514) Kabbalah: From Obscurity to the Defining Essence of Judaism

First printing of the Zohar, Cremona 1558.

Introduction

This article—based extensively on the research by Professor David Malkiel[1]—explores the thirteenth-century rise of Kabbalah in Spain and its subsequent peaking in sixteenth-century Safed. Since the Safed period, Kabbalah has come to be widely regarded as embodying the very essence and greatest depths of Judaism in the popular imagination. How did this transformation take place? Some would suggest that this is a natural progression towards messianic times. But any study of Jewish messianism shows that we have always believed we've been living in imminent messianic times. There may be additional ways of tracking the development of Kabbalah.

Malkiel introduces an unusual history of the rise of Kabbalah from a cultural perspective connecting it to the Rennaissance and the emerging preoccupation with ‘realism,’ which (ironically for a study on mysticism) avoids fantasy and idealism in favour of concrete reality.