342 A History of Judaism
internal space was rearranged at the end of the twelfth century, with a
double nave formed by Romanesque columns similar to those used in
the contemporary construction of Worms cathedral.^ These were build-
ings designed to provide a sense of solemnity to communal gatherings,
which increasingly in medieval communities were centred on the syna-
gogue even when the subject for meeting was not itself religious, but
they did not lift the spirit. Exceptional was the remarkable Altneuschul
of Prague, an impressive Gothic building with a double nave modelled
on contemporary Christian architecture; built in 1270, it is still in use
today.^41
For some medieval Jews – as for some medieval Christians – a sense
of transcendence was found in mystical speculation, although as we
shall see the circles in which such mysticism flourished remained
restricted throughout the Middle Ages. Mystics had already speculated
on the nature of the divine realm in the talmudic period, as we saw in
our discussion of Hekhalot mysticism (Chapter 11), but mysticism only
really began to take a more central role in common liturgy and prayers,
and to find its way into all other areas of Jewish religious life (including
halakhah), with the promulgation of the extraordinary work called the
Zohar (‘Splendour’) in the last decades of the thirteenth century. The
Zohar, a disorganized collection of twenty or so separate treatises in a
stilted form of Aramaic invented with a partial knowledge of the lan-
guage in order to sound impressive and exalted (see below), brought
into the mainstream of Jewish religious thinking a mystical theology
which took the biblical narratives as symbolic of the divine world and
explained the world through the divine attributes that emanate from the
hidden God.
If one takes the Zohar at its own estimation, this mystical theology
constitutes a higher knowledge than halakhah and comes straight from
scripture through the interpretation of the second- century rabbinic sage
Shimon bar Yohai. Shimon, who had lived in Palestine at the time of the
Bar Kokhba war in the second century ce and was believed to have hid-
den in a cave for seven years in order to escape the Romans, was thought
to have composed the Zohar under the inspiration of the prophet Eli-
jah, thus uncovering sublime truths:
Rabbi Shimon said, ‘Woe to the man who says that the Torah intends to set
forth mere tales and common talk! If that were so, then we could at once
compose a torah out of common talk, one of much greater worth. If the
Torah intends to disclose everyday matters, then the princes of the world