Free Kabbalah by Joseph Dan Page A

satanic powers; he described the “older Lilith” and “younger Lilith,” the latter being the spouse of Asmodeus, whom Samael covets. The realm of evil includes images of dragons and snakes and other threatening monsters.
    He claimed to have used various ancient sources and traditions, but it seems that they are fictional ones, invented by him to give an aura of authority to his novel worldview. He used older sources, including the writings of Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, but changed their meaning and inserted his dualistic views into them.
    Rabbi Isaac did not assign a religious role to human beings in the process of the struggle against evil. Unlike Rabbi Ezra of Girona, he did not find the root of evil’s existence in the events in the Garden of Eden and human sin. Evil evolved from the 50

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    6 An amulet designed to repel the power of Lilith.
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    third sefirah , binah, as a distorted side effect of the process of emanation. It continues throughout the history of the world, and will come to an end in the final, apocalyptic struggle between Samael and the messiah. The last pages of this treatise are dedicated to a detailed description of the final battles between angels and demons, and the ultimate triumph of the messiah. Thus, this treatise is the first presentation of a dualistic concept of the cosmos in kabbalistic literature, and at the same time it is the first to describe messianic redemption in terms of the kabbalistic worldview. Earlier kabbalists hardly paid any attention to the subjects of messianism and redemption; only in Rabbi Isaac’s treatise do we find the first integra-tion of kabbalah and messianism, a phenomenon that later became central to the kabbalah and a main characteristic of its teachings.
    Rabbi Isaac was one of the writers of a school of kabbalists that flourished in Castile in the middle and second half of the thirteenth century. Other writers of this group, including his elder brother, Rabbi Jacob ben Jacob ha-Cohen, did not participate in the development of these dualistic ideas, nor do we find in any of their works a trace of the messianic apocalypse presented by Rabbi Isaac. Only one of his disciples, Rabbi Moshe of Burgos, wrote a treatise that follows the worldview of the Emanations on the Left . All other kabbalists completely ignored it, with one most meaningful exception. Rabbi Moses de Leon, the author of the Zohar, accepted Rabbi Isaac’s mythology and put it at the center of the teachings of the Zohar. Rabbi Isaac’s works were almost completely forgotten in the history of kabbalistic literature, and only a handful of later writers were familiar with them, until they were published by Gershom Scholem in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet, his worldview became one of the most important images and ideas of the kabbalah as a whole, after it was included and developed in the sermons of the Zohar, and was, therefore, regarded as a traditional foundation of the kabbalah. De Leon even preserved a hint to the title of Rabbi Isaac’s treatise. In the Zohar the realm of evil is 52
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    called sitra ahra , an Aramaic phrase meaning “the other side.”
    “Other” is the unmentionable left side, which is also the name of God’s archenemy, Samael.
Kabbalah and Spiritualization
    Judaism entered the High Middle Ages in Europe in a disad-vantageous position compared to the two other scriptural religions that dominated the medieval world. Christianity and Islam preceded it in adopting and accommodating their spiritual world to the teachings of Greek philosophy. The concept of God as infinite and purely spiritual demanded that religious life emphasize the spiritual aspects rather than the practical and material ones. The concept that God is absolutely perfect and eternal denied any possibility of interaction between God and the world. The ancient Platonic dualism, which