164 r Ronald C. Kiener
Conclusion
There was much Jewish mysticism after the thirteenth century, and a good
deal of it continued to take place in the lands of the Ishmaelites. Kabbalah
took root throughout the Mediterranean, and there was much Kabbalis-
tic literature (some of it in Judeo-Arabic) in North Africa, Palestine, and
Syria well into the eighteenth century.^49 The famous mystical confrater-
nity of sixteenth-century Safed occurred under Ottoman domain, and
many of the Safed circle moved on to Damascus. The seventeenth-century
mystical messiah Sabbetai Sevi, whose messianic mission culminated in
apostasy to Islam, conducted his most successful campaign in Egypt, Tur-
key, and Palestine.^50 Well-documented is the fact that a small number of
Sabbatians followed their messiah into the religion of Ishmael, forming
the crypto-Muslim sect of the Dœnmeh. This group reportedly survived
in Turkey until the twentieth century and periodically arises in public dis-
course as the source for intriguing conspiracy theories in modern Turkish
politics.
It is our modest hope to have persuaded the reader with these selected
but highly representative examples that a new accounting of the history
of Jewish mysticism is in order, one that places key historical develop-
ments in the narrative of Jewish mysticism within an Islamicate and Mid-
dle Eastern environment. Future recountings of the historical sweep of
the many streams of Jewish mysticism will have to situate them in their
proper setting—the lands of the Ishmaelites.
Notes
- Moshe Idel, “Jewish Mysticism and Muslim Mysticism,” Mahanayyim 1 (1991): 33
(Hebrew). - Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1974), 2:202n1. - Scholem himself made significant contributions to the study of Jewish mysticism in
Islamic lands. For example, Gershom Scholem, “Sifro ha- ̔Aravi shel R. Yosef Ibn Waqar
̔al ha-Qabbalah u-ve-Filosafiah,” Kiryat Sefer 20 (1943–44): 162–153. - See the exchange between Gil Anidjar, “Jewish Mysticism Alterable and Unalter-
able: On Orienting Kabbalah Studies and the ‘Zohar’ of Christian Spain,” Jewish Social
Studies 3 (1996): 89–157, and Moshe Idel, “Orienting, Orientalizing, or Disorienting the
Study of Kabbalah: ‘An Almost Absolutely Unique’ Case of Occidentalism,” Kabbalah 2
(1997): 13–47.