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

Jewish Mysticism in the Lands of the Ishmaelites: A Re-Orientation r 155

reflection.”^19 Here is the most salient example: in asking about the signifi-
cance of the Hebrew vowel hireq, the Bahir reports that it is an expression
for burning: u-ma’y mashma ̔ hireq, leshon soref (“And what is the mean-
ing of hireq? It is an expression for burning.”)^20 and this association of the
word hireq with the word burning does not occur in Hebrew or Aramaic,
but does work if one recalls that the Arabic word haraqa means “burn.”
Scholem maintained that while the Bahir was composed in Provence,
some of its thematic and stylistic sources came from the East.
As a further embellishment of Scholem’s vague claim for Eastern ori-
gins for the Bahir, Ronit Meroz has recently proposed that a far more siz-
able portion of the Bahir than those parallels to the lost Sefer Raza Rabbah
must be situated in Iraq of the ninth century or, at the very latest, the first
half of the tenth century.^21
Also recently, an interesting if implausible alternative to Scholem’s ac-
count for the origins of the Bahir has been offered by Michael McGaha,
situating the text against the backdrop of contemporary Andalusian
Sufism.^22 McGaha rejects Scholem’s account for the history of the origins
of the Bahir; rather than thinking of it as a Provencal text that found its
way to Spain, McGaha believes that it was written in northeastern Spain
“at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, by an
Arabic-speaking Andalusian refugee from Almohad persecution.”^23 This
hypothesized author was under the influence of early Sufi theosophy,
Gnosticism, and letter mysticism, not unlike that found in the near con-
temporary Futuhat al-Makkiyah of Muhyi Din Ibn al- ̔Arabi. To take one
example of McGaha’s evidence, we have the already mentioned notion
that the ten divine hypostases are presented in the Bahir as the fruit of a
cosmic tree, also referred to as the ha-male’ (“the all,” the pleroma). We
quote from §14 of the Bahir:

It is I who have planted this tree that the whole world may delight

in it and with it. I have spanned in it the All, called it “All,” for on it

depends the All and from it emanates the All; all things need it and

look upon it and yearn for it, and it is from it that all souls flower.^24

Scholem took this imagery as evidence for an ancient heretical Judeo-syn-
cretistic Gnostic source for the Bahir, though he could not explain exactly
how this material reached a medieval author. Using a more levelheaded
approach, McGaha turns to Ibn al- ̔Arabi’s discussion of the shajarat al-
wujud (the tree of existence):