AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies

The spread of Kabbalah in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from its major centers, the Galilee, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, where it was studied as an esoteric discipline by elites, to become a widespread, popular mysticism is one of the central intellectual transformations of Jewish early modernity. Gershom Scholem's pioneering series of essays Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941) stimulated significant academic research into Jewish mysticism, which eighty years later has yielded a comprehensive scholarly landscape that continues to unravel the maze of kabbalistic thought espoused by figures such as Joseph Gikatilla, Moses Cordovero, and Isaac Luria. The "spread of Kabbalah" is discussed extensively in a number of studies, such as Jacob Elbaum's Openness and Insularity (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990), and more recently in Roni Weinstein's Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2016) and Jonathan Garb's A History of Kabbalah: From the Early Modern Period to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Yet what has been largely absent is a concerted effort to understand the minute processes behind Kabbalah's spread, including questions such as: Who read kabbalistic books? How were they read? What were the material processes behind the dissemination of kabbalistic ideas? These queries have generally not (with notable exceptions such as the studies of Ze'ev Gries) been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Andrea Gondos's excellent study makes significant steps in addressing this deficiency, providing an invaluable contribution into understanding a neglected area of research. By scrutinizing the roles of authorial methodology and pedagogical strategy, she provides an essential resource for scholars of early modern Kabbalah, Jewish thought, the Jewish book, and the overall role of print culture in the early modern period. Gondos combines an erudite understanding of recent developments in scholarship relating to the history of the book and manuscript culture (developing the pathbreaking studies of Ann Blair, Carlo Ginsberg, and Elizabeth Eisenstein) with a philological expertise in analysing the writings of the main subject of her attentions: Rabbi Yissakhar Baer of Prague (ca. 1580–1629).

Gondos begins by exploring how the printing revolution impacted Jewish audiences, and the role of secondary elites in the transmission and production of knowledge (following the example of Elhanan Reiner). She demonstrates that although printing did not immediately revolutionize the production of knowledge in Jewish communities, it did create the opportunities for secondary elites such as printers and preachers to produce condensed booklets which could be sold for a profit, and which could simplify dense and complicated material written by traditional rabbinic elites. In particular, the area of Kabbalah was impacted significantly by the production of abridged, cheap summaries which could be [End Page 162] understood by a wider audience. Although printing provided a gateway to knowledge, secondary agents of culture recognized that further elucidation was required to make mystical texts accessible. Study guides, abridgments, and lexicons became essential genres in the production and transmission of knowledge, with these secondary elites emerging as "important intermediaries between elite and popular culture" (15). An emphasis on pedagogy, Gondos suggests, was an essential tool for these secondary agents, both as a means of selling their books and as a strategy for disseminating new ideas and knowledge. Gondos's opening chapters provide a fascinating window into the demand for kabbalistic knowledge among both Jews and Christians, which created an "indelible nexus between Christian and Jewish scholars" (37), although in-person scholarly collaboration was an impossibility.

Gondos argues convincingly that Yissakhar Baer's literary activity, which bridged between elite and popular cultures, marked a critical moment in the cultural formation of Ashkenazic communities, where social mobility was not possible for Jews in Poland-Lithuania and Bohemia (77). Baer's writings served as reference aids with a concise format, consumed by preachers and the less learned strata of Jewish society (81). These works also played an important part in canonizing existing kabbalistic classics such as Cordovero...