The genesis of the Kabbalah inside the Muslim world
As I told Stephan Beyer yesterday, this figure is
(and his Arabic speaking circle in Baghdad are) who I consider to be the real
founder(s) of what eventually became the sephirotic system of the Kabbalah we
know today (i.e. the Tree of Life, four worlds, ten spheres, twenty-two paths,
etc.) In his two articles i. Sefer Yesira and Early Islam: A Reappraisal
and ii. Further Thoughts on the Origins of "Sefer yeṣirah", Steven Wasserstrom all but proves that
the Sefer Yetzirah originated in Arabic speaking circles and is possibly a sort
of redacted medieval Jewish reiteration of an Arabic translation of a work
attributed to Apollonius of Tyana (Arabic 'Balīnus'), viz. sirr al-khalāʿiqa
(The Secrets of Creation), wherein Abraham (ع) stands in for Apollonius as
the author.
This thesis is not in any way dismissing or
otherwise diminishing Jewish intellectual contributions to Islamic high
culture, which are manifold. It merely posits that the sephirotic Kabbalah as a
system is a neopythagorean-neoplatonic re-iteration/reinvention of Islamic
Neoplatonism in Jewish guise and has no antiquity: Jewish mysticism and
esotericism properly before the Kabbalah being the system of the Hekhalot which
is a native Palestinian form of Jewish Gnosticism (capital 'G'). The influence
of Hekhalot mysticism itself on the varieties of the early Ghulāt Shiʿism as
well as (and especially) Islamic occulture and occultism are questions only now
being explored by scholars, in this respect particularly by Gideon Bohak.
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Comment: Maimonides was a
dyed in the wool Avicennan. His Guide for the Perplexed was originally written
in Arabic, and it is a thoroughly Avicennan work. His son Abraham was regularly
hanging out with the Sufis of Cairo and basically became a devotee to the
writings of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi, the Master of Illumination (d. 1191).
Abraham Maimonides in turn was one of the sources for Joseph Gikatilla, who
authored The Gates of Light (Sha'are Orah), which is practically a Jewish
kabbalistic reiteration of Suhrawardi's Hikmat al-ishraq. Note that Gates of
Light is the first systematic excursus upon the sephirotic Kabbalah as a
system. This would make Suhrawardi one of the hidden intellectual sources for
the whole kabbalistic system as we know it.
