History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

pantheism. Both its cosmogony–its account of how creation was conceived in God’s words–and its theory of divine emanations led to the logical deduction that all things contain a divine element. In the 1280s, a leading Spanish kabbalist, Moses ben Shem Tov of Guadalajara, produced a summa of kabbalistic lore, the Sefer-ha-Zohar, generally known as the Zohar, which became the best-known treatise on the subject. Much of this work is explicitly pantheist: it insists repeatedly that God ‘is everything’ and everything is united in Him, ‘as is known to the mystics’. But if God is in everything, and everything is in God, how can God be a single, specific being, non-created and absolutely separate from creation, as orthodox Judaism had always emphatically insisted? There is no answer to this question, except the plain one that Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind. Yet it is a fact that this kind of mystic pantheism exercises a curious appeal to very clever people whose customary approach to thought is soberly rational. By a remarkable paradox, the current of speculation