The genre of Zoharic lexicons—literary works produced primarily in the early modern period that aimed to explicate the difficult linguistic elements in the medieval kabbalistic classic, the Zohar—may be usefully explored using the theoretical discourse of form, rhetorical strategies, and the construction of meaning.Footnote 1 As scholars of textual studies have recently noted, beyond the presentation of specific content, texts also function at the level of semiotics, often driven by the genre chosen and rhetorical devices deployed by authors. Literary elements of the text and the framework they are inserted into create implicit realities that point beyond the ostensible semiotic meaning in order to construct and communicate cultural values, theological considerations, and ideological paradigms.Footnote 2
Yissakhar Baer ben Petaḥyah Moshe's lexicon to the Zohar, ʾImrei binah, printed in Prague by Moshe ben Beẓalel Katz in 1610, constitutes the most comprehensive lexicon to the foreign and difficult words of Zohar extant in print and was the lexicon of choice to be incorporated in the Sulzbach edition of the Zohar (1684)—the product of a joint effort between Jewish and Christian thinkers and printers—to serve as a built-in reference tool that ran as a continuous text at the bottom of each page. ʾImrei binah will serve as my point of departure to illuminate how authors coped with organizing and re-presenting esoteric knowledge in more accessible ways in the aftermath of the appearance of printed works of Kabbalah in the mid-sixteenth century.Footnote 3 I will argue that the production of ʾImrei binah must be evaluated in the diachronic context of earlier attempts to mediate the linguistic and symbolic dimensions of the Zohar by the publication of reference guides that appeared within a few years after the Zohar's printing in 1558–1560. Attempts to create a system and topical order to the Zohar's associative and sometimes rambling narrative can be identified already in Menaḥem Recanati's Commentary on the Torah (1523), Moses Galante's Mafteaḥ ha-Zohar (1566), Yissakhar Baer Naftali ha-Kohen of Szczebrzeszyn's Marʾeh kohen (1589), and Moses Cordovero's Pardes rimonim (1592), which contains a special section (Shaʿar ha-kinuyim; gate 23) devoted to exposing the association between kabbalistic words and concepts and their sefirotic analogs, using the Zohar as the base text. I will also explore ʾImrei binah's synchronic context of similar efforts by other intellectuals, such as the scholar Menaḥem de Lonzano, a contemporary of Yissakhar Baer, who differed from him in geographical milieu and scholarly scope, which was not primarily in the field of Kabbalah.Footnote 4
The many textual strategies developed by diverse authors for mediating Jewish mystical language and concepts highlight the growing cultural prestige Kabbalah acquired in the early modern period. At the same time, the publication of these reference tools and study guides demonstrates the limitations of print culture as a technical mediator of knowledge. Thus, in the field of Kabbalah, a novice reader could not acquire understanding by merely sitting down with a printed volume of the Zohar. Self-study of the published text required additional forms of cultural and epistemic mediation, which in this case was accomplished by kabbalistic study guides. Printing thus initiated and stimulated the development of new genres and the reorganization of printed matter to provide conceptual tools that eased learning and facilitated comprehension. Standing between print matter and personal notebooks, kabbalistic study guides as a literary genre provide interesting and somewhat unexplored insights into learning, the transmission of knowledge, and the role of pedagogy in print culture.
Literary Strategies of Mediating the Zohar
1. Commentary
Beginning in the fourteenth century, the preparation of study guides, lexicons, anthologies, and interpretative manuals on the Zohar became major strategies to render Kabbalah more exoteric. Many regarded the Zohar as the foremost repository of kabbalistic wisdom and therefore viewed the reading and comprehension of the text as the means to acquire its mystical content.Footnote 5 Owning textual fragments of the Zoharic corpus and being able to quote from and comment on the Zohar ascribed cultural power to those who pursued such activities.Footnote 6 Prior to its appearance in print, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the main hermeneutic activity associated with the Zohar was kabbalistic authors’ incorporation of select textual fragments into their works. One of the earliest and most comprehensive examples, Menaḥem Recanati's Commentary on the Torah, was written in the thirteenth century and published in 1523 as one of the first printed works on Kabbalah. Recanati's work incorporated the greatest number and the longest passages from the Zohar until that point, marking it as an important attempt already in the Middle Ages to disseminate the Zohar more broadly.Footnote 7 Moreover, Recanati's foremost literary achievement lies in synthesizing diverse areas of study—in part biblical and in part kabbalistic commentary—facilitating the promotion of a new integrated study of Torah in which the mystical layer became an essential and not a subsidiary facet of Jewish learning. Arranged in the order of biblical chapters (parashiyot), his text presented the esoteric material in a framework already familiar to the reader. It attests to the significance of this work that it was one of the earliest printed texts of Kabbalah and was published twice in Venice well before the appearance of the Zohar in print.Footnote 8
2. Translation
In addition to commentary, translation proved to be a critical tool for rendering the Zohar more accessible to readers. The Zohar presented considerable intellectual challenges to all readers: to the erudite and the lay Jew, as well as to the interested Christian Hebraist or theologian, for two reasons. First, its Aramaic differed considerably from the Aramaic of the Talmud and deployed neologisms (milim zarot) not found in earlier rabbinic texts. Second, the difficult language was exacerbated by a hermeneutic method that took the traditional midrashic mode of commentary on the Torah and projected it onto a metaphysical metatextual dimension in which words, characters, and places became cognomens for divine hypostases and processes. Recanati's Commentary already engaged translation as a literary tool, albeit only selectively, to ease and facilitate the comprehension of the text. Thus, while Recanati refrained from presenting all Zoharic excerpts in Hebrew translation, he did explicate certain key ideas and words in Hebrew throughout his work. While several earlier attempts had been made to translate Zoharic fragments into Hebrew, the first comprehensive translation of the Zohar was completed only in the fourteenth century, by Rabbi Judah he-Ḥasid.Footnote 9
Translators of the Zohar were motivated not only by pedagogical aspirations, but also by ideological and theological considerations. The Renaissance humanist ideal of returning to an ancient fount of divine knowledge (prisca theologia) engendered persistent efforts to translate the Zohar into Latin by Christians throughout the sixteenth century. Recanati's Commentary on the Torah served as the base text for several Latin translations of the Zohar, as in the case of the Jewish convert to Christianity Paul Ricius, the Italian friar and orientalist Pietro di Galatino, and the Dominican bishop and linguist Agostino Giustiniani.Footnote 10 The French Christian kabbalist Guillaume Postel completed his translation of the Zohar on Genesis into Latin in 1553, an undertaking that he framed within the larger context of his messianic agenda. In so doing, Postel reflected the opinion of some of his Jewish rabbinic contemporaries that the appearance of the Zohar in print denoted the final epoch of humanity. He further maintained that the Zohar constituted hidden teachings transmitted to Moses on Sinai and subsequently transcribed by Simon the Righteous, who, according to him, belonged to the followers of Jesus. Therefore, for Postel, the Zohar represented an undiluted source of universal wisdom suitable to form an intellectual and theological bridge between Judaism and Christianity.Footnote 11
Another Latin translation of the Zohar, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah denudata (Sulzbach, 1677), served a broader political and theological purpose of creating rapprochement between the Protestant and Catholic followers of the Christian faith. Beyond an ostensible messianic agenda, von Rosenroth was convinced that the pursuit of Kabbalah could help to create dialogue and act as a unifying theology among the followers of diverse Christian denominations. For him, Kabbalah originated from the time of Jesus and the apostles and therefore constituted an authoritative and authentic source of religious truth to connect the various factions in the post-Reformation church.Footnote 12 Von Rosenroth did not work in isolation but served as an important member of the editorial team centered in the court of Count Christian August in Sulzbach that sought to publish a new edition of the Zohar with a number of technical and semantic improvements.Footnote 13 As mentioned above, one of the innovative features of the Sulzbach Zohar (1684) was the inclusion of a built-in lexicon, ʾImrei binah, originally printed in Prague in 1611.Footnote 14 As a running reference, ʾImrei binah proved to be a practical and convenient technical tool for readers who were not entirely proficient in the Aramaic of the Zohar and could thus look up difficult words without having to open up another book as they immersed themselves in the Zoharic narrative.Footnote 15
3. Zoharic Lexicons
The study of grammar and language was a long-standing tradition in Jewish scholarship, applied to the Bible, the masorah, and the targumim.Footnote 16 By the early modern period, authors in a variety of fields had compiled dictionaries in order to mediate meaning to readers living in different linguistic and cultural contexts. Jews in western Europe, for instance, translated plant names and terminology that described the natural world into Latin and other Romance languages.Footnote 17 While from the seventh to eleventh century, the Geonim had initiated a systematic method of translating biblical words, the most ambitious and comprehensive undertaking was completed in the eleventh century by Nathan ben Yeḥiel of Rome. His work, the ʿArukh, set out to translate and explicate unusual, difficult, and foreign expressions found in rabbinic texts—the Talmud, the midrashim, and targumim—and became the foundational source for all subsequent lexicographic and philological works.Footnote 18
In the field of Jewish philosophy, the lexicon and dictionary were prevalent literary genres beginning in the Middle Ages. Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed, for instance, traditionally appeared with Samuel ibn Tibbon's Commentary of Foreign Terms (Perush milim ha-zarot) appended to its printed editions.Footnote 19 This lexicon was usually placed at the back of the standard editions to the Guide, with the exception of the 1553 Sabbioneta edition by Tobias Foa, where it appears in the front. Specialists, already conversant with philosophical nomenclature, used Ibn Tibbon's lexicon to clarify and affirm their understanding of the Guide, whereas for audiences who had little or no recourse to this field of knowledge, the dictionary was an indispensable learning aid to navigate the complicated and associative narrative of the Maimonidean original. Working in Poland, Bohemia, and Italy in the sixteenth century, the prodigious rabbi Mordekhai Yaffe could not assume that Maimonides's Guide, replete with philosophical and scientific terminology, would be easily accessible to the eastern European reader. In composing Levush pinat yikrat he set himself the task of creatively responding to this challenge by furnishing Ibn Tibbon's original dictionary of philosophical terminology with comprehensive explanations. The types of philosophical terms that Yaffe included in his commentary were “equivocal terms, derivative terms, amphibolus terms, univocal expressions, and species,” clarifying and explicating difficult concepts and terminology.Footnote 20
Similar to the linguistic and semantic difficulties of philosophical works, the Zohar's linguistic peculiarity—a preference for the use of Aramaic as opposed to Hebrew—elicited early scholarly notice and demanded serious inquiry. By the thirteenth century most theological works of the Jewish literary canon appeared in Hebrew, while Arabic was the language of choice for secular subjects, such as philosophy and science, especially among Jews in the Iberian Peninsula. Aramaic, an ancient Semitic language once the vernacular of Jews living in distinct locales of the Middle East, became textualized in Jewish religious literature through the targumim and the Talmud, which was redacted over several centuries by generations of rabbis active in Babylonian academies. As scholarly consensus ascribes the authorship of the Zohar to thirteenth-century Castile and hence rejects the pseudepigraphic claim of the work as the product of the second-century Tanna R. Shimon bar Yoḥai, the conundrum of the Zohar's unique style of Aramaic still fascinates readers and is the subject of enduring academic discussions and debates.Footnote 21 What perplexes researchers the most is that the Aramaic of the Zohar does not reflect the natural philological development of the language into western and eastern dialects and is more a product of textual accretion that incorporates layers derived from other languages, notably Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Latin, and Greek.Footnote 22 Gershom Scholem called the Aramaic of the Zohar an artificial idiom that borrowed from genuine Aramaic sources in order to manufacture a language that resembled the one it sought to imitate.Footnote 23 New attempts in the last decade have called into question Scholem's conclusions and advocated for more systematic philological analyses.Footnote 24
Yehuda Liebes, in contrast to earlier scholars, has repeatedly celebrated the creative and playful appeal inherent in the Zoharic Aramaic and its literary potential for fomenting the formation of a reading community with a shared mystical purpose and theological imperative.Footnote 25 Liebes therefore argues that the Zohar's Aramaic is an entirely natural construct and the only suitable vehicle for its narrative and theological articulation. Words, as “living and portable” entities from the past, can become compelling “mediators to embody a culture with particular fullness and meaning.”Footnote 26 In this case, Aramaic is analogous to and derived from the world of evil, the sitra ʾaḥra, and serves as a fitting linguistic antidote to its destructive potential. Early modern kabbalists, such as Meir ibn Gabbai and Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, emphasized not as much the latent spiritual but the effective magical capacity of the Aramaic language by prescribing the public recitation of the Zohar as a spiritual and magical panacea with the potential to reintegrate the forces of evil into the side of holiness.Footnote 27
Kabbalists generated their own dictionaries and lexicons that, much like their philosophical counterparts, functioned as reference tools that readers could consult when they encountered kabbalistic concepts and terminology that were unfamiliar to them.Footnote 28 An early example of a Zoharic lexicon is the anonymous composition Biʾur ha-milim ha-zarot (Dictionary of foreign words), which came to serve as the basis for many subsequent reference aids and anthologies to the Zohar.Footnote 29 Today it is extant in several manuscript variantsFootnote 30 and two abridged, defective printed editions.Footnote 31 It is clear that Shimon ibn Lavi and Abraham Azulay, the two foremost anthologists of the Zohar, both originally from North Africa, were not only familiar with the Biʾur but also cited from it extensively in their own works.Footnote 32 Other works influenced by the Biʾur include Yesha Yah written by Isaiah ben Eleazar Ḥayim of Nice (Venice, 1637)Footnote 33 and ʾImrei binah by Yissakhar Baer ben Moses Petaḥyah, to which I will turn below. It is of note here that ʾImrei binah adopts a very different organizational structure than Yesha Yah, thus signaling a departure from the formal layout of the Biʾur.Footnote 34 Accordingly, while the former orders the foreign and difficult words into the sequence of biblical chapters (parashiyot) reflecting the original literary structure of the Zohar, Yesha Yah faithfully reproduces the Biʾur's alphabetical organizational template. Since ʾImrei binah was reproduced in several printed editions of the Zohar, those printers who included it in their books may have regarded it is a more valuable learning tool to accompany the reading of the Zohar than some of its competitors.Footnote 35
4. An Early Modern Zoharic Lexicon: ʾImrei Binah
Rabbi Yissakhar Baer ben Petaḥyah Moshe, an early seventeenth-century author active in east-central Europe, wrote ʾImrei binah as one of four compositions, published in Prague from 1609–1611, and as part of an overall intellectual agenda to make Kabbalah more accessible to lay readers. Each of his compositions addresses the reader's need to comprehend Kabbalah from various aspects of the classical rabbinic textual corpora: through philology and language (ʾImrei binah), its relation to the halakhic or legal strata of rabbinic texts (Yesh sakhar), and their more midrashic and symbolic characteristics (Mekor ḥokhmah and Pitḥei Yah). As a writer, Yissakhar Baer belonged to a cadre of authors, secondary elites in Jewish society, who rose to prominence and acquired cultural prestige with the diffusion of print culture. He came from a learned family, but unlike scions of elite rabbinic dynasties who had enough financial support to dedicate themselves to full-time learning, he probably had to eke out a living by taking on less prestigious communal jobs. We learn of his financial difficulties from his introduction to Yesh sakhar, where he reveals his lack of adequate funds to print his extensive commentary on the Zohar called Yodʿei binah, which he was forced to put off “until such time that God expands my means for behold I have ‘learned the lesson’ [Proverbs 24:32], distress has taught me and found my aid against the foe [allusion to Psalms 60:13].”
We have limited information about his life, but we do know that he was relatively young when his works were published, probably in his mid- to late twenties, and he was already listed among the dead in Aharon Zeilig's ʿAmudei sheva, a composition printed in 1635. According to a genealogical record, his father was a parnas in the Prague community and died in 1599.Footnote 36 He is also connected to the Amsterdam rabbi David ben Aryeh Leib of Lidda, author of Sefer sod ha-Shem, who mentions him as his uncle, “the light of my glory the divine kabbalist.”Footnote 37 Based on this evidence he must have been born in the last decades of the sixteenth century and died sometime around 1630.
In penning ʾImrei binah, Yissakhar Baer took up the challenge of proffering a powerful pedagogical tool to promote and aid the conceptual and linguistic processing of the Zohar.Footnote 38 ʾImrei binah is the only printed lexicon to the difficult and foreign words of the Zohar arranged not alphabetically but in the order of biblical chapters (parashiyot). One might argue that a word index that follows the order of biblical chapters was more expedient to the traditional manner in which the Zohar was studied, where the elucidation of difficult or foreign words unfolded in a more organic fashion embedded in the context of the original narrative exposition. The alphabetical exposition style, by contrast, is more valuable in a scholarly context as a tool for quick and easy referencing.
The work was printed in Prague by Moshe ben Beẓalel Katz, a member of a prolific branch of the influential Gersonides family of printers, on December 14, 1610. The elaborate decorative frame on the front page of the work displays prominently the kohen's hands with outstretched fingers, denoting the priestly provenance of the printers. In ʾImrei binah, Yissakhar Baer offers two types of learning aids to the Zohar. The main part of the book, organized into double columns, includes a lexicon, which functions simultaneously as a concordance that helps to locate difficult expressions and foreign terms (milim zarot) at the site of their original source in the Cremona edition of the Zohar.Footnote 39 At the same time, ʾImrei binah cross-references and intersects with other kabbalistic compositions that mention and comment on these words, such as Cordovero's Pardes rimonim, Yehudah Ḥayyat's Minḥat Yehudah, and also Meir ibn Gabbai's Derekh ʾemunah. The author's postscript on the colophon summarizes the sources he engaged in writing the book: “Blessed is the Lord, the God of Israel, who has aided me to bring to light the mysteries of the words of the Zohar, its foreign terms and multiple expressions together with the original source of these sayings in the Tikkunim and other compositions, such as the Pardes [rimonim], the Maʿarekhet ha-ʾElohut with its commentary, the Minḥat Yehudah.”Footnote 40 By comparison, the anonymous Biʾur turned more to classical rabbinic sources, such as the Aramaic targumim to Scripture and rabbinic literature, especially the Talmud Bavli, to uncover the philological and etymological roots of difficult expressions in the Zohar. In addition, the author of the Biʾur consulted works by the medieval grammarian and commentator R. David Kimḥi, and the book Mashal ha-kadmoni.Footnote 41
The second type of reference tool Yissakhar Baer provides is inserted just before the colophon and organizes the homiletical material (maʿasiyot) of the Zohar and into a list in the format of two running columns that follow the order of Torah chapters.Footnote 42 This separate section, a collection of references to Zoharic tales, provides an easily searchable catalogue to the Zohar's aggadic material. Following the biblical parashiyot, Yissakhar Baer identifies each Zoharic tale, adds a brief synopsis, and provides the corresponding page numbers in the Cremona edition of the Zohar. For Parashat Yitro, for example, he includes the following story: “Story of a man, who gathered herbs and had a snake in his hand with which to annihilate a demon in his house” (Zohar Yitro, folio 206b).Footnote 43 This new section with a distinct thematic focus at the end of the Zoharic lexicon was a particularly effective reference tool for preachers, who could conveniently locate these stories in the Zohar and incorporate them seamlessly into their sermons.
Several scholars have noted an increase of Zoharic excerpts incorporated into homiletical texts and sermons, which demonstrates the cultural prestige associated with using kabbalistic ideas in the hortatory practices of the period.Footnote 44 Anthologies based largely on the Zohar, such as Eliyahu de Vidas's Reshit ḥokhmah (Venice, 1579) and Isaiah Horowitz's Shenei luḥot ha-berit (Amsterdam, 1648), with a focus on ethical behavior, were particularly influential among preachers and contributed to the popularization of the Zohar even among lay segments of the Jewish community. One remarkable example is the bar mitzvah speech of Abraham Rapoport (a Polish talmudist, ca. the end of the sixteenth through the middle of the seventeenth century), entitled “Neki kapayim,” which he concluded by citing a passage from the Zohar. Rapoport's example confirms that those educated in elite eastern European yeshivas in the early modern period were expected to demonstrate familiarity with the Zohar even at a young age.Footnote 45
Itinerant preachers who moved from town to town helped to diffuse kabbalistic customs and stimulate growing interest in Kabbalah. As Zeev Gries notes, doctrines that emphasized the idea of redemption were frequently adopted by preachers in their homiletics.Footnote 46 At the same time, even rabbinic personalities who combined outstanding halakhic expertise with charismatic public speaking abilities, such as David Shlomo Eybeschütz, cited kabbalistic books in their preaching. For instance, Eybeschütz delineated how to cultivate resilience in Jewish children against the power of the evil inclination already in their childhood by constructing a well-conceived educational program. The books he specifically cites in his sermon are the Zohar, Tikkunei ha-Zohar, and the Shenei luḥot ha-berit.Footnote 47 Study guides and reference tools were therefore important resources for various strata of Jewish society to inculcate ethical imperatives and advocate the cultivation of greater spiritual perfection for all members of the community.
In compiling a list of Zoharic stories, Yissakhar Baer followed the literary precedent of Moses Galante, whose Mafteaḥ ha-Zohar, printed in Venice in 1566, was the first work to have a separate section devoted to narrating “the marvelous deeds that occurred to the holy men in the land [of Israel].”Footnote 48 The major difference between Galante's index and Yissakhar Baer's is that while the former provides a short summary of each story in the original Aramaic of the Zohar, the latter mediates these homiletical accounts in Hebrew translation. Changing the language from Aramaic to Hebrew signals a critical shift in the reception of the Zohar as canonical and sacred text and underlines the awareness of authors that new readers require improved tools to absorb the original material.
Following a brief stay in Rome, Moses Galante, a descendant of Spanish refugees, eventually settled in Safed. In the Upper Galilean hill town, he studied with Rabbi Joseph Sagis and was one of the closest disciples of Rabbi Joseph Karo. He belonged to the local elite and attained leadership positions in the Safed community as both a judge on the beit din as well as the head of the Provençal yeshiva, which was under the direct spiritual leadership of Karo. He studied Kabbalah directly from the eminent master and exceptional systematizer, Rabbi Moses Cordovero.Footnote 49 As a student of Cordovero, who wrote one of the most elaborate and comprehensive commentaries to the Zohar, ʾOr yakar, Galante was proficient in reading the Zohar in its Aramaic original and did not avail himself of the tool of translation when constructing his index to the Zohar.Footnote 50
In the cultural environment of Bohemia, working nearly half a century later, Yissakhar Baer used translation as an effective strategy for transmitting and disseminating the Zohar. His intended educational paradigm when composing ʾImrei binah was predicated on individualized self-study without the presence of a kabbalistic master-teacher who could explicate or correct textual and conceptual difficulties; therefore, translation from Aramaic to Hebrew was important in mediating the stories of the Zohar. It is also instructive that the publishers placed the index of stories at the end of Yissakhar Baer's Zoharic dictionary, and not, for instance, at the conclusion of his Zoharic anthology, Mekor ḥokhmah, published shortly after ʾImrei binah. The presentation of the narrative depiction of events and personalities in the Zohar at the end of a lexicon serves to efface strong boundaries between genres and strengthen translation as a unifying modulating strategy between the textual source and its readers.
Apart from the primary function of ʾImrei binah as a lexicon and reference guide, the composition bears a number of interesting and distinctive features. While it was printed a few weeks before Mekor ḥokhmah, it was actually written and designated by Yissakhar Baer as his last work, as we learn in the author's introduction, half of which is devoted to acquainting the reader with the titles and brief content of his other compositions. In the absence of book catalogues and dust jackets, authors’ introductions were effective tools to advertise and entice the audience to read and purchase their other publications. Entrepreneurial considerations that time and again informed the intellectual commitments of secondary elites are clearly evident in Yissakhar Baer's publishing program. In writing ʾImrei binah he wished to present readers “who are far removed from the words of the Zohar, because they are shut and sealed” with a practical key to unlock those mysteries. However, the conservative stance he took against citing laws in Yesh sakhar that contradicted normative practice is expressed here in his own admission that none of his compositions touch upon the more recondite texts of Zoharic literature, which he identifies as the Sifra di-ẓniʿuta (Book of concealment), the ʾIdra rabbah, and the ʾIdra zuta (Large and small assembly).Footnote 51 By admitting to this, he discloses his awareness not merely of the esoteric stratification of the Zohar but also of his own limitations as author to probe and open up these texts, which like Noah's Ark are closed to most but a few exceptional individuals.Footnote 52
One of the most striking literary features of ʾImrei binah is the insertion of a lengthy kabbalistic poem arranged in the acrostic of the author's name.Footnote 53 The poem serves as a literary point of departure for Yissakhar Baer to compose an elaborate kabbalistic commentary, which over a few pages sets down the foundational principles for understanding the main concepts of Kabbalah.Footnote 54 The author's aim is to explicate and provide guidance to the reader in the correct beliefs concerning the basic tenets of Jewish mysticism. The inclusion of theosophical teaching at the incipit of the book shows that the author wished to shape his readers’ belief and ideology at the same time as providing a reference tool.Footnote 55 Other extant Zoharic dictionaries do not devote space to explicating the theosophical principles of Kabbalah. In this poem, Yissakhar Baer focuses on elucidating the basic characteristics and internal dynamics of the sefirot, or ten divine emanations. His first composition, Pitḥei Yah (Prague, 1609)—a primer to the main principles of Kabbalah—serves as the textual source to the more abridged commentary presented in verse in ʾImrei binah. Pedagogically, the poem, with its brief stanzas, rhymed prose, and acrostic structure, serves to enhance memorization, while the longer commentary explicates the meaning in a concise and lucid manner. The integrated presentation of poetry and narrative commentary demonstrates Yissakhar Baer's awareness of the communicative value and pedagogical potential inherent in diverse literary genres, as he innovatively adjusted the form of presentation to the function he assigns to it. ʾImrei binah is addressed to readers of diverse backgrounds, satisfying a variety of educational needs in the area of Kabbalah.
Another remarkable feature of ʾImrei binah is a poem in praise of Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai (Rashbi). The poem's stanzas consist of several lines and begin with the name of one of the ten sefirot, which are emphasized in larger and bolded font type. The sefirot are presented in ascending order with Malkhut (kingdom) appearing at the top and Keter (crown) at the bottom of the page. Rashbi's name, “bar Yoḥai,” functions as a form of poetic refrain in the opening and closing stanzas, connecting one sefirah conceptually to another. This poem, written originally by R. Shimon ibn Lavi in North Africa, quickly disseminated and enjoyed enormous popularity in the Land of Israel at the end of the sixteenth century.Footnote 56 However, while previously printed in Heikhal ha-Shem by Yeḥiel Luria Ashkenazi, in Ashkenazic lands it was Yissakhar Baer's ʾImrei binah that recorded it for the first time.Footnote 57 It is possible that this poem was mediated to Yissakhar Baer via his connection with Shlomiel Dresnitz or other cultural agents who similarly participated in the transmission and circulation of ideas through well-established transregional networks that shuttled individuals, books, and traditions between eastern Europe and the Land of Israel in the early modern period.
Kabbalistic poems were intended to mediate between the written text and the oral transmission of mystical secrets. Like the visual aspect of Kabbalah and the construction of Lurianic tree diagrams (ʾilanot), they are linked to the performative dimensions of religious life.Footnote 58 Today we are aware of several kabbalistic poems that functioned as songs, including the welcoming of the Shabbat Bride, Lekha Dodi, widely sung in synagogues all over the world at the onset of Shabbat. The poem was composed by R. Solomon Alkabeẓ, one of the Spanish exiles, who eventually settled in Safed and became an important disseminator of Kabbalah there in the sixteenth century.Footnote 59 The sixteenth-century rabbi and scholar Menaḥem de Lonzano also penned an Aramaic poem for Shabbat entitled “Shivḥa de-matrunita” (Praise of the lady), adopting the language of the Zohar. In a short preface to the poem he explains that it was to be recited to welcome the Sabbath and “thus Menaḥem de Lonzano will sing this song to God reciting His name and with it I shall build thirty-two houses corresponding to the thirty-two pathways, thirty-two words of the King, the thirty-two letters, in addition to yud or ten corresponding to the words of the Queen, which are the ten Sefirot.”Footnote 60 De Lonzano wrote another poem, intended for recitation three times on Shabbat, evening, morning, and afternoon, dedicated to the number twenty-six, the sum total of the unique name of God (yod heh vav heh), which was supposed to precede the recitation of “Woman of Valor” (ʾEshet Ḥayil; Proverbs 31:10–31) in the liturgical sequence of the blessings of wine and bread (Kiddush) at the Shabbat table on Friday evenings.Footnote 61
In the main section of ʾImrei binah, Yissakhar Baer employs four pedagogical strategies to ease the reader's understanding of the foreign terms that come up frequently in the Zohar: (1) translation; (2) explication based on rabbinic texts; (3) reference to other kabbalistic compositions; and (4) relating words to sefirotic/kabbalistic symbolism. I will illustrate each of these strategies by an example from the text. Translation of Zoharic words and passages from Aramaic to Hebrew was one of the earliest and most effective technical tools to render the Zohar exoteric and popular. Yissakhar Baer's repeated use of this technique in ʾImrei binah ensures a crisp, to-the-point, and easy-to-follow rendition of difficult Aramaic expressions. In explaining the word pekudah, for instance, which occurs in the Genesis portion of the Zohar, the Hebrew equivalent is made readily accessible to the reader as miẓvah, and the corresponding page number in the Zoharic base text is supplied in brackets.Footnote 62
The second strategy is explaining words by reference to their source in rabbinic literature. To clarify the phrase me-susita de-ḥoshekh, Yissakhar Baer cites the Talmud Bavli tractate Sotah, and gives the meaning of the Aramaic in Hebrew to denote the “hewing of darkness.”Footnote 63 Reference to additional compositions—the third strategy employed by Yissakhar Baer—expands the kabbalistic library and broadens the sources that can be studied and consulted by the reader. Yissakhar Baer both mentions the title of these works and meticulously outlines the exact location of the word in other compositions under consideration. For instance, to elucidate the term itparshin dragin, he writes, “see its explanation in Minḥat Yehudah, fol. 9, and [also] in Derekh ʾemunah, fol. 15,Footnote 64 where you will find a slightly different description; nonetheless they all allude to the same thing.”Footnote 65 Clearly, Yissakhar Baer is mindful of the diversity of approaches available to explicate kabbalistic terminology, and he considers it important to alert his readers to these theoretical alternatives.
5. Boẓina de-Kadrinuta, de-Kadranuta, de-Kardunita, or de-Kardinuta: Comparative Approaches to Meaning
The fourth method affords the highest degree of authorial creativity and freedom, where the writer can define and nuance the depth of kabbalistic explanation he is ready to deploy in order to explain a word. Yissakhar Baer resorts to this tool in explaining the Aramaic expression boẓina di-kardinuta, to which he offers several variant spellings:
It is powerful spark, which alludes to the negation of perception, for the rational eye cannot see and understand hidden things that are above, just as it is impossible for the eye to look upon the appearance of a glittering spark, which sparkles with great brilliance and illumination. This expression is used by the sages in the Talmud Bavli tractate Pesaḥim, “the wheat of kardunita” referring to the wheat grown in the terrible and mighty mountains. Alternatively, boẓina di-kadrunita comes from the word “blackness and darkness,” to allude to the great concealment within it, thus everything that is hidden is related to the word darkness, as the verse says, “He made darkness his hiding-place” [Psalms 18:12]. Another possibility is that boẓina di-kardunita refers to a builder's plumb, which they use to weigh, estimate, and measure so that a structure would stand straight. The word kadrunita comes from the Mishnah and implies estimating a steep incline [of a mountain]. The phrase in Arabic means darkness (takdir); since this spark is the beginning of His majesty, may He be blessed, it thus becomes a measure for the [entire] structure [of creation] ascending and descending [like a plumb] and therefore it was called boẓina di-kadrunita. And let now the reader choose [from among these alternate readings].Footnote 66
It is evident from this passage that pedagogical principles motivate Yissakhar Baer to include alternative readings from different sources to nuance and illuminate the multiple meanings each word carries. As this passage reveals, ʾImrei binah constitutes more than a straightforward dictionary with Aramaic words and other neologisms presented in direct translation into Hebrew. Rather, the author aims to offer readers a conceptual introduction into the world of Kabbalah and its unique symbolism. In this way, he is able to preserve teachings he received and learned, while at the same time to use this hermeneutic opening as an opportunity to innovate and offer novel insights to the reader.
As an editor of earlier kabbalistic sources relevant to explicating Zoharic terms, Yissakhar Baer cites classical works of Kabbalah all printed in the sixteenth century—the anonymous Sefer Yeẓirah and Maʿarekhet ha-ʾElohut, together with Meir ibn Gabbai's ʿAvodat ha-kodesh and Moses Cordovero's Pardes rimonim—while he refrains from engaging Lurianic ideas and texts.Footnote 67 Hence references to rabbinic texts in the above excerpt serve to establish continuity between the Zohar and authoritative sources of the ancient Jewish textual tradition, the Mishnah and the Talmud, while problematizing the theological concepts of darkness/light, concealment/revelation in their association with the internal dynamics of the divine world.
A comparison between the exposition of ʾImrei binah with other lexicons shows that authors adopted strategies of varied representation for the organization and transmission of knowledge. The Biʾur, mentioned above, which was preserved in manuscript, serves as the base text for both Yissakhar Baer as well as for the Zoharic lexicon Yesha Yah, published in Venice in 1637.Footnote 68 Both of these texts allude to different conceptualizations of darkness as expressed by the phrase boẓina de-kadranuta:
It is the same invisible spark that is conjoined with the rim of the pot so that when they place a fire of burning wood under it, it becomes joined with the smoke that sticks to the pot and recedes immediately after, and gets connected to it, again and again, as long as the fire burns under the pot. In this sense, it serves as a metaphor for the spark that is emanated from the supernal [divine] brain which constantly throbs and gushes—touching, but not touching, luminous yet concealed—and thus it is called boẓina di-kadranuta, on account of the blackness and darkness associated with great concealment for everything that is hidden is related to darkness in the mystery of the verse, “He made darkness His hiding-place” [Psalm 18:12], and He is elemental light.
A variant reading is that this light is a measuring plumb, a weight, used by builders with which they measure and assess if the building stands straight and it is called plomada in SpanishFootnote 69 and the word, boẓina denotes the plumb. According to this interpretation kadranuta comes from an expression in the Mishnah [Eruvin 5:4], “chiseling in the mountains,” as they estimate measures of the incline and the height. In Arabic, it means takdir, “blackness.”Footnote 70 Because this above-mentioned spark constitutes a plumb for building, that ascends and descends, hence it is called boẓina di-kadranuta, a plumb that measures and estimates, and all come to mean the same.
What we find in most books, namely that the resh is written before the dalet, appears to be based on incorrect spelling, provided that we follow the second explanation.Footnote 71
The author of Yesha Yah cites this passage verbatim almost in its entirety, but with an interesting prefatory qualification, which reveals that while he is delighted by his discovery he is also greatly puzzled by the variant spellings and exegetical variance between the ʿArukh'sFootnote 72 interpretation of the word kardunita as “light above darkness,” and the Biʾur's rendition as kadrunita,Footnote 73 denoting a measuring plumb.Footnote 74 Pointing out variant readings and including both sources, the author of Yesha Yah creates meaning by presenting the reader with two complementary interpretations of a multivalent Zoharic construct, boẓina de-kardinuta. These two meanings had already been explored and developed by the sixteenth-century kabbalist Moses Cordovero.Footnote 75
Cordovero was an important cultural and theoretical mediator of the Zohar for early modern authors and commentators, as he undertook to expose in a systematic manner not just the symbolic and kabbalistic layers of the Zohar, but also its complex language. Yissakhar Baer cites him throughout ʾImrei binah, and Menaḥem de Lonzano also frequently consulted him in reconstructing an accurate reading of the Zohar. Furthermore, his didactic effort to include an entire section called Shaʿar ha-kinuyim in the Pardes rimonim as a reference dictionary organized in alphabetical order—aimed to explicate kabbalistic idioms and words that carry important symbolic associations in Jewish mystical writings—created a conceptual framework that paved the way for later compilers to promote their own projects and strategies for representing the Zohar.
Cordovero displays awareness of multiple parallel interpretations of the words kardunita and kadrinuta. In his enormous and extensive commentary on the Zohar, ʾOr yakar, printed only in the twentieth century, he uses the meaning of kadrinuta as referring to “darkness.”Footnote 76 Cordovero reconciles two variant readings, the idea of darkness and the kabbalistic concept of concealment as constituting integral stages in the process of divine creation necessitated by the ontological nature of the enormity of the divine light. In another source, his Pardes rimonim, he offers a nuanced reading of darkness as concealment: “This is darkness on account of great concealment.”Footnote 77 Cordovero further expands the discussion on the word kardunita to expose a lengthy theosophical excursus on the important sefirotic implication of the word, as the vessel that emits and emanates light from Ein Sof / Supernal Keter to all the sefirot: thus, boẓina de-kardunita constitutes “the source of light to all lights.”Footnote 78 At the same time, after it is emanated it operates as a measuring line (kav ha-midah) that sets the measurement and unique function of all the sefirot like an invisible and concealed force behind the activities of the divine emanations. Thus, in Cordovero's reading, creation is characterized ab ovo by a dialectical relationship between the concepts of light and darkness, revelation and concealment, that is captured by the lexical variants of the word kardunita/kadrinuta.
6. A Turn toward the Philological Aspects of Kabbalah: Comparing Menaḥem de Lonzano and Yissakhar Baer
Like Yissakhar Baer, his contemporary Menaḥem de Lonzano learned Kabbalah mainly from books and from a large collection of manuscripts that he acquired during his many travels across the Mediterranean, a unique circumstance that was not available to Yissakhar Baer. Applying his philological expertise and keen interest in the lexicographic aspects of language, de Lonzano also launched a dictionary project, but with a focus on rabbinic midrashim, which he entitled Maʿarikh, which was printed as a section of a larger work, Shetei yadot (Venice, 1618). Having lost his parents at a young age, de Lonzano was forced to travel to different parts of the Mediterranean, Safed, Constantinople, and Italy, and his many journeys brought him into contact with foreign languages, which he acquired assiduously, especially Arabic and Greek. Beyond acquiring texts and languages he also gained anthropological insights as he became acquainted with local customs he observed during his travels, which he subsequently integrated into his textual analysis. In his glosses on the rabbinic midrashim he frequently draws on his lexicographic expertise as well as on first-hand ethnographic experience of practices he witnessed while visiting among diverse ethnic groups:
The correct explanation of this passage has eluded the commentators for they were unfamiliar with the customs of the Arabs. The author of Yefeh to'ar repeated what his predecessors wrote, and he wrote that it was the custom of our forefathers to loosen the belt. … However, I say … the custom of the Arabs is to lift their clothes with the [aid of the] belt during their hours of work, and therefore they loosened their clothes in his [Jacob's] honor. Also it is their custom to make the sleeves of their garments wide and long, and during work they lift them and tie them together behind their shoulders and now they loosened them in his honor.Footnote 79
He was a distinguished philologist and bibliophile, who prided himself on his scientific approach to texts, using the tools of close reading and rigorous inquiry to sift through textual inconsistencies and linguistic errata in order to reconstruct the most accurate version of a particular source. His approach to the text of the Zohar was informed primarily by linguistic, grammatical, and philological considerations, as attested by his many glosses in the marginalia to the Mantua edition of the Zohar and to his notes to Tikkunei ha-Zohar (Mantua, 1558). Accordingly, whenever he encountered textual inaccuracies or inconsistencies in the Zohar that contradicted the biblical text, he repeatedly decided against accepting a mystical or kabbalistic exegesis of the Zohar in favor of correcting it to reflect the masorah and other accurate manuscripts of the Bible. At times he even corrected his own emendations when new evidence presented itself that necessitated such revision. The text-centered learning and understanding of Kabbalah that we observed in Yissakhar Baer's compositions is manifest also in de Lonzano's hermeneutic stance that privileges textual witnesses and evidence and philological rigor as the basis of exegetical activity.
He was also an impassioned critic of other scholars and leading rabbinic personalities of his time, couching his disagreements with them in his own critical methods of textual criticism. In his ʾImrei ʾemet, he carefully navigates a fine line, avoiding explicitly undermining the authority of the renowned kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria (Ari), while diligently highlighting the mistakes he had found in Luria's commentary on the Zohar section Sifra de-ẓniʿuta:
Since I know that … R. Isaac [Luria] of blessed memory wrote a commentary on some parts of Sifra de-ẓniʿuta, based on his own study before he reached the level of wisdom and before God's word was revealed to him, therefore, I agreed to check that commentary as far as I am able to, and to comment to the interested regarding that which needs comment. … And lest someone suspects me, saying who is the man who will come after the king [Luria], to argue with the Ari after his death, … I will inform the interested that on the contrary, he too is my salvation, and my master will rejoice in my actions, because the Ari of blessed memory wrote that commentary at the beginning of his studies, based on his own logic, therefore a few things were included which are incorrect.Footnote 80
This brief excerpt discloses de Lonzano's staunch attitude toward adopting correct methods in textual transmission, which advocated philological accuracy over religious authority. Texts, once written down, regardless of their authors, were to be subjected to the sedulous analysis of the textual critic, and when errors were detected they required urgent emendation. Only the expert grammarian, linguist, and philologist could authorize texts, even in the field of Kabbalah, and only based on solid evidence. This is a view that is also shared in contemporary scholarship of Kabbalah, particularly in the studies of Daniel Abrams and his students on the importance of manuscript studies in reconstructing the textual layers of medieval compositions.Footnote 81
An important difference between Yissakhar Baer and de Lonzano is their lexicographic approach to text and the textual sources they employ. While de Lonzano did not write an actual dictionary to the Zohar, he engaged and commented on a significant portion of the Zoharic literature, analyzing and probing the etymologies of difficult words. Furthermore, when a revised version of his dictionary to rabbinic literature, the Maʿarikh, was printed in Salonika in 1804, it was bound together with Shimon ibn Lavi's Zoharic dictionary in an explicit acknowledgement by the publishers that classical rabbinic midrash and the Zohar as a form of mystical midrash would present complementary reference tools for readers.Footnote 82 In other words, a reader inclined to study the language and meaning of midrashim will be likely to study the Zohar concurrently, adding a kabbalistic layer to classical midrashic exegesis. Therefore, by the nineteenth century, a dictionary containing these two learning tools proved economically and intellectually invaluable. De Lonzano's unmediated knowledge of Arabic, Greek, Turkish, and other European languages, which he acquired through his travels, gave him direct access to the linguistic facets of cultures that influenced the production of rabbinic texts. By reconstituting the words in the texts he studied to their original philological sources he was able to correctly decode their meaning and origins. By contrast, the occasional words in Arabic that Yissakhar Baer cites in ʾImrei binah are mediated indirectly from other written sources.Footnote 83
In addition, the biographical notes de Lonzano left behind reveal that he was a tenacious collector of books as well as manuscripts. His own critical remarks denouncing certain interpretations of Zoharic passages proposed by the Ari and Ḥayim Vital were based on acquiring a large number of manuscripts attributed to these kabbalists, which he was able to compare to other manuscripts of the Zohar he already owned. In the manuscript version of his work ‘Omer man, a commentary on the ʾIdra zuta section of the Zohar, he explicitly states that his philological rigor, namely knowledge of Greek and Arabic, compels him to interpret certain words differently and thus disagree with the hermeneutic conclusions of the Ari.Footnote 84 It is not surprising that when ‘Omer man was printed the editors censored the original work, omitting de Lonzano's critical comments of the Ari.Footnote 85
By contrast, manuscripts were not a primary source for Yissakhar Baer's textual analysis of the Zohar, since they were expensive and often required a collector to undertake extensive travels. As demonstrated earlier, he goes to great lengths in ʾImrei binah to collate diverse sources in order to offer a multilayered approach to the lexical and kabbalistic meaning of Zoharic words, but the books he consults are all printed texts and never manuscripts. De Lonzano, conversely, was a prodigious scholar, who spared no financial expense or physical hardship to obtain the necessary tools for scientific study based on rigorous textual analysis, which was a prerequisite to restoring texts to their philological foundation. Yissakhar Baer was primarily a pedagogue and a kabbalist, who produced for a readership that bought printed matter, just as a reader he also consulted and consumed the printed product. As a lexicon, Yissakhar Baer's ʾImrei binah is as much a dictionary to the philological difficulties of the Zohar as it is an introduction to the symbolic language and world of Kabbalah. Lexical oddities of Zoharic Aramaic serve as invitation for deeper conceptual analysis and engage Yissakhar Baer's knowledge as a kabbalist. While his library and language skills were both considerably less impressive than those of de Lonzano, his accessible organizational style, the range of sources he deploys, and the lucidity of his explanation established his lexicon as an important reference source for understanding the Zohar.
As this article has demonstrated, the transmission of knowledge is a complex multistage process that involves textual, philological, as well as ideological and religious considerations that coalesce into fashioning a new cultural product. The unique genre of Zoharic lexicons that emerged shortly after the printing of classic works of Kabbalah in the mid-sixteenth century has shown that Jewish mysticism, language, and dictionaries have an imbricated relationship in the intellectual history of early modernity. Printing in this period succeeded in opening up new conceptual fields of inquiry, such as Kabbalah, but constituted merely the first stage in the transformation of esoteric wisdom into exoteric lore. Early modern authors such as Moses Cordovero, Yissakhar Baer, Menaḥem de Lonzano, and others took advantage of a moment in cultural history when dissemination of Kabbalah required pedagogic adjustment, and deployed diverse strategies as cultural mediators that enabled and empowered readers who wished to partake of this lore on their own as part of independent self-study. Their efforts successfully paved the way for interreligious encounters, as the study of Kabbalah became an important meeting point between Jewish and Christian intellectuals at the time. The inclusion of two related but independent works in the Sulzbach edition of the Zohar—the original Zoharic text and Yissakhar Baer's ʾImrei binah—further celebrates the creative use of language, literary form, and pedagogy in the creation and transmission of meaning.
Kabbalistic dictionaries have a longue-durée history, beyond their impact in the early modern period, of generating new opportunities for meaning construction, and were an often-overlooked source for the revival of the Hebrew language in the twentieth century. Many words adopted into Modern Hebrew have derived from Zoharic words and expressions. Yet it is revealing that the otherwise meticulously edited and researched dictionary ʾEven Shoshan failed to account for the philological roots of phrases that stem from the Zohar. Expressions such as raḥimu, ʾitkasia, and ʾitgalia are merely mentioned as Aramaic without indicating the Zohar as a source, whereas rabbinic words are clearly identified as “derived from the Talmud” or midrashic.Footnote 86 It was the writer S. Y. Agnon who acutely observed the nascent points of contact between language and Kabbalah as he commented on the scholarship of Gershom Scholem: “The scholarship in which Scholem is engaged invigorates his language. I can already visualize the ridicule with which future students of language will scoff at our dictionaries, which claim to contain all the words of the Hebrew language but which fail to recognize the language of the Kabbalah.”Footnote 87 The cultural and intellectual significance of Zoharic dictionaries points beyond the narrow field of philology and early modernity as their contributions to language and identity in a new era of Jewish history invite continued scholarly appreciation.
