Jewish mysticism has exerted influence outside the Jewish community. Kabbala, distorted and deflected from its own intentions, has helped to nourish and stimulate certain currents of thought in Christian society since the Renaissance. “Christian Kabbala,” born in the 15th century under the impetus of Jewish converts from Spain and Italy, claimed to find in the Kabbalistic documents—touched up or even forged if necessary—arguments for the truths of the Christian faith. A certain number of Christian humanist scholars became interested in Jewish mysticism, and several of them acquired a fairly extensive knowledge of it on the basis of authentic texts. Among them were Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) and Gilles of Viterbo (Egidio da Viterbo; c. 1465–1532) in Italy; Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) in Germany, who wrote one of the principal expositions of Kabbala in a language accessible to the learned non-Jewish public (De arte Cabbalistica, 1517); and the visionary Guillaume Postel (1510–81) in France. The occult philosophy of the 16th century, the “natural philosophy” of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the occult and theosophic theories that are cultivated even today and that have coloured the ideology of Freemasonry—all of these continue to borrow from Kabbala, though they rarely grasp its spirit and meaning. The same is true of most of the books on Kabbala put out by publishers of occult and theosophic literature today.
The scholarly study of Jewish mysticism is a very recent phenomenon. The state of mind and the tendencies of the founders of the “science of Judaism” (the scholarly study of Jewish religion, literature, and history) in Germany during the first half of the 19th century were too permeated with rationalism to be favourable to scholarly investigation of a movement judged to be obscurantist and retrograde. Although there were some valuable early studies, research on a large scale and application of the proved methods of philology and history of religions began only with the work of Gershom G. Scholem (1897–1982) and his disciples. This research addressed all the many areas of Jewish mysticism, but in every area the gaps in knowledge remain serious. Critical editions of mystical texts are few in number; unpublished documents are cataloged incompletely; and only a few monographs on writers and particular themes exist, though these are indispensable preliminaries to a detailed and thorough synthesis. It is to be hoped that the synthesis outlined by Scholem in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), though exceptionally valuable in its time, will be taken up again and completed. Georges Vajda Jewish myth and legend
Jewish myth and legend comprises a vast body of stories transmitted over the past 3,000 years in Hebrew and in the vernacular dialects spoken by Jews, such as Yiddish (Judeo-German) and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). These stories have played an important role in the history of Jewish religion and culture.Virtually all the standard types of folktales are represented. Conspicuously absent, however, are pure fairy tales, because fairies, elves, and the like are foreign to the Jewish imagination, which prefers to populate the otherworld with angels and demons subservient to God. Significance and characteristics
Apart from their intrinsic appeal, Jewish myths and legends claim attention for three special reasons: (1) Those incorporated in the Hebrew Bible are now part and parcel of the cultural heritage of the Western world and have exerted a profound influence on its literature and art. (2) During the Middle Ages, Jews were among the principal transmitters of Middle Eastern and North African tales to the West, so that many familiar Eastern stories can be traced to Jewish compilations. (3) Since these stories have been accumulated through centuries of constant migration, they provide an unrivalled body of “clinical” material for studying the processes by which popular tales in fact travel and are transformed.
Not all of the stories are of Jewish origin; many have parallels elsewhere and are derived from tales the Jews picked up from their non-Jewish neighbours in the lands of their dispersion. Even what is borrowed, however, is usually impressed with a distinctive Jewish stamp. The tales were often adapted to point up some precept of the Jewish religion, to illustrate some facet of Jewish life, or to exemplify some trait of Jewish character and temperament. The dominant feature of the stories is their religious and moral tone; most of them are told specifically as part of the homiletic exposition of Scripture. Such stories are taught to Jews from early childhood as a regular part of their religious education. To the tradition-minded Jew, therefore, they are more than mere literary fancies. Biblical characters and events are presented more in the lineaments of later legend than in their original biblical form, and popular notions about heaven and hell, reward and punishment, the coming of the messiah, and the resurrection of the dead derive mainly from these sources rather than from Scripture itself.
A distinction must be made between myth and legend. In common parlance, a myth is a story about gods or otherworldly beings. In this sense, therefore, there can be no original Jewish myths, because Judaism is a rigorously monotheistic religion. Nevertheless, from the earliest times, Jews have not disdained to borrow the myths of their pagan neighbours and adapt them to their own religious outlook. If, however, the term is interpreted in a larger sense to mean the portrayal of perennial concerns in the context of particular historical events, myth is indeed one of the essential vehicles by which Judaism conveys its message. It is only when historical happenings are translated into this wider dimension that they cease to be mere antiquarian data and acquire continuing relevance. In Judaism, for example, the Exodus from Egypt is projected mythically from something that happened at a particular time into something that is continually happening, and it comes to exemplify the situation and experience of all humans everywhere—their emergence from the bondage of obscurantism, their individual revelations at their individual Sinais, their trek through a figurative wilderness, even their death in it so that their children or children’s children may eventually reach the figurative “Promised Land.” By the same token, the historical destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem is transformed by myth into a paradigm of the continuing mutual estrangement of God and humans, their exile from one another. Legend, on the other hand, implies no more than a fanciful embroidering of purportedly historical fact. Unlike myth, it does not transcend the historical and the local. Sources and development Myth and legend in the Bible
The vast repertoire of Jewish myths and legends begins with the Hebrew Bible. Their overall purpose in Scripture is to illustrate the ways of God with humans, as exemplified both in historical events and in personal experience. The stories themselves are often derived from current popular lore and possess abundant parallels in other cultures, both ancient and modern. In each case, however, they are given a peculiar and distinctive twist. Myths
Biblical myths are found mainly in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. They are concerned with the creation of the world and the first man and woman, the origin of the current human condition, the primeval Deluge, the distribution of peoples, and the variation of languages.
The basic stories are derived from the popular lore of the ancient Middle East; parallels can be found in the extant literature of the peoples of the area. The Mesopotamians, for instance, also knew of an earthly paradise such as Eden, and the figure of the cherubim—properly griffins rather than angels—was known to the Canaanites. In the Bible, however, this mythical garden of the gods becomes the scene of man’s fall and the background of a story designed to account for the natural limitations of human life. Similarly, the Babylonians told of the formation of humankind from clay. But, whereas in the pagan tale the first man’s function is to serve as an earthly menial of the gods, in the scriptural version his role is to rule over all other creatures. The story of the Deluge, including the elements of the ark and the dispatch of the raven and dove, appears already in the Babylonian myths of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis. There, however, the hero is eventually made immortal, whereas in the Bible this detail is omitted because, to the Israelite mind, no child of woman could achieve that status. Lastly, while the story of the Tower of Babel was told originally to account for the stepped temples (ziggurats) of Babylonia, to the Hebrew writer its purpose is simply to inculcate the moral lesson that humans should not aspire beyond their assigned station.