Cosmology and Cosmogony in Doresh Reshumoth, a Thirteenth-Century Commentary on the Torah

Abstract

During the intellectual ferment of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Kabbalist speculation emerged in Provence and Spain amid the background of neoplatonism. The Kabbalah was not, however, the only field of Jewish intellectual endeavor in which neoplatonic speculation found expression. Thinkers of the tenth and eleventh centuries, such as Isaac Israeli and Solomon ibn Gabirol, had elaborated neoplatonic philosophies; by the mid-twelfth century, however, this trend appears to have spent itself. An unpublished thirteenth-century manuscript from the collection of David S. Sassoon preserves an anonymous Hebrew biblical commentary, Doresh Reshumoth, which embodies aspects of neoplatonic thinking that were developed independently of the Kabbalah. In this paper, I shall attempt to reconstruct the cosmology and cosmogony that were accepted by the author of this commentary, and to place that cosmology and cosmogony within the broader context of medieval Jewish intellectual history. Some of the discussion that follows is necessarily technical and involved, but the conclusions to be drawn from this study are of much wider import. The connections between the earliest phases of the Kabbalah and neoplatonism have long been suggested; with the help of Doresh Reshumoth, I hope to render some of these connections explicit by focusing on particular concepts that were shared by both trends. Moreover, I hope to trace the different trajectories taken by the Kabbalah and neoplatonism at a critical juncture.