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

Jewish Mysticism in the Lands of the Ishmaelites: A Re-Orientation r 163

Kabbalah, particularly as expressed in the Sefer ha-Zohar, which spark
certain questions in the comparative religionist. To take but one example
of a literary theme, the appearance in a late portion of the Zohar corpus
of a theory of a fourfold interpretation of scripture is strikingly similar to
Shi ̔ite and Sufi approaches to scriptural exegesis, even more so than it is
to Christian text-theory.^44 Or, to take a terminological example noted over
a hundred years ago by Steinschneider, the imagery of “a donkey bearing
books” (hamor nose’ sefarim) found in Zohar Hadash 101c bears a striking
resemblance to the image of Qur’an 62:5: al-himar yahmilu asfaran.^45
On the doctrinal level, the myriad theories of divine emanation and
the differing and competing locations of the Divine Will and Intelligence
in these myriad systems all point to a fervid intellectual climate in which
precise influences are difficult to determine. Scholem, who studied Arabic
in Basle as a young Orientalist, was first to suggest Islamic phenomeno-
logical parallels, but ultimately it has been others who have done the phil-
ological spadework regarding Islam. In particular, some of the obscure
details of Isma ̔ili cosmology seem to reverberate in certain thirteenth-
century Kabbalistic theories of the sefirotic world, and here it is Israeli
scholars like Sarah Heller-Wilensky, Yehuda Liebes, Amos Goldreich,
and Moshe Idel who have done most of the work. Islamic neo-Platonism
comes in many guises, and it may be just as reasonable to attribute these
similarities to the common denominator of the Long Recension of the
Theology of Aristotle, which was rendered into Hebrew, as it is to look
into the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (which was also partially rendered into
Hebrew), or al-Kirmani, or the neo-Platonic writers of Ishraqi and Anda-
lusian Sufism.
This study is not intended to thoroughly review the Islamic context
for the massive Sefer ha-Zohar, which could easily become a book-length
effort. Suffice it to point out two important facts concerning the Zohar:
(1) as a matter of historical documentation, the principal author of the
Zohar—or alternatively, the lead sage of the circle that produced the bulk
of the Zohar—was familiar with Islam in Spain;^46 and (2) the extant Zohar,
a massive anthology of diverse literary pieces in three volumes that runs
over 1,600 pages, contains numerous Arabisms, doctrinal affinities to Sufi
teachings,^47 and interpretations of rituals and symbols in a Sufic key.^48
Therefore it may prove worthwhile to view this anthology, and the so-
called Spanish Kabbalah from which it sprang, as emerging from within
an Islamicate context.