"Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices by Tzahi Weiss (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: "Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices by Tzahi Weiss Alessia Bellusci Tzahi Weiss. "Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 208 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000210 Sefer Yeẓirah (The book of formation) is a Jewish cosmogonic book which focuses on the role of the decimal number system (sefirot) and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in the creation and in the created world. Considered a canonical Jewish text since the tenth century—notably, the same period in which the book is first attested—Sefer Yeẓirah became one of the most influential compositions for Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. Unique in style and content, it has attracted remarkable attention both in Jewish and non-Jewish circles, fascinating scholars from various disciplines as well as a broader readership. Despite the rich scholarship devoted to it, Sefer Yeẓirah has not been fully deciphered yet, especially for what concerns its authorship, dating, and ultimate significance. [End Page 452] With his masterful monograph, Tzahi Weiss offers a clever new interpretation and contextualization of Sefer Yeẓirah, which, for the first time, takes into account and interrelates the actual subject of the book, its textual tradition, and its reception history. The identification of the precise interest of Sefer Yeẓirah in the speculation on the twenty-two Hebrew letters and their creative powers enables Weiss to draw solid comparisons with Syriac Christian literature, and, ultimately, to trace the intellectual matrix from which the book developed. Weiss shows how the nuances of the linguistic, physiologic, astrological, and cosmological notions displayed in the text point to a sophisticated late antique Jewish tradition that cannot be identified with rabbinic Judaism. Challenging the main theories on the time and context of Sefer Yeẓirah, he convincingly demonstrates that the book was "written and edited around the seventh century by Jews who were familiar with Syriac Christianity" (2). Showing how the history of the text is interwoven with its reception, Weiss argues for the existence of a mystical-mythical-magical interpretation of Sefer Yeẓirah prior to the twelfth century. The idea that late antique and early medieval Judaism was much more nuanced than the monolithic and rabbinocentric portrait outlined by a certain type of scholarship is the fil rouge of the book. Weiss situates both the formation and the earliest reception of Sefer Yeẓirah in a nonrabbinic milieu, showing that the text not only crystallized in an intellectual world neatly detached from both rabbinic culture and the known magico-mystical circles spinning in the rabbinic orbit—those that produced the hekhalot literature—but also, already in an early age, was transmitted and interpreted by Jews clearly interested in mysticism and magic and not only by "a limited section of the rabbinical elite" (104). The volume consists of an introduction, five chapters, a short epilogue, and three appendices. The introduction discusses the main issues which complicate a definitive contextualization of Sefer Yeẓirah, explaining how Weiss's theory interconnects with or challenges the most relevant studies on the topic. This section should be read together with appendix 1, which unveils the anachronism of the argument for an Abbasid context for Sefer Yeẓirah. In the first three chapters, Weiss advances his thesis on the composition of Sefer Yeẓirah, starting by demonstrating that—albeit contested by church authorities—letter speculation developed remarkably also in Syriac Christian marginal circles, the specific intellectual environment in which Sefer Yeẓirah was conceived (chapter 1). In his analysis of late antique conceptions on letter speculation, Weiss identifies two main traditions. The first—outlined in chapter 2—resurfaces in rabbinic and hekhalot literature and assumes the creation of the world / seal of the abyss from the ineffable name of God—or, in later articulations, from its specific letters. Within this model—which may be traced back to a Greek/Coptic preference for vowels—the matres lectionis (Hebrew vowels) hold a higher status. Conversely, the second tradition—discussed in chapter 3—conceives the creation of the world from the twenty-two Hebrew letters as a whole and with no hierarchy between vowels and consonants. Completely unattested in rabbinic and...