“A better understanding of the history of some of the mystical techniques found in Kabbalah will show that some of them stem from magical sources. Likewise, neglected texts found in manuscripts related to [Jewish] ‘saintly’ mystical figures…will reveal a much greater role played by magic in their activities than previously suspected.”
-Moshe Idel
Wizards, said the Enlightenment-era writer Daniel Defoe, “reveal and discover conspiracies” and “blast or succeed the enterprises of princes and people”. The prophets of Israel were, in many senses of the word, wizardly.
Inspired by a voice from a burning bush, Moses outmaneuvered the Egyptian sorcerers, fuelling a series of events that led to the emancipation of Hebrew slaves. Elijah, a bona fide tempestarius, brought fire down from heaven, incinerating the reputation of the oppressive King Ahab and his god Baal. Daniel, a Jew whose intellect incensed Babylonian elites, illuminated the minds of two kings and set flame to a plot to have him killed.
A wealth of literature testifies to the unceasing, destiny-changing miracles produced over the ages by Jewish sages like these. And some Kabbalists, like Elisha of old, have inherited their mantle.
Dr Yosef Rosen is a scholar and student of the Kabbalah who is currently teaching an online class on the Ba’alei Shem, Jewish “shamans” he says roamed through Ashkenaz (Western and Central Europe) “offering healing and mystical ecstasy”. Rosen, who studied with legendary Kabbalah scholars Moshe Idel and Yehudah Liebes, received his doctorate in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley with a study on the deep links between the Talmud and the Kabbalah.
We spoke to Rosen to learn more about his research, musical interests, and the mysterious “Shamans of Ashkenaz”.
The Custodian: When and why did you start studying the Kabbalah?
Dr Yosef Rosen: The secrets of Kabbalah—Ein Sof, Shekhinah, Sefirot, Merkavah—came to my attention long after I needed them. Such is the nature of esotericism—secrets are only learnt after one knows that there are hidden matters. Like most American Jews, I did not grow up with the knowledge that there is helpful wisdom to be found in the mysterious Jewish lore and literature of Kabbalah. I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community where rigorous study of ancient Jewish text was the highest form of religious life (for men, at least).
But Kabbalah was not part of that curriculum. Its texts were not alluded to, not even as the summit of spiritual study that a student might eventually reach later in life. None of my rabbis, no matter their age, stature, or beard-size, studied Kabbalah; it had slowly been eradicated from the curriculum of Yeshivah learning since the early-nineteenth century. Our study regiment of ancient Jewish wisdom was limited to a narrow range of texts that address the legal and moral predicaments of daily life. There were no whispers of arch-angels, divine emanations, the erotics of a shattered, androgyne God, or the magical powers of letters.
I first was lured toward Kabbalah when I began to congregate with neo-hassidic, Anglo seekers in Israel. Imagine a social scene where the hallucinogenic improvisation of the Grateful Dead and the seering existentialism of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov dance hand in hand. My first encounter with Kabbalah was thus mediated by two waves of revivalism: Neo-hassidut began in the early twentieth century as a modernist revival of Hassidut, which, itself, is an early-modern, Eastern-European folk revival of Kabbalah.
Hassidism has always had a soft spot in my heart; my father’s grandfather was a hassid. I was attracted to its fervour, its stylistic otherness to the rational and tucked-in Jewishness of my youth. But the study of classical hassidic texts left me wanting. Its overdetermination of subjectivity as the crux of theological discourse seemed to ignore the ways that materiality, cosmology, and history are sites where the divine can emerge in complex and ever-changing ways; its simplification of metaphysics into a binary of “nothingness” and “the infinite” seemed to leave out all that bridges the two; and its simplifications of kabbalistic symbolism only made me hungry to discover the origins of Kabbalah before its early-modern transformation into Hassidut.
To sate these curiosities, I began graduate work at Hebrew University, almost a century after Gershom Scholem began the historical study of Kabbalah there, not far from the Mount of Olives. Amidst the olive trees and the BM-section of the library, the gates of Kabbalah began to open and whispers of a weirder, metaphysically maximalist Judaism lured me onward.
C: Who would you say has most influenced your approach to the study of Jewish esotericism?
YR: I see myself as part of the fourth-generation of Kabbalah scholarship. Scholem launched the field with his rigorous Germanic philology, but he also brought with him grandiose historiographical assumptions, a distaste for rabbinic Judaism, and a devaluation of “practical Kabbalah”. Many of his students broadened the sphere of what might be studied as Jewish mysticism, such as the myths of rabbinic lore, the ancient apocalypses, and the Renaissance dialogues between Christian hebraists and Jewish esoterica. They filled-in the historical gaps and introduced new phenomenological models to account for the varieties of Jewish mysticism. I was lucky enough to study at Hebrew University with two of the greatest still-living scholars of that wave, Moshe Idel and Yehudah Liebes, and they left a lasting impact on how I analyze kabbalistic manuscripts and concepts.
Over the past twenty to thirty years, the academic study of Jewish mysticism has flourished, diversified, and reoriented itself as a more interdisciplinary field. Such scholars as Elliot Wolfson, Boaz Huss, Shaul Magid, Yossi Chajes, Melila Hellner-Eshed, and Jonathan Garb have brought with them a broader toolkit of humanistic methodologies and a refusal to live within the paradigm of the detached scholar. I have learnt much from each of these teachers, but my orientation as a historian of Kabbalah might be most impacted by someone who has never written on the topic. My doctoral advisor at UC Berkeley, Daniel Boyarin, taught me that it’s possible to be both a philologist (a textual-critic in the widest sense) and a cultural historian, that the composition and production of texts is part of cultural history and often the most interesting stories can only be uncovered by finding the seams within the text and recovering its history of composition.
C: Has your study of the Kabbalah’s practical and theoretical aspects impacted your approach to music and dance?
YR: Kabbalah offers a method for mapping, diagramming, and visualising the ineffable. Dance is quite similar—it asks of the body to create a somatic language for sensations, aspirations, and even ideas that we may otherwise have difficulty articulating in language. Just as the ten sefirot are a kabbalists way to diagram how divinity becomes psyche, becomes materiality, the choreography of dance, even if it is improvisatory, is a way to diagram the experience of embodiment, to map what it feels like to have sinews and sadness, blood and humility, children and parents.
As a DJ, I try to enable people to find these choreographies, to find the prayer that is spoken with nothing but the hip, to find a new way to map a relationship between their upper and lower bodies. And then, once the body is speaking, once the mind and muscles are aligned, I usher people back to the unmappable wilderness.
C: Could you tell us a bit more about your dissertation?
YR: My dissertation reunites two arenas of Jewishness—Talmud and Kabbalah—that lack models for their integration. In both academic and religious scholarship, Talmud study is seen as disconnected and almost irrelevant to the study of Kabbalah. Talmud is legal, rational, practical, Late Antique; Kabbalah is mythic, imaginative, spiritual, Medieval. I argue that the emergence of Zoharic literature came out of an application of Talmudic models of creativity, debate, and rhetoric to the newly emergent esoteric theologies circulating Spain in the mid-thirteenth century. I sketched out why this interdisciplinarity occurred and how it provides scholarship with a model for avoiding the simplistic binaries that divide the current disciplines of Rabbinics and Jewish Mysticism.
C: Could you tell us more about your course on the shamanistic elements of Ashkenazi tzadiks?
YR: Not too long ago, Jewish shamans roamed through Ashkenaz offering healing and mystical ecstasy. These practitioners were called Ba’alei Shem, masters of the name, because kabbalistic names of God and angels were a core part of their medical craft—written in amulets or chanted over herbs. Trained in herbalism, Kabbalah, bloodletting, hypnotism, and magical incantations, they offered a uniquely Jewish style of healing throughout the early-modern period. They were turned to as resources for all sorts of maladies: depression, madness, headaches, infertility, lice, the mortal dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, exorcisms, and epidemics. But now they roam no longer. In the course we will excavate their healing modalities, explore why they disappeared, and revive their wisdom for contemporary Jewish concerns, such as mental health, psychedelics, herbalism, and ecstatic-transformative ritual.
The course is part of two bigger interventions: (1) Theoretical Kabbalah (Theosophy, Theurgy, Hermeneutics) and Practical Kabbalah (Jewish Magic) have mostly developed as two separate genealogies and one is wont to find much Jewish magic that uses kabbalistic symbolism. But that’s not because it doesn’t exist! In late-medieval Ashkenaz, Renaissance Italy, Morocco, and in modern western esotericism there are such integrations, they are just mostly unknown or indecipherable.
I’m trying to reintegrate the two within a contemporary idiom and this course maps many such intersections and offers a template for a new kabbalistic magic. (2) While my path to Kabbalah began with neo-hassidut, I am currently energized by paleo-hassidut—the mystical terrain that directly preceded Hassidism and from which it emerged. At the heart of this terrain is the Ba’al Shem Tov. While he is valorised as the instigator of Hassidism, he is more aptly understood as a radical evolution of Ashkenazi Ba’alei Shem. By relocating the origins of Hassidism in the milieu of early-modern herbalists, magical healers, and proto-psychotherapists, a new model of an earthy, soul-body integration emerges. Essentially, the course is trying to introduce a new possibility for twenty-first-century Jewishness: Neo-Ba’alei Shem.
C: What other projects are you currently working on?
YR: I am working on several digital, multimedia projects that seek to offer a new model of public Jewish scholarship. I am almost done making a web-based, choice-driven, learning adventure through the world of the Merkavah. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure meets the study of Jewish mysticism. Any person, at their own pace and time, can navigate through a labyrinth of learning (for instance, when they begin, they can choose between “text”, “art”, or “culture” and each choice leads to many other options) and emerge learned in the ways of Merkavah mysticism. I sense that digital technologies are way ahead of our current models of pedagogy and scholarly publication, and I’m trying to remedy that lag by using digital models to make learning more interactive.