156 r Ronald C. Kiener
He [God] is the Root, and we are the branch of the Root. The [di-
vine] names are the bough of this tree—I mean the tree of exis-
tence—and we are identical with its fruit, or rather, He is identical
with its fruit.^25McGaha furthermore notes that the Bahir’s frequent term for the ple-
roma, often symbolized by water imagery, is directly and terminologically
related to Ibn al- ̔Arabi’s term mala’, also enveloped by water metaphors.
That which prompted Scholem to engage in convoluted hypothesizing
and surmises about ancient Gnostic sources, McGaha resolves with eco-
nomical simplicity. Needless to say, the issue is far from resolved,^26 since
both Scholem’s and McGaha’s theories rest on a good bit of speculation,
but at the very least the argument for Islamic influences deserves fur-
ther investigation. If Meroz’s dating is accurate, then instead of looking
to Andalusia, we should redouble our efforts to understand the impact of
Sufism upon the Iraqi Jewish community of the ninth and tenth centuries
and use those early segments of the Bahir as a test case.
The Thirteenth Century
The thirteenth century is the decisive one for the development of Jew-
ish mysticism. During this century, at least three distinct Jewish mysti-
cal schools or movements emerge: (1) the so-called Spanish Kabbalah,
constructed on the Bahir’s revolutionary doctrine of the ten sefirot as
emanations of God, culminating in the Bible commentary known as the
Sefer ha-Zohar (or “Book of Splendor”) written in central Spain in the
late thirteenth century; (2) the so-called prophetic Kabbalah of Abraham
Abulafia, the peripatetic Spaniard who traveled throughout the Mediter-
ranean basin, including war-ravaged Palestine in 1260; (3) and the esoteric
pietism of Abraham Maimuni, son of Maimonides, and his disciples, in
Ayyubid Egypt. Each of these mystical traditions, some more than others,
were the products of a robust interaction between Islamic and Jewish cul-
tures. Let us start with the most obvious, the Egyptian-Jewish pietism of
the Maimunis of Egypt, and then return to what seems the most distant,
the Spanish Kabbalah of late thirteenth-century Christian Guadalajara.
Abraham Maimuni was the son and successor of the renowned Rabbi
Moses ben Maimon, or as he is known in the West, Maimonides. Abraham