Assimilation, Sovereignty, Diaspora: The Politics of Mysticism from a Jewish Perspective

Regardless of the vast phenomenological diversity of experiences reported in traditions throughout human history, modern definitions of mysticism have centered upon experiences of “union,” that is, moments of “mystical death” wherein one’s sense of individuated self dissolves into infinite divinity. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century in Europe and North America, it became commonplace for scholars of religion and religious seekers alike to identify such experiences as the common core of all (legitimate) religions. This perennialist approach imagined an essence of religion that lies beneath all the external trappings of ritual practice, social formations, etc. In the twenty-first century, Leigh Eric Schmidt and others have demonstrated the extent to which this mystical discourse reflected not only Protestant sensibilities but also, moreover, the modern European project of liberalism. Amid liberal-humanist efforts to determine how different religious groups might coexist civilly, many embraced visions of self-dissolution into a supposedly universal All that just happened to resonate with liberal Protestant theologies.

In this paper, I contemplate the politics of mysticism through a Jewish cultural-historical lens in order to shed new light on the modern category of mysticism as well as modern liberal politics, including modern Jewish politics. While scholars such as Leora Batnitzky, Aamir Mufti, and Sarah Hammerschlag have shown how attention to the “Jewish question” illuminates foundational blind spots, complexities, and dangers of liberalism, this study builds upon that scholarship through demonstrating how representations of Judaism among the architects of modern mysticism reveals a great deal about that very category and its entanglements with liberalism. My study refracts this material through the prism of three different pathways in modern Jewish politics: assimilation, sovereignty, and diaspora. 

In the nineteenth century, mystical fascinations with self-dissolution correlated with the liberal project of assimilation. Indeed, spiritual visions of annihilating individuation harmonized with political visions of melting minority identities into the unified whole of state citizenry. While the case of supposedly indissoluble Jewish particularity (in bodily practice and in social identity) haunted the architects of liberalism, the progenitors of modern mysticism had their own version of this “Jewish question.” Scholars of mysticism tended to portray Judaism as a stark antithesis. “Judaism and mysticism are irreconcilable opposites,” declared one Eckhart scholar in 1868. “[T]he Jewish mind” is hardly compatible with mysticism due to “its rigid monotheism and its turn towards worldly re­alism and statutory observance,” explained the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on Mysticism in 1910. James simply did not mention Judaism in his lectures on mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Even in 1960, Walter Stace, whose definition of mysticism continues to be cited routinely in psychedelic studies today and forms the theoretical basis for that field’s Mystical Experience Questionnaire, claimed that “Judaism is perhaps the least mystical of all the great world religions.” In short, just as early liberals exhibited anxieties about whether Jews could ever fully assimilate into a universal (but actually liberal Protestant, Eurocentric) humanism, so too the mystical discourse associated with that liberal project critiqued Judaism for its resistance to absorption into a universal (but actually culturally situated) divinity.

In the twentieth century, it appears that Jewish scholars of religion increasingly recognized correlations between enlightened assimilation and mystical absorption, and some intervened accordingly. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Steven Katz, whose 1978 essay “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism” launched the constructivist/contextualist turn in the study of mysticism, was a Jewish Studies scholar. However, the seeds of this shift emerged already at the dawn of the century. When Martin Buber introduced the very idea of Jewish mysticism in his introduction to his first Hasidic anthology in 1906, he cast it as surging “from an original characteristic of the people (Volkes) that generated it,” revealing “the hidden reality of the folk-soul (Volksseele).” And Buber explicated elsewhere that it was his Zionism that propelled his turn toward Hasidism in the first place. This was true also for Gershom Scholem, who founded the academic field of Jewish mysticism. And, like Buber, Scholem portrayed Jewish mysticism as a fundamentally internal Jewish outpouring, essentially independent of any “external” influences. Moreover, it is especially significant for our purposes that Scholem claimed that Kabbalah lacks experiences of mystical union. The fact that this is a rather gross overstatement, as Idel and others have shown, makes Scholem’s claim even more intriguing. Indeed, as Huss has suggested, Scholem’s repudiation of mystical death reflects his own Jewish nationalism. Thus, if absorptive mysticism mapped onto a politics of Jewish assimilation, then this later approach correlates with a politics of Jewish sovereignty. Whereas the former embraces the death of the “I,” the latter amounts to a denial of death. And this nationalist Jewish mysticism does not overcome perennialism so much as refigure it: If the assimilationism model locates a common core spanning all religions, then the sovereignty model locates a perennial core within the nation itself.

Finally, this paper explores possibilities for an alternate model of mystical experience that is neither assimilationist absorption nor nationalist essentializing, one that is more dialectical than either perennialism or constructivism. On one hand, there is no view from nowhere, no pure immediacy that is culturally neutral. Humans are always already hermeneutical beings. On the other hand, no cultural frame, biographical positionality, or personal intention has total sovereignty over one’s spectrum of possible experiences. There are, dare I say, human as well as more-than-human elements that transcend and transform our situated selves, and the continually shifting shapes of our lives alter those surroundings in turn. The study of those experiences called “mystical” ought to examine such hermeneutical, phenomenological, and ecological dynamisms. From this perspective, selves (individual and collective) are neither dissolvable nor perennial, but rather decentered and dispersed. The politics of mysticism here is neither one of assimilation nor sovereignty, but—we might say—one of diaspora. Here scholars can trace the particular contours of selves and collectivities while also surveying what is borderless, where spiritual deaths and metamorphoses may reflect transcendence but do not simply signal some pseudo-universalism or “cosmopolitanism” that always proves parochial.