148 r Ronald C. Kiener
a vituperative scholarly exchange took place between Gil Anidjar and
Moshe Idel, with Anidjar accusing the field of Jewish mysticism studies
of a kind of Jewish Orientalism—either an intentional ignoring of Islamic
contextualization, or a disgusted distancing from the entire issue of Islam.
Idel, in turn, accused Anidjar of willful deceit in his tendentious charac-
terization of the field and all but charged Anidjar—of course, only rhetori-
cally—with libel against the field and against Idel in particular.^4 Idel quite
rightly pointed out that the field has come a long way; and yet, outside of
the specialists’ domain, Jewish mysticism seems still to be a phenomenon
of European provenance. In the history of ideas, it is now widely acknowl-
edged—thanks primarily to the work of Harry Austryn Wolfson—that
medieval Jewish philosophy in the guise of Moses Maimonides or Judah
Halevi cannot be properly understood without a deep appreciation of the
intellectual culture of al-Kindi or Ibn Sina or Ibn Rushd. But medieval
Jewish mysticism is often popularly portrayed as either a xenophobic or
a slightly Christian-influenced religious movement. With that in mind,
what I am attempting in this chapter is not simply to summarize the state
of the field but to suggest that since so much of the history of Jewish
mysticism takes place either in or on the periphery of the Lands of the
Ishmaelites—to use a Jewish medievalism—we must rewrite the history
of Jewish mysticism accordingly. A good bit of the work has been done
piecemeal, and a new narrative that takes this research into account has
yet to be written. I propose to lay out a preliminary case for such a reori-
entation, first by considering the geographical origins of the earliest forms
of Jewish mystical activity, then by reviewing some of the classic cases of
medieval Jewish mysticism, and finally by observing some premodern
and latter-day trends.
Early Jewish Mysticism
Since Jewish communities had thrived in what is known as the Ancient
Near East for more than a millennium before the Muslim conquests of
the seventh century, and since the internal affairs of the Jews were of little
concern to the new masters of the Muslim Middle East, it was only natural
that the patterns and structures of Jewish life under Persians and Byzan-
tines would persist into the Muslim era. Even if we discount the historicity
of the conquest narratives as an imposition of ninth- or tenth-century
historical wishful thinking onto a time of great upheaval, it seems from