Terrors of History: Medieval Kabbalah and the Lachrymose Reading of Jewish Experience

           Salo Baron famously argued that modern historians should avoid falling into “lachrymose” narratives that treat Jewish history as a litany of tragic events. The record of Jewish history provides evidence for a much richer and more complicated story. Such caution is well founded for scholars studying the history of Jewish experience. However, when it comes to the study of Jewish historical memory, the situation is different. Researchers examining the ways that pre-modern Jews understood and ascribed meaning to Jewish historical experience often encounter texts that present deeply lachrymose narratives of Jewish history. Even though Jews historically experienced significant periods of safety, prosperity, and cultural flourishing, the historical realities that drew their attention and interpretive energies were often negative. Periods of relative calm did not raise the same problems as the phenomena of exile, subjugation at the hands of foreign nations, expulsions, and massacres. Continued commitment to covenantal theology that the idea that the Jews as God’s chosen people demanded a more complex understanding of the negative events of Jewish history.

            Late medieval kabbalists writing during the period between the completion of the main body of the Zoharic corpus in the early 14th century and the development of the Lurianic school of Jewish mysticism in Safed in the mid-16th century produced a particularly rich discourse for decoding the misfortunes of Jewish history. These texts, often anonymous, drew upon earlier kabbalistic sources to add a new and highly complex layer to the standard biblical and rabbinic understanding of why Jews experience historical setbacks. They argued that the secret divine revelations of the kabbalistic tradition provide Jews with unique insight into the heavenly causes of earthly human history, and they deployed several uniquely kabbalistic techniques for interpreting Jewish historical suffering. In this paper I will describe how kabbalistic texts composed during this period used the image of the sarim, or heavenly archons of the nations, to explain Jewish subjugation to Christian and Muslim nations. I will also describe how they understood gilgul, or reincarnation, as the hidden mechanism whereby Jewish souls carry out their secret mission over the course of multiple lifetimes across the long arc of Israel’s exile. And finally, mention will be made of the ways that kabbalistic texts situated these strategies for reading Jewish history within a macro-historical concept of multiple successive worlds, according to which the present world is the most difficult of all possible manifestations of the cosmos. These ideas served as kabbalistic keys for decoding the meaning behind Jewish suffering on the plane of history. This paper will argue that the strategies evident in these discourses suggest that kabbalists sought to imagine Jews as the proactive agents of history, rather than the disempowered victims of more dominant nations.

              While their framing of the course of Jewish history was lachrymose, the kabbalistic project of understanding Jewish history in kabbalistic terms was optimistic. These texts deployed kabbalistic depictions of Jewish historical experience to reimagine the setbacks and misfortunes of Jewish history as ironic, secret signifiers of progress. By suffering, they claimed, Jews wield power and move history forward. These texts also argued that, even though Jewish experience in exile is painful, God has given the Jewish people the unique gift of Kabbalah, which reveals to them the true meaning behind all events over the course of human history. In a counter-theological inversion of the image of the blindfolded synagoga, these texts depict Jews as the only people who are not blind to the secret of history.