The Convergence of Judaism and Islam. Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

Jewish Mysticism in the Lands of the Ishmaelites: A Re-Orientation r 153

is different from our own. It was transmitted in the name of a great

rabbi and gaon. They referred to him as Rabbi Masliah. Now the

venerable Gaon, our Rabbi Pelatiah, was from the holy city of Jeru-

salem. And this booklet was brought by a great scholar and pietist

known as Rabbi Gershom of Damascus. He hailed from Damascus

and lived in Arles for approximately two years, and people there told

stories about his great wisdom and wealth. He showed this booklet

to the elder sages of that generation. I copied from it some things.^14

If we cautiously back away from the specifics, what we are left with
is this: the implantation of long-existent merkabah secrets to European
Jewry came by way of the transplantation of Eastern lore through the
migration of Middle Eastern Jews to Europe. Whether the legend of Abu
Aharon is fact or trope, it seems reasonable to believe that it was not Eu-
ropean Jews traveling to Muslim Iraq that resulted in the appearance of
merkabah lore in Europe, but the reverse case: Jews from Iraq and Pales-
tine brought heretofore unknown esoteric traditions to Europe.
So to sum up this first phase in the history of Jewish mysticism, we have
the emergence of an esoteric lore, centered on the visionary ascent experi-
ence of the merkabah, which developed in the pre-Islamic Near East. As
Halperin has shown, beginning in the ninth century, some Muslim writ-
ers utilized these traditions, particularly in expanding upon the tradition
of Muhammad’s glorious mi ̔raj.^15 In this case the dynamic of osmosis
seems to point from Judaism to Islam, and traces of this flow can be found
in early Muslim magical, alchemical, and arithmomantic sources.^16 And
it is quite possible that the forces of osmosis flowed in both directions,
as Jews were situated in one of the most prominent early centers of Sufi
and Shi ̔ite activity, Baghdad and southern Iraq. Possibly of special sig-
nificance are the comparisons drawn by Michael Sells between merkabah
visionary accounts and the famous mi ̔raj of Abu Yazid al-Bistami, who
died in 878, though far from Baghdad.^17

Early Kabbalah

It is in the later half of the twelfth century that a new form of Jewish mys-
ticism appears in Provence, a teaching that builds upon the merkabah
lore but now adds a theosophic dimension that was foreign to the largely
descriptive accounts of the charioteers. The first known literary artifact