‘To Return the Creator to His Place:’ The Performative and Magical Deployment of Sefer Yezirah in Medieval and Early Modern Books of Secrets

• In Event: The Reception of Kabbalistic Works in Early Modernity and the Modern Period

Abstract

The interface between magic and mysticism, the practical and theoretical aspects of Jewish esotericism, has constituted a vexing question in the history of Jewish religious practice and philosophical speculation. Scholarship has tended to strongly bifurcate these fields treating Jewish magic and Kabbalah as distinct fields of inquiry that generally engage different texts and nomenclature, with diverse goals and methods, pursued by religious professionals, who occupy distinct social positions within Jewish society (Bohak, 2008). At the same time, texts, such as the enigmatic work, Sefer Yezirah, problematize such unambiguous divisions and compel us to re-examine how texts circulated, functioned, and ultimately came to be deployed by users – readers, commentators, and practitioners. In this essay, I will examine the circulation of Sefer Yezirah in Hebrew manuscripts of magic and Kabbalah, written in the late medieval and early modern periods, that foreground the practical deployment of this work in liturgy, amulets, and magical recipes. The formulation of Sefer Yezirah, “return the Creator to His place,” serves, I posit, to reinforce the point that magical operations in the lower world serve to realign the universe with the supernal realms, strengthen sanctity in the physical world, and reaffirm the Creator’s place in it. Using the semantic categories of magic and mysticism more capaciously will enable me to pinpoint shared elements and trace the adaptation and reconfiguration of techniques, visual-diagrammatic representation, and symbols as the Sefer Yezirah was received by differing Jewish esoteric circles in premodern times.

Author

• Andrea Gondos, University of Rochester, Department of Religion and Classics