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Paper by Julien Darmon
Symposium on “The Sefer Yetsirah“
Nahmanides (1194-1270) occupies, in the eyes of the later kabbalistic tradition as well as those of academic research, an axial place in the history of the Kabbalah. For the first, attested in particular by Hayyim Vital in his introduction to ‘Ets Hayyim , he is the ultimate representative of an authentic transmission that emerged historically in Provence with Abraham b. David de Posquières (1120-1198) and passed through his son Isaac the Blind (1160-1235) and from there to ‘Ezra and ‘Azriel of Girona (1160-1238). For contemporary research, he is with his crypto-kabalistic commentaries on the Torah one of the very first witnesses, and undoubtedly the most important, of the writing of the Kabbalah and the major referent of later kabbalists until the appearance of the Zohar in the early years of the fourteenth century. It is on his work that the direct or indirect pupils of his disciple Salomon b. Adret (1235-1310) whose biblical commentaries take the form of supercommentaries of that of Nahmanides: thus Menahem Recanati (1223-1290), Bahya b. Asher (1255-1340), Joshua Ibn Shu’ayb (c. 1280-c. 1340), Shem Tov ibn Gaon (1283-c. 1330) and Isaac of Acre (1250-1340).
However, while the Kabbalistic nature of his commentary on the Torah is evident, we do not possess any explicitly Kabbalistic writings in his own hand; hence the significance of having a commentary by him on the Sefer Yetzira. (By “explicitly Kabbalistic,” we mean the fulfillment of a criterion that is ultimately simple: the non-cryptic use of the names of the sefirot, namely Keter, Hokhma, Bina, Hesed, Gevura, Tif’eret, Netsah, Hod, Yesod, and Malkhut.) The discovery of such a text would be all the more unexpected given that Nahmanides, both in his introduction to the commentary on the Torah and in his correspondence with Isaac the Blind, repeatedly denounced the new practice of putting the secret doctrines of Kabbalah into writing. Could he nevertheless have succumbed to this temptation, much to the delight of his followers? This discovery would also play an essential role in reconstructing the chain of tradition, since it would allow the Sefer Yetzira to be incorporated into the Kabbalistic corpus and trace its origins much further back in time than the Catalan Provençal-Catalan period, thereby providing it with the ancient foundation that some of his contemporaries would undoubtedly have questioned. It is therefore clear that having such a commentary is crucial, both for Tradition and for academia.
In fact, the princeps edition of the Sefer Yetzira , printed in Mantua in 1562, includes two commentaries thereby canonized, one attributed to Abraham b. David de Posquières, the other to Nahmanides. Later research (Jellinek, Scholem), building on reservations already expressed by 16th-century Kabbalists, has however clearly questioned these attributions, and generally considers that attributed to Abraham b. David de Posquières would in fact be due to Joseph b. Shalom Ashkenazi, pupil of Ibn Shu’ayb, who would have composed it around 1320, and that attributed to Nahmanides should rather be attributed to ‘Ezra or ‘Azriel of Girona.
Scholem further states that the commentary exists in two recensions, a short one, contained in particular in the manuscript Jer. 8°404 except that it lacks the beginning and a long one, contained in the manuscripts of the British Museum, Paris (ms. heb. 763, fol. 31v-34r), Jerusalem and Leyden. He judges that it is the short recension which constitutes the authentic commentary on Nahmanides – and it is the only one of which he gives an edition in his article.
The long version contains a few omissions as well as numerous additions, mainly explanatory glosses. Scholem also considers it to be quite old, but believes that it was drawn up in an Ashkenazi context – although our Paris manuscript is written in Sephardic cursive and presumably copied in Italy.
Soon enough, this “discovery” of Scholem was called into question. In his edition of the Writings of Nahmanides (1962), Charles (Hayyim) Chavel considers that this attribution is not conclusive and that, on the whole, the commentary of the Mantua edition reflects as much if not more the traditions of his school.
The very possibility of Kabbalistic writings by Nahmanides is, moreover, doubtful if one takes literally his explicit opposition to such an endeavor, as evidenced by the criticisms he directed in his letters to Isaac the Blind. If Nahmanides did indeed write any Kabbalistic works, they could only have been personal notes at most 1. For this entire discussion, see D. Abrams, *Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory*, pp. 198–203. —which, incidentally, is not incompatible with the fragmentary commentary attributed to him by Scholem.
At this point, it is helpful to take a step back and consider more broadly the various commentaries attributed to the very first generations of Provençal-Catalan Kabbalists. It has long been accepted that the commentary attributed to the Raavad is in fact the work of Joseph b. Shalom Ashkenazi, a student of Ibn Shu’ayb (c. 1320). Avishai Bar Asher, in a recent in-depth study,2 Avishai Bar-Asher. “Illusion versus Reality in the Study of Early Kabbalah: The Commentary on *Sefer Yetzirah* Attributed to Rabbi Yitzhak Sagi Nahor and Its History in Kabbalah and Scholarship.” Tarbiẕ, vol. 86-2/3, Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies / מנדל, 2019, pp. 269–384, convincingly argued that the attribution to Isaac the Blind was also apocryphal and that it had likely been composed within the same circle of Catalan Kabbalists at the very end of the 13th century. The commentary attributed to Nahmanides in the Mantua edition, once its apocryphal nature was established, was attributed to ‘Ezra or ‘Azriel of Girona, but apparently without any convincing arguments other than the conviction that it must be a “principled” commentary ”—even though its style appears to date from a later period than the “authentic” commentary by Nahmanides that is the subject of this discussion. Avishai Bar Asher, regarding the latter, also deconstructs the arguments put forward by Scholem to authenticate it on the basis of passages cited in the works of Nahmanides’ successors. Hebrew manuscript 763 of the BNF also contains, on folios 12r–21v, a text by Asher ben David, grandson of Abraham ben David of Posquières, nephew of Isaac the Blind, and a contemporary of Nahmanides, which offers a lengthy Kabbalistic exegesis of the Tetragrammaton. Given that he refers repeatedly to the Sefer Yetzirah, it is not unreasonable to think that this is Asher ben David’s lost commentary on that book, although it is not, strictly speaking, a continuous commentary—far from it. The presence of a gloss in Provençal on folio 21r certainly suggests a pre-Catalan-period origin.
The first assessment of this panorama seems at first very disappointing: none of these texts, so often presented as the first traces of kabbalistic literature, would be authentic? Should we only see clumsy attempts, on the part of generations after the golden age closed with Nahmanides and before the emergence of the Zohar , to reconstitute a written trace of the passage from the “kabala” of the Sefer Yetzira to that of Provence and Catalonia?
Paradoxically, the use of the long version of the Paris manuscript, traditionally presented as later and therefore virtually uninteresting, makes it possible to shift the gaze. The long version certainly omits the three passages where the short version expresses misunderstandings or hesitations – “I don’t know”, “it’s not clear”, which is consistent with a subsequent “smoothing out”. Above all, it systematically adds clarifications as to the sefirotic symbolism. The short version focuses on Hochma and Bina (as these words appear in the Sefer Yetzira ), as well as Keter , and adds Gedula / Gevura along with Netsah and Hod , but Tiferet and Malchut are absent altogether. The long version, for its part, adds long developments on Malchut , which it calls ‘ Atara (in 32v. in particular), as well as the expression ‘ilat ha-‘ilot , “cause of causes”.
This set of phenomena is significant in that concepts such as the names of the higher sefirot are absent from Nahmanides’ Commentary on the Torah, which focuses most of its kabbalistic discussion on the dialectic between Tiferet and Malkhut —without ever referring to them by name. Of course, one should not conclude from this that Nahmanides was “unaware” of the other sephirot, as these are integral to Provençal and Spanish Kabbalah. The explanatory intent of the long version is similar to the supercommentaries by the students of Solomon ben Adret on Nahmanides’ Commentary on the Torah, as evidenced by this concern to clarify the concepts of Tif’eret and‘Atara. Indeed, this method of writing is characteristic in particular of Isaac of Acre’s *Me’irat ‘Einayim* and the *Ma‘arekhet ha-Elohut*, whereas the very term*‘Atara* —so typical of this school—is found onlyonce in the commentary on the Sefer Yetsira attributed to Nahmanides in the Mantua edition, once in Nahmanides’s writings compiled by Chavel (in *Derashat ‘al divrei Qohelet*, *Kitvei Ramban*, vol. I, p. 180), and not at all in his Commentary on the Torah. It should also be noted that the names Tif’eret and‘Atara appear in our full version only as abbreviations, which could mean two things that are not mutually exclusive: that the terms are already well known to the intended audience, and that their names must still be concealed from the uninitiated.
There is little doubt that this long version is a later, secondary elaboration of the short version. However, if we accept the dating of the Hebrew manuscript 763 to the year 1284—as Giacomo Corazzol argued in his opening remarks at the symposium dedicated to this manuscript at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris on November 14, 2021—then the chronology becomes interesting. Indeed, Nahmanides left Spain for the Land of Israel between 1265 and 1267 and died in 1270. This means, therefore, that within the space of a few years, his disciples and contemporaries worked to produce several successive versions of a commentary on the Sefer Yetsira that they attributed to him (and which may well have been compiled from fragments preserved in our text), and this even before the birth of the school’s later representatives, such as Joshua Ibn Shu’ayb and Shem Tov ibn Gaon. It is probably to this same circle that we must attribute the development—again in successive layers—of the commentaries attributed to Isaac the Blind, Abraham ben David, ‘Azriel of Girona, and others. Paradoxically, Asher ben David’s Kabbalistic commentary on the Tetragrammaton appears to represent an older style of writing, one that draws on the maxims of the Sefer Yetzirah without feeling the need to justify its arguments by adopting the form of a commentary following that work. All of this Kabbalistic output, dating from the years 1270–1280, is in any case remarkable for its abundance and inventiveness. This observation invites us to finally move beyond the notions of an “authentic commentary” and an “original version,” which do not really make sense within the context of 13th-century writing practices and which, by pitting texts against one another, often prevent us from perceiving their richness and polyphony.
