rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 351
composed by Adret’s own pupils on the mystical part of the commen-
tary by Nahmanides on the Pentateuch reveal the role of his school in
transmitting the theosophical kabbalah to later generations by a route
separate from the Zohar.^53
What was the origin of all these ideas? On the one hand it is possible
to trace many specific motifs in the developed kabbalah back to Hekh-
alot mysticism of late antiquity, and the continuing practice of copying
manuscripts of these late antique texts from the twelfth century in itself
confirms that these traditions were still alive. On the other hand it is
possible to trace an explosion of ideas specifically from twelfth- or
thirteenth- century Provence and Spain in which esoteric ideas were gen-
erated within intense coteries of mystics or hammered out in reaction to
the plethora of speculative texts produced over a very short period. It
seems clear that such religious outpourings cannot be delineated into a
neat history of development. The fecundity of speculation derived pre-
cisely from its lack of restrictions. In marked contrast to the strict controls
on theological speculation in contemporary Christian circles, and the
necessary restraints for rabbis themselves when ruling on halakhah, it
was possible to dream with little restraint about the nature of the divine
and its secret revelation through the enigmatic words of scripture. The
different routes of speculation evidently flourished in parallel.
Mystical speculation was not always easy to combine with the rest of
life as a rabbinic Jew, as we have seen most strikingly in the career of
Avraham Abulafia: on the one hand, the kabbalah promised everything,
but it could also lead into danger. Moses of Burgos, a leading kabbalist
in Castile in the thirteenth century and (with his teachers Jacob and
Isaac Cohen) an important influence on Moshe de Leon and the com-
position of the Zohar as well as a repository of traditions that the Zohar
omits, asserted uncompromisingly of the philosophers in his time that
‘the position attained by their heads reaches only the position of our
feet’ but also that, despite the effectiveness of the kabbalistic traditions
for reciting the divine names, he himself had never tried to put this into
practice. There was an evident danger on the one hand that kabbalistic
practice might merge into magic, while on the other hand kabbalists
might attack specialists in halakhah for lacking real religious intensity:
a mystical homily in Tikkunei Zohar refers to the Mishnah as ‘the bur-
ial place of Moses’. What is clear, however, is that neither extreme was
standard, so that many halakhists indulged in kabbalistic speculation
and no medieval kabbalists believed their mystical insights to absolve
themselves and other Jews from the need to follow the halakhah