Scholastic Magic: Ritual and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism.

• Author: Halperin, David J.
• Position: Review

By MICHAEL D. SWARTZ. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xi + 263. $35.

It is not easy to review a book on a subject about which you yourself have earlier written extensively. You are bound to keep asking how the author's perspective and conclusions differ from your own. Where they differ, has the author seen something significant that you have not? When they are in harmony, will the author acknowledge this convergence?

I make these remarks to lay out the personal ground for the mixture of approval and disappointment (along with substantial disagreement) with which I respond to Michael Swartz's Scholastic Magic. The book's topic is the Sar Torah, a sub-genre of the Hekhalot literature concerned with magical techniques for mastering that mass of biblical and non-biblical learning dubbed "Torah" by the ancient rabbis. It is, as far as I know, the first book-length study of the subject. Yet Sar Torah figured prominently in my 1988 book The Faces of the Chariot (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1988). It was, indeed the key to my own attempt to establish the social context of the Hekhalot.

Since Gershom Scholem's classic studies, scholars have tended to assume that the essential subject of the Hekhalot is the heavenly ascent. The relation of the Sar Torah component to the ascension theme was, at best, tenuous and obscure; in discussions of the Hekhalot ascensions, therefore, it is best set aside. The ascensions themselves, Scholem believed, represent an esoteric mysticism cultivated by the rabbinic elite.

Against Scholem's view, I took the Sar Torah materials as my starting point for understanding the Hekhalot. These materials, I argued, best make sense if we suppose they do not represent the inside circles of the rabbinic world, but are voices of outsiders trying to get into those circles. They cannot, moreover, reasonably be separated from the ascension materials. The latter may therefore be read as a protest against rabbinic authority by people outside the rabbinic circles yet dependent on them for their own religious self-definition, who used the image of ascent as a metaphor for seizing the high citadels of religious and social prestige. These people, I argued, were the spiritually disenfranchised of the rabbinic world: those without expertise in "Torah," whom the rabbinic sources normally disparage as am ha-aretz. Swartz is of course aware of my views as well as Scholem's. He outlines both at the beginning of his book, and proposes...