Compiling Kabbalistic Secrets after the Spanish Expulsion

Introduction

Shushan Sodot is arguably the most important and influential compilation of kabbalistic secrets and short-form texts. Some of its texts may be extracts of larger works and some passages or series of passages may be compilations drawn from earlier compilations. As a document that was edited from earlier copies of yet earlier manuscripts of texts, short and long, and which was then copied again and again, we are compelled to study the afterlife of many earlier and lost textual events. In this case, there is both a pre-history, the life of the component texts before the compilation took form, and the afterlife of the edited document in numerous manuscripts or a later abridged printed edition. Not all the versions of Shushan Sodot are the same, with the most interesting and predominant transfer of manuscript witnesses taking place in Ashkenazi lands. The present study begins with a history of compilations of numbered secrets, followed by a description and history of the surviving manuscripts of Shushan Sodot. It then turns to the printed editions of this text and conclude with methodological comments for future research.

Secrets Composed in Ashkenaz, Attributed to Ashkenazim, and their Afterlife in Ashkenaz

Methodological questions will guide this study of kabbalistic secrets (sodot) and their relationship to Ashkenazi esotericism. Any history of kabbalistic secrets must take into account their appearance in thirteenth-century Spain and from there, their diffusion to other lands. Ashkenazi esotericism, of course, predates the rise of theosophical and ecstatic forms of kabbalah in Spain. Consideration must be given to itinerant Ashkenazim who encountered Spanish secrets, traditions, and the texts that influenced these figures or those texts that arrived by one means or another into Ashkenazi circles. Moreover, research has only just begun to account for the overwhelming influence of Ashkenazi traditions in both Catalonia and Castile, thus destabilizing any simple binary between Ashkenaz and Spain.^[1] So what makes something Ashkenazi? Is it that a text, or tradition as a text, began its career in Ashkenaz, returned to Ashkenazi lands, or was copied in Ashkenazi script? The latter is most significant as Ashkenazi manuscripts provide concrete proof of the reading practices, the choices of what was copied, read and produced as their literary culture, beginning in the fourteenth century, continuing in the early modern Ashkenazi codices and in the great printing houses of Central and Eastern Europe, such as Koretz.

The Ashkenazi pre-history to Spanish secrets, begins with numerical calculations concerning the divine name attributed to Abraham Ibn Ezra. These texts were preserved by the German Pietists, who wrote similar works and some of these materials were transferred to Spain by Menahem, the student of Eleazar of Worms (c. 1176–1236), at least according to certain manuscript attributions. A marvelous example of this text and attribution is sod ha-heshbon, found in Ms. St. Petersburg, evr 1 98, copied in 1297. As for the secrets written by the earliest esotericists in Ashkenaz, a number of these secrets were composed by a few prominent pietists, such as the sodot on unity (sod ha-yihud) with a version attributed to Judah the Pious (c. 1150–1217), Eleazar of Worms (The British Library, London, England Or. 1054, folios 61v–64v). Another secret on unity, attributed to Eleazar ha-Darshan, is copied in Ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, héb. 843. The texts compiled in the Paris manuscript are significant because it is a large codex which includes many Spanish secrets, copied in Ashkenazi script in the fourteenth century. Some later secrets attributed to Eleazar, which clearly reflects the desire to produce the chain of tradition that extends from the pietists to the kabbalists no matter how tenuous that connection might have been. One such example is the text that begins with the words kol ha-neshamot mi-sheshet yemei bereshit. It appears without a title in many early manuscripts, such as Ms. Rome, Casanatense Library 3152, fols. 49v–50v, later titled sod ha-yibbum. There is also a sod ‘aza’el in Ms. London, Montefiore 341, now housed in Princeton, Princeton University 35, fol. 35r–v. We must remember that it was Eleazar who presented the esoteric interpretations of the prayers in the name of his teacher, Judah the Pious, as sodot ha-tefilah, even if his commentary on the prayers conforms to the flow of the text of the liturgy. Other collections of pietistic sodot to the prayers were produced and attributed variously to either Judah or Eleazar, as written about by Israel Tashma and Simha Emanuel. Scholarship has yet to weigh in on whether Nehemiah ben Shlomoh, another thirteenth-century Ashkenazi pietistic figure, composed sodot with such a title, although some manuscripts have preserved his writings in this form, such as sod ha-hayot asher hena.^[2]

Ashkenazim in Spain, and Spanish Kabbalah in the Hands of Ashkenazim

Perhaps the earliest Ashkenazi traveler to bridge Ashkenazi and Spanish kabbalah was a certain Menahem, the student of Eleazar of Worms.^[3] Thereafter we must shine a light on the thirteenth-century figure, Isaac of Chernigov, who is cited in several Castilian kabbalistic texts from this period.^[4] The celebrated fourteenth-century Ashkenazi kabbalist, Menahem Tsiyoni, traveled to the holy land, following a route on his return to Ashkenaz through Byzantium.^[5] This is of extreme importance since Tsiyoni was one the first to cite Tikkunei Zohar, amongst other supposedly Spanish texts, reframing them in an Ashkenazi key. He apparently did not receive many Spanish works of kabbalah in Ashkenaz, nor in the Land of Israel. He may have read them when traveling through Byzantine lands, returning home through a more southern route. Identifying what is Byzantine kabbalah, the works composed there, copied there and read there, is an understudied topic and of crucial importance to the understanding of both early and later forms of kabbalah.

Kabbalistic secrets composed in Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries began to circulate to other lands. The first major attempt to collect and organize them was undertaken by Moshe of Kyiv (1449–c. 1520). He assembled Shushan Sodot, a compilation that constitutes a treasure trove of secrets originating for the most part in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and all without ever having visited Spain. We cannot formally characterize Moshe of Kyiv as an Ashkenazi, even if he lived in lands later populated by Ashkenazim, and as we shall see his works found a home amongst Ashkenazi scribes and printers and an Ashkenazi readership.^[6] Did Moshe of Kyiv visit Ashkenazi lands or come in contact with Ashkenazi kabbalists? Where he encountered the materials he compiled, in which codices, and why he selected what he did is what will concern us in the following sections of this essay.

In his historical review of kabbalah in Byzantium, Moshe Idel gave a prominent place to Shushan Sodot, due to the material he identified there.^[7] In any event, amidst the examples provided above, we see different forms of contact for the interaction between Ashkenazi agents of esoteric culture and Spanish or Byzantine kabbalah.^[8] In light of past scholarship, if the migration of these kabbalists was motivated by a desire to obtain the literary materials of others, or whether it happened by chance, namely as a result of other factors, remains an open question.

Moshe of Kyiv was born in 1449 in Šeduva [Shádov], Lithuania and died c. 1520, in Kaffa, Crimea.^[9] In 1482, the Tatars attacked Kyiv and he lost all his fortune and needed to secure funds to pay the ransom for his children taken captive. He may have traveled and produced various works in order to raise money, but this is speculation. He returned to Kyiv after securing the ransom and then wrote Sefer ha-Dikduk and Yesod ha-‘Ibbur, works on grammar and the Jewish calendar.

Moshe of Kyiv wrote various other works, such as a commentary on the Torah, entitled Otsar Nehmad. In this work, he references Shushan Sodot and in various sodot therein, including in the commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, he made frequent references to his Perush ‘al ha-Torah, which I understand to be Otsar Nehmad. The poem that introduces Shushan Sodot in some manuscripts, and which is absent in the printed edition, was apparently written before the compilation of Shushan Sodot, taken from his other work, Otsar Nehmad, as suggested first by Firkovich.^[10] The work was compiled over many years or possibly there were two versions of it, again as argued by Firkovich.^[11] In the poem found at the beginning of the work in some manuscripts, he wrote that he collected the secrets in the month of Nisan 255, that is, 1495. In the poem at the end of some manuscripts, the work was said to be completed in shenat lismo‘a ankat asi”r, being the numerical equivalent of 271, designating the year 1511.

Shushan Sodot: Description, Features, and Dating

Shushan Sodot appears to have been quite popular in early modern Ashkenaz, as evidenced by multiple manuscript copies and its print history. As a working thesis, I would like to suggest that Shushan Sodot served as the antithesis or complimentary compilation to Kanfei Yonah, each being a compilation of secrets repeatedly copied in Ashkenazi script in this period and printed in Koretz. While it is aesthetically pleasing to construct an image of a regimen of study of numerous sodot produced before and after the Spanish expulsion, namely before and after the rise of Lurianic kabbalah, many classics were published concomitantly in Koretz.

Shushan Sodot is an anthology of 656 secrets which according to internal and external attributions was compiled by Moshe of Kyiv. A rich scholarly record recounts, again and again, the biographical details and some discussion of the manuscript and print history, but almost nothing has been accomplished in reading and interpreting the passages on their own or contextualizing the compilation in the history of its genre. Its reception includes a complicated and diverse trajectory of manuscript reproduction in different lands, as well as a truncated version in a printed edition produced in Koretz in 1784. Another related book was also printed in Koretz, Moshe of Kyiv’s Commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, in 1779, which is the second part of the 656 secrets.

Manuscripts of Shushan Sodot Discussed in Prior Scholarship

My discussion of the manuscripts of Shushan Sodot begins with Ms. New York, YIVO 404, if only because of the early dating of the copy and the central place it had in the study of Hayim Lieberman. The manuscript includes Sefer ha-Hekhalot, otherwise known as 3 Enoch (1r–14r); a series of Catalonian sodot printed as well in the beginning pages of the Koretz edition of Shushan Sodot (14v–19r); Commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, attributed in modern scholarship to Ya‘akov ha-Kohen (10r–20v); and Shushan Sodot (21r–206v). The manuscript was copied in the year 1563, as indicated on folio 205v. The manuscript was housed in Vilna, with ownership markings of the historical and ethnographic society of S. Ansky, Vilna. On folio 206v appears the owner’s signature of Shmeul Zanvil Ziskind. Hayim Lieberman discussed Ms NY YIVO 404 and reproduced a few images of its illustrations in his article.^[12] He noted that pages are missing, comprising secrets 65–68, 71–74 and 144–150.

I have identified that the same scribe of the YIVO manuscript produced another copy of Shushan Sodot, this time without a colophon. It is housed in the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 5447, where the texts of the missing pages from the YIVO manuscript are found. The same text layout and page division was preserved for many folios of the two copies, even if the recto and verso arrangement is one page off. At first, I considered that the manuscript without the colophon (namely, JTS) was this scribe’s personal copy, and he added his name to the YIVO manuscript because he produced it for a patron and expected it to be released for further copying. However, as the first example indicates, from the appearance of more than one homeoteleuton in the margin of the YIVO manuscript, but not in the JTS manuscript, makes this conclusion far less likely. This scribe copied other texts such as Sefer ha-Peli’ah in 1599: Ms. Göttingen State and University Library, Göttingen, Germany Ms. Cod. Hebr. 7. Further, in 1562, the same scribe copied a codex which includes Abulafia’s Sefer ha-Tseruf, Hanoch Constantini’s Mar’ot Elohim, Berit Menuhah and commentaries on the divine name, amongst other miscellanea (private manuscript, Bnei Brak, Yosef Iraki Ha-Cohen Collection, 213).

Ms. Oxford Opp. 556, Neubauer Catalogue 1656, of 313 folios, was produced in Prague in the early eighteenth century, apparently from one of the copies described above. Proof of this can be found in the interpolation of the marginal gloss found in Ms. YIVO 404, fol. 163r (passage 458), which was interpolated into the Oxford manuscript on folio 235r. (See illustrations 9–10). Moreover, the scribe’s name, Yitshak Goakil, is preserved on folio 306r from an earlier copy: ha-kotev yitshak goakil … nishlam ha-sefer bikhlal ve-alu sodotav ke-minyan shushan ve-hayta hashlamato sheni le-elul shenat lishmo‘a ankat asi”r. Here, the abbreviation »ASI”R« refers to the year 1511. This manuscript lacks a title page, and the poem found at the opening of the copies described above. The text of Shushan Sodot begins with the first numbered passage about the Shema’. The sodot are numbered through 106, concluding on folio 56r. An index of 656 numbered sodot is found on folios 306v–313r. The commentary on Sefer Yetsirah begins on folio 239v. Following the copy of Shushan Sodot, we find the Hekhalot texts, numbered in 48 passages (314r–333r), followed by the ›secrets‹ (333r–339v) and the commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, identified as the work of Ya‘akov ha-Kohen (339v–341v). Hugo Odeberg used this manuscript for the base-text of his edition of 3Enoch, writing that

This ms. seems to be based on an early ms. In a very good textual condition, but it has suffered through carelessness of the present copyist though the corruptions caused by him are as a rule easily emended. Apart from these corruptions, [the manuscript referred to by Odeberg with the letter] א without contradiction presents the very best readings of all the mss. and printed fragments.^[13]

Gershom Scholem offered additional remarks about Shushan Sodot, naming Oxford Opp. 556 (Neubauer 1656) as the most complete copy of this text. In a note penned in the margin of his copy of Neubauer’s catalog, Scholem compared this manuscript to that housed in YIVO, which he knew about from reading Hayim Lieberman’s work. Even so, Scholem based his work on the Oxford manuscript since he was able to read it on a visit there. In an encyclopedia entry from 1973 he wrote:

Fig. 1:

Ms. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Opp. 556, folio 62v. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Books written by the Ashkenazim after the expulsion from Spain were mainly of the anthological type: like the Shushan Sodot of Moses b. Jacob of Kyiv (partially printed 1784, and extant in its entirety in Oxford Ms. 1656).^[14]

This comment is no doubt based upon access to this codex after having viewed the manuscript upon a visit to the Bodleian Library. Upon returning home to Jerusalem, Scholem penned a few notes into one of his two copies of the Koretz edition, noting that the diagram of the sefirotic tree was not reproduced in the printed edition. The printers did include at least one complex illustration on folio 33r of the printed edition but skipped over this kabbalistic tree (Fig. 1).

Ms. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel 4º 7538, of 106 folios, contains another copy of Shushan Sodot in Ashkenazi script. The manuscript was previously housed in Perth, Australia, and was donated to the National Library of Israel. Folios 1r–81r include numbered sodot through number 463 after which is found the Commentary on Sefer Yetsirah on folios 81v–105v. It concludes with the poem (106r) and index (107v) listing 656 sodot. The scribe, Yitshak Goakil, is similarly mentioned, as having copied this text in the year 1511 according to the text of the colophon found in other manuscripts, followed by the poem. The manuscript was produced by multiple scribes who alternated in copying out the text. What emerges from my survey of Ashkenazi manuscripts of Shushan Sodot is that the main line of transmission of this compilation to the Ashkenazi communities began with the handwritten copies produced by Yitshak Goakil. His manuscripts served as a model for multiple Ashkenazi scribes who reproduced Shushan Sodot, demonstrating the circulation and popularity of this text in Ashkenaz.

Fig. 2:

Shushan Sodot, Koretz 1784, title page (Gershom Scholem’s copy, National Library of Israel, R344). Public Domain.

Fig. 3:

Shushan Sodot, Koretz 1784, verso of title page (Gershom Scholem’s copy, National Library of Israel, R344). Public Domain.

The Poem and the Attribution of the Compilation to Nahmanides

On folio 26r of Ms. New York, Yivo 404 there appears the following poem, introducing Shushan Sodot:

בשם השם הרחום והמרחם ספר שושן סודות כי בו סודות כמנין השושן זה שירו אשר שר המחבר

עשר קבין ירד שכל   על כל חוקר מבין סודות

רבנו משה בר נחמן   נטל מהם תשע ידות

כי הוא השלישי מתשבי קבל מהם סתרי עשר מדות

משה בכר"נ הרב מורנו עם בשמי סודות נכבדות

בשנת רנ״ה חודש ניסן  הוא עת צרה אל צאן אובדות

וילקוט מהם קב נקי  קרא לשמו שושן סודות

The poem has been discussed many times and presented according to various renderings. It is highly significant whether the text read bekhiri or bekhiran, as the latter, ending with the letter nun, was understood to be an abbreviation of ›Nahman‹, and thus a declaration that he was a grandson or great-grandson of Nahmanides.^[15] As we shall see below in any one of the manuscript copies that contain the 656 secrets, kabbalistic traditions attributed to Nahmanides play an important role. Regardless of whether there is a claim to family lineage, the authority of Nahmanides is evoked in one way or another.

Israel Zinberg cited a passage from the Koretz edition, folio 43r,^[16] which is passage 166 in the manuscripts:

The author said: In our commentary on the Torah we explain this secret. Even so, we kindly explain these secrets in our work [or following Ms. Jerusalem 7538: ›In my work, mentioned above‹]. And God should be with us, exonerate and forgive all these revelations since our intent is for the sake of heaven that these matters will not be lost, having lost Moses, as everyone passes away.^[17]

It is reasonable to accept that the author referred to himself in this third person, ›the author said‹ (amar ha-mehaber), as the words of Moshe of Kyiv. Furthermore, there are other references in Shushan Sodot to a commentary on the Torah. More interesting is the reference to Shushan Sodot as hibburenu or in the manuscript from Perth, hibburi. In the passage cited here, Moses of Kyiv identifies with Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides) based on a shared first name, Moses, that some record of Nahmanides’ secrets must be recorded since he is long since deceased and everyone is mortal, including the compiler of Nahmanides’ secrets. The most focused presentation of his authority is found in Ms. Moscow, The Russian State Library, Günzburg 671, which begins with a unique preamble–the first sodot in the partial collection of the compilation all refer to Nahmanides.^[18]

The compilation as a whole, however, is not about Nahmanides’ kabbalah. For the most part, this is a collection of texts composed in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Spain, with some passages being composed in Byzantine lands. All in all, this is a collection of largely unknown textual representatives of a genre that is well-known in the early kabbalah. The collection was prepared following the Spanish exile, in Ottoman lands and we can only speculate if it were prompted as an act of recovery and preservation in light of historical circumstances. I was not able to ascertain any particular order or internal structure to the literary units, nor have I identified, as of yet, smaller compilations that were subsumed into the larger literary framework of Shushan Sodot. One avenue for future research would be to categorize the subject matter of the various secrets and offer an analysis of what is and is not found in this compilation relative to the wealth of secrets composed in the early kabbalah.

The Importance of Shushan Sodot in Ashkenaz: Methodological and Historical Conclusions

This study has positioned Shushan Sodot within a literary history of numbered secrets, either initially composed as a series of short textual units or compiled as such at a later time from various sources. I have offered an assessment of the historical record of scholarship on Shushan Sodot, and I documented the evidence of the surviving manuscripts and printed editions, with special attention to the Ashkenazi afterlife of this text as a living document. Many of these manuscripts were produced in late Ashkenazi scripts, often by multiple scribes, additionally read and glossed in Ashkenazi reading communities in the early modern period. The model copy that reached Ashkenazi scribes in one form or another has been confirmed as the manuscript that is now housed in YIVO, as discussed by Lieberman. Even so, the YIVO manuscript lacks a few pages which were lost after it was copied by these scribes. I have identified a manuscript produced by the same scribe, which includes the page spread of the text absent in the YIVO manuscript. However, this study has not claimed to identify a singular or ›original‹ version compiled by Moses of Kyiv, nor has it attempted to account for the various literary arrangements and features found in the various extant copies of Shushan Sodot. This essay has provided a richer outline of the transmission history of the early modern Ashkenazi manuscripts, some beholden to the YIVO copy directly or indirectly. The Bar Ilan and Moscow manuscripts appear to belong to a different line of transmission of Shushan Sodot compilation into Ashkenaz, with different textual material featured in its opening pages.

I identified the literary of Moses of Kyiv, or rather confirmed it once again, in light of efforts made by scholars some one hundred years ago. I utilized the extant scholarship on the text of Shushan Sodot to talk about the compiler, but little about the content of the work or the history of the manuscripts. I have not been able to identify any smaller compilations of secrets that served as building blocks for Moshe of Kyiv’s work. While some texts of ecstatic kabbalah and the famous hagiographic testimony that Maimonides recognized the truth of kabbalah at the end of his life are known to be in the collection of secrets of Shushan, there is little material that is repeated or borrowed from other collections of secrets.

So many subjects are covered in this compilation that it might be more fruitful to ask what is not found there in order to consider what might have been intentionally excluded. The text displays no recognizable internal organization, even if there are clusters of material on certain themes and ample material attributed to the kabbalah of Nahmanides. However, it demonstrates no parallels to the textual material familiar from the students, and the students of the students, of Nahmanides in Catalonia, which in itself is significant. This collection might be deemed an act of recovery by pinning it on a historical consciousness of the national crisis following the Spanish expulsion an anxiety of literary loss, but this is mere speculation. One cannot explain the compilation as resulting entirely from the reading choices of Moshe of Kyiv, since that could only be established if we could identify secrets found in other surviving codices of the period, while the textual material of Shushan Sodot is rather unique. The latest source mentioned by name in the compilation is the Book of the Zohar, although we do not know the scope of what he viewed textually. Tikkunei Zohar and other later texts from the fourteenth century are absent.

Should this collection be characterized as an example of Byzantine kabbalah? While a simple assessment might lead us to answer affirmatively, the answer may be more complicated than that. Do we refer to the location of the act of compilation, the provenance of its constituent parts, or the character of any revision of the sources that were copied or edited? When considered on his own, in his own time, Moshe of Kyiv may best be considered a pre-Ashkenazi figure, even if he and his compilation were later adopted by Ashkenazi reading communities as one of their own. As a compiler, he displays many Ashkenazi features, in that Shushan Sodot offers no literary beginning or end, a lack of order which is commensurate with Ashkenazi textual practices. This is to say, one can open the compilation at any place and its content leads one to multiple connections within the text and beyond it.

It is also no coincidence that Shushan Sodot was printed in Koretz. This printing house, set up in the late eighteenth century, and its intended reading audiences were interested in classical kabbalistic texts, both contemporary (such as Kanfei Yonah) and those written in earlier periods (such as Sefer ha-Peli’ah).^[19] A major question that should be asked is, why is the Koretz edition incomplete with regards to the extant manuscript sources? Its editors certainly knew that the compilation should include 656 sodot. The printers’ remarks at the end of the book offer a clue. They claim that they were asked by many to print this already popular book whose text was corrupt in the copies they had viewed. They therefore justify their editorial efforts at the level of the text, but also acknowledge the perceived need to rearrange the text (‘asinu lo seder). Even with all its faults, and missing texts, relative to the fuller manuscripts, the printed edition became the canonical text for so many till this day. Three modern editions have replicated the Koretz edition, one a facsimile, another a transcription, and a third an annotated edition of the same—none, however, returned to manuscript sources to revise their text.

Would it be helpful to identify a manuscript or the manuscripts that served the printers? Would it even matter? As I have shown, in the YIVO manuscript of Shushan Sodot is preceded by various other ›secrets‹ not included in other copies of Shushan Sodot. These are extracts from the 90 numbered secrets that were compiled in Catalonia along with passages from what I identified as the commentary on Sefer Yetsirah composed by Jacob ha-Kohen. They appear in the first few folios of the Koretz edition and demonstrate that the printers at least did not care about the literary structure established by Moses of Kyiv. At the very least, they viewed the secrets as modular textual units and so reinvented the structure and order of the whole compilation. The abridgment of the text and removal of most graphics from the Koretz edition is of great significance, especially since the printers did make the effort to include some.

These textual phenomena, in the reproduction and distribution of the compilation, may lead us to question the working assumptions of its Ashkenazi editors and readers. Did they believe they were preserving the work penned by Moshe of Kyiv? Did the Ashkenazi scribes and later, the printers in Koretz believe they were preserving some original text, or perfecting the best version of that text that reached them? These questions and the wide variety of textual forms that have survived lead us to destabilize the construct of a copy of a work, or certainly, of an ordered compilation.

The Ashkenazi copies of Shushan Sodot transported texts of various origins, and reconstituted these texts as a larger compilation, away from their Spanish and Byzantine sources to and into an Ashkenazi textual milieu. Moreover, it can hardly be said that the Ashkenazi editors displayed any awareness that the materials were Spanish or Byzantine while copying and reading the secrets comprised in Shushan Sodot. The reproduction of these sources in Ashkenazi manuscripts is a sufficient condition to redesignate Shushan Sodot as Ashkenazi by virtue of its re-purposing, editing and later printing.^[20] It is my impression that the numbering and indexing of secrets in the extant copies of Shushan Sodot are not necessarily early, or the product of Moshe of Kyiv’s editorial work, even if he intended to collect a total of 656 literary units. The removal of the numbered ordering of secrets by the Koretz editors would seem to be intentional. This act would appropriate the text from its fixed form in the manuscripts that the editors consulted toward the particular cultural zone of Ashkenazi textual practices. The large number of Ashkenazi manuscripts produced speaks to the repurposing of textual material to the Ashkenazi editors’ reading interests.

It would be inappropriate generally, and even in this case study, to offer any essentialist characterization of what Ashkenazi textual culture is. Even so, we might begin to approach this question by considering the following comparison between Ashkenazi and Sephardi literature once offered by Abraham Joshua Heschel:

Sephardic literature is distinguished by a strict, logical orderliness; it is written in accordance with a clear-cut scheme, in which every detail has its assigned place. Ashkenazic writers renounce clarity for the sake of profundity, the contours of their thoughts are not very clearly marked; the thoughts, however, are direct, moving, and natural. Sephardic literature is like classical architecture. Ashkenazi literature, like a painting by Rembrandt, profound and full of mystery. The former prefers the harmony of a system; the latter, the tension of dialectic. The former is sustained by a balanced solemnity; the latter, by impulsive inspiration. Frequently, in Ashkenazic literature, the form is shattered by the overflow of feeling, by passion of thought, and explosive ecstasy. Sephardic literature is like a cultivated park; Ashkenazi, like an ancient forest. The former is like a story with a beginning and an end; the latter has a beginning, but turns frequently into a tale without an end.^[21]

This characterization is replete with romantic generalizations that rhetorically advance Heschel’s claim. This is not to say that the statement is without any merit. No doubt, a main feature of the literary and hermeneutic predilections of the Ashkenazi esotericists is the fluid nature of their texts, more so than their esoteric compatriots from other regions. This relative judgment places the Ashkenazi esotericists as most invested in textual material that was conducive to modularity and brief discussions on a wide range of topics. These topics did not have a single theme sustained across a systematic and organized presentation in a voluminous work.

This estimation might be theorized in line with some literary observations offered by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their book, A Thousand Plateaus, in which they describe their own book, and possibly many others, as a rhizome, composed of plateaus:

For example, a book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a »plateau« any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one must have a method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can substitute for it. In fact, these are more often than not merely mimetic procedures used to disseminate or disperse a unity that is retained in a different dimension for an image-book.^[22]

The importance of a comparison of this literary machine to the Ashkenazi reception of Shushan Sodot is an appreciation that the collection has no beginning and no end and can be rearranged or accessed from any point. This would explain how this collection of secrets was ripe for a robust reception of Shushan Sodot, indexed, re-arranged, printed, and referenced as a great repository of esoteric knowledge, with some late Ashkenazi collections referencing passages as extracted from it as a statement of its authority.^[23]

The Ashkenazi readership showed a particular interest in this text as evidenced by numerous Ashkenazi manuscripts and the printing of the compilation in Koretz. That the order could be changed by these printers is arguably an Ashkenazi appropriation of the compilation. These editors and readers realized, or chose to understand, that the compilation could be read in any order, defying the structural demands of other reading communities. This compilation served the needs of a very eager readership in later times, to the extent that we can say that its afterlife is a testimony to this Ashkenazi impulse.

Appendix: Extant Manuscripts of Shushan Sodot