Elijah Benamozegh, the nineteenth-century Italian kabbalist, was a remarkably idiosyncratic character. The son of Moroccan immigrants, he was, at once, an orthodox kabbalist, steeped in traditional kabbalistic texts, and a liberal thinker who was conversant with and intellectually indebted to contemporary philosophic thought. The subject of Alessandro Guetta's Philosophy and Kabbalah: Elijah Benamozegh and the Reconciliation of Western Thought and Jewish Esotericism is Benamozegh's attempt to reconcile these two heritages—his ambition “to reconstruct a comprehensive Jewish philosophical system” that, in his words, would “reestablish with the most advanced human sciences the harmony that has been broken” (10) between Kabbalah and philosophy.

Guetta's book covers many aspects of this enterprise, and a complete summary is impossible in this context. However, let me summarize a few of its salient themes. A major concern of the first section of the work, to which Guetta repeatedly returns in the other sections, is Benamozegh's attempt to resolve the seeming contradiction between a traditional commitment to an unchanging revealed tradition and the faith of nineteenth-century philosophers in the progress of humanity. Benamozegh's resolution depended on his view that the revelation at Sinai, whose true essence was Kabbalah, was a seed that contained within it objective truth that was only gradually revealed over time.

The second section focuses on Benamozegh's commitment to oral tradition in a nineteenth-century culture that worshipped text. Valorizing oral tradition turns out to be central to Benamozegh's aforementioned attempt to present a Judaism that is at once a revealed religion and an evolving doctrine. In his view, “tradition is not a body of frozen data but a living organism that coexists with the future of the people” (122).

Finally, the third, very brief section attends to stylistic features of Benamozegh's work: he expresses himself “more in oratorical tones reminiscent of natural speech than with strict regard for order,” and “his style is circular” (171). Guetta attributes such features to Benamozegh's Oriental character and traditional kabbalistic training. In Guetta's analysis, this type of writing is a symptom of Benamozegh's attempt to reconcile Kabbalah and philosophy. For Benamozegh, “the Orient is faded but religious … and the Western world is progressive, but without any religion” (174). Judaism, however, with its Oriental idiom and progressive beliefs, is the synthesis of both.

An especially notable feature of this book is the successful manner in which Guetta is able to use Benamozegh's work to reflect on the intellectual climate of Italian Jewry in particular and of Western European Jewry in general. Indeed, his discussions of Benamozegh's indebtedness to Catholic thinkers, such as Vincenzo Gioberti, allow Guetta to speak broadly of the state of religious thought—Jewish and non-Jewish—in Italy and Western Europe. Those with an interest in nineteenth-century religious thought will find this book especially engaging. However, I would like to focus on what this book might contribute to the study of Kabbalah.

In a variety of ways, Benamozegh's thought, as presented by Guetta, strikes me as relevant to issues that are at the center of contemporary Kabbalah scholarship. Scholars such as Moshe Idel, Yehudah Liebes, and Michael Fishbane have rejected Gershom Scholem's contention that Kabbalah is essentially a foreign mythic system of thought that was imported into the heart of a Jewish faith that had overcome myth. Instead, these scholars see Kabbalah as part of an organic development from within the heart of Judaism. While accepting neither the specific claim of traditional kabbalists of the antiquity of the Zohar, nor the broader claim that Kabbalah has been passed down unchanged from Sinai, they have moved, nevertheless, closer to a traditional view. Interestingly, Benamozegh worked out a similar compromise. He accepted the view of nineteenth-century critical scholarship that the Zohar was not composed until the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and he saw Kabbalah “as having developed gradually: there had been no sudden birth of a rigid and immutable thought system.” Thus, there was a gradual revelation up to the Zohar, which represented “an end point rather than a beginning” (152).Footnote ¹

Contemporary scholars of Kabbalah, most notably Elliot Wolfson, have also dealt with the ethical ramifications of the particularism of traditional Kabbalah—at the most extreme, its sense that Jews are intrinsically different from and superior to non-Jews. Benamozegh, Guetta stresses repeatedly, was a thinker with liberal values. This is manifest in his treatment of the relationship between Israel and the nations. As is well known, in kabbalistic theosophy, multiple aspects—the sefirot—inhere in the unified God. In fact, however, the unity is not as perfect as it should be, and it falls on Jews to effect the appropriate union through worship and observance of the commandments with proper intention. In Benamozegh's striking presentation of this notion, the sar (angelic minister), which according to rabbinic and kabbalistic sources is appointed to each nation, is in fact a reflection of one of the aspects of God. What is more, this sar corresponds to the Volksgeist, the spirit of the particular nation, and, most remarkably, its particular idea of God. From all this, Benamozegh draws the conclusion “that the gathering—not, note, the union—of the various peoples leads to the reunification of God, the idea of whom had been fragmented” (56). The traditional kabbalistic drive to restore divine unity, therefore, is also a drive to restore harmony between the nations. Israel itself, in this account, is “figured as the primus inter pares, and its primacy resides solely in religious genius”—its mission “to disseminate the religion that will enable all peoples to rediscover their unity without losing their individuality” (57). In my view, it is impossible to support such an interpretation of traditional kabbalistic doctrine on textual grounds. Nevertheless, it is notable that such an interpretation exists and, perhaps more importantly, that this interpretation raises the question of the extent to which the particularism of Kabbalah must be seen as inseparable from other aspects of kabbalistic thought. That is, does such a reading do intrinsic violence to earlier kabbalistic thought, or does it successfully, to use a kabbalistic expression, liberate the sparks trapped in the husks?

In this context, I would stress that a strength of Guetta's work is that he avoids the temptation to lampoon Benamozegh's readings of kabbalistic literature or dismiss them as mere apologetics. Rather, he allows them to be heard with all the sincerity that Benamozegh meant them. Indeed, the main shortcoming of this work, in my view, is that it does not allow them to be heard with sufficient detail. In numerous places, Guetta does not say enough. For example, we do not get a full picture of Benamozegh's kabbalistic sources, which would be useful in situating him in the history of Kabbalah. Similarly, I found some of his discussions of Benamozegh's attempts to reconcile various kabbalistic and philosophical ideas lacking in details.

In the final section of the book, Guetta highlights the intellectual isolation that Benamozegh felt: “There were many who had heard of him and his works, and their compliments were occasionally hyperbolic, calling him master or genius. However, those who could truly claim to have read his books and understood them were few indeed. He was sadly deprived of dialogue” (175). The foregoing reservations not withstanding, Guetta's work, especially now that it is available in an English translation, should go a long way toward bringing Benamozegh's thought into contemporary dialogue.