised so great an influence on many Christian mystics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in Germany, Holland and England. Boehme’s doctrine of the origins of evil, which created such a stir, indeed bears all the traits of Kabbalistic thought. He, too, defines evil as a dark and negative principle of wrath in God, albeit eternally transfigured into light in the theosophical organism of divine life. In general if one abstracts from the Christian metaphors in which he tried, in part at least, to express his intuitions, Boehme, more than any other Christian mystic, shows the closest affinity to Kabbalism precisely where he is most original. He has, as it were, discovered the world of Sefiroth all over again.» — el paralelo con Jacob Boehme: también él define el mal como principio oscuro de ira en Dios, y abstrayendo de las metáforas cristianas muestra más que ningún otro místico cristiano la afinidad más estrecha con el kabbalismo precisamente donde es más original. El límite va en la misma página — admite como posible que asimilara elementos cabalísticos por medio de amigos eruditos

«It retains the distinction between three spiritual agencies: Nefesh or life; Ruah or spirit; and Neshamah or soul proper, but abandons the idea that they represent three different faculties of the soul. Rather all three are already latently present in the first, Nefesh, and the higher grades correspond to the new and deeper powers which the soul of the devotee acquires through the study of the Torah and through meritorious actions.» — el giro cabalístico sobre la psicología medieval: el Zóhar retiene la distinción de Nefesh, Ruah y Neshamah pero abandona la idea de que sean tres facultades distintas — las tres están ya latentes en la primera

«Here the doctrine of transmigration, Gilgul, also plays a part. One encounters it first in the book Bahir.133 Unless it goes back to the literary sources of this work, it is reasonable to assume that the Kabbalists of Provence who wrote or edited the book Bahir owe it to the influence of the Catharists, the chief religious force in Provence until 1220, i.e. during the years which saw the rise of Kabbalism. The Catharist heresy, which was only stamped out after a bloody Crusade, represented a late and attenuated form of Manichaeism, and as such clung to the doctrine of metempsychosis which the Church condemned as heretical.» — el Gilgul aparece primero en el Bahir, y la filiación va ofrecida como presunción razonable y no como hecho: los cabalistas de Provenza que lo escribieron la deberían a la influencia de los cátaros, forma tardía del maniqueísmo, durante los años que vieron nacer el kabbalismo

«The spread of Lurianic Kabbalism with its doctrine of Tikkun, of the restitution of cosmic harmony through the earthly medium of a mystically elevated Judaism, this doctrine could not but lead to an explosive manifestation of all those forces to which it owed its rise and its success.» — deriva el sabbatianismo del lurianismo por vía interna y no por contagio externo: la doctrina del Tikkun no podía sino desembocar en una manifestación explosiva de las mismas fuerzas a las que debía su ascenso

«A people which had suffered from all the tribulations which exile and persecution could bring, and which at the same time had developed an extremely sensitive consciousness of life actually lived between the poles of exile and redemption, needed little to take the final step to Messianism.» — la condición previa la pone la historia y no la doctrina: un pueblo que había sufrido cuanto el exilio puede traer, y que había desarrollado una conciencia sensibilísima de una vida vivida entre los polos del exilio y la redención, necesitaba poco para dar el paso final

«It is not my purpose here to describe the swift rise and the sudden collapse of the Sabbatian movement in 1665 and 1666, from Sabbatai Zevi’s proclamation of his Messianic mission to his renunciation of Judaism and adoption of Islam when he was led before the Turkish Sultan. I am not primarly concerned with the biography of the Messiah and his prophet, Nathan of Gaza» — acotación de alcance declarada por el propio autor: no se propone describir el ascenso y el colapso del movimiento de 1665-1666 ni la biografía del Mesías y su profeta. Citar sus tesis sin esta acotación las convierte en lo que la obra dice no estar haciendo

«It was the awakening of Nathan of Gaza to his prophetic mission which set the whole train of events in motion.» — adjudica el motor del movimiento al despertar profético de Nathan de Gaza, no a la actividad de Zevi, y lo dice contra la lectura corriente: sin Zevi el movimiento habría sido impensable en esa forma, pero su actividad sin ayuda jamás habría bastado

«he was constitutionally a manic-depressive, that is to say he belonged to a type whose lack of mental balance displays itself in alternate fits of deepest gloom and most uncontrollable exuberance and exaggerated joy. Periods of profound depression and melancholia constantly alternated in him with spasms of maniacal exaltation, enthusiasm and euphoria, separated by intervals of a more normal state of mind. What is known of his character does not give the faintest indication of paranoia, but on the other hand it hardly lacks a single trait of manic-depressive psychosis as described in the standard handbooks of psychiatry.» — diagnóstico que hace suyo a partir de la documentación: Zevi era constitucionalmente maniacodepresivo y no paranoico, que era lo que se venía diciendo. El límite lo pone en la misma página y es la razón del diagnóstico — esa enfermedad, a diferencia de otras, no descompone la personalidad ni afecta la inteligencia

«A latent antinomianism is discernible in these acts—harmless enough at first—to which the Sabbatians gave the restrained but significant name maasim zarim» — nombra el rasgo que hará al movimiento: en sus fases de exaltación Zevi se sentía impelido a cometer actos contrarios a la ley religiosa, a los que los sabbatianos dieron el nombre contenido pero significativo de maasim zarim

«But his truly original characteristic is without any doubt to be found in the peculiarity of his mania: the commission of antinomian acts which in his state of exaltation he appears to have regarded as sacramental actions.» — sitúa la originalidad de Zevi no en su intelecto —al que llama sin rodeos mediocre como cabalista y erudito— sino en la peculiaridad de su manía: actos antinomianos que en estado de exaltación parece haber tenido por acciones sacramentales

«And this and nothing else is the true heritage of Sabbatai Zevi: the quasi-sacramental character of antinomian actions, which here always take the form of a ritual, remained a shibboleth of the movement, not least in its more radical offshoots.» — lo que Zevi legó no es una doctrina sino una forma: el carácter cuasi sacramental de las acciones antinomianas, que ahí adoptan siempre forma de rito

«In his “normal” state, the Sabbatian is anything but an antinomian. The performance of such acts is a rite, a festive action of an individual or a whole group, something out of the ordinary, greatly disturbing and born from the deep stirring of emotional forces.» — el límite que más falta hace y que un resumen suele comerse: en su estado normal el sabbatiano es todo menos antinomiano, y la ejecución de esos actos es un rito, algo fuera de lo ordinario nacido de la conmoción profunda de fuerzas emocionales. Citar el antinomianismo sabbatiano sin esto lo convierte en conducta permanente, que es lo que la obra niega

«he “abandoned his mission and went also to Gaza in order to find a Tikkun and peace for his soul.”20 I consider this to be the most interesting sentence in the history of Sabbatai Zevi. Thus when the story of Nathan’s illumination spread, Sabbatai Zevi came to him, not as the Messiah or in accordance with some secret understanding, but “in order to find peace for his soul.” To put it plainly: he came as a patient to a doctor of the soul.» — la frase que la obra declara la más interesante de la historia de Sabbatai Zevi, y la inversión que formula sin rodeos: Zevi no llegó a Gaza como Mesías ni por acuerdo previo, sino como paciente ante un médico del alma

«If the expression be permitted, he was at once the John the Baptist and the Paul of the new Messiah, surely a very remarkable figure. He had all the qualities which one misses in Sabbatai Zevi: tireless activity, originality of theological thought, and abundant productive power and literary ability. He proclaims the Messiah and blazes the trail for him, and at the same time he is by far the most influential theologian of the movement.» — caracteriza a Nathan con una analogía que declara como licencia: fue a la vez el Juan Bautista y el Pablo del nuevo Mesías, y es de lejos el teólogo más influyente del movimiento

«Nathan does not himself practice antinomianism; he interprets it. He raises an indefinable state of exaltation with its euphoria, which manifests itself in absurd, bizarre and sacrilegious actions, to the rank of a “sacred act” in which a sublime reality becomes manifest: the state of the new “world of Tikkun.“» — distingue la práctica de la interpretación: Nathan no practica el antinomianismo, lo interpreta, y eleva un estado de exaltación que se manifiesta en actos absurdos y sacrílegos al rango de acto sagrado

«The new step taken by Nathan consists in linking this question with the traditional ideas of Lurianic Kabbalism. According to Nathan, there exists a certain relationship between the Messiah and the course of all those intrinsic processes of which I have spoken in the last lecture: Tsimtsum, Shevirah and Tikkun. In the beginning of the cosmic process, En-Sof withdrew His light into Himself, and there arose that primal space in the center of En-Sof in which all the worlds take birth. This primal space is full of formless, hylic forces, the Kelipoth. The process of the world consists in giving shape to these formless forces, in making something out of them. As long as this has not been done, the primal space, and in particular its lower part, is the stronghold of darkness and evil. It is the “depth of the great abyss” in which the demonic powers have their abode. When, following the Breaking of the Vessels, some sparks of the divine light, radiating from En-Sof in order to create forms and shapes in the primal space, fell into the abyss, there also fell the soul of the Messiah which was embedded in that original divine light. Since the beginning of Creation, this soul has dwelt in the depth of the great abyss, held in the prison of the Kelipoth, the realm of darkness.» — la innovación doctrinal de Nathan, expuesta entera: Luria no reserva lugar a la raíz del alma del Mesías, y Nathan lo enlaza con Tsimtsum, Shevirah y Tikkun — tras la Ruptura de los Vasos, junto con las chispas cayó al abismo el alma del Mesías, que desde el principio mora presa de las Kelipoth

«It is a matter of the deepest interest that one encounters in the writings of a youth from the Ghetto of Jerusalem in the seventeenth century an age-old Gnostical myth of the fate of the Redeemer’s soul, built up from Kabbalistic ideas but nevertheless obviously intended as an apology for Sabbatai Zevi’s pathological state of mind. Were it not for the fact that the raw material of this Kabbalistic doctrine is actually to be found in the Zohar and in the Lurianic writings, one would be tempted to postulate an intrinsic, though to us obscure, connection between the first Sabbatian myth and that of the ancient Gnostical school known as Ophites or as Naassenes who placed the mystical symbolism of the serpent in the center of their Gnosis.» — aquí la obra plantea una conexión y en la misma frase la retira: halla en un joven del gueto de Jerusalén del XVII un mito gnóstico milenario, y el límite anula la tentación comparativa — SI NO FUERA porque la materia prima está de hecho en el Zóhar y en los escritos lurianos, uno se vería tentado a postular una conexión con los ofitas. Citar la primera mitad sin la segunda invierte lo que dice

«To trace the history of Sabbatianism through its various stages objectively, sine ira et studio, has been impossible as long as two distinctly opposed but equally strong emotional currents combined to prevent the description of this most tragic chapter in later Jewish religious history. These were on the one hand the very understandable aversion of the orthodox against the antinomian tendencies in Sabbatianism, and on the other the dread felt by rationalists and reformers, particularly during the nineteenth century of having their spiritual ancestry traced back to that despised sect which was commonly regarded as the incarnation of every conceivable aberration and perversion.» — adjudica el estado del campo a dos intereses opuestos y de igual fuerza: la aversión de los ortodoxos a las tendencias antinomianas, y el temor de racionalistas y reformadores del XIX a que se les rastreara la ascendencia espiritual hasta una secta despreciada

«most, if not all, the theological and historical documents which could throw some light upon it have undoubtedly been destroyed.» — el muro documental, declarado como propio: la dificultad no viene de la oscuridad de la doctrina sino de que la mayoría, si no todos, los documentos que podrían alumbrarla fueron destruidos

«Its heretical mysticism produced an outburst of more or less veiled nihilistic tendencies among some of its followers. Finally it encouraged a mood of religious anarchism on a mystical basis which, where it coincided with favorable external circumstances, played a highly important part in creating a moral and intellectual atmosphere favorable to the reform movement of the nineteenth century.» — la tesis de largo alcance, con sus verbos exactos: su mística herética produjo un estallido de tendencias nihilistas y ALENTÓ un ánimo de anarquismo religioso que, donde coincidió con circunstancias favorables, JUGÓ UN PAPEL EN CREAR la atmósfera del movimiento de reforma del XIX. No dice causa, dice atmósfera

«As late as in the middle of that century, Leopold Loew, the leader of the Jewish reform movement in Hungary who in his youth had come in touch with the Sabbatians in Moravia, wrote that in their circles much was done to propagate and encourage the new rationalist movement.29 Yet in the whole of Jewish historical literature you will find no reference to this highly important relation between the mystical heretics and the representatives of the new rationalism.» — el testimonio con que prueba el eslabón, con su fuente nombrada: Leopold Loew, líder del reformismo judío en Hungría, que en su juventud trató a los sabbatianos de Moravia, escribió que en esos círculos se hizo mucho por propagar el nuevo movimiento racionalista. Y la constatación: en toda la literatura histórica judía no se halla referencia a esa relación

«It is not as though the Sabbatians were a species of Quakers—many of them were anything but that. But here again, the attempt of a minority to maintain, in the face of persecution and vituperation, certain new spiritual values which corresponded to a new religious experience, facilitated the transition to the new world of Judaism in the period of emancipation.» — el límite de la analogía, dicho inmediatamente después de proponerla: no es que los sabbatianos fueran una especie de cuáqueros — lo que se transfiere es la forma, el intento de una minoría de sostener valores espirituales nuevos frente a persecución

«From a popular movement it became a sectarian one, whose propagandist work was conducted in secret. The transformation did not take many years. Comparatively soon, Sabbatianism took the form of a more or less loosely organized sect whose adherents met in secret conclave and were at pains to hide their ideas and activities from the outside world in order to avoid persecution.» — el cambio de forma tras el retorno que no llegó: de movimiento popular a secta laxamente organizada, con propaganda en secreto y ocultamiento de ideas para evitar la persecución

«Sabbatian writings can often easily be recognized from their employment of certain terms and modulations of terms such as emunah “belief,” sod ha-elohuth “the mystery of God,” and Elohe Israel “The God of Israel.”» — criterio filológico de identificación que ofrece como operativo: pese a la disimulación, los escritos sabbatianos se reconocen por el empleo de ciertos términos — emunah, sod ha-elohuth, Elohe Israel

«Twice Sabbatianism took the form of organized apostasy by large groups who believed such repetition of the Marranic example to be the way of salvation. The first time in Salonica, where in 168335 the sect of the Doenmeh—as the Turks called them, the word meaning “apostates”—was founded, its members outwardly professing Islam; and for the second time in Eastern Galicia, where the followers of the sinister prophet Jacob Frank in 1759 entered the Catholic Church in large numbers.» — las dos apostasías colectivas, entendidas por sus protagonistas como repetición del ejemplo marrano: Salónica en 1683, donde nace la secta de los Doenmeh, y Galitzia oriental en 1759, donde los seguidores de Jacob Frank entraron en masa a la Iglesia católica

«The writings of Jonas Wehle himself, the spiritual leader of these Prague mystics around 1800, already display an astonishing mixture of mysticism and rationalism. Of his extensive writings, an extremely interesting commentary to the Talmudic Aggadoth is extant in manuscript37 from which it is clear that his particular pantheon had room for Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant side by side with Sabbatai Zevi and Isaac Luria.» — el caso que mide el cruce: de un comentario manuscrito de Jonas Wehle, líder espiritual de los místicos de Praga hacia 1800, se desprende que su panteón daba lugar a Moses Mendelssohn e Immanuel Kant junto a Sabbatai Zevi e Isaac Luria

«Redemption is no longer primarily a liberation from the yoke of servitude in exile, but a transformation of the essence of Creation. It is conceived as a process which runs through all the visible and the hidden worlds, for it is nothing but Tikkun, the restoration of that great harmony which was shattered by the Breaking of the Vessels and later by Adam’s sin. Redemption implies a radical change in the structure of the universe.» — el desplazamiento del concepto en Safed: la redención deja de ser primariamente liberación del yugo del exilio y pasa a ser transformación de la esencia de la Creación, proceso que corre por todos los mundos

«Inner and outer experience, inner and outer aspects of Geulah, of Redemption and Salvation, were suddenly and dramatically torn apart. This conflict, for which nobody was prepared, which nobody had ever dreamt could happen, went to the very root and core of existence. A choice became necessary. Every one had to ask himself whether he was willing to discover the truth about the expected redemption in the distressing course of history or in that inner reality which had revealed itself in the depths of the soul. Sabbatianism as a heresy came into existence when large sections, first of Sephardic and later also of Ashkenazic Jewry, refused to submit the judgment of their soul to that of history.» — la definición operativa que da de la herejía: experiencia interna y externa quedaron desgarradas, y hubo que elegir entre buscar la verdad de la redención en el curso de la historia o en la realidad interior. El sabbatianismo como herejía nace cuando amplios sectores rehúsan someter el juicio de su alma al de la historia

«In both cases the ancient Jewish paradox of the sufferings of God’s servant is pushed to extremes. In both cases, too, a certain mystical attitude of belief crystallizes round an historical event which in turn draws its strength from the very fact of its paradoxality. Both movements begin by adopting an attitude of intense expectation towards the Parousia, the advent or return of the Savior, be it from Heaven, be it from the realm of impurity. In both cases the destruction of the old values in the cataclysm of redemption leads to an outburst of antinomian tendencies, partly moderate and veiled and partly radical and violent; in both cases you get a new conception of “belief” as the realization of the new world of Salvation, and in both this “belief” involves that latent polarity of even more startling paradoxes. In both cases, finally, you get in the end a theology of some kind of Trinity and of God’s incarnation in the person of the Savior.» — enumera punto por punto la similitud con el cristianismo: la paradoja del siervo sufriente llevada al extremo, una actitud mística cristalizada en torno a un acontecimiento histórico, la espera de la Parusía, el estallido antinomiano, una concepción nueva de la creencia y al final una teología de la Trinidad y de la encarnación

«Yet nothing could be farther from the truth than the idea that the similarity of which I have just spoken owes everything to foreign influence or to the imitation of Christian prototypes. The crisis in Judaism came from within and it would hardly have taken any other course had there been no Christian influence.» — el límite que anula la lectura difusionista, inmediatamente después de la lista: reconoce que la influencia cristiana no debe subestimarse y aun así declara que nada estaría más lejos de la verdad que atribuir esa similitud a imitación de prototipos cristianos — la crisis vino de dentro y difícilmente habría tomado otro curso sin influencia cristiana alguna

«The paradox of crucifixion and that of apostasy are after all on two altogether different levels. The second leads straight into the bottomless pit; its very idea makes almost anything conceivable. The shock which had to be surmounted in both cases is greater in the case of Sabbatianism. The believer is compelled to furnish even more emotional energy in order to overcome the terrible paradox of an apostate Savior. Death and apostasy cannot possibly evoke the same or similar sentiments, if only because the idea of betrayal contains even less that is positive. Unlike the death of Jesus, the decisive action (or rather, passion) of Sabbatai Zevi furnished no new revolutionary code of values. His betrayal merely destroyed the old. And so it becomes understandable why the deep fascination exercised by the conception of the helpless Messiah who hands himself over to the demons, if driven to its utmost limits, led directly to nihilistic consequences.» — la diferencia estructural, formulada como asimetría y no como jerarquía: crucifixión y apostasía están en planos distintos, y la traición contiene aún menos de positivo que la muerte porque no aportó código nuevo de valores — solo destruyó el viejo. Por eso la fascinación del Mesías que se entrega a los demonios condujo derecho a consecuencias nihilistas

«The idea of an apostate Messiah could be presented to them as the religious glorification of the very act which continued to torment their own conscience.» — el factor externo decisivo: generaciones de marranos obligadas a una doble vida retuvieron esa constitución espiritual al volver al judaísmo, y a ellos la idea de un Mesías apóstata podía presentárseles como la glorificación religiosa del acto que seguía atormentándoles la conciencia

«it is no accident that the leading propagandist of this school, Abraham Miguel Cardozo (died 1706), was himself born as a Marrano and began by studying Christian theology.» — Abraham Miguel Cardozo, principal propagandista de esa escuela, nació marrano y empezó estudiando teología cristiana; la obra dice que no es accidente

«the attraction of saintliness is not always sufficient to liberate the sparks from their prisons, the Kelipoth or “shells.” There are stages of the great process of Tikkun, more particularly its last and most difficult ones, when in order to liberate the hidden sparks from their captivity, or to use another image, in order to force open the prison doors from within, the Messiah himself must descend into the realm of evil.» — la versión herética de la elevación de las chispas, diferenciada de la ortodoxa solo en sus conclusiones: hay etapas del Tikkun en que, para forzar las puertas de la prisión desde dentro, el Mesías mismo debe descender al reino del mal

«It can easily be seen how this doctrine satisfied those who thought they had experienced their own and the world’s salvation in their inner consciousness and consequently demanded a solution of the contradiction between their experience and the continuation of Exile. The apostasy of the Messiah is the fulfilment of the most difficult part of his mission, for redemption implies a paradox which becomes visible only at the end, in its actual occurrence. It is not a steady and unhindered progress as it appears in Luria’s doctrine, but a tragedy which renders the supreme sacrifice of the Messiah incomprehensible to others. In order to fulfil his mission he must condemn himself through his own acts. An immense amount of religious passion has been lavished on the task of developing this dangerous paradox and letting the believers taste its bitterness to the full.» — la función que la doctrina cumple para quien la sostiene, y la ruptura con Luria que marca: la apostasía pasa a ser el cumplimiento de la parte más difícil de la misión, y no es progreso sostenido como en Luria sino tragedia

«In other words, redemption implies the destruction of those aspects of the Torah which merely reflect the Galuth, the Torah itself remains one and the same, what has changed is its relation to the mind. New vistas are opened up, a new Messianic Judaism takes the place of the Judaism of the Galuth.» — formulación exacta de qué se destruye y qué no: la redención implica destruir aquellos aspectos de la Torá que SOLO REFLEJAN EL GALUT; la Torá misma sigue siendo una y la misma, y lo que cambia es su relación con la mente. El matiz es la tesis: no se aboliría la Torá, cambiaría su aspecto

«It is true that he has taken precautions against the danger of pure antinomianism: the positive law of the new world becomes visible, according to him, only with the complete and final redemption, i.e. after the Messiah will have completed his Calvary through the world of evil and annihilated or transformed its power from within. Until that new epoch, in the early dawn of which we ourselves live, the ancient law retains its force.» — la acotación que el propio Perez pone y que hay que citar con lo anterior: la ley positiva del mundo nuevo solo se vuelve visible con la redención completa, y hasta esa época la ley antigua conserva su fuerza

«The existence of such a moderate wing of Sabbatianism, in particular until about 1715, is of importance for the understanding of the movement, and the fact that it was ignored has tended to obscure matters. For this reason frequent and unsuccessful attempts have been made to dispute the fact that such men belonged to the Sabbatian movement, which was regarded as nothing but an unholy rebellion against rabbinical Judaism, with an open tendency towards transgressions and sins in theory and practice. A picture which is far from portraying the whole truth.» — la existencia de un ala moderada es importante para entender el movimiento, y haberla ignorado enturbió el asunto: se hicieron intentos frecuentes de disputar que tales hombres pertenecieran a un movimiento tenido por rebelión impía con tendencia abierta a la transgresión

«The point at which moderate and extreme Sabbatianism parted ways was supplied by the question whether the actions of the Messiah serve as an example to the believer or not.53 The moderate thought not. They held that the paradox of the new religious life is limited to the person of the Messiah. The Messiah alone stands at the crossroads where the old values are no longer binding, and he alone must tread the weary path through the world of evil which is the mark of his mission. His actions are not examples to be followed; on the contrary, it is of their nature to give offense.» — la línea divisoria, dicha como una sola pregunta: si los actos del Mesías sirven o no de ejemplo al creyente. Los moderados decían que no — la paradoja se limita a su persona, y sus actos no son ejemplos a seguir sino que por su naturaleza dan escándalo

«Already Nathan of Gaza asserted (in 1667) that precisely the “strange actions” of Sabbatai Zevi constituted proof of the authenticity of his Messianic mission: “For if he were not the Redeemer, these deviations would not occur to him; when God lets His light shine over him, he commits many acts which are strange and wonderful in the eyes of the world, and that is proof of his truth.» — la inversión probatoria en la letra de Nathan, fechada: precisamente las acciones extrañas de Zevi constituían prueba de autenticidad, porque si no fuera el Redentor esas desviaciones no se le ocurrirían

«The consequences which flowed from these religious ideas were purely nihilistic, above all the conception of a voluntary Marranism with the slogan: We must all descend into the realm of evil in order to vanquish it from within. In varying theoretical guises the apostles of nihilism preached the doctrine of the existence of spheres in which the process of Tikkun can no longer be advanced by pious acts; Evil must be fought with evil.» — la posición radical y su consigna: un marranismo voluntario con el lema de que todos debemos descender al reino del mal para vencerlo desde dentro, porque el mal debe combatirse con el mal

«I am referring to the fatal, yet at the same time deeply fascinating doctrine of the holiness of sin, that doctrine which in a remarkable way reflects a combination of two widely different elements: the world of moral decadence and another, more primitive, region of the soul in which longslumbering forces are capable of sudden resurrection.» — presenta la santidad del pecado como posición que aparece con necesidad casi trágica en toda gran crisis del espíritu religioso, y la describe como combinación de un mundo de decadencia moral y otra región más primitiva del alma. Lectura restituida: la fuente imprime «long-slumbering» con guion de corte que la herramienta une

«But another sect among them turns the heresy to a different purpose. It is their custom to argue that with the arrival of Sabbatai Zevi the sin of Adam has already been corrected and the good selected out of the evil and the ‘dross.’ Since that time, according to them, a new Torah has become law under which all manner of things formerly prohibited are now permitted, not least the categories of sexual intercourse hitherto prohibited. For since everything is pure, there is no sin or harm in these things.» — voz de Moses Hagiz, cazador de herejías, sobre la segunda forma de herejía sabbatiana: con la llegada de Zevi el pecado de Adán ya fue corregido y rige una Torá nueva bajo la cual está permitido lo antes prohibido

«These assertions of a heresy-hunter like Hagiz, which in themselves would perhaps not carry full conviction, are, however, supported by a mass of evidence on the development of Sabbatianism between 1700 and 1760. The doctrine described and condemned by Hagiz in 1714 was practiced in various forms and in widely scattered localities until the end of the century.» — modelo de cómo la obra trata a una fuente hostil sin desecharla ni creerle: las afirmaciones de un cazador de herejías por sí solas quizá no convencerían del todo, pero están respaldadas por una masa de evidencia sobre el desarrollo del sabbatianismo entre 1700 y 1760

«In the history of Gnosticism, the Carpocratians are regarded as the outstanding representatives of this libertinistic and nihilistic form of gnosis.60 But nothing that is known of them touches the resolute spirit of the gospel of antinomianism preached by Jacob Frank to his disciples in more than two thousand dogmatic sayings. The ideas he adduced in support of his preachings constitute not so much a theory as a veritable religious myth of nihilism.» — compara con los carpocracianos y marca el límite de la comparación: nada de lo que se sabe de ellos alcanza el espíritu resuelto del evangelio antinomiano que Frank predicó en más de dos mil dichos dogmáticos

«The Torah, as the radical Sabbatians were fond of putting it,66 is the seed-corn of Salvation, and just as the seed-corn must rot in the earth in order to sprout and bear fruit, the Torah must be subverted in order to appear in its true Messianic glory.» — la imagen con que los radicales justificaban la subversión, en su propia formulación: la Torá es el grano de simiente de la Salvación, y así como el grano debe pudrirse en la tierra para dar fruto, la Torá debe ser subvertida para aparecer en su verdadera gloria mesiánica

«From this epigram, many Sabbatians drew the moral: since we cannot all be saints, let us all be sinners.» — la inversión de una sentencia talmúdica de la que muchos sabbatianos sacaron la moraleja: ya que no podemos ser todos santos, seamos todos pecadores

«Mere condemnation of this doctrine, however, leads us nowhere. Attention must be given also to its positive side. The religious, and in some cases the moral, nihilism of the radicals is after all only the confused and mistaken expression of their urge towards a fundamental regeneration of Jewish life, which under the historic conditions of those times could not find a normal expression. The feeling of true liberation which “the believers” had experienced in the great upheaval of 1666, sought to find an expression on the moral and religious plane, when historical and political realization was denied to it. Instead of revolutionizing the external circumstances of Jewish life, a thing it could no longer do after the apostasy of the Messiah, it became introverted and encouraged a mood which easily adapted itself to the new spirit of rationalization and reform, once the myth of the Messiah’s journey to the gates of impurity had begun to fade.» — la regla de registro de la propia obra, aplicable a todo el capítulo: la mera condena no lleva a ninguna parte y hay que atender también al lado positivo — el nihilismo de los radicales es la expresión confusa de un impulso hacia la regeneración de la vida judía que en las condiciones de entonces no hallaba expresión normal

«That is the idea that the elect are fundamentally different from the crowd and not to be judged by its standards. Standing under a new spiritual law and representing as it were a new kind of reality, they are beyond good and evil.» — el motivo que acompaña casi invariablemente a la doctrina de la santidad del pecado en la historia de las sectas místicas: que los elegidos son fundamentalmente distintos de la multitud y no han de juzgarse por sus criterios

«The radical Sabbatians, the nihilists, were agreed that just as redemption had so far become only intrinsically real and not yet visible, so the true belief must be held only in secret, while external behavior must conform to the power of evil in the world of the Galuth. The belief which one professes can by its very nature no longer coincide with that which one really holds. Everyone must in some way share the fate of the Marranos; one’s heart and one’s mouth may not be one.» — la regla de conducta que se sigue de la premisa: la creencia verdadera debe sostenerse solo en secreto mientras el comportamiento externo se conforma al poder del mal — todos deben compartir de algún modo la suerte de los marranos

«When the outbreak of the French Revolution again gave a political aspect to their ideas, no great change was needed for them to become the apostles of an unbounded political apocalypse. The urge towards revolutionizing all that existed no longer had to find its expression in desperate theories, like that of the holiness of sin, but assumed an intensely practical aspect in the task of ushering in the new age.» — el giro de la energía al terreno político: cuando la Revolución Francesa devolvió aspecto político a sus ideas, el impulso de revolucionar todo lo existente ya no tuvo que expresarse en teorías desesperadas y adquirió un aspecto intensamente práctico

«As a theory, Sabbatianism had its roots in an extravagant overstressing of certain aspects of Lurianism. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that from now on a multitude of new theories either tried to draw the final consequences from Luria’s ideas, or else started from scratch with mystical ideas of their own.» — como teoría, el sabbatianismo arraiga en una exageración extravagante de ciertos aspectos del lurianismo

«Abulafia, the Zohar, the book Peliah, the Kabbalistic systematizers of Safed—they all no less than the Sabbatians and Frankists, plead the coming of the dawn as the justification of what was new in their ideas.» — regla general del campo y no rasgo sabbatiano: Abulafia, el Zóhar, el Peliah y los sistematizadores de Safed igual que sabbatianos y frankistas alegan la llegada del alba como justificación de lo nuevo en sus ideas

«Although Eibeschuetz denied responsibility for these writings when, thirty years later, a scandal broke out in Hamburg because of his alleged Sabbatianism, his authorship can be proved by philological analysis.» — adjudicación de autoría en disputa viva, y la atribución es el dato: aunque Eibeschuetz negó responsabilidad treinta años después, la obra AFIRMA que su autoría puede probarse por análisis filológico — y registra en la misma frase que su afinidad secreta con el sabbatianismo ha sido negada con particular calor hasta nuestros días. Al fichar: la obra sostiene, no se demostró

«It is nothing less than a new form of the Gnostic dualism of the hidden God and the God who is the Creator of the world. This then was to be the true meaning of Monotheism.» — la tesis central sobre la teología sabbatiana: lo que ofrecieron como contenido de un judaísmo regenerado no es menos que una forma nueva del dualismo gnóstico entre el Dios oculto y el Dios creador del mundo

«The ancient Gnostics of the second and third century distinguished between the hidden and benevolent God, the God of the illuminate whose knowledge they call “gnosis,” and the Creator and Lawgiver whom they also call the Jewish God, and to whom they attribute the writings of the Old Testament. The term Jewish God or God of Israel is abusive and meant to be so. The Gnostics regarded the confusion between the two Gods, the higher loving one, and the lower who is merely just, as a misfortune for religion. It is metaphysical antisemitism in its profoundest and most effective form which has found expression in these ideas and continues to do so.» — y el juicio que formula en presente sobre el dualismo gnóstico antiguo, donde «Dios judío» es término injurioso y está pensado como tal: es antisemitismo metafísico en su forma más profunda y eficaz lo que se expresó en esas ideas y sigue expresándose

«Where the ancient Gnostics disparaged the God of Israel, the Sabbatians disparaged the unknown God. According to them, the error committed by Israel in exile consists in confusing the First Cause and the First Effect, the God of Reason and the God of Revelation.» — la diferencia significativa, y es una inversión y no una repetición: donde los gnósticos antiguos denigraban al Dios de Israel, los sabbatianos denigraban al Dios desconocido. Citar lo anterior sin esto deja al sabbatianismo como gnosticismo sin más, que es justo lo que la obra corrige

«To the Sabbatians all reality became dialectically unreal and contradictory. Their own experience led them to the idea of an existence in permanent contradiction with itself, and it is not surprising that their God no less than their Messiah bears the mark of such self-contradiction and disintegration.» — cierre de la conferencia: para los sabbatianos toda realidad se volvió dialécticamente irreal y contradictoria, y por eso su Dios, no menos que su Mesías, lleva la marca de esa autocontradicción

«this Polish and Ukrainian Hasidism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has nothing to do with mediaeval Hasidism in Germany. The new Hasidism was founded shortly before the middle of the eighteenth century by that famous saint and mystic Israel Baal Shem (“Master of the Holy Name”) who died in 1760 and who during his life-time impressed the mark of his personality on the movement much as Sabbatai Zevi had shaped the character of Sabbatianism.» — separación terminológica que insiste en marcar: el jasidismo polaco y ucraniano del XVIII nada tiene que ver con el jasidismo medieval de Alemania, y fue fundado por Israel Baal Shem, que le imprimió su personalidad como Zevi al sabbatianismo

«Even so restrained a critic as Ahad Haam wrote around 1900, in a critical essay on modern Hebrew literature:2 “To our shame we must admit that if today we want to find even a shadow of original Hebrew literature, we must turn to the literature of Hasidism; there, rather than in the literature of the Haskalah, one occasionally encounters, in addition to much that is purely fanciful, true profundity of thought which bears the mark of the original Jewish genius.» — voz de Ahad Haam, citada como testigo contenido: para hallar hoy siquiera una sombra de literatura hebrea original hay que ir a la literatura del jasidismo y no a la de la Haskalá

«The fact is that attempts have been made for some time to deny the mystical character of Hasidism.4 Although I do not agree with these views, it seems to me there is something to be said in their favor; moreover they have a value precisely because they show us that we are dealing with a problem.» — cómo la obra registra una posición que no comparte: consigna que desde hace tiempo se intenta negar el carácter místico del jasidismo, declara no estar de acuerdo y al mismo tiempo que algo puede decirse a su favor, y que valen precisamente porque muestran que estamos ante un problema

«The problem to my mind is that of the popularization of Kabbalistic thought, or to put it a little differently, we have to consider in this lecture the problem of the social function of mystical ideas.» — enuncia el problema de la conferencia: la popularización del pensamiento cabalístico o, dicho de otro modo, la función social de las ideas místicas

«I think one can say that after the rise and collapse of Sabbatianism there were only three ways left open to the Kabbalah, in addition to that of accepting the contradictions in which the new believers and adherents of Sabbatai Zevi had become hopelessly muddled. One was to pretend that nothing in particular had happened; that was actually what a good many orthodox Kabbalists tried to do. They continued in the old way without bothering much about new ideas.» — las salidas que le quedaron a la cábala tras el colapso sabbatiano, y la primera: fingir que nada había ocurrido, que es lo que hicieron bastantes cabalistas ortodoxos

«Kabbalism becomes at the end of its way what it was at the beginning; a genuine esoterism, a kind of mystery-religion which tries to keep the profanum vulgus at arm’s length.» — la fórmula del cierre de la segunda vía: el cabalismo se vuelve al final de su recorrido lo que fue al principio, esoterismo genuino, una suerte de religión de misterios que mantiene a distancia al profanum vulgus

«Finally there was a third way, and that is the one which Hasidism took, particularly during its classical period. Here the Kabbalah did not renounce its proselytizing mission; on the contrary, Hasidism—a typical revivalist movement whose founder was innocent of higher rabbinical learning—aimed from the beginning at the widest possible sphere of influence.» — la tercera vía, la del jasidismo clásico: la cábala no renunció a su misión proselitista, y el jasidismo, cuyo fundador carecía de alta formación rabínica, apuntó desde el principio a la esfera de influencia más amplia posible

«As far as I can see, Hasidism represents an attempt to preserve those elements of Kabbalism which were capable of evoking a popular response, but stripped of their Messianic flavor to which they owed their chief successes during the preceding period. That seems to me the main point.» — la tesis central de la conferencia, marcada dos veces como opinión propia: el jasidismo es un intento de preservar aquellos elementos del cabalismo capaces de suscitar respuesta popular, pero despojados del sabor mesiánico al que debían sus mayores éxitos

«I am far from suggesting that the Messianic hope and the belief in redemption disappeared from the hearts of the Hasidim. That would be utterly untrue; as we shall see later on, there is no single positive element of Jewish religion which is altogether lacking in Hasidism.» — el límite explícito, pedido por el propio autor: está lejos de sugerir que la esperanza mesiánica desapareciera del corazón de los jasidim — eso sería enteramente falso, y no hay un solo elemento positivo de la religión judía que falte del todo en el jasidismo. Sin esto, la tesis de la neutralización se lee como supresión, que es lo que la obra niega

«But it is one thing to allot a niche to the idea of redemption, and quite another to have placed this concept with all it implies in the center of religious life and thought.» — la distinción que hace precisa la tesis: una cosa es asignar un nicho a la idea de redención y otra haber colocado ese concepto en el CENTRO de la vida y el pensamiento religiosos

«Equally, the old Lurianic doctrine on the “uplifting of the holy sparks” was deprived of its intrinsic Messianic meaning by introducing a differentiation between two aspects of redemption. The one was said to be the individualistic redemption, or rather salvation, of the soul and the second the truly Messianic redemption which is, of course, a phenomenon concerning the whole body of the community of Israel and not the individual soul. The uplifting of the sparks was assumed already by the first theorist of Hasidism, Rabbi Jacob Josef of Polna, to lead up only to the first aspect of redemption, in contradistinction to Messianic redemption which can be wrought by God alone and not by the action of man.» — el mecanismo exacto de la neutralización, y conviene fichar el mecanismo y no la etiqueta: la doctrina de la elevación de las chispas fue privada de su sentido mesiánico introduciendo una diferenciación entre dos redenciones, y la mesiánica puede obrarla Dios solo, no la acción del hombre

«It can hardly be called an accident that the Hasidic movement made its first appearance in the regions where Sabbatianism had taken strongest root, Podolia and Volhynia.» — argumento geográfico: difícilmente puede llamarse accidente que el jasidismo apareciera primero en las regiones donde el sabbatianismo había arraigado con más fuerza

«Now all this amounts to no less than the fact that the founder of Hasidism guarded the literary heritage of a leading crypto-Sabbatian and held it in the highest esteem.» — la conclusión y su alcance: el fundador del jasidismo custodió el legado literario de un cripto-sabbatiano destacado y lo tuvo en la más alta estima. El límite va en la misma página — llama al vínculo «aunque solo inconsciente», suponiendo que la creencia sabbatiana de Heshel fuera tan poco conocida al Baal Shem como a sus seguidores

«For rabbinical Jewry, particularly in those centuries, the ideal type recognized as the spiritual leader of the community is the scholar, the student of the Torah, the learned Rabbi. Of him no inner revival is demanded; what he needs is deeper knowledge of the sources of the Holy Law, in order that he may be able to show the right path to the community and to interpret for it the eternal and immutable word of God. In the place of these teachers of the Law, the new movements gave birth to a new type of leader, the illuminate, the man whose heart has been touched and changed by God, in a word, the prophet.» — el punto en que sabbatianismo y jasidismo se apartan juntos de la escala rabínica de valores: el tipo ideal de líder. Para la judería rabínica es el erudito; los movimientos nuevos engendran otro tipo, el iluminado, en una palabra el profeta

«But for them it was not scholarship and learning that counted; it was rather an irrational quality, the charisma, the blessed gift of revival.» — lo que cuenta en esa escala nueva: no la erudición sino una cualidad irracional, el carisma, el don bendito del avivamiento

«And yet there is an all-important difference between even these radical groups and the Sabbatians: their motives are entirely different. For the followers of the “Great Maggid” Messianism as an active force of immediate appeal no longer had any importance. The mood that inspired them and scandalized their opponents was the primitive enthusiasm of mystical “friends of God.”» — el deslinde que impide leer las excentricidades jasídicas como antinomianismo sabbatiano: hay una diferencia de la máxima importancia incluso con los grupos radicales, porque los motivos son enteramente distintos — para los seguidores del Gran Maggid el mesianismo ya no tenía importancia, y lo que los inspiraba era el entusiasmo primitivo de unos amigos de Dios místicos

«To the Hasidic mind, Devekuth and Kawwanah were primarily emotional values, a significance which they had by no means always had before.» — el desplazamiento del sentido de dos términos técnicos: para la mente jasídica Devekuth y Kawwanah fueron ante todo valores emocionales, significado que en modo alguno habían tenido siempre antes

«But this enthusiasm was anything but Messianic. It was not based on Chiliastic expectations. Here is the explanation of the fact that when it came into conflict, as it could hardly fail to do, with the sober and somewhat pedestrian spirit of rabbinical Orthodoxy, typified by the Lithuanian brand, it more than held its own. We have seen how Sabbatianism centred round the hope of a mystical redemption. On this issue no compromise was possible or even conceivable. With the shelving of the Messianic element an understanding between rabbinical and mystical Judaism was no longer ruled out. From a possibility it became a reality after the Hasidic movement had outgrown its first stormy period of growth and from active revivalism turned to religious organization, if still on a pneumatic and mystical basis. Here and there, an individual became the bearer of Messianic hopes, but the movement as a whole had made its peace with the Galuth.» — la explicación de por qué el jasidismo sobrevivió donde el sabbatianismo no: ese entusiasmo era todo menos mesiánico, y por eso aguantó al chocar con la ortodoxia lituana. Archivado el elemento mesiánico, el entendimiento entre judaísmo rabínico y místico dejó de estar excluido, y el movimiento hizo las paces con el Galut

«Jacob Frank (1726–1791) is a Messiah with a thirst for power; indeed his greedy lust for power dominated him to the exclusion of every other motive. It is this which makes his personality at once so fascinating and so ignoble. There is a certain demonic grandeur about the man. The quality that set him apart from Sabbatai Zevi is well expressed in a remark attributed to him. “If Sabbatai Zevi,” he is reported to have said, “had to taste everything in this world, why did he not taste the sweetness of power?”23 This almost sensuous love for power, which Frank possessed in the highest degree, is the stigma of nihilism.» — retrato de Frank y el rasgo que lo distingue de Zevi: un Mesías con sed de poder cuya codicia de dominio lo dominó excluyendo cualquier otro motivo — ese amor casi sensual al poder es el estigma del nihilismo

«Lust for power is active even among those profound theoreticians of Zaddikism who developed the doctrine of the Zaddik, the saint and the spiritual leader of the Hasidic community, as the non-Messianic Messiah, and characteristically carried it to its extreme.» — la fórmula doctrinal del Zaddik: los teóricos del zaddikismo desarrollaron la doctrina del Zaddik como «el Mesías no mesiánico», y característicamente la llevaron a su extremo

«No less surprising, however, is the fact that this burst of mystical energy was unproductive of new religious ideas, to say nothing of new theories of mystical knowledge.» — la paradoja que define el problema del jasidismo para la obra: el gueto engendró en poco tiempo una galaxia de santos-místicos con intensidad creativa superior a la de Safed, y no menos sorprendente es que ese estallido de energía mística NO produjera ideas religiosas nuevas

«The new element must therefore not be sought on the theoretical and literary plane, but rather in the experience of an inner revival, in the spontaneity of feeling generated in sensitive minds by the encounter with the living incarnations of mysticism.» — dónde sí está lo nuevo: no en el plano teórico y literario, sino en la experiencia de un renacimiento interior y en la espontaneidad que genera el encuentro con las encarnaciones vivas del misticismo

«Even this popularization of the Kabbalistic vocabulary, however, is not a specific product of the Hasidic movement, but one that dates back to the literature of the so-called Musar-books (moralizing tracts), particularly those written during the century before the rise of Hasidism.» — otra atribución corregida: ni siquiera la popularización del vocabulario cabalístico es producto específico del jasidismo, porque se remonta a los Musar-books del siglo anterior — de los que los jasidim se nutrieron mucho más que de la literatura teosófica

«Unfortunately no serious attempt has yet been made to establish the true relation between the traditional and the novel elements in Hasidic thought—the one known to me27 has failed completely.» — muro declarado del campo, y es la propia obra advirtiendo del estatuto de lo que sigue: no se ha hecho aún ningún intento serio de establecer la relación entre lo tradicional y lo novedoso en el pensamiento jasídico, y uno queda reducido a generalizaciones peligrosas

«To put it as briefly as possible, the distinctive feature of the new school is to be found in the fact that the secrets of the divine realm are presented in the guise of mystical psychology. It is by descending into the depths of his own self that man wanders through all the dimensions of the world; in his own self he lifts the barriers which separate one sphere from the other;28 in his own self, finally, he transcends the limits of natural existence and at the end of his way, without, as it were, a single step beyond himself, he discovers that God is “all in all” and there is “nothing but Him”.» — el rasgo distintivo del Habad: los secretos del reino divino se presentan bajo la forma de una PSICOLOGÍA MÍSTICA — descendiendo a las profundidades de su propio yo el hombre recorre todas las dimensiones del mundo. Psicología en lugar de teosofía, y la obra lo llama de la máxima importancia

«What has really become important is the direction, the mysticism of the personal life. Hasidism is practical mysticism at its highest.» — lo que pasa a primer plano: la mística de la vida personal. El jasidismo es mística práctica en su grado más alto, y todo gira en torno a la Devekuth

«There is much truth in Buber’s remark in the first of his Hasidic books that Hasidism represents “Kabbalism turned Ethos”, but a further ingredient was needed to make Hasidism what it was.» — cómo acepta una fórmula ajena y la declara insuficiente en la misma frase: hay mucho de verdad en la observación de Buber de que el jasidismo es «Kabbalism turned Ethos», pero hacía falta un ingrediente más

«Briefly, the originality of Hasidism lies in the fact that mystics who had attained their spiritual aim—who, in Kabbalistic parlance, had discovered the secret of true Devekuth —turned to the people with their mystical knowledge, their “Kabbalism become Ethos”, and, instead of cherishing as a mystery the most personal of all experiences, undertook to teach its secret to all men of good will.» — el ingrediente que faltaba, y es sociológico antes que doctrinal: místicos que habían alcanzado su meta espiritual se volvieron hacia el pueblo con su saber y, en lugar de guardar como misterio la más personal de las experiencias, se propusieron enseñar su secreto a todos los hombres de buena voluntad

«Nothing is further from the truth than the view which regards Zaddikism, that is to say the unlimited religious authority of an individual in a community of believers, as foreign to the nature of Hasidism, and insists that one must distinguish between the “pure” Hasidism of the Baal Shem and the “depraved” Zaddikism of his followers and their followers. This simon-pure Hasidism never existed because anything like it could never have influenced more than a few people. The truth is that the later development of Zaddikism was already implicit in the very start of the Hasidic movement.» — rechazo frontal de una periodización corriente: nada más lejos de la verdad que exigir que se distinga entre el jasidismo puro del Baal Shem y el zaddikismo depravado de sus seguidores. Ese jasidismo purísimo NUNCA EXISTIÓ, porque algo así jamás habría influido a más de unas pocas personas

«The whole development centers round the personality of the Hasidic saint; this is something entirely new. Personality takes the place of doctrine; what is lost in rationality by this change is gained in efficacy.» — el eje del cambio con su balance explícito: la personalidad ocupa el lugar de la doctrina, y lo que con ese cambio se pierde en racionalidad se gana en eficacia

«mainly in that he himself “has become Torah.” It is no longer his knowledge but his life which lends a religious value to his personality. He is the living incarnation of the Torah.» — la definición del Zaddik frente al Talmid Hakham rabínico: se distingue en que él mismo se ha vuelto Torá, y ya no es su conocimiento sino su vida lo que da valor religioso a su persona

«The upshot of all this unlimited emotionalism was paradoxically enough a return to rationality. Such paradoxes by the way are not infrequent. In the event the waves went so high that emotion turned against itself. There was a sudden anticlimax. Zaddikim such as Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk, the most important among this group and generally speaking one of the most remarkable personalities—not a “saint”, but a true spiritual leader—in Jewish religious history, began to inveigh against the extravagant sentimentalism which the cult of religious emotion had produced, notably among the Jews in Poland.» — el movimiento se corrige a sí mismo: el resultado de todo ese emocionalismo fue, paradójicamente, un retorno a la racionalidad, y Zaddikim como Mendel de Kotzk empezaron a arremeter contra el sentimentalismo producido por el culto de la emoción religiosa. Lectura restituida: la fuente imprime «anti-climax» con guion de corte que la herramienta une

«The “Gaon” Elijah of Vilna, the oustanding leader of Lithuian Jewry and an excellent representative of the highest rabbinical learning combined with a strictly theistic, orthodox Kabbalism, took the lead, in 1772, in an organized persecution of the new movement. Nor were the orthodox squeamish about the means that were employed in this struggle. As late as 1800, fanatical opponents of Hasidism tried to induce the Russian Government to take action against it. The history of these organized persecutions and of the Hasidic defence against them has been fully described by Simeon Dubnow.» — el conflicto con sus fechas y su fuente: el Gaón de Vilna tomó la delantera en 1772 en una persecución organizada del nuevo movimiento, y la historia de esas persecuciones la describió por completo Simeon Dubnow. Erratas de la capa de texto que van tal cual: «oustanding», «Lithuian»

«One could easily make a collection of Hasidic epigrams which breathe a spirit not very far removed from that of Sabbatianism. The Hasidic Zaddik, too, is occasionally compelled to descend to a lower or even dangerous plane in order to rescue the scattered sparks of light, for “every descent of the Zaddik means an elevation of divine light.”32 And yet Hasidism did not go the way of Sabbatianism. Its leaders were far too closely connected with the life of the community to succumb to the danger of sectarianism.» — la proximidad admitida y la diferencia explicada en un solo movimiento: sería fácil reunir epigramas jasídicos que respiran un espíritu no muy lejano del sabbatiano, y sin embargo el jasidismo no fue por ese camino — y la razón que da no es doctrinal sino social, sus líderes estaban demasiado ligados a la vida de la comunidad

«Hasidism in fact solved the problem, at least as far as Judaism was concerned, of establishing so close a relation between the pneumatic, that is to say the man who feels himself inspired in every act by a transcendental power, the Pneuma or Spirit, and the religious community, that the inevitable tension between them helps to enrich the religious life of the community instead of destroying it.» — el logro con su acotación de alcance: el jasidismo resolvió el problema de establecer entre el pneumático y la comunidad una relación tan estrecha que la tensión inevitable enriquece la vida religiosa en vez de destruirla

«Probably under the influence of this fact, Solomon Schechter defined the doctrine of God’s immanence in all things not only as the very root and core of Hasidism, but as its distinguishing characteristic.33 It is permissible to doubt this; as has been shown in some of the previous lectures, the same doctrine had been expounded long before by some of the great Jewish mystics and Kabbalists.» — disenso nombrado, con la posición ajena expuesta antes de objetarla: Schechter definió la inmanencia divina como rasgo distintivo del jasidismo, y la obra responde que es lícito dudarlo porque la misma doctrina había sido expuesta mucho antes

«To me not the doctrine seems new, but rather the primitive enthusiasm with which it was expounded and the truly pantheistic exhilaration evoked by the belief that God “surrounds everything and pervades everything.”» — la contrapropuesta, marcada como propia: lo nuevo no es la doctrina sino el entusiasmo primitivo con que se expuso y la exhilaración panteísta que evocó la creencia de que Dios lo rodea todo y lo penetra todo

«The fact is that Hasidism represents throughout a curious mixture of conservatism and innovation. Its attitude towards tradition is somewhat dialectical. Thus when a great Zaddik was asked why he did not follow the example of his teacher in living as he did, he replied: “On the contrary, I do follow his example, for I leave him as he left his teacher.” The tradition of breaking away from tradition produced such curious paradoxes.» — la fórmula que resume la conferencia: el jasidismo representa de principio a fin una curiosa mezcla de conservadurismo e innovación, y su actitud hacia la tradición es dialéctica — la tradición de romper con la tradición

«This is the close connection between mysticism and magic throughout the history of the Hasidic movement. It is as though the personality of Israel Baal Shem had been created solely for the purpose of confusing the modern theorists of mysticism. Here you have a mystic whose authentic utterances permit no doubt as to the mystical nature of his religious experience and whose earlier and later followers have resolutely taken the same path. And yet he is also a true “Baal Shem”, that is to say, a master of the great Name of God, a master of practical Kabbalism, a magician.» — pieza clave para este corpus: mística y magia no se separan al final del recorrido. La personalidad del Baal Shem parece creada para confundir a los teóricos modernos del misticismo — es un místico cuyas expresiones no dejan duda sobre su experiencia religiosa y a la vez un maestro de cábala práctica, un mago

«The revival of a new mythology in the world of Hasidism, to which attention has been drawn occasionally, especially by Martin Buber, draws not the least part of its strength from its connection between the magical and the mystical faculties of its heroes. When all is said and done it is this myth which represents the greatest creative expression of Hasidism. In the place of the theoretical disquisition, or at least side by side with it, you get the Hasidic tale.» — el renacer de una mitología nueva saca no poca de su fuerza de esa conexión entre las facultades mágicas y místicas de sus héroes, y es ese mito lo que constituye la mayor expresión creativa del jasidismo: en lugar de la disquisición teórica aparece el relato

«To tell a story of the deeds of the saints has become a new religious value, and there is something of the celebration of a religious rite about it.» — el estatuto del relato: contar una historia de los hechos de los santos se ha vuelto un valor religioso nuevo, y hay en ello algo de la celebración de un rito

«And here it is, as I have heard it told by that great Hebrew novelist and story-teller, S. J. Agnon:36 When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer—and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the “Maggid” of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go the the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers —and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs— and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.» — el cuento de las cuatro generaciones, atribuido a S. J. Agnon: el Baal Shem encendía el fuego y decía las oraciones en el lugar del bosque; el Maggid ya no podía encender el fuego; Moshe Leib de Sassov ya no sabía las oraciones pero sabía el lugar; e Israel de Rishin no podía nada de eso, pero podía contar la historia de cómo se hacía — y el relato tuvo el mismo efecto

«You can say if you will that this profound little anecdote symbolizes the decay of a great movement. You can also say that it reflects the transformation of all its values, a transformation so profound that in the end all that remained of the mystery was the tale.» — las DOS lecturas, ofrecidas como opción y no como conclusión: puede decirse que la anécdota simboliza la decadencia de un gran movimiento, y puede decirse también que refleja una transformación de valores tan profunda que al final todo lo que quedó del misterio fue el relato. Fichar solo la primera falsea el cierre

«The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me.» — la negativa a cerrar: el relato no ha terminado, no se ha vuelto aún historia, y la vida secreta que guarda puede estallar mañana en ti o en mí

«But I have come here to speak to you of the main tendencies of Jewish mysticism as we know them. To speak of the mystical course which, in the great cataclysm now stirring the Jewish people more deeply than in the entire history of Exile, destiny may still have in store for us—and I for one believe that there is such a course—is the task of prophets, not of professors.» — la última frase del libro, y es una acotación de competencia: vino a hablar de las tendencias principales de la mística judía tal como se las conoce, y hablar del curso místico que el destino pueda reservar todavía es tarea de profetas, no de profesores

«The first crucial step is philological analysis, though his method is by no means restricted to philology, contrary to the recent claim of one vocal critic. Sifting through the Aramaic of the Zohar, with minute attention to syntax, grammar, idioms, and vocabulary, he shows how the language consistently reflects late medieval Hebrew, along with Spanish and Arabic, and manifests certain systematic errors of usage that have precise, recurrent analogues in the signed Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon. (As a lover of Hebrew and Aramaic, Scholem comments, with the touching disdain of a true purist, that Moses de Leon’s “use of prepositions and conjunctions is often quite preposterous.”) Having demonstrated that the language must derive from the late Middle Ages, from Spain, and almost certainly from the pen of Moses de Leon, Scholem goes on to examine the geographical references, the characteristic patterns of literary organization, the internal allusions, and the exploitation of specific philosophic ideas and antecedent mystical doctrine in the Zohar. After all this, he is able to conclude persuasively that the core component of the Zohar was composed by Moses de Leon between 1275 and 1280, and that the bulk of the work was completed by the same writer during the six years following this initial period.» — el prólogo de Robert Alter (1995), encuadernado en esta edición, sostiene que la adjudicación del Zóhar no descansa en la filología sino que empieza ahí: el arameo refleja hebreo tardomedieval con español y árabe y comete errores sistemáticos cuyos análogos están en los escritos firmados por Moses de Leon; después vienen las referencias geográficas y las alusiones internas. El límite es doble y explícito — la aclaración de que el método no se restringe a la filología va dicha contra «the recent claim of one vocal critic», y el propio prólogo separa esta demostración de otras tesis de Scholem que dice seriamente disputadas

«But whereas the notion of paradox affirms that an entity or condition is simultaneously a thing and its contradictory opposite—say, God is at once transcendent and immanent—the dialectic implies, as Hegel in fact stressed, restless process, things being transformed into their opposites in a constant dynamic movement. Thus, Scholem explains the cosmogony of the Zohar, whereby out of the primordial Nothing (ain) the divine I (ani) comes into being, as “a dialectical process whose thesis and antithesis begin and end in God: surely a remarkable instance of dialectical thought.”» — el prólogo de Robert Alter separa dos cosas que suelen confundirse al leer una tradición mística: la paradoja afirma que algo es a la vez una cosa y su contraria, mientras la dialéctica implica proceso inquieto, cosas que se transforman en sus opuestas. Con esa distinción explica por qué «dialectical» es el término que Scholem aplica una y otra vez al misticismo judío, y acota que Scholem jamás lo enlazó con «materialism», a diferencia de Benjamin

«There are clearly nuances of difference in how Scholem describes the balance of dialectical relation to tradition from one mystic movement to the next. Hasidism is the most conservative; the classical Kabbalah fills the framework of tradition with new spiritual content; Sabbatianism ends up breaking the frame.» — el prólogo de Robert Alter gradúa la relación con la tradición en vez de tratar la ruptura como una sola cosa: el jasidismo es el más conservador, la Cábala clásica llena el marco heredado de contenido nuevo, y el sabbatianismo termina rompiendo el marco. Lo apoya en fórmulas del propio Scholem citadas ahí — la Cábala temprana como «deeply conservative and intensely revolutionary»

«Every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it —is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness» — de Scholem, citado por Robert Alter en el prólogo de esta edición; está escrito en Jerusalén durante la guerra.

«the violation of the Torah is its fulfillment» — la fórmula del antinomismo sabatiano, tal como la resume Alter en el prólogo.

Ein Sof (el Infinito) — Significa «lo infinito» y no «el que es infinito»: la precisión es gramatical, y de ella sale el carácter impersonal de ese aspecto del Dios oculto.

Sefirot (las diez numeraciones) — Los atributos divinos se toman como esferas reales de luz, hasta admitir una raíz del mal en Dios mismo.

Cadena de transmisión (quién tomó de quién) — «Kabbalah» significa literalmente «tradición», y esa es la paradoja: una doctrina del contacto inmediato con lo divino se nombra por su transmisión.

Crítica de fuentes (criterios de inclusión y descarte) — No hay mística como tal, solo la mística de un sistema religioso particular: la comparación entre tradiciones no puede partir de un género común.

Gnosis (conocimiento salvífico) — Dedica la segunda lección a la mística de la Merkabah y al gnosticismo judío.