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

Jewish Mysticism in the Lands of the Ishmaelites: A Re-Orientation r 159

The maidservant the wife of Basir the bellmaker kisses the ground

and submits that she has on her neck three children because her

husband was completely infatuated with [life on] the mountain with

al-Kurani, in vain and to no purpose, a place where there is no To-

rah, no prayer, and no mention of God’s name in truth. He goes

up the mountain and mingles with the mendicants, although these

have only the semblance, but not the essence, of religion.

The maidservant is afraid there may be there some bad man who

may induce her husband to forsake the Jewish faith, taking with him

the three children. The maidservant almost perishes because of her

solitude and her search after food for the little ones. It is her wish

that our Master go after her husband and take the matter up with

him according to his unfailing wisdom, and what the maidservant

entreats him to do is not beyond his power nor the high degree of

his influence.^35

We do not know how the Nagid responded to this plea, but it is quite
possible that the bellmaker Basir had crossed a communal line, and it was
precisely because of the Nagid’s sympathy for Sufism that the abandoned
wife turned to her last hope.
It is by no means the case that with the close of this group, the inter-
play of Sufism and Middle Eastern Judaism came to an end. The Cairo
Genizah, that great literary storehouse of discarded manuscripts found a
century ago in the ruins of Cairo’s Ben Ezra synagogue, has given forth
dozens of texts in Judeo-Arabic and in Hebrew of either Sufi-influenced
treatises for a Jewish audience, or else Hebrew transcriptions of Sufi clas-
sics, from al-Hallaj to al-Ghazali to al-Suhrawardi to Ibn al- ̔Arabi.^36 If
ever there was a syncretistic full-fledged Jewish Sufism, it was during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Egypt.
A second individual of this thirteenth century, of far less glorious
lineage, also illustrates signs of Sufi impress. We now turn to Abraham
Abulafia, the itinerant holy man and Messianic pretender, who—unlike
most of the key figures in the history of Jewish mysticism—never received
rabbinic ordination and never served as a communal leader. Born in Sara-
gossa, he traveled to the far-flung reaches of the Mediterranean, a student
and teacher sporadically of philosophers and mystics alike. In fact, he was
once run out of town in Comino, near Malta, for his improprieties. Im-
prisoned and condemned to death by the Vatican in 1280 for presenting