Abstract
This study is a comparative analysis of the appearances of the lower and upper Paradise, their divisions, and the journeys to and within them, which appear in mystical Jewish and Islamic sources in medieval Iberia. Ibn al-‘Arabī’s vast output on the Gardens of divine reward and their divisions generated a number of instructive comparisons to the eschatological and theosophical writing about the same subject in early Spanish Kabbalah. Although there is no direct historical evidence that kabbalists knew of such Arabic works from the region Catalonia or Andalusia, there are commonalities in fundamental imagery and in ontological and exegetical assumptions that resulted from an internalization of similar patterns of thought. It is quite reasonable to assume that these literary corpora, both products of the thirteenth century, were shaped by common sources from earlier visionary literature. The prevalence of translations of religious writing about ascents on high, produced in Castile in the later thirteenth century, can help explain the sudden appearance of visionary literature on Paradise and its divisions in the writings of Jewish esotericists of the same region. These findings therefore enrich our knowledge of the literary, intellectual, and creative background against which these kabbalists were working when they chose to depict Paradise in the way that they did, at the time that they did.
Highlights
In the history of Jewish literary depiction of Paradise and Hell, the second half of the thirteenth century proved a formative period
The present study argues that to better grasp the depiction of Paradise in Castilian Kabbalah we should look not to western Christendom but to the western Islamicate
The kabbalistic works divide the innermost circle of Paradise into seven divisions, which correspond to individual or group attainments in religious observance. This resembles Ibn al-‘Arabı’s descriptions of Paradise, where one of eight religious directives meticulously observed takes on a spiritual-eschatological significance and is molded into a key that unlocks a gate of Paradise
Summary
In the history of Jewish literary depiction of Paradise and Hell, the second half of the thirteenth century proved a formative period. I enumerate the main elements of the terrestrial and celestial Paradises in Castilian Kabbalah of the second half of the thirteenth century, and of Ibn al-‘Arabı’s comprehensive and complex writing on the paradisiacal Gardens, in his Meccan Revelations After setting this stage, I dedicate the part of this study to the many and major similarities between the two. I explore potential literary contacts that would account for these convergences, given the absence of any historical evidence that medieval Jewish esotericists of the thirteenth-century Iberian Peninsula read the Arabic writings of contemporary Islamic mystics and esotericists These are meant to pave the way for further scholarly consideration of possible literary contacts between the kabbalists of northern Spain and the Andalusian mystics to the south
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