152 r Ronald C. Kiener
improbable name meaning “elder one”) from the Iraqi academy of Mata
Mehasya to Apulia, in the twelfth century. There Rabbi Qashisha’ taught
from a small book that he had assembled, and the great mystic German
rabbi, Judah the Pious, came from Corbeil to study at Rabbi Qashisha’s
feet.^11 While there is no other record of such a travel on the part of Rabbi
Judah the Pious, if the tradition were true, it would place the migration
of Iraqi Jewish mysticism to Europe no earlier than the twelfth century,
when Rabbi Judah the Pious lived.
An even earlier variation on this migration trope comes in the guise
of a single mysterious Iraqi Jew who appears in a Hebrew poetic legend
entitled “The Chronicle of Ahima ̔as” written in Italy in 1054.^12 Here we
are told a similar tale: a Rabbi named Abu Aharon—otherwise identified
as Aaron ben Samuel of Baghdad, a practitioner of magic and a teacher
of merkabah traditions—visits Apulia in the ninth century. Rather than
Rabbi Judah, this wondrous Abu Aharon teaches Judah’s ancestors, the
scions of the rabbinic Kalonymus family. And indeed, some 350 years
later a devoted student of R. Judah the Pious, no less than R. Eleazar of
Worms, the last great light of the German Pietists, as these mystics are
now called, and a descendant of the Kalonymus clan, records a detailed
name-by-name seventeen-generation isnad of how the secrets of Abu
Aharon passed through the Kalonymus family in order to reach him.
If only we could know what these secrets were!^13 It is generally accepted
that the secrets of Abu Aharon concerned the order and wording of the
ritualized liturgy of the Jewish prayers, an esoteric lore which was one
of the principal disciplines of the German Pietists. This is as much as R.
Eleazar of Worms alludes to. But what these secrets were we do not today
know. Certainly, it was in Iraq in the ninth and tenth centuries that the
first prayer orders were composed: the Siddurs of Amram Gaon and Saa-
dya Gaon. Could it be that Abu Aharon was the conduit whereby these
orders came to Europe, enhanced with mystical interpretations?
Other reports of the migration of Jewish esotericists from the Middle
East to Europe keep popping up in the few historical comments prof-
fered by European kabbalists. For example, Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob Cohen
of Soria, a mystic who wrote in the latter half of the thirteenth century,
provides this firsthand account:
When I was in the great city of Arles, a master of this tradition
showed me an extremely old booklet. Its handwriting was crude and