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

by Simon Schama

there is no doubt at all that they continued to exert an extraordinary spell over generation after generation of Jews for whom the scholastic interrogation of Talmudic law and the interpretation of the overt text of the Bible would never be enough. If you were young (or even old) in the Mediterranean world in the nightingale time of expectation, how could you not immerse yourself in the ten sefirot, the ten emanations, each with their numerical attributes, through which the infinite Ein Sof is revealed and from which both the heavenly and earthly universes were constituted? At the summit, Keter (the Crown), the ineffable, interminable and unformable presence, beyond conscious apprehension. Then, Hokhma, wisdom; Hesed, loving kindness; Gevurah, forceful power; Tiferet, beauty; Netzah, victory; Hod, splendour; Yesod, foundation; and the two female presences, Binah, the generative womb of understanding, and Shekhina, the divine radiance. When merely enumerated in a history like this they seem no more than the usual mystical vapours which are always the outriders of institutionalised theologies and laws; but that is to sell Kabbalistic cosmology, or at least its perennial appeal, short. It was, after all, wrestling with the same questions that had taxed the perfervid community of the yachad at Qumran – how is the origin of the universe and the persistence of disorderly evil explained? The development of a numerology that might be manipulated or endlessly reformulated has not a...