rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 343
possess books of greater excellence. Let us seek those out and make a
torah of them. However, all the words of Torah are sublime and supernal
mysteries. Observe: the upper world and the lower world are in perfect
balance – Israel below corresponding to the angels above ... The Torah
has a body ... the commandments of the Torah which are called “bodies”,
i.e. main principles, “of the Torah”. This body is clothed in garments made
up of earthly tales. Foolish people look only at those garments, the tales of
the Torah: they know nothing more and do not look at what is beneath the
garment. Those who are wiser look not at the garment, but at the body
beneath. But the true Sages, the servants of the Most High King, those who
stood at Mount Sinai, look only at the soul of the Torah, which is the root
principle of all, the true Torah, and in the world to come they are destined
to look at the soul of the soul of the Torah.’But the Zohar was in fact very much a reflection of Jewish life in a medi-
eval Christian world – hence, for instance, the frequent references in the
Zohar to God as a three- fold unity, apparently deliberately promulgat-
ing an anti- Christian version of the Christian Trinity.^42
We shall have more to say below (p. 349) on the Zohar itself, but the
Zohar was the heir of a well- established mystical tradition. We have
seen above how pietists in the Rhineland and northern France from the
second half of the twelfth century to the thirteenth century developed
an intense form of ethics encapsulated in the immensely popular Sefer
Hasidim. The same circles developed a series of esoteric teachings in the
cities of Worms and Mainz, particularly under the leadership of mem-
bers of the Kalonymus family which (as we have seen) had migrated
from Lucca in northern Italy to Mainz in the tenth century and acted as
communal leaders for the Rhineland communities before and after the
First Crusade.
It is not clear whether the Kalonymus family brought mystical teach-
ings with them from Italy or just developed mystical ideas once in the
Rhineland. More clearly products of the Rhineland are the series of
books written by R. Eleazar b. Yehudah of Worms after 1217, in which
he celebrated the total spirituality and transcendence of God, from
whose concealed being the visible glory emanates to connect the divine
to creation. These books must owe something to the trauma Eleazar
had undergone when his wife and daughters had been slaughtered by
Crusaders before his eyes, but the metaphysics of his theology were not
really coherent. Like others of the Hasidei Ashkenaz he seems to have
been more concerned with the achievement of piety through penitence.