MENTALITIES OF ANCIENT JUDAISM

Modern scholars are often disappointed by the apparently lowly, working-day status accorded to imagination in medieval psychology—a sort of draught-horse of the sensitive soul, not even given intellectual status. Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories, they boast unashamedly of their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior moral character as well as intellect. —Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory

This book is a story of imagination in the service of memory, of magic in The service of scholasticism. In the visionary literature of the talmudic period, there are several texts that concern the conjuration of an angel known as the Sar-Torah, the "Prince of the Torah." This angel is said to bestow upon a person an extraordinary memory, prodigious skill in absorbing what he has learned, and esoteric knowledge of the cosmos and heaven. Most of the texts are stories of how ancient sages conjured that angel, who transformed them into great rabbis. Those secrets, say the texts, are available to the reader, who can become as learned as they merely by following the rabbis' magical instructions.

Like the intellectuals in Mary Carruthers's study of memory in the Middle Ages,1 rabbinic Jews in ancient Palestine and Babylonia revered sages whose authority and holiness lay in their ability to memorize and retain sacred law and lore. The Sar-Torah literature can tell us about how these values influenced the popular religion, magic, and pneumatic spirituality of the time. These texts also play an important role in the history of Judaism in late antiquity, and can help us understand who the ancient Jewish mystics were.

The Sar-Torah traditions are set into a remarkable corpus of Hebrew and Aramaic texts known as the Hekhalot literature. This literature, which has received a great deal of attention in recent years, took shape in Palestine and Babylonia in the period of the classical Talmuds and midrashim and afterward, from the third to eighth centuries, C.E. It is preserved mostly in medieval manuscript traditions stemming from Germany, Italy, and the Middle East. The best-known texts in this corpus are pseudepigraphic accounts of the ascent of a second-century rabbi, usually Rabbi Ishmael or Rabbi Akiba, through the chambers of Heaven, the Hekhalot, to the chariot-throne of God, the Merkavah. Many of these texts are based on the visions of the heavenly throne depicted in the books of Ezekiel and Isaiah. Also prominent in the corpus, however, are texts, such as the Sar-Torah literature, about the cultivation of angels who bring practical benefits to people on earth.

We are only beginning to understand the significance of Hekhalot literature for the history of religions. It is of value to students of religious phenomena and behavior because of its place in the history and study of rabbinic Judaism and Jewish thought, and because of the distinctive conceptual and literary problems it presents. Little is known about the social environment of the rabbinic estate in late antiquity. Hekhalot literature is evidence for trends and groups within Jewish society who were related to that of the founders and leaders of rabbinic Judaism in complex ways. Moreover, its peculiar variations on rabbinic theology, ritual, and scholastic values can shed light on the worldview of those rabbis.

This study is an exploration of central themes in Hekhalot literature—Torah and wisdom, tradition and authority, and the ritual process—through an analysis of the Sar-Torah and related texts. Its aim is to find out what these texts can tell us about the social and historical context of their authors, and to demonstrate how culture, tradition, and society operate in mystical and magical systems. In the course of this enterprise, we shall uncover aspects of ancient Judaic thinking that this literature reveals.

Approaches to History

Alasdair MacIntyre, in the opening pages of After Virtue, asks us to imagine a cataclysm in which all the works of scientific progress had been destroyed, leaving only a few scattered, fragmentary documents. The society living in its aftermath would try to reconstruct the sciences from the remaining fragments, and eventually convince themselves that what they had developed were, in fact, those sciences. MacIntyre likens that scenario to the relationship of contemporary moral philosophers to their moral tradition: "What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived."

MacIntyre bases his moral argument on a historical one. The moral argument is that to understand the sources of moral life that our society values it is necessary to reconstruct their cultural context. The historical argument is that the complex cultures that modern Western civilization considers to be its heritage are known to us only fragmentarily since the Enlightenment. This study is concerned with the historical issue implied in MacIntyre's scenario rather than the moral one. If we wish to understand the religious ideas of premodern civilizations such as that of ancient Judaism, we must be prepared to reconstruct the cultural universe that those cultures inhabited, in all their apparent familiarity and alienness. This exercise is important, for while the historical study of rabbinic Judaism and its environment has preoccupied scholars for more than two centuries, we do not always question certain basic assumptions we have about the way ancient Jews thought.

Historians have recognized this larger problem for several decades, and its implications have penetrated most fields of historical research. Many historians look to the social sciences to ask whether the cultures we study differed from ours in fundamental ways of thinking. In the study of religion, this has meant increased attention to cultural anthropology for methodological models. In the study of classical and medieval history, this has given rise to what is called the histoire des mentalités, in which historical sources, including literary texts and archival documents, are studied not only for political and intellectual history but for information about basic facts of everyday life, including rituals, popular physiology and psychology, and the subtleties of social distinctions. This method stresses that the study of history requires the discovery of the assumptions governing those societies that we do not share.

Two ways in which this program can be carried out are of interest to us here. In one type of study, a...