The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

But there is no doubt that, as Talmudic studies became ever more legalistic and nit-picking, an approach to works that claimed to unlock deeper significance behind the ostensible meaning of words exercised an extraordinary spell. For those stuck in the textual drudgery, or scholastic hair-splitting, it opened the reader to a new way of living. Just looking at Kabbalistic texts – embroidered as they were with cosmic diagrams, anagrams, vortices, webs, musical patterns, the unthreading of words into their constituent letters and sounds and their reworking into magical illuminations – was a heady experience, a kind of literary alchemy which, even if it did not ultimately remake the world as bottomless treasure chest, was a thrilling experiment. But it was entirely possible to be steeped in Kabbalah while not rejecting Talmudic studies. The Kabbalah was first and foremost a cosmology on the ways in which the dynamics of Creation continued to influence earthly experience; the Talmud was about everything else. And yet in the second half of the eighteenth century, the priority given to one or the other represented a definite choice of what kind of Jew one was.