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| A fragment from the Cairo Geniza in the hand of Maimonides' only son, Avraham ben haRambam |
Introduction
This article—based extensively on the research by Professor Ronald Kiener—examines the contested origins of Jewish mysticism, including the neglected question of the role Islamic mysticism may have played. This Islamic influence seems to have been previously missed by the doyenne of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, who “based largely on manuscripts from Italy and Germany…hardly professes to say much of Judaism in Islamdom” (Hodgson 1974: 2:202, n.1). Scholem’s use of texts predominantly from Europe accounts for his Eurocentric approach to the history of Jewish mysticism. Scholem was not alone because sixty years ago most scholars indeed “looked to Europe in order to provide narrative explanations for the history and development of Jewish mysticism” (Kiener 2011:147). However, scholarship has changed since then, and Moshe Idel, one of the foremost contemporary scholars on Jewish mysticism, starkly declares:
“Muslim culture is the primary source of influence upon Jewish mysticism” (Idel 1991:33).
In fact, after publishing his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in 1942, even Scholem himself—together with several of his students—began to make “significant contributions to the study of Jewish mysticism in Islamic lands” (Kiener 2011:164, n.3). Nevertheless, the die had been cast and “outside of the specialists' domain, Jewish mysticism seems still to be a phenomenon of European provenance” (Kiener 2011:148). This European provenance, in the popular perception, was often synonymous with Christian influence.
However, the same way that the great Jewish Medieval philosophers like Maimonides, Yehuda Ha-Levi and others (by their own accounts) cannot be understood unless against a backdrop of the likes of al-Kindi (the father of Arab philosophy), Ibn Sina or Ibn Rushd—so too Jewish Medieval mysticism may need to be viewed against a corresponding mystical Islamic cultural milieu.
Of course, it is important to remember that in studies like this, one never really deals with influence flowing in one direction only. There is always a two-way exchange of ideas. The problem is that many people only accept ideas as valid when they are useful to their predetermined perspectives. It is never easy for any culture to acknowledge influence from another. What follows is a kaleidoscope of contested views on the origins of Jewish mysticism.
Possible Jewish influence on Islam
Jews had lived in the Ancient Near East for more than a thousand years before the advent of Islam in the seventh century. According to Keiner, and contrary to popular perceptions, the Jews adapted to the new Muslim rule “rather well”:
“There was no great upheaval with the arrival of the Muslim conquerors and their subsequent Umayyad regime. Indeed, all the major Jewish communities survived intact, and all the major communal institutions—the rabbinic academies of Sura and Pumbedita, the institutions of the Gaonate and the Exilarchate [Reish Galuta]—flourished. More important, what was taught in the Jewish academies was left untouched by the new regime” (Keiner 2011:149) [For a slightly different perspective see: Kotzk Blog: 209) THE AMAZING STORY OF THE JEWS OF ARABIA:].
If Keiner is correct, it means that the Jewish mystical and magic tradition was well-preserved during the early Islamic period. This is borne out by the surviving textual record, which indicates the perpetuation of the earliest strata of Jewish mysticism, known as Heichalot and Merkavah literature. Essentially, this was based on the prophetic book of Ezekiel and involved “visionary tours of heaven, thereby encountering heretofore undisclosed secrets of the divine realm.” This literature inspired attempts at attaining “celestial visitations” (Keiner 2011:149). These Heichalot and Merkavah mystical practices impressed the many Christians and Muslims who sought to imitate these mystical ascents and “tours of heaven” (Keiner 2011:150).
Heaven was perceived to be populated by angels and demons (only to be replaced by a more sophisticated form of Sefirot (spiritual spheres) with the emergence, first of the Sefer Yetzira (produced somewhere between the first and ninth centuries), the Bahir (twelfth century) and then later the Zohar at the end of the thirteenth century. During the Heichalot and Merkavah period, the cosmological question of how the world was created was not a matter of great concern. This began to change with the onset of Sefer Yetzira (aptly titled the Book of Creation), and more so later with the Bahir and the Zohar.
David Halperin (1988) discovered hints of Heichalot and Merkavah mysticism in early Islam. These can be traced in the Tafsir and Hadith and possibly even in the Qur'an. Halperin has also shown similar reflections of this early Jewish mysticism in the Shi’ite description of Muhammad’s Mi’raj or Night Travels.
Kiener’s critique of claims of direct Jewish
influence on early Islam
Kiener acknowledges points where Jewish ideas and practices plausibly intersect with early Islamic material, but he argues that the evidence is more complex and indirect. Essentially, Kiener emphasises that the Near East in late antiquity (third to eighth centuries) was a multi‑religious, multilingual environment where ideas circulated widely. Therefore, similarities between Jewish and Islamic texts can reflect common cultural background rather than direct borrowing. He maintains that parallels are not always proof of direct transmission.
Ninth century
Kiener seems to suggest that Jewish influence on Islam may have been more intense during the ninth century (as opposed to the early Islamic period of the seventh century). During the ninth century:
“some Muslim writers utilized these [Jewish mystical] traditions, particularly in expanding upon the tradition of Muhammad's glorious mi'raj. In this case the dynamic of osmosis seems to point from Judaism to Islam” (Kiener 2011:153).
The complicated provenance of the twelfth-century Bahir
Towards the end of the twelfth century, a new form of Jewish mysticism began to emerge in Provence (southern France), with the emergence of the Bahir, which built upon—yet displaced—the previously dominant Heichalot and Merkavah mystical literature. By introducing a theosophic framework, the Bahir reframed the cosmos around emanations of Sefirot (spiritual spheres) rather than angelic hierarchies. This means that we now find the Sefira of, say, Chessed (Kindness) instead of the Angel of Kindness, and so on:
“This book [ of the Bahir], which is shot through with symbolic and Gnostic themes heretofore unknown in Jewish circles, centers around the revolutionary teaching that God's mystery is made manifest through ten divine emanations, or sefirot… a symbolic matrix of hypostases [manifestations and congretisations of spirituality] that interact in a Gnostic pleroma [the perfect realm of Divine emanations] of cosmic good and evil…[Also the] heretofore relatively unknown doctrine of metempsychosis [transmigration of the soul] finds a home in a Jewish text” (Keiner 2011:154).
Gnosticism
Gnosticism flourished around the second century CE and was comprised of Jewish and Christian break-away mystical groups. The Gnostics generally believed people are saved by gaining secret, spiritual knowledge rather than by faith or good deeds. They viewed the material world and the human body as evil or flawed traps that hold a spark of divine light captive. The goal was to recognise that divine spark within, and escape the physical world to return to the spiritual realm. Scholem maintained that Jewish mysticism was deeply rooted in Gnosticism. In fact, Scholem claimed that Heichalot and Merkavah literature was a form of Jewish Gnosticism and he used the terms interchangeably. While mainstream (Christian) Gnostics rejected the Torah (Pentateuch) as the evil work of a lesser God, the Demiurge—the Jewish Gnostics accepted the Torah and rabbinic tradition.
Moshe Idel challenged Scholem on his thesis that Jewish mysticism emerged from Gnosticism, and maintained instead that Jewish mysticism evolved slowly and naturally from within Judaism itself—and, in fact, it was Judaism that influenced Gnosticism in the first instance.[1] According to Kiener, on the other hand, it was only during the twelfth century that Judaism made its first acquaintance with Gnosticism, which was only then introduced to Judaism through the Bahir.
Scholem discovers a link to the East
To complicate matters further—bearing in mind that Scholem did his groundbreaking doctoral dissertation on the Bahir, trying to unravel its historical roots—he noted certain parallels between the Bahir and an ancient, now lost, book of Merkavah magic, angelology, and demonology titled Sefer Raza Rabbah (Book of the Great Secret). This book is cited by Iraqi and Palestinian rabbis in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Sefer Raza Rabbah was even praised by Rav Hai Gaon of Baghdad. For Scholem, this was an indication that the Bahir was rooted in Iraq. Scholem further noticed certain Arabisms in the Hebrew style of sections of the Bahir. In one instance, in a discussion on the Hebrew vowels, the Bahir explains that the vowel ‘chirik’ (the single dot under a Hebrew letter, with the sound ‘eeh’) is leshon soref—an expression of burning. The problem is that it is not in Hebrew that chirik is associated with burning, but rather in Arabic, where charqa (a semantic link to charcoal?) means burn. This is but one example of Scholem’s argument that the Bahir, although composed in Provence, had its stylistic and thematic origins in the East. Ronit Meroz has subsequently added further evidence connecting the Bahir to Iraq (Meroz 2002:135-80). Kiener builds on this link to the East, and suggests that instead of looking to Andalusia (southern Spain), we should turn our attention to Iraq and look at the extent of Sufi influence on the Jewish community during the ninth and tenth centuries (Kiener 2011:156).
Sufism
To complicate matters even further, Michael McGaha does indeed situate the Bahir in Andalusia, but there is still a connection to the East because he claims an influence by Andalusian Sufism. McGaha notices similarities between texts of the Bahir and Sufi writings of the Sufi mystic, Ibn al-‘Arabi (d.1240). For example, the Bahir states:
“It is I who have planted this tree that the whole world may delight in it and with it. I have spanned in it the All, called it ‘All' for on it depends the All and from it emanates the All; all things need it and look upon it and yearn for it, and it is from it that all souls flower (Bahir 14).
This Bahir remarkably resembles Ibn al-‘Arabi's Tree of Existence [Eits Chaim?]:
“He [God] is the Root, and we are the branch of the Root. The [divine] names are the bough of this tree—I mean the tree of existence—and we are identical with its fruit, or rather, He is identical with its fruit” (Chittick 1989:100).
Thirteenth century: Rethinking the Rationalism–Mysticism
Binary
The thirteenth century is the most significant period in the development of Jewish mysticism, because it produces three distinct forms of Kabbalah: 1) The Egyptian Kabbalah of Maimonides’ only son, Avraham Maimuni (Avraham ben haRambam), who perpetuated a form of Jewish Sufism that flourished for five successive generations of Maimonides’ descendants; 2) The prophetic or ecstatic Kabbalah of Avraham Abulafia; and 3) The Spanish Kabbalah (built on the Bahir), known as the Zohar. Significantly, Kiener notes:
“Each of these mystical
traditions, some more than others, were the products of a robust interaction
between Islamic and Jewish cultures” (Kiener 2011:156).
1) Avraham, son of Maimonides
The Jewish Sufism of Avraham Maimuni has the most overt and clear connection to Islamic Sufism. This was a great irony as his father, Maimonides, was the eminent Jewish Aristotelian rationalist. Avraham inherited his father’s leadership title of Nagid, which remained in the Maimonidean family for the successive five (or six) generations. To add to the irony, the concluding section of Maimonides’ ultra-rational Guide for the Perplexed, which deals with themes like the:
“‘Perfected Man’ and the goal of
the pious life, to ‘persist’ in God's presence, touches on themes that were
current in Islamic mysticism” (Kiener 2011:157 and Faur 1999) [see: Kotzk
Blog: 561) Maimonidean philosophy as a form of rationalist mysticism?].
Accordingly, the Sufi connection was not only to Maimonides’ son and later descendants, but to Maimonides himself! The thirteenth-century Sufi master, Hasan ibn Hud, sensing a mystical element in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, taught his students directly from the Guide, in Baghdad.
Adding to the already complex situation, Avraham Maimuni wrote a defence of his father’s controversial Guide that was considered by the mystics as far too rationalist for the faithful. The Guide was soon to be banned and burned in some Jewish communities (and still is off-limits in contemporary Breslov). Avraham’s defence, titled Kifayat al- ‘Abidin (The Complete Guide for the Pious), was three times as long as his father’s original Guide for the Perplexed—and it resembled in both structure and content the writings of al-Ghazali's Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din (Shusman 1985). Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) was a Shafi'i Sunni Muslim Persian scholar, and one of the most influential writers in the Islamic world. Al-Ghazali blended rational philosophy with Sufism. In a similar vein, Avraham Maimuni tried to merge rationalism with mysticism in his defence of his father:
“Ferocious in his defense,
Abraham maintains that the ascetic and pietistic turn he provides to his
father's system is precisely what his father passed down to him” (Kiener
2011:157-8).
Avraham Maimuni maintains that the Sufis were the custodians of the original Jewish mysticism. He writes:
“You know that there is to be found amongst these Sufis of Islam…—because of the sins of Israel—the ways of the ancient holy Israelites, which is not to be found or is little found amongst our present-day community” (Abraham Maimonides, The Highways of Perfection, ed. S. Rosenblatt, 1938, 2:266).
A considerable movement of later rabbis attempting to reconcile Maimonidean rationalism with mysticism began to develop. This may have been in keeping with the general Sufi project—under Al-Ghazali—to seamlessly combine the apparently irreconcilable rationalist and mystical worlds.
2) Avraham Abulafia
Avraham Abulafia—a radical mystic whose ideas fall into
a different category of mysticism altogether—astonishingly also claimed to be
based on Maimonides and thus fits the emerging genre of mystics defending
Maimonidean rationalism.
“Abulafia claimed that his interpretation of Maimonides, and the systematic mystical program it generated, took over where the merkabah visionaries and the sefirotic topographers left off. His mysticism was a mysticism of Maimonidean psychology, where the soul through a particular kind of prescribed meditation is led to the divine effulgence and to a deathlike experience of utter unity with the Divine Being” (Kiener 2011: 160).
But Abulafia, too, cannot be separated from Sufism as his writings are first-person accounts of mystical ascent, typical of the writing style of the Sufis. He also authors ‘manuals of discipline’ which mirror the Sufi step-by-step style of writing. Abulafia’s end goal is union with the Divine, a state of ‘hu Hu” (he is He). This is an exact replication of the Sufi master Mansour al-Hallaj's (d. 922) expression of unio mystica. Abulafia differs from the path of the Spanish Kabbalists, who aimed instead for Deveikut (clinging to God) over the more intimate blending with God in a state of unio mystica (Kiener 2011:161) [see:Kotzk Blog: 187) THE CENSORSHIP OF ABULAFIA AND HIS ATTEMPT TO CONVERT THE POPE:]
Abulafia’s student, R. Natan ben Saadia, wrote a work titled Sha'arei Tzedek (Gates of Justice) that also contains numerous references to his first-person experiences and to direct Islamic spiritual practices:
“I ... have probed my heart for
ways of grace to bring about spiritual expansion… I learned..[a way] practiced
by Ishmaelite 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 recite (zokhrim) the
Name of God in the Ishmaelite language, and they say ‘Allah'… I investigated
further and I found that when they pronounce these letters… 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 (Sefer
Sha’arei Tzedek, ed. Yosef Parush, Shaare Ziv, 1999:21).
3) Zohar
In recent times, much has been written on possible influences from Islamic Neoplatonism and Sufism on the Zohar. These include renowned scholars like Yehudah Liebes, Amos Goldreich and Moshe Idel. The Zohar contains over 1 600 pages and “contains numerous Arabisms, doctrinal affinities to Sufi teachings, and interpretations of rituals and symbols in a Sufi key” (Kiener 2011:163).
Safed
According to Kiener, this eastern influence did not stop with the Zohar because centuries later the great mystical communities of sixteenth-century Safed operated within the Ottoman domain, and many of this circle moved on to Damascus. Safed was previously an official Sufi city. Some of the Safed Kabbalists had travelled to Aleppo, where the Jewish Sufi, David Maimuni (the fifth descendant of Maimonides) had moved to establish a large library, and brought with him the Torah scroll endorsed by Maimonides as the most accurate scroll, which later became known as the Aleppo Codex. This connection to Aleppo may have acted as a bridge between the Egyptian Jewish Sufis and the Safed Kabbalists. Not surprisingly, there were also communities of Jewish Sufis in Safed during the sixteenth century.
Conclusion
For the reasons discussed above, in addition (or contrast) to Scholem’s Eurocentric approach to the history of Jewish mysticism, Kiener suggests that in the post-Scholem era:
“a new accounting of the history
of Jewish mysticism is in order, one that places key historical developments in
the narrative of Jewish mysticism within an Islamicate and Middle Eastern
environment” (Kiener 2011:164).
Further reading
Kotzk
Blog: 151) ‘CHOVOT HALEVAVOT’ – A SUFI CONNECTION?
Kotzk
Blog: 152) RAMBAM'S ONLY SON – ANOTHER SUFI CONNECTION?
Kotzk
Blog: 547) From the Nile to Safed: Egyptian Judeo-Sufism as an influence on
Lurianic Kabbalah
Kotzk
Blog: 424) Avraham Ibn Chasdai's references to 'a certain Chacham'
Kotzk
Blog: 286) GENIZA DOCUMENT REVEALS FIRST STIRRINGS OF ANTI-MAIMONIDEAN
SENTIMENT IN EGYPT:
Bibliography
Chittick, W., 1989, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn
al-'Arabis Metaphysics of Imagination, S Y Press, Albany, translating al-Futuhat
al-Makkiyah, ed. U. Yahia, Beirut, n.d.
Faur, J., 1999, Homo Mysticus: A Guide to
Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse.
Halperin, D.J., 1988, The Faces of the Chariot:
Early Jewish responses to Ezekiel’s vision, J. C. B. Mohr (P. Siebeck),
Tuebingen.
Hodgson, M.G.S., 1974, The Venture of Islam, University
of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Idel, M., 1991, ‘Jewish Mysticism and Muslim
Mysticism’, Machanaim 1, (Hebrew).
Kiener, R.C., 2011, ‘Jewish Mysticism in the Lands of
the Ishmaelites: A Re-Orientation’, in The Convergence of Judaism and Islam:
Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions, Edited by Michael M.
Laskier and Yaacov Lev, University Press
of Florida, Gainesville, 147-167.
Meroz. R., 2002,
‘On the Time and Place of Some of Sefer ha-Bahir’, Daat 49, 135-IIO
(Hebrew).
Shusman, A., 1985, ‘The Muslim Sources of Rabbi Abraham
Maimuni's Book Kitab Kifayat al- 'Abidin', Tarbiz 55, 229-50 (Hebrew).
[1]
Online source: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/challenging-the-master/.
Retrieved 6 August 2026.
