Let us suppose, for argument's sake, that academic and popular interest in Kabbalah have peaked and Kabbalah is going out of style. In academia and on the street, people are starting to discover the limitations of the form. Kabbalah invites the practitioner to get entangled in its mythos and symbolism, a thicket of forms and names, each with hidden and manifest values and content. In Western society, populations that are willing to accept such a mythos at face value are probably outnumbered by those who seek the void, who have a visceral need to meditate. The foremost exemplification of this in Jewish terms lies in the nexus of Judaism's encounters with Sufism, and that is the subject of a number of striking studies by such scholars as Diana Lobell, Paul Fenton, and Sarah Pessin.

Time is past due, then, to address the activities of one man who stood between the two worlds, who chose Kabbalah over the possibilities of the Abulafian path and eventually drifted into the Sufi path. That person was Isaac of Acre, “Rav Yitzchak de-min Akko.” Isaac of Acre was an intercessor between the world of Abraham Abulafia and his prophetic Kabbalah and the theosophical Kabbalah of the world that he embraced when he fled the burning city of Acre in 1291. Now Eitan Fishbane has produced a masterful portrayal of this kabbalist from the two extant works Meirat ‘Einayim (published by Amos Goldreich) and Ozar ḥayyim (in manuscript). From these two theoretical works, Fishbane has constructed a view of this kabbalist so vivid that sometimes one feels that one is walking in the mystic's own skin. In his presentation, Fishbane endeavors to answer the following questions: “How is (Isaac) a bridge between systems and how is he a contemplative mystic?” (18).

Isaac fled the burning city of Acre in the wake of its fall to the Muslims in order to become a Mediterranean peripatetic. In his subsequent writings, he shows a distinct preference for the teaching, culture, and polis of Christendom, against the trends indicated by, among others, Mark R. Cohen in his Under Crescent and Cross. Isaac had no love for the Muslims, and that antipathy drew him to Christian Spain, ostensibly to interview Moshe de Leon and possibly to obtain the source document for the mysterious “Midrash of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai” that was emerging from the latter's study room in dribs and drabs. The interview with De Leon's widow, which planted the seeds of the subsequent, tiresome debates about the Zohar's “authenticity,” are the way that Isaac of Acre has been most remembered by the academy.

That should end now, as Fishbane presents a carefully parsed analysis of Isaac's worldview, which remains in many respects a template for the spirituality of the Zohar in which the kabbalist is enmeshed in a consciousness defined by the interactions of the tropes of the Jewish canon, the images of the phenomenal world, the demands of the law, and the larger sweep of history. To quote Fishbane, Isaac “reflects a broad fusion of contemplative themes and practices (including deep integration of ascetic tensions) with an expansion of Nachmanidean exotericism and exegesis” (284). These disparate objects of thought weave in and out of each other in a state that Elliot Wolfson has defined as constantly unfolding, a secret that never fully reveals itself.

Isaac of Acre drew from a variety of sources. David Maimonides’ stay in Acre in 1280 (in flight from the disapprobation of his congregants in Egypt) laid the groundwork for Isaac's incorporation of Sufi themes. Acre was also a center for tosafist thought that had been imported with the immigration of scholars from the Franco-German schools. Fishbane sees Isaac as the product of “the convergence of Near Eastern Jewish Sufism and Ashkenazi pietism” (30). There is some educated guessing here, as Fishbane surmises that “he was very likely educated in the Talmudic (Tosafist) academy of Akko, was clearly schooled in the thought and exegetical ways of Nachmanidean Kabbalah, had received oral instruction from Masters of Jewish Sufi piety and was evidently very close to the front lines of the battle over Maimonidean philosophy” (32). Nonetheless, he ended his life in North Africa, in apparent rejection of R. Asher ben Yechiel, and there he composed his more sufistic work, Meirat ‘Einayim. His relationship with the philosophical tradition was somewhat fraught. He made some attempts to reconcile the two traditions, but elsewhere averred that God did not hear the philosophers’ prayer! Nonetheless, his construction for mystical gnosis drew on Maimonidean models.

Fishbane regards Isaac as developing a doctrine of a kabbalistic chain of legitimacy, in which the authenticity of one's spiritual lineage is the source of the spiritual master's legitimacy. In fact, this is not a novel idea. The first chapter of Avot confers a semi-apostolic chain of tradition within rabbinic Judaism, for which the mystique of ordination and the authorizing to education (semikhat hora'ah) is an expression. The tension between tradition and extemporaneity is also inherent in the tensions between the Nachmanidean tradition and the creative and expressive practices of the circles that produced the Zohar. To teach the process, Isaac adopted the confessional writing style, as Fishbane notes:

At the end of Isaac's life, theosophical Kabbalah was beginning to coalesce in various way stations on the Mediterranean rim, and his thought reflects these interests, such as the practice of unification, or, in Fishbane's rather dense locution, “to center the mind on the Infinity that binds all of the sefirot together (and to fuse such concentration with the ritual act of utterance) this itself emerges as a technique for the transcendence of the ordinary workings of cosmic law” (137). There was, as in Safed, the practice of willfully taking on the neshamah yeteirah, or extra dimension of the soul. In stressing the act of unification as central to Isaac's mysticism, as in his use of the terms yiḥud and keshirah, Fishbane rediscovers what has been widely known about zoharic Kabbalah. Fishbane tends to operate in the bubble of Isaac's thought. His analysis of the Janus-like theme of du-parzufim is not linked to its rabbinic antecedents or to its later incarnation in the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah. In this, as in other instances, Fishbane's presentation is weakened by a lack of recourse to contemporary parallels to Isaac's ideas. For all of Fishbane's close and elegant definition of Isaac's methodology, the kabbalist ultimately does not surprise the reader overmuch, as his ideas paralleled other, more widely known sources such as the Zohar tradition.

Isaac may have introduced the very notions of hishtavut (equanimity), devekut (cleaving to God), and hitbodedut (contemplation). He probably adapted these ideas from Sufism, where they certainly have counterparts, and from Abulafian sources. All of these ideas would eventually become foundational principles of Hasidism. In presenting these manifestations of “pure” spirituality, originating in the East but surviving in Polish Hasidism, Fishbane finds himself in useful dialogue with Paul Fenton and Moshe Idel in a fashion that profitably moves the discussion forward. It is to be hoped that this will happen, as Fishbane notes in his mission statement: “Scholarship should aim to converse with multiple audiences as one” (3).