154 r Ronald C. Kiener
that puts forth this new theosophic teaching is entitled the Sefer ha-Bahir,
“The Book of Brilliance,” and it caused quite a stir in rabbinic circles in
southern France in the third decade of the thirteenth century. This book,
which is shot through with symbolic and Gnostic themes heretofore un-
known in Jewish circles, centers around the revolutionary teaching that
God’s mystery is made manifest through ten divine emanations, or sefirot,
which constitute a cosmic tree, a symbolic matrix of hypostases that in-
teract in a Gnostic pleroma of cosmic good and evil, and in their totality
provide the mystic with knowledge of the divine Being. Additionally, the
heretofore relatively unknown doctrine of metempsychosis finds a home
in a Jewish text.
Gershom Scholem, the towering figure of twentieth-century scholar-
ship in Jewish mysticism, devoted more than a few studies, including his
groundbreaking doctoral dissertation, to this short and cryptic book. In
endeavoring to uncover the historic sources for the Bahir, Scholem was
struck by certain parallels between it and an ancient, now lost, book of
merkabah magic, angelology, and demonology entitled Sefer Raza Rab-
bah (The Book of the Great Secret), mentioned and cited by Iraqi and Pal-
estinian Jewish scholars in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. First
mentioned (and condemned) in the ninth century by the Qaraite Daniel
al-Qumisi, the Raza Rabbah was also referred to in more glowing terms
by the eleventh-century Rabbanite leader Hai Gaon of Baghdad. While it
is unlikely that any of the newer theosophic themes of the Bahir can be
located in the Raza Rabbah, it is clear that some of the magical passages
of the Bahir derive from it. For Scholem, teachings of Iraqi provenance
find their way into European Jewish mystical discourse. Scholem adopted
the legendary pedigree for the Bahir found in a thirteenth-century sec-
ondhand account: “This book came from the Land of Israel to the old
Pietists, the Sages of Germany, the kabbalists, and from there it appeared
and reached some of the eminent scholars among the Rabbis of Provence,
who were in pursuit of every kind of secret knowledge.”^18 In Scholem’s
detailed theory, the Bahir starts with Eastern magical and angelogical tra-
ditions (possibly Abu Aharon?) transplanted to Italy, then to Germany,
then to Provence, where it was finally redacted in the 1170s, and only then
to Spain, where it is first cited by name in the 1230s. In pushing his theory
of an Eastern proto-Bahir, Scholem also noted certain Arabisms to be
found in the Hebrew style of one part of the Bahir, a discussion of the
Hebrew vowels, which he asserts in typical understatement “are cause for