IN RUSSIAN |
Gregory Margovsky
THE FARSIGHTED PEOPLE OF GERONA An introduction into metaphysical history The theosophic and esoteric doctrine of Cabala (literally meaning «reception»
or «transfer») to a large extent was a repetition of the historical Jewish
vagrancy route. It is not a mere accident that pan of the most ancient
texts created in the first through the third centuries A.D., in Eretz
Israel and Babylonia, reached our times under the name of Sifrut-ha-Merkava
(the literature of chariot); this kinetic term is not so much a result
ofEllada's gnostic influences (see the fierce myth about Phaetons, the
unsophisticated coachman, as interpreted by Euripides and Goethe, Michelangelo
and Picasso), as it is the consequence of long-term statelessness within
this vagrant ethnic group, its alienation in space. Provence, Zefat, German
Worms and Catalan Gerona are just the most visible stations of the mystical
train en route, the train is comprised of dozens of schools establishing
quasi-contacts and then occasionally interacting with each other. However,
even those short term stops at Eurasia's rest areas were sometimes sufficient
for the souls of traveling mystics yordei-merkava to ascend to the throne
of divine Glory and contemplate visual aspects of the Unutterable Name
sitting on the Heavenly Throne. The impact of their ecstatic visions on
the history of civilization is truly universal; (evidently, with a certain
margin of error, it holds on to the proportion of the tenets of Judaism's
impact on Christian dogmatic development); one cannot help being amazed
by the fact that the academic world has yet to show genuine interest in
this phenomenon. The backwater Catalan town of Corona happened to be one of the cabalistic
centers of Spain between 1230 and 1260. Within just thirty years an invaluable
precious stone extracted by the Jewish mystics of Provence during the
previous period, such as an incredibly esoteric commentator of the famous
«Book of Creation» (Sefer-Yetzira) Itzkhak Saggi Nakhor (Itzkhak the Blind,
1165?-1235) underwent subtle prophetic processing. An apprentice's awesome
attitude to his master's authority played a major role here; Ezra ben
Shiomo and Arid of Gerona, the brightest representatives of the local
circle, were direct descendants of the blind Provencal and maintained
correspondence with him on a permanent basis; it is difficult not to notice
a coincidence between that constant flow of letters and St. Paul's Epistles;
(St. Paul, incidentallywas not blessed withex ñ client sight throughout
his life, either). Being the most fruitful writer of his circle Arid left
us not only his discourse on ethical and thematic subtleties oftheTalmud
but also his comments on the system of Sfirot (digital hypostases of nonre-vealed
God, each one of which has specified properties). Purely cabalistic works
of Nakhmanides (Rab Moshe ben Nakhman, or, in short form, Ramban) whose
name is also associated with Gerona are not numerous. However, biblical
commentaries left by this unforgettable participant of the Barcelona between
Jews and Christians (incidentally, the tournament resulted in the winner's
expeditious departure to Eretz Israel, in spite of all the good intentions
by Jacob of Aragon, the Spanish monarch who favored religious disputes)
easily reveal motives unmistakably pointing at the knowledge of and infatuation
with Cabala. Representatives of the school of Gerona held similar methodological and
research premises in their works, their differences being merely in insignificant
details. Their rabbinical mysticism contains quite a generous share of
neoplatonism and other medieval philosophical heresies. Here is what Hershom
Gerhardt Sholem (1897-1982), one of the most prominent historians of cabalistic
ideas, or, rather, a founder of the science of Cabala describes this period.
«Even though we have only a vague and superficial idea about some prominent
thinkers, and do not possess the data sufficient to come to a definite
opinion about all of them, research that has been conducted within the
last thirty years brought an amazing abundance of revealing facts. We
have to keep in mind that each of these prominent individuals possessed
his own characteristic spirituality which, due to its definite nature
cannot betaken for anyone else's. Trends and tendencies have borderlines
that are no less distinct, being characterized by terminology and specific
nuances of mystical thought».(0snovniye techenya v yevreiskoi mistike,v.l,p.
169, Jerusalem, 1989). This citation by an Ashkenazi intellectual who
studied in Berlin and Munich and left the future Third Reich well in advance
in 1923 (it might be possible to explain his farsightedness by the fact
that the same year 1923 saw the publication of his German translation
and comments on the enlightening and cheering «Sefer-habakhir», the book
that happened to come to Provence probably from the Orient and was so
much enjoyed by the Qatars) is fully applicable to the «Book of Image»
(«Sefer-hatmuna») that was probably written in Gerona, too. This anonymous
work is dedicated to the creation and the structure of the Universe. According to this treatise by an unknown Catalan cabala scholar the Universal
cycle is similar to the agricultural (land tilling) process in ancient
Israel. Just like a new cycle begins in the fields every seven years,
and there is an anniversary year every 49 years, the world is recreated
each 7 thousand years. Every time this recreation occurs under the influence
of one of the seven bottom sfirot; after 49 thousand years there comes
an anniversary millennium when the matter dissolutes completely as the
bottom sfirot crave to fall down to drink from their source which is Bina
(Mind) or the Third Sfira. This is quite a metaphor for earthly civilization!
Gesiodus himself who perpetuated the toils of an ancient ploughman in
the treasure of poetry might have been jealous! Now let us move two and a half centuries forward to Muscovy where Ivan
the Third, a zealot of the autocracy restoration, already proclaimed himself
the Tzar of all Russia and refused to pay tribute to the Mongols after
winning a loud victory over them on the river of Ugra. His reign so modestly
squeezed in between the reigns of Vasily the Dark and Ivan the Terrible
is as enveloped in the darkness of ignorance as it is pierced through
with a feeling of an approaching thunderstorm. Here is how Karamzin described
that feeling: «In addition to external dangers and enemies, young Joann
faced the challenge of overcoming widespread spiritual yearning, some
kind of relaxation and dozing of hearts inside the nation. According to
Greek chronographers it had been already seven thousand years after the
Creation of the world. Common superstitions were expecting the end of
the world. Unfortunately this idea dominated people's minds as it imposed
indifferent attitudes on the nation's glory and welfare. People were less
ashamed of their country's state of dependence, they were less easily
captured by the idea of independence because everything looked ephemeral
to them. That left hearts and imaginations even more prone to sad things.
Sun eclipses, pseudomiracles seemed to be more terrifying to simple folks
than at any previous period. There were assurances that the lake of Rostov
was howling every night for the whole week and would not let local residents
fall asleep. There were important and real disasters; crops were destroyed
by severe colds and trosts: heavy snowhail happened in May two years in
a row. The plague, to which chronicles refer to as zhelezo (iron), was
still seeking new victims in Russia, particularly in the Novgorod and
Pskov regions (regions where the heresy of «Judaizings» had originated
from- G.M.). There, if we are to believe the information provided by an
annalist 250, 652 persons died within two years: 48,402 in Novgorod alone,
and about 8000 in monasteries. Also, there were many people who died from
this infection in Moscow, other cities and villages, and on the roads».
(Istoriya Gosudarstva Rossiyskogo, v.6, gl. 1). In ancient Russia, the chronological system back in those days was based
on the creation of the world, that is according to the chronology established
by Panadorus, a monk from Alexandria as early as the 4 century A.D. It
was only in times of Peter the First, in 1700, that the system «from the
nativity of Christ' was introduced. The difference between these two systems
was 5,508 years. Hence, it is easy to figure out that the people of the
Third Rome were full of superstitious horror of the mystical meaning of
the number 7 as they were waiting for the end of the world and Doomsday
by the year 1492. Let us make a note that Ivan the 3rd who had married a masterful Byzantine
princess Sophia (Zoia) Paleologue, was quick to pick up lots of Byzantine
customs and prejudices from his wife. Global tribal invasions were followed
by radical shifts in social thinking of the Eastern Christendom. Constantinople, the religious and cultural center of Eastern Orthodox
Christianity fell in 1453 at the hands of Turkish yataghan,- Greek and
Eastern Slavic lands found themselves under the power of Sultan. The approaching
catastrophe had long before directed the thought of Byzantine orators
toward unavoidable global calamity. That calamity was predicted to happen
within the near future; Byzantine literature many times indicated that
the world created by God in seven days was supposed to exist within seven
thousand years. Most scholars in the fields of theology, rhetoric, esthetics and linguistics
from Constantinople lived in Western Europe in 1492. Florence was a place
they enjoyed more than anywhere else; that was where they found shelter
and welfare under the wing of Lorenzo Medici, a man of various talents
and profound education. That Florentine ruler without a crown, even though
he had been born to a family of bankers who usurped power in the city,
did not only patronize poets and painters but entertained himself with
picturesque pastoral poems in flexible and stentorian everyday volgare.
It was he who gave young Michelangelo a taste for sculpture, welcomed
great Leonardo, hid Pica della Mirandola persecuted by the papal bull,
and also contributed to the success of the Greek philological intricacies
as represented by Argiropulos and Plifonus, Khalkondilus and Laskaris,
all refugees from Turkisized Byzantium, within the walls of his Platonic
Academy. However, the year 1492 turned into tragedy even in that careless
Mediterranean nook. Here is how the humanist Angola Poliziano describes
the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in his letter writr ten on May 18,1492
to Jakopo Antikvario, a clerk in the office of the Duke of Milano: «In
nons of April (5th of April- G.M.) about 3 p.m„ three days before his
death, a female God's fool who was listening to the sermon from the podium
of Santa Maria Novella Temple suddenly took to her heels as she was yelling:
«Look, look, citizens, can't you see a furious ox who is overthrowing
this magnificent temple with his fiery homs?» In the evening when the
sky suddenly became overcast with clouds the roofing of the said basilica
supported by the most beautiful arc in the world was stricken by lightning,
and a major part of it collapsed right in the direction where the palace
of Medici was located; huge marble pieces rolled down with a horrible
force and speed...» (Sochineniya italyanskikh gumanistov, str. 241, Moscow,
1985). Fragments of the past magnificence tumbled down on tile heads of the
Florentine visionaries. This is how the prophetic damnation of Girolamo
Savonarola, who hated arts passionately, was accomplished; his gloomy
rigor was Renaissance's eschatological pain in the neck. Pope Innocentius
the 7th passed away three and a half months later, precisely in accordance
with the prophesy of the monk who had been so zealously mortifying other
people's flesh. Rampant bloodshed set itself in Rome; during the Pontifs
long agony, he was consumed by his immesurable lust, 220 residents were
killed on the streets of the Eternal City, their dead bodies were floating
on the surface of water in the Tiber without burial. This lawlessness
continued until odious Alexander the 6th (Lenzuoli Borgia), born in Spanish
Valencia, through the shameless bribing of cardinals put on a garment
of the Christ's deputy on Earth. This mean plotter and cruel poisoner
who was rumored to have molested his own daughter Lucrecia, ended up dying
from poison prepared for one of his victims. These horrible convulsions
suddenly occurred in the Apennines Peninsula eight years before the end
of the century. As for Spain, a reader who is at least partially knowledgeable in history
hardly needs to be reminded of what happened there in 1492. The year began
with the complete capitulation of Moors in Granada on the second of January;
the Spanish flag and a cross instead of a crescent were raised on the
watchtower ofAlhambra. The moral peak of the year, however, was reached
on the 12th of October when clothmade symbols of Iberian restoration caught
the virgin eye of a native Haitian as they were flapping in fair wind,
being brought there by a light hand of a charismatic man from Genoa. Probably
old Gumilyov was not completely and hopelessly out of touch: how can we
explain the frantic leap of the Ottoman Turks to the Balkans from Minor
Asia and a logically following leap of the Spaniards into Northern Africa
and India by anything other than the passionary push? It looked like a
cargo train was started and all its cars set into motion but it was done
consecutively, not simultaneously like in mechanics, one ethnic group
after another, sometimes in chess order. On August 2,1483, Pope Sixtus
the 4th, fearful of loosing the last citadel of Catholicism in the West,
cracked out with a decree on establishing a stationary «holy» court martial
headed by an Inquisitor General in Castille. This sinecure position of
a torture professional ended up being grabbed by a confessor of a royal
couple, a Dominican fanatic and bigot Thomas Torkvemada (his grandmother
on his father's side was from a Marrano family). During his 18 year long
career that virtuoso of fire and rack «burnt alive 1022 victims; 6860
people were burnt symbolically after death or in absense; 97,321 persons
were defamated and fired from their positions in public offices of honor.
The total number of those barbaric executions reacheit 141400 families
destroyed forever» (H. A. Liorente, «Kriticheskaya istoriya ispanskoi
inkvizitsii», t.2, str.250). In 1484, Sixtus the 4th in a personal letter
to Torkvemada advised him on his being praised by Cardinal Borgia (the
prospective Alexander the 6th) and added the following on his own behalf:
«We rejoiced at having heard this reference. We are delighted that you,
enriched by knowledge and vested by the authority directed your pursuits
on things glorifying the name of the Lord and useful for our true faith.
On March 3 lst, 1492, the rulers of the Pyrenean peninsula issued, under
fanatical pressure of Torkvemada, an edict on the expulsion of Jews from
Spain and its protectorates. According to the edict, the Jews were obliged
to leave the country by the end of July (or by the 9th of Ava as if it
were made deliberately). The edict was based on a rotten idea that the
sons of Israel had been luring Christians into Judaism, and the Maranas
could not become honest Catholics because of the Old Testament influence.
All attempts of the Jewish courtiers, particularly Itzkhak Abravanel and
Abraham Senior, to achieve voiding of that decision by means of familiar
oiling of the palms of this world's princes failed, and the tribe of eternal
vagrants left Spain in silence. Houses and belongings were being sold
at rock bottom prices, and that «clearance sale» preceded the following
incessant devaluation of the peso. The confiscated property of the Jewish
community was being used to establish new churches and monasteries; the
Spaniards believed that the said metamorphosis was a logical result of
the preceding historical and architectural Stambulization of Constantinople.
By historians' estimates, the number of refugees was as high as one fifth
of a million,- and such a number could easily drive any of the then demographers
nuts! Most of the Jews found temporary asylum in neighboring Lusitania.
About 50 thousand crossed the Pillars of Hercules and were the first to
taste the zealous hospitality of Moroccan throat cutters. The luckiest
ones found asylum in the Ottoman empire, the only power which, according
to the Sultan's caustic remark, was accessible to its potential enrichers;
some Jews moved to Heptameron's homeland or to the papal Avignon located
next to the County of Navarra. This expulsion resulted in the shift of
the Jewish spirituality center to the countries of Central Europe and
Minor Asia but there was no way to help it: only the Throne of His Glory
has remained insurmountable in centuries. The disaster of 1492 providentially transformed the external appearance
of cabalistic pursuits while leaving intact their spiritual core. The
Jewish mystics asserted the idea of the necessity and possibility of influencing
the approach of the global crash by means of returning to the initial
point of creation. The cataclysm, coming as soon as this return was achieved,
was being expected by hundreds of initiated people merging their efforts
in their unified push to crown the syntactical period of visible eventfulness
with a point. The lonely exercises were intertwined with meditative pursuits
of the whole community like threads of the Orthodox tzitzit brocade. The
call to improve the Universe (tikkun) turned out into a terrible weapon
called upon to destroy all evil forces: the annihilation of devilish tricks
was identified with the Act of Deliverance (Geula). Thus, the nation of
exiles disintegrated as a result of its dispersed condition and deprived
of its right to partake in the global political game, and, moreover, once
again serving as an altar sacrifice for tricky tossing of alien historical
entities kneaded a mystical and ethical dough from its suffering experience
which later served as a collateral for its physical survival. Actually,
nuclear weapons and Einstein's formula created, to a large extent, through
the efforts of Jewish thought, could hardly emerge out of a calm and happy
existence not ploughed by traitors, apostates and creatures of the third
generation of the strong Semitic genes. And it was this weapon that nowadays
has served as an instrument of checking factor against the global expansion
of uproaring evil, and as the most reliable form of self-defense for the
State of Israel recreated in Levantine latitudes. This is how Gershom Sholem covers this subject with his enviable imperturbability:
«Even though ideas and visions of the Messianic century were not a substantial
element of the early Cabala, the fair share of them was well known, and
it would be wrong to assume that the Cabala completely ignored an issue
of Deliverance «nowadays». But when Cabala was to get involved in the
issue it was doing so as something optional, located beyond the scope
of its basic tasks. The ominous fact that it was the year 1492 that had
been announced by some Cabala scholars to be the first year of Deliverance
long before it came was typical for the catastrophic aspects of Deliverance
well digested as such by the Cabala scholars. However, instead of Divine
freedom, that year brought the most cruel expulsion in history. The awareness
of the fact that Deliverance combines the notions of freedom and catastrophe
was so pervasive in the new religious movement that it can be defined
as the flip side of the Apocalyptical mentality dominating Jewish life...
The Messianic doctrine that had earlier captured only the attention of
apologists for a while turned into business for belligerent propaganda.
Classical compendiums in which Itzkhak Abravanel codified Messianic doctrines
of Judaism several years after the expulsion were followed by numerous
epistles, treatises, sermons, and apocalypses which became the highest
point of waves caused by the disaster of 1492. (Incidentally, Abravanel
was that very Minister of Finance who persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella
to provide funds for the expedition of Columbus (Columb-Colon was descended
from baptized Jews of the island of Mallorca and considered himself King
David's spiritual heir. Probably he was daydreaming about exotic India
not only for the sake of gold of Ophir but also seeking reunion with the
lost tribes of Israel who, according to the legend that inspired even
the cabalism scholar Abulaphiah lived behind the mysterious river Sambation.
G-M.). The authors of those works did their best attempting to match the
expulsion with the ancient prophecies of the end of the world as they
emphasized the redemptive nature in the disaster of the year 1492. It
was suggested that the Expulsion was the beginning of the labor contractions
of the Messianic Era through which history must come to a completion (the
authors of apocalyptical works referred to this as «crash» of history)
(G. Sholem. Osnovniye techeniya v yevreiskoi mistike, torn 2, str.59).
Now, let us reiterate and address the prophetic masterpiece of the nameless
cabalist scholar ofGerona mentioned at the beginning of my article. Did
not Sefer hatmunah specify the time of the world's renovation which is
every 7 thousand years? The world was truly sort of reborn in 1492: the
Moors were completely kicked out ofGranada, the Jews were deprived of
the shelter they loved so much, Russia saw the spread of the «Judaizing»
heresy and the restoration of autocracy, Italian humanism was experiencing
its most profound of the possible crises while Catholic obscurantism reached
the scope unthinkable any time before as it transferred its heathenish
acts into the territory of the newly-discovered huge continent. The fact
is indisputable: the planet's landscape changed drastically, and from
a geographical standpoint the planet doubled itself, and through that
doubling received collateral for the future balance of power, collateral
embodied in the continent which unexpectedly aped the Old World. The objection
to this last thought is certainly obvious: the Gerona «Book of Image»
contained the foresight of the apocalypse in conjunction with the Jewish
chronology, not Orthodox Christian (the year 1492 A.D. was the year 7071
according to the calendar of Galacha). From our standpoint even this «failure»,
along with the suddenness of expulsion which came instead of salvation,
can be justified by aberration of ethnic sight. After all, even the Turks
who sheltered the Jews for the sake of their own profit-loving sympathy
could not expect Balfour's Declaration at the end. After all, each nation
is merely another zigzag of an intricate and continuous ornament of human
civilization, and no ethnic group of this planet, even though it possesses
historical intuition so swollen and subtle as the one granted to the bearers
of the Law of Moses, is capable of contemplating the picture of the future
with complete objectivity. Another thing is important though: the Cabala
scholars of Gerona, who lived in the first half of the 13th century, demonstrated
an incredibly good command of the spirit and the letter of metaphysical
history. That is the science (if it ever emerges as such) whose name may
remain the responsibility of the author of this article. Metaphysical
history is necessary for all mankind and that is why only the homosphere
as such must be the object of its research, on conditions of maximum localization
of a particular chronological period. In other words, to ensure the efficiency
of our research of about ourselves, we would be better off if we look
not only at all rings of a single tree section but, having figured out,
by means of sample sawing of all the trunks of the oak wood, the hoop
described by a particular circle of nature we are looking at, determine
commonly shared features of its contour which brings a year restored in
memory maximally close to being deciphered. Such research and study will
enable us to foresee painful knots and stigmas of our civilization's development,
conduct mutual adjustments of geopolitical doctrines of nations and continents
and possibly even prevent some of history's seismic disasters. The number
of chronological systems in our world is limited; it is obvious that for
a computer whiz it is not difficult to browse through them one by one
with regard to a particular sacred text forecasting. Moreover, along with
a set of cabalistic sfirot, the Pythagorean theory of numbers has been
attracting curious people since times immemorial; it is hardly more readily
accessible for amateurish minds than Cabala; the news of the fact that
both systems were initially derived from the same innermost source would
not be much of a surprise. Just to complete the landscape of facts I would like to add that the year 1492 has every right to claim to be the year of birth for philosophic ecumenism: in that particular year the rebellious Count Pica della Mirandola from Florence began to write one of his most important treatises «On the Existing and the Unified» (De Ente et Uno); unfortunately that work remained uncompleted. While attempting to reconcile the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle Pica who was guided from the highest was moving in the direction of creating syncretic concepts on the basis of the ideas ofneoplatonic syncretism. The count in disgrace dreamt about the union of philosophers of all countries and trends; along with Johann Reichlin in Germany he studied Hebrew grammar; his contemporaries marveled at his knowledge of many ancient and modern languages (Greek, Latin, Arabic and Aramaic); according to some sources he was proficient in 22 languages (incidentally, this is the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet). Pica was seeking a clue to the knowledge of the world in the doctrine of Pythagoreans and, at the same time, in the doctrine of Cabala. «On the Existing and the Unified» is referred to his friend Angola Poliziano who was teaching a course on the doctrine of Aristotle at the University of Florence as he was besieged by a question of how to appease his patron Lorenzo Medid who was opposed to the ideas of the great peripatetic. Mirandola who was trying to help his friend out attempted to justify the ancient Greek philosopher but did not finish his pursuits; the need for such justification suddenly disappeared after the death of the ruler of Florence. If we think of this seemingly usual episode of the chronicles of Italian humanism metaphorically we can certainly say that the development of the syncretic trend in modern historiosophy would be a direct completion of the unfinished work of the quattrocento period aimed at justifying the Cabala's genius intuition as viewed by representatives of the world's science of history. |
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