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    2217 Manichaeism Lurianic

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    mohsen fatemi
    The document discusses potential influences of Manichaeism on the Jewish mystic Isaac Luria and his version of Kabbalah in the 16th century, called Lurianic Kabbalah. It notes conceptual similarities between Lurianic Kabbalah concepts like divine sparks and repairing the world, and specific Manichaean doctrines like the trapping of souls in matter. The document argues these similarities suggest Manichaeism may have indirectly influenced later Jewish mystic traditions more than generally acknowledged.

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    2217 Manichaeism Lurianic

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    mohsen fatemi
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    The document discusses potential influences of Manichaeism on the Jewish mystic Isaac Luria and his version of Kabbalah in the 16th century, called Lurianic Kabbalah. It notes conceptual similarities between Lurianic Kabbalah concepts like divine sparks and repairing the world, and specific Manichaean doctrines like the trapping of souls in matter. The document argues these similarities suggest Manichaeism may have indirectly influenced later Jewish mystic traditions more than generally acknowledged.

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    2217ManichaeismLurianic

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    The document discusses potential influences of Manichaeism on the Jewish mystic Isaac Luria and his version of Kabbalah in the 16th century, called Lurianic Kabbalah. It notes conceptual similarities between Lurianic Kabbalah concepts like divine sparks and repairing the world, and specific Manichaean doctrines like the trapping of souls in matter. The document argues these similarities suggest Manichaeism may have indirectly influenced later Jewish mystic traditions more than generally acknowledged.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    16 views3 pages

    2217 Manichaeism Lurianic

    Uploaded by

    mohsen fatemi
    The document discusses potential influences of Manichaeism on the Jewish mystic Isaac Luria and his version of Kabbalah in the 16th century, called Lurianic Kabbalah. It notes conceptual similarities between Lurianic Kabbalah concepts like divine sparks and repairing the world, and specific Manichaean doctrines like the trapping of souls in matter. The document argues these similarities suggest Manichaeism may have indirectly influenced later Jewish mystic traditions more than generally acknowledged.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 3

    Manichaeism and Lurianic Kabbalah: An Unlikely Pair

    The foundational concepts of Manichaeism are in no small part related to fundamental

    Platonic and Gnostic ideas of “goodness” and of the relationship between souls and bodies. The

    influence of Platonism, Gnosticism, and related schools of thought on early Christian religions –

    many of which were offshoots of Jewish sects – is fairly unambiguous. However, what seems to

    have gone underexplored in modern scholarship is the influence not just Platonism and

    Gnosticism, but Manichaeism in particular, had on Jewish mystics even as late as the 16th

    century. Since Manichaeism persisted in the eastern Roman world through the 6th century and in

    China through the 1300’s, it is not altogether unlikely that its influence reached later Jewish

    scholars in the Middle East. Specifically, the similarities are curious between Isaac Luria’s

    version of Kabbalah (i.e. Jewish mysticism) and Manichaeism, despite the fact that Luria lived in

    Jerusalem in the 1500’s under Ottoman rule over a millennium after the death of Mani, the

    founder of Manichaeism (Freedman 2006).

    According to Lurianic Kabbalah, the creation of the physical world was directly a result

    of God’s attempt to fill ten vessels (almost certainly metaphorical, at least to a degree) with his

    divine light. However, the vessels could not contain such a holy substance, and they cracked; the

    vessel shards fell and created what is now the earth, each of which contained some portion of the

    divine spark meant to be contained within them. Luria proposes that Tikkun Olam - the repair of

    the world - is a Jewish duty that one performs through acts of goodness, and in performing these

    duties Jewish people may repair these vessels and return the lost divine sparks to their rightful

    place in the universe (Drob 2000). While Luria lived and studied in the 16th century, Platonic

    and Gnostic thought had clear influences on many Jewish mystics throughout the centuries,
    including Luria himself. Many modern scholars acknowledge Gnostic influences on Kabbalah,

    but most sources only cursorily – if at all – reference Manichaeism (Fine 2003).

    The aforementioned tenets of Lurianic Kabbalah have a striking resemblance to specific

    Manichaean concepts. First, both depict a dualistic world in which a “divine spark” of some sort

    is trapped within matter; in Manichaeism, the soul is trapped in the body, while in Lurianic

    Kabbalah, the divine sparks are trapped in all matter derived from the shattering of vessels. In

    addition, both describe a chosen people’s duty to return those sparks to their divine origin

    through specific action; in Manichaeism, the Electi do so through vegetarianism, abstaining from

    sex, and other actions that limit the trapping of “good particles,” and according to Kabbalah, the

    Jewish people return the divine light to God through mitzvot or other charitable deeds (van Oort

    2013; Gardner 1995). These similarities seem even less coincidental when noted that along with

    Hebrew, Luria may have spoken some combination of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian (the most

    common languages in that region of the Ottoman empire at the time), languages in which extant

    Manichaean texts were written. Although some scholars claim that Lurianic teachings were

    “highly original,” (Drob 2000), I will endeavor to draw connections between such teachings and

    Manichaeism - connections so uncanny that we are forced to reconsider the Platonic, Gnostic,

    Manichaean, and heretical Christian influences on later Jewish theology.

    Bibliography

    Drob, Sanford L. Kabbalistic Metaphors: Jewish Mystical Themes in Ancient and Modern

    Thought. Northvale, Jason Aronson Inc., 2000.

    Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic

    Fellowship. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003.

    Freedman, Daphne. Man and the Theogony in the Lurianic Cabala. Piscataway, Georgias Press,
    2006.

    Gardner, Iain. The Kephalaia of the Teacher. Leiden, Brill, 1995.

    Ed. Van Oort, Johannes. Augustine and Manichaean Christianity: Selected Papers. Leiden, Brill,

    2013.

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