MOSHE IDEL

ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC,

OR KABBALAH AS RENAISSANCE
BEFORE THE RENAISSANCE

ESTRATTO
da

RIVISTA DI STORIA
E LETTERATURA RELIGIOSA
DIRETTA DA
G. CRACCO - G. DAGRON - C. OSSOLA
F. A. PENNACCHIETTI - M. ROSA - B. STOCK

Anno XLIX - N. 2 - 2013

Leo S. Olschki Editore

Firenze
 Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa
diretta da
GIORGIO CRACCO - GILBERT DAGRON - CARLO OSSOLA
FABRIZIO A. PENNACCHIETTI - MARIO ROSA - BRIAN STOCK

Periodico quadrimestrale
redatto presso lUniversita degli Studi di Torino
Direzione
Cesare Alzati, Giorgio Cracco, Gilbert Dagron, Francisco Jarauta,
Carlo Ossola, Benedetta Papasogli, Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, Daniela Rando,
Mario Rosa, Maddalena Scopello, Brian Stock

Redazione
Linda Bisello, Paolo Cozzo, Valerio Gigliotti, Giacomo Jori, Marco Maggi,
Chiara Pilocane, Davide Scotto

Articoli
A. DORDONI, Il riposo dellanima in Dio: Sebastiano Valfre e la mistica . . . Pag. 293
C. FERLAN, Tramandare una memoria scelta: le cronache dei Collegi gesuitici. Il
caso goriziano nel contesto austriaco (secoli XVII-XVIII) . . . . . . . . . . . 315
M. BRAGAGNOLO, Il Castelvetro di Muratori. Storia, religione e diritto tra le carte
dellEstense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351

Rassegne e discussioni
M. IDEL, Anamnesis and Music, or Kabbalah as Renaissance before the Renais-
sance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389
S. CAMPANINI, Des oiseaux a la langue percee. Sur une parabole zoharique . . . 413
I. COSTA, Le murmure (susurratio, susurrium) comme phenomene moral et pro-
phetique a lepoque de Thomas dAquin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
M. MAZZOCCO, Entre silence et vibrations sonores: la poesie mystique dAngelus
Silesius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443

Recensioni
G. ZAMAGNI, Fine dellera costantiniana. Retrospettiva genealogica di un concet-
to critico (R. Perin) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
The Great Beginning of Cteaux: A Narrative of the Beginning of the Cistercian
Order (D. Pezzini) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
M. PELLEGRINI, Religione e Umanesimo nel primo Rinascimento. Da Petrarca ad
Alberti (N. Marcelli) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 462
Gian Matteo Giberti (1495-1543). Atti del Convegno di Studi, a cura di M.
Agostini, G. Baldissin Molli (E. Patrizi) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
M. CAVARZERE, La giustizia del vescovo. I tribunali ecclesiastici della Liguria
orientale (S. Ragagli) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468
A. GIACHERY, Jacopo Morelli e la repubblica delle lettere attraverso la sua corri-
spondenza (1768-1819) (A. Barzazi) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
 RASSEGNE E DISCUSSIONI

Vengono qui raccolti alcuni degli interventi proposti al College de France il 22 febbraio 2013, nel-
lambito della Giornata di Studi diretta da Carlo Ossola in onore di Moshe Idel: Bruissements.
De linarticule dans la mystique et la musique. Altri interventi, pronunciati in quella giornata, sa-
ranno pubblicati nei prossimi fascicoli della Rivista. Non si e trattato di esplorare cio che non arriva
ad esprimersi, ma cio che si raccoglie come ci ha insegnato Moshe Idel nella memoria di un can-
to, di un popolo, o di un palpito.

ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC,

OR KABBALAH AS RENAISSANCE BEFORE THE RENAISSANCE

1. The Combination of Anamnesis and Divine Harmony

Two well-known themes, Pythagorean music of the spheres 1 that was known
also to Plato,2 and Platonic anamnesis,3 are found in separate sources in anti-
quity. In any case according to scholars in the field Platos two main formulations
of anamnesis represent some form of de-mythologization of earlier Orphic-Pytha-
gorean theories.4 According to the interpretation offered by Jean-Pierre Vernant,
anamnesis is related to a sort of ecstasy, which has in some cases salvific over-
tones.5 To my best knowledge of the rich bibliography on Platos anamnesis, de-
spite his interest in music of the sphere, he did not link it to recollection.6 How-

1 See the comprehensive monograph of L. SPITZER, Classical and Christian Ideas of World

Harmony, Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word Stimmung, Baltimore, John Hopkins

Press, 1963. To a certain extent, the following study is a small appendix to this book, which did
not address the Jewish aspects of the topic of the otherwise very erudite monograph. For the
theory of harmony of the spheres in the more recent centuries see J. GODWIN, Lesoterisme mu-
sical en France 1750-1950, Paris, Albin Michel, 1991.
2 See E. MOUTSOPULOS, La musique dans loeuvre de Platon, Paris, PUF, 1959.

3 See Phaidon, 75e, Phaedrus, 249b-250b, and Menon, 81cd. On anamnesis in Plato see

A. CAMERON, The Pythagorean Background of the Theory of Recollection, Wisconsin, Menasha,

1938; F.M. CONFORD, Principium Sapientiae, New York, ed. W.K.C. Guthrie (Harper Torch-
book, 1965), pp. 45-61. On the reverberations of Platonic anamnesis in Neoplatonism and then
in the Middle Ages see G. SHAW, Theurgy and the Soul, The Platonism of Iamblichus (Penn State
University Press, University Park, PA., 1995), pp. 24, 164, 175, 194, 201. See also the interesting
reflections of Mircea Eliade on Platonic anamnesis and the archaic man in Aspects du mythe
(Paris, 1963), pp. 147-155 and below beside note 113. To judge from a perusal of Mary Car-
ruthers books anamnesis was not a widespread vision in the Latin Middle Ages.
4 J.-P. VERNANT, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs, Paris, Editions La Decouverts, 1988,

pp. 51-78 and M.L. MORGAN, Platonic Piety, Philosophy & Ritual in Fourth-century Athens,
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 47-54, 69-70, 175-177.
5 J.P. VERNANT, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs, cit., pp. 51-78 and J.E. MENARD , La function

soteriologique de la memoire chez les gnostiques, RSR, LIV, 1980, p. 306.

7
390 MOSHE IDEL

ever, as part of the syntheses between Platonism and Pythagoreanism in Neopla-

tonism, the two themes are found together and the question is whether this is a
new synthesis between two independent themes in Neoplatonism, or preservation
or a reconstruction of a pre-Platonic view or a Middle Platonic view, which did
not survive in such explicit a manner in earlier sources.7 Let me adduce the most
explicit combination between the two themes found in a late Neoplatonic thinker
deeply influenced by Pythagoreanism: 8 Iamblichus.

Indeed, before the soul gave itself to the body, it heard the divine harmony plainly. There-
fore, after it departs into the body and hears the sort of melodies that especially preserve the
trace of the divine harmony, it welcomes these and recollects the divine harmony from them. It
is drawn to this, makes itself at home with it, and partakes of it as much as possible. 9

We may distinguish between three main stages of the soul represented in this pas-
sage: 1] the soul preexisted its descent in the body and when in the supernal world
it heard the divine harmony, which should be understood from the context as mu-
sical since it is connected later on with melodies. 2] when the soul is within the body
and listens to music she is recollecting the primordial melodies. 3] This recollection
brings the soul to a state reminiscent of the initial one, but within this world. Thus,
recollection by listening to harmonious music, reminiscent of the divine harmony, is
a possible way of regaining the experience of the preexisting soul while alive.
Earlier in the same book Iamblichus claims that by means of such melodies
adapted to the Gods, their divinity becomes present... So, whatever happens to
possess a likeness to the Gods directly participates in them: a perfect possession
immediately takes place and the [experience of] being filled with the essence
and the power of a Higher Being. 10 Elsewhere in the same book Iamblichus
writes that the inspiration of the Gods is not separate from divine harmony. 11
Melodies belonging to Gods instantiate therefore the divine presence within the
soul while she is in the body. Recollection constitutes therefore the counterpart
of the possible ascent of the soul to its source, by drawing the divine inspiration
down. Let me point out the conceptually composite nature of Iamblichus book as

6 See E. MOUTSOPULOS, La musique dans loeuvre de Platon, cit.

7 See F. BUFFIERE, Les mythes dHomere et la pensee greque, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1956,
p. 479; C. VAN LIEFFERINGE, Les Sirenes: du chant mortel a la musique des spheres. Lectures home-
riques et interpretations platoniciennes, RHR, CCXXIX, 2012, p. 495, M. SHIFFMAN, Erotic
Wisdom and the Socratic Vocation in Plutarchs Platonic Question 1, in Greek, Roman, and By-
zantine Studies, L, 2010, pp. 263, where the view of Ammonius, a Middle Platonist, is referred.
8 On Iamblichuss Life of Pythagoras, where music plays an important role see the texts re-

ferred by F. BUFFIERE, Les mythes dHomere et la pensee greque, cit., pp. 469-470, 475.
9 IAMBLICHUS , De Mysteriis, 120, 7-14. The translation is that of G. SHAW, Theurgy and the

Soul, cit., p. 175.

10 Ibid., 118, 6-119, 9; ivi, pp. 174-175.

11 Ibid., 119, 10-11; ivi, p. 175.

ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 391

well as of earlier Pythagorean traditions, a point to which we shall revert below.12

It should be pointed out that the imperative to remember Gods redemption
of Israel from Egypt, is a basic view in Biblical and post-Biblical Judaism.13 Here,
however, I am not concerned with the musica mundana in itself, or with anamnesis
in Judaism, but in a particular nexus between them, which stems from the Greco-
Hellenistic background.

2. Medieval Reverberations

Iamblichuss book has not been translated into Arabic or in any language be-
fore Ficinos translation in the late eighties of the 15th century. Nevertheless the
combination of the two themes recurs in Arabic sources, which transmitted also
other Pythagorean themes to the Middle Ages.14 There are three different kind
of sources found in Arabic where this combination is found: a Hellenistic doxo-
graphy translated in Arabic by the famous translator Hunain ibn Ishaq, which
has been translated in Hebrew early in the 13th century by Yehudah al-Harizi,
a text that had many reverberations in Jewish sources. It is called in Hebrew Mu-
serei ha-Filosofim, namely the Maxims of the Philosophers, and it brings together
dicta stemming from a variety of ancient thinkers, mentioning Ammonius in the
general context. In a long chapter on music, which shows how much the topic
found in Greek and Hellenistic texts could find its way to the Middle Ages, were
read: when the soul will concentrate 15 she will play plaintive 16 melodies and will
remember her supreme world, and will join the supreme joint and will have a

12 W. BURKET, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, Cambridge Mass., Harvard

University Press, 1973, P. KINGSLEY, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and
Pythagorean Tradition, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1995.
13 See M. MESLIN , Lexperience humaine du divine, Paris, Cerf, 1988, pp. 320-364, and my

Memento Dei: Remarks on Remembering in Judaism, in Il senso della Memoria, Roma, Accademia
Nazionale dei Lincei, 2003, pp. 143-192, ID., Remembering and Forgetting as Redemption and
Exile in Early Hasidism, in Arbeit am Gedaechtnis fuer Aleida Assmann, ed. by Michael C. Frank,
G. Rippi, Muenchen, Fink, 2007, pp. 111-129.
14 See F. ROSENTHAL , Some Pythagorean Documents Transmitted in Arabic, Orientalia, n.s.

X, 1941, pp. 104-115, 383-395; ibid., The Classical Heritage in Islam, London, Routledge, 1975,
p. 40 and D.J. OMEARA, Pythagoras Revived, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 230-
232. On Nemesius of Emessa, John of Damascus and Shahrastani, who all mentioned Pythagoras,
see H.A. WOLFSON, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, ed. by I. Twersky & G.H.
Williams, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1973, vol. 1, p. 357 and see also SAID AL-ANDA-
LUSI, Tabaqat al-umam, tr. G. Blachere, Paris, 1935, pp. 57-62, B.R. GOLDSTEIN , A Treatise on
Number Theory from a Tenth Century Arabic Source, Centhaurus, X, 1964, pp. 129-160.
15 E. WERNER and I. SONNE, The Philosophy and Theory of Music in Judaeo-Arabic Litera-

ture, HUCA, XVII, 1942-43, p. 525, translate Living in Solitude, but I preferred the other
possibility. See my Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, Albany, SUNY Press, 1988, pp. 103-169. See
also below beside note 69.
16 Maatzivot. See below in our discussion of Yohanan Alemannos passage.
392 MOSHE IDEL

rhythmic sweet melodies. 17 Here music is presented as counteracting the acts of

nature that attempt to draw soul to material realm. Unlike Iamblichuss approach,
the role of the melodies here is to subdue the lower functions in the human per-
sonality, while the recollection of the supernal world is not related necessarily to
the performance or listening of music. Much more detailed is the discussion
found in the Encyclopedia of the Sincere or Pure Brethren, a text translated in Eng-
lish by Amnon Shiloah.18 Though a small part of this encyclopedia has been trans-
lated in Hebrew, it was not the epistle dealing with music, which nevertheless has
been transliterated in Hebrew characters but in its original Arabic and is extant in
one single manuscript.19
In a way similar though not identical to the earlier view, writes also Rabbi
Shem Tov ben Yosef Falaqera, a Jewish philosopher active in Spain in the last
third of the 13th century, who was well-acquainted with Arabic language and Mus-
lim thought, and he even translated from Arabic to Hebrew. In his Sefer ha-Me-
vaqqesh, he wrote:
they assert that the celestial spheres and stars performing their revolutions, produce joyful
tones and delightful melodies. They assert also that as soon as the soul hears a melody of
balanced composition and rhythmic measure she rejoices and find delight therein and
yearns for her Creator, longing to reach Him. Consequently, the soul contemns the miseries
and the accidents of the temporal world and meditates upon the upper world. Such is the
aim of the music performing sages. 20

This approach, like it earlier sources is cosmic and restorative in nature. I assume
that Falaquera was acquainted with a doxography similar to the Maxims of the Phi-
losophers.21
These two types of sources, which were available in the Middle Ages, at least
in part, in Hebrew, were more theoretical treatments of music. However in Arabic
there are also other types of texts, related to Sufism, where music was practiced as
an essential part of the mystical techniques, known as dhikr the recitation of the
name of God and sama though I did not identify a view identical to that of Iam-
blichus as discussed above.22 Though the possible impact of such practices on

17 Musrei ha-Filosofim, 1:18, as printed in I. ADLER, Hebrew Writings Concerning Music in

Manuscripts and Printed Books, From Geonic Times up to 1800, Repertoire International de
Sources Musicales, in RISM BIX2, Munich, G. Henle, 1975, p. 148; see also the emendations
of the sequence of this passage in E. WERNER I. SONNE, The Philosophy, cit., vol. 17, pp. 515-
516 and p. 525 for another English translation, and pp. 558-563 for a discussion of the Greco-
Hellenistic sources of this doxography.
18 The Epistle on Music of Ikhwan al-Safa, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University, 1978.

19 Printed in ADLER, HWCM, cit., pp. 50-54.

20 For the Hebrew text see ADLER, HWCM, cit., pp. 164-166, and E. WERNER I. SONNE , The

Philosophy, cit., vol. 17, p. 547, and for the English translation, slightly modified here, see ivi, p. 550.
21 See A. SHILOAH , R. Shem Tov ibn Joseph Falaqeras Sourcess for the Chapter on Music in

his Sefer ha-Mevakesh, in Proceedings of the Fourth World Congress of Jewish Studies, vol. 2,
1963, pp. 373-377.
ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 393

Jewish texts cannot be totally neglected, insofar as a specific affinity with the texts
we shall discuss below on musica mundana and anamnesis cannot be proven.

3. R. Joseph Angelets Passage and its Elaborations

Unlike Muslim mysticism, whose interest in music was quite prominent, in

Kabbalah there is a much more modest resort to it in practice. With the exception
of Abraham Abulafias ecstatic Kabbalah, where music played an important
role,23 and much later in East European Hasidism, in other branches of Jewish
mysticism we find much more theoretical discussions 24 and one of them will con-
cern us here.
In the second half of the 13th century, the Kabbalah in Spain was enriched by
an exposure to a series of texts that were not known earlier by Kabbalists, some of
which stem from Hermetic sources. This happened in both Catalunia and Castile,
most probably as part of what has been called the Alfonsine Renaissance, contem-
porary to the renascence of Kabbalah.25 Also Pythagorean themes circulated in
Kabbalistic literature.26 Recently, scholars have pointed out the possible influence
of ideas found in Iamblichus on late 13thy century Kabbalists in Castile; Yehuda

22 A. SHILOAH , The Role and Nature of music in the practice of sama, in Repport of the

twelfth Congress, Berkeley, 1977, pp. 425-428, 433-434; A. GRIBETZ, The Sama Controversy: Sufi
vs. Legalist, Studia Islamica, LXXIV, 1991, pp. 43-62, J. DURING, Musique et extase, Laudition
mystique dans la tradition soufie, Paris, Albin Michel, 1988. For the resort to the concept of ana-
mnesis in Sufism see EVA DE MITRAY MEYEROVITCH, Mystique et poesie en Islam, Paris, Desclee
de Bouwer, 1972, pp. 72, 83 where she mentions one of Iamblichus texts adduced above and
102.
23 See M. IDEL , The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, tr. Jonathan Chipman, Al-

bany, SUNY Press, 1988, pp. 53-71.

24 See my The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations of Music from the Renaissance to Ha-

sidism, in Yuval, vol. IV, 1982, pp. 33-63 (Hebrew), ID., Conceptualizations of Music in Jewish
Mysticism, in ed. Lawrence Sullivan, Enchanting Powers, Music in the Worlds Religions, Cam-
bridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 159-188, ID., Music in sixteenth-century Kab-
balah in Northern Africa, in Yuval, vol. VII, 2002, pp. 154-170, and now D. SCHWARTZ, Music in
Jewish Thought, Ramat Gan, Bar Ilan University, 2013 (Hebrew).
25 See also my Kabbalah and Hermeticism, and On European Cultural Renaissances and Jew-

ish Mysticism, in Kabbalah, vol. 13, 2005, pp. 43-78.

26 On the Pythagorean Golden Verses see M. PLESSNER, The Translation in Arabic and He-

brew of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, in Eshkoloth, vol. 4, 1962, p. 58 (Hebrew), Y. TZVI LAN-
GERMANN, Studies in Medieval Hebrew Pythagoreanism, Micrologus, IX, 2001, pp. 219-236,
M. BAR ILAN, Astrology and Other Sciences among the Jews of Israel in the Roman-Hellenistic
and Byzantine Periods, Jerusalem, Bialik Institute, 2011, pp. 146-147, 208, n. 497, 215, M. IDEL,
Ben, Sonship and Jewish Mysticism, London, New York, Continuum, 2008, pp. 315-318, Kabbalah
in Italy, pp. 15-16, ID., On the Meanings of the term Kabbalah: Between the Prophetic Kabbalah
and the Kabbalah of Sefirot in the 13th Century, in Peamim, vol. 93, 2002, pp. 50-51 (Hebrew), ID.,
Sefirot above the Sefirot, in Tarbiz, vol. 51, 1982, p. 261, n. 110 (Hebrew), and my introduction to
JOHANNES REUCHLIN, On the Art of the Kabbalah, De Arte Cabalistica, trs. M & S. Goodman, Lin-
coln and London, The Nebraska University Press, 1993, pp. XI-XV and Johannes Reuchlin: Kab-
394 MOSHE IDEL

Liebes discussed his possible influence on a passage in the book of the Zohar 27
and Elka Morlok dealt with reverberations of Iamblichuss views on Rabbi Joseph
Gikatilla.28 It is also in this context that the occurrence of the following passage
should be understood.
Rabbi Joseph Angelet,29 a Kabbalist that flowered in Spain in the first third of
the 14th century, who commented on both the Book of Zohar and on one of Gi-
katillas major Kabbalistic treatises,30 adduces an interesting version of anamnesis
as concerning music that has been most plausibly drawn from an unidentified,
presumably Arabic source. In his commentary on the book of the Zohar entitled
Livenat ha-Sappir, a book to which he was very close in both thought and lan-
guage,31 he wrote as follows:
[a] And when someone wants to arise to the Torah and prayer, in order that the holy
spirit will dwell upon her,32 and he arouse: And when the player played and the spirit
was on him 33 [b] because the [higher] soul 34 is derived from above, from the bundle of
life,35 and she is accustomed with melodies and with the songs of the servant angels, and
the song of the spheres. But now, when she is within the body and she listens to melodies,
then she takes pleasure and delight as she was accustomed when she was cleaving to her
root, and 36 to the delight of the voice of the spheres. And out of the pleasure and joy

balah, Pythagorean Philosophy and Modern Scholarship, Studia Judaica, XVI, 2008, pp. 30-55,
and E. MORLOK, Rabbi Joseph Gikatillas Hermeneutics, Tubingen, Mohr/Siebeck, 2011, passim,
especially pp. 77-83, 308-309. See also J. WEINBERG, Azariah de Rossi and Pythagoras, or What has
Classical Antiquity to Do with Halakhah?, in Tov Elem, Memory, Community & Gender in Med-
ieval & Early Modern Jewish Societies, Essays in Honor of Robert Bonfil, ed. by E. Baumgarten,
A. Raz-Krakotzkin, R. Weinstein, Jerusalem, The Bialik Institute, 2011, pp. 183-184.
27 See his Zohar and Jamblichus, in Essays in Honor of Moshe Idel, ed. by S. Frunza,

M. Frunza, Cluj-Napoca, Provo Press, 2008, pp. 106-111, and now his The Cult of the Dawn,
Jerusalem, Carmel, 2011, pp. 99-105 (Hebrew). A view similar to both Iamblichus and the Zohar
as discussed by Liebes is found also in a treatise from Abraham Abulafias school, the anonymous
Sefer Ner Elohim, cfr. IDEL, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, p. 125. For another
parallel between this treatise and an early Zoharic view on the nature of the soul, found only in
Pythagoreanism, see what I wrote in my The Writings and Doctrine of Abraham Abulafia, Jeru-
salem, Ph. D Thesis, Hebrew University, 1976, pp. 73-74 (Hebrew).
28 Rabbi Joseph Gikatillas Hermeneutics, see index, p. 350 sub voce Iamblichus.

29 The name under which this Kabbalist was known in scholarship was Angelino, but this

has been corrected to Angelet by I. FELIX, Chapters in the Kabbalistic Thought of Rabbi Joseph
Angelet, Jerusalem, M.A. Thesis, Hebrew University, 1991 (Hebrew).
30 See his anonymous commentary on Gikatillas Shaarei Orah, found in manuscripts.

31 R. MEROZ, R. Joseph Angelet and his Zoharic Writings, in New Developments in Zohar

Studies, ed. by R. Meroz [= Teuda, vol. XXI-XXII], Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University Press, 2007,
pp. 303-404 (Hebrew).
32 Namely the soul.

33 II Re 5, 15 but it is the hand of God not the spirit, that is mentioned in the biblical verse.

34 Nishemeta. In the theosophical Kabbalah this is the highest of three souls, which stems

from the third sefirah, Binah.

35 See I Samuel 25, 29 in the context of David. This phrase became in Judaism a standard

reference to the post mortem blissful situation of the soul.

ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 395

she merits that the spirit of God will dwell upon her,37 as she behaved in her first root. [c]
And it seems to me that David, that had nothing of himself, needed to arouse himself by
means of sorts of melodies in order to draw life upon his attribute from the supernal light
called life, and this is the reason why the highest of his degrees is that he knows how to sing
in order to arouse the voice, the spirit and the speech,38 in order to draw good-will to the
lower world. 39

This compact passage has not parallel discussion in Angelets other writings,
and in general his interest in music is rather scant. The passages [a] and [b] are found
almost verbatim in Ms. London-Montefiore 348, as an oral tradition heard from the
mouth of RYA, which is quite plausibly the acronym of R. [Y]Joseph Angelet.40 In
my opinion, we have here a hybrid text that draws upon the earlier connections be-
tween the music of the spheres and anamnesis, but adding biblical verses and con-
jugating it with the Jewish ideal of studying Torah and praying. Implicitly at least, the
Torah study and prayer are understood as performed by means of some form of mel-
ody. The Kabbalist elaborates upon the nature of the music heard by the soul, add-
ing to the song of the spheres or their voices, namely to the planetary music, also
Jewish motifs of the song of the servant angels, found in late antiquity sources.41 For
Angelet the main feeling that recollection causes is pleasure and delight, an aesthetic
feeling that is reminiscent of the pre-existential condition of the soul. According to
the Kabbalist, it is the strength of the souls pleasure that causes the descent of the
supernal spirit on the soul. To be sure: some form of musica mundana that induces
pleasure is mentioned already in the Book of the Zohar,42 a book upon which Angelet
commented, but there is no trace there of the theme of musical anamnesis. The re-
sort to the descent of the spirit has, in Jewish tradition, some prophetic implications,

36 Perhaps the meaning was that while in the divine world the root the soul listened to

the music of the spheres.

37 An ancient Rabbinic dictum claimed that the divine presence does not dwell but on

someone who is joyful. See BT, Shabbat, fol. 30b.

38 Cfr. Sefer Yetzirah, I:9.

39 The phrase lower world may refer not only to the terrestrial world but, according to

many instances in Kabbalistic terminology, to the last sefirah. In Livenat ha-Sappir (mistakenly
attributed in print to R. David ben Yehudah he-Hasid) ed. Shlomo Mussaioff, Jerusalem,
1913, fol. 12bc. Some part of the text is in Aramaic, since Angelet imitates the Aramaic language
of the Zohar. See also the reverberations of this view in R. ISRAEL TOIB OF MODZITZ, Divrei Yis-
rael, New York, 2008, p. 246, reprinted in MEIR SH. GESHURI, Le-Hasidim Mizmor, Jerusalem,
1936, p. 78 (Hebrew), or J. SHAPOTSNICK, SHULCHAN ARUCH, LAMUDEY HACHEM, Lon-
don, 1932, p. 17.
40 Ms. London-Montefiore 348, fol. 5a. This reference may indicate that Angelet had a fol-

lower who preserved an oral tradition of his.

41 K.E. GROEZINGER, Musik und Gesang in der Theologie der fruehen juedischen Literatur,

Tuebingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1982.

42 See, e.g., Zohar III, fol. 170ab. See M. IDEL, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pil-

lars, Ladders, Lines, Budapest-New York, CEU Press, 2005, pp. 106-107, where I pointed out to
the possible Pythagorean background.
396 MOSHE IDEL

though I am not sure that this is necessarily the case also here.
Let me elaborate on the resort to the term her root that translates the He-
brew form yesodah. The assumption in a philosophical context would be that all
the souls have the same root, the universal soul, though in a theosophical context
it seems to be that each soul has a different root on high, which characterize her
nature and behavior. Such a Kabbalistic understanding of an earlier philosophical
text, assumes a complex world within the divine structure, perhaps not only ten
sefirot. The term yesod, widespread in Livenat ha-Sappir, has there another mean-
ing, namely the ninth sefirah, but the more Neoplatonic use does not occur in the
context of the root of the soul elsewhere in Angelets other writings. In any case it
is possible to discern the use of the phrase deveqah bi-ysodah in late 13th century
thinkers, including Kabbalists, without however using the theory of anamnesis. In
these sources it is a personal eschatology that defines the meaning of the souls
cleaving to the supernal world, as culminating a life of holiness, not an initial state
of the soul before her descent in the body. Moreover, in some cases, the concept
of the paradisiacal music to be listened by the souls in the post-mortem situation
has nothing to do with our discussions here.43
Passage [c] is basically a comment on [b] which seems to refer to an earlier
source, especially since Angelet starts [c] with the phrase it seems to me. Indeed
the last passage constitutes a theosophical-theurgical comment, based on the as-
sumption of a special affinity between the soul and its source and the responsibil-
ity of the soul in the lower world for the corresponding divine power to which she
was related. The King David was conceived in the main schools of Kabbalah as
corresponding to the last sefirah, referred in passage [c] as his attribute,44 and
since this sefirah was commonly described in Kabbalah as lacking a nature of itself
but having the influxes that come from the nine higher sefirot, the biblical king
was portrayed as using music in order to induce power within the supernal attri-
bute connected to him. Whether the Kabbalist is also capitalizing on the Plotinian
view as to the continuum between the embodied soul and its source, known in the
book of the Zohar,45 in order to explain the manner in which the human influence
works, is not so obvious here. It is possible that we have one of the reverberations
of the more ancient identification of king David as musician with Orpheus.46
I resort to the term theurgical in order to refer to an act by means of which a

43 See, e.g., the poetical eulogy of R. Moshe ben Nahman, written in the memory of

R. Abraham ben Yitzhaq, a Kabbalist and a cantor in Gerona, printed in Kitvei ha-Ramban,
ed. Ch. D. Chavel, Jerusalem, Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1963, I, p. 387.
44 See, e.g., M. IDEL, R. Nehemiah ben Shlomo the Prophet on the Star of David and the

Name Taftafia: From Jewish Magic to Practical and Theoretical Kabbalah, in Ta Shma, Studies
in Judaica in Memory of Israel M. Ta-Shma, ed. by A. Reiner and alia, Alon Shevut, Tevunot
Press, 2011, I, pp. 22-26 (Hebrew).
45 I. TISHBY , The Wisdom of the Zohar, tr. D. Goldstein, London, Littman Library, 1991, II,

p. 752.
46 See already the mosaic at Dura Europos, and for the secondary literature see e.g., N. ZEE-
ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 397

person can intervene in processes within the divine world 47 that is constituted of a
multiplicity of divine powers, a structure I refer as theosophy. In the passage [b]
the assumption is that the soul is empowered by listening to music by means of the
recollection of the supernal realm and the temporary participation in them. This
view was referred by some scholars as theurgical, which is just another legitimate
use of the term.48 In both cases there is some form of manipulation of the gods or
divine powers. However, given the emphasis of many of the Kabbalists on neces-
sity to impact on the balances and processes within the divine sphere, I have ap-
propriated one of the two meanings found in the late antiquity pagan sources.
What seems to me interesting is the fact that the theurgical understanding of
music, which is hardly found in earlier Kabbalah recurs in two authors who were
contemporaries of R. Joseph Angelet: the anonymous author the later layers of Zo-
haric literature, Tiqqunei Zohar and Raya Meheimna, and in the writings of an-
other Kabbalist R. David ben Yehudah he-Hasid.49 It should be mentioned that
both Angelet and R. David, were most probably connected to some aspects of the

GERS-VAN DER VORST, Les versions juives et chretiennes du fr. 245-7 dOrphee, in LAntiquite Clas-
sique, vol. 39, 1970, pp. 475-506, P. FINNEY, Orpheus, David, and the Gaza Synagogue, Journal
of Jewish Art, V, 1975, pp. 6-15, the appendix of J.-M. ROESLI, De lOrphee ecossais, Bilan et
perspectives, to John Block Friedmans book Orphee au Moyen Ages, tr. J.-M. Roesli et alia,
Paris, Le Cerf, 1999, pp. 285-343, as well as the entire literature on the figures in the Dura Euro-
pos synagogue, for example, the study of A. OVADIAH, The Symbolic Meaning of the David-Or-
pheus image in the Gaza Synagogue Mosaic, in Studium Biblicum Franciscanum: Liber Annuus
LIX, 2009, pp. 301-307.
47 See M. I DEL, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988,

pp. 156-157, ID., From Structure to Performance: On the Divine Body and Human Action in
the Kabbalah, Mishqafayim, XXXII, 1998, pp. 3-6 (Hebrew), ID., Absorbing Perfections, Kab-
balah and Interpretation, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 3, 13, 31, 60, 67, 73-74
etc., Ascensions on High, pp. 7, 11, 16-18, 68, 114-115, 120-121, etc., ID., On The Performing
Body in Theosophical-Theurgical Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Remarks, in The Jewish Body, Cor-
poreality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ed. by M. Diemling,
G. Veltri, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2009, pp. 251-271, ID., Some Remarks on Ritual and Mysticism in
Geronese Kabbalah, in Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. III, 1993, pp. 111-130, or Enchanted
Chains: Techniques and Rituals in Jewish Mysticism (Los Angeles, Cherub Press, 2005), pp. 33-
34, 47; as well as CH. MOPSIK, Les Grands textes de la Cabale, Les rites qui font Dieu, Lagrasse,
Verdier, 1993, Y. LORBERBAUM, Image of God, Halakhah and Aggada, Tel Aviv, Schocken, 2004
(Hebrew), J. GARB, Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism, Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 2005
(Hebrew), E. WOLFSON, Mystical-Theurgical Dimensions of Prayer in Sefer ha-Rimmon, in Ap-
proaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, vol. III, 1988, pp. 41-80, and I. FELIX, Theurgy, Magic,
and Mysticism, Ph. D. Thesis, Hebrew University Jerusalem, 2005 (Hebrew). For this specific
understanding of theurgy see G. LUCK, following E.R. DODDS, Arcana Mundi, Magic and the Oc-
cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Crucible, 1987, p. 21; see also more recently, G. LUCK,
Theurgy and Forms of Worship in Neoplatonism, in Religion, Science, and Magic, ed by J. Neus-
ner, & alia, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 186 and R. MAJERCIK, The Chaldean
Oracles, Leiden, Brill, 1989, p. 22, where she adduced also other similar definitions of theurgy.
Again following some of these scholars, I draw a distinction between theurgy and magic; see
R. MAJERCIK, ivi, pp. 22-23.
48 See, e.g., G. SHAW, Theurgy and the Soul, cit., p. 175: musical theurgy.

49 See M. IDEL, The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations, cit., p. 51, n. 118, p. 55, n. 144.
398 MOSHE IDEL

Kabbalistic thought as found in Tiqqunei Zohar.50 In this layer of the Zohar, music
plays indeed a greater role than in other forms of contemporary theosophical-
theurgical Kabbalah. Let me point out that unlike the discourse of the 12th cen-
tury Jewish philosophers and their followers later on, the Kabbalists are quoting
only rarely their non-Jewish sources, creating the impression that they present a
Jewish view, in many cases the real esoteric meaning of the Bible. This point con-
tributed to the understanding of Kabbalah as a prisca theologia, as we shall see be-
low in section 7.
Last but not least: Platonic anamnesis had an impact on some Rabbinic
sources, where the assumption in one of the passages is that the soul studies Torah
before entering the body, and in that moment an angel causes the forgetting of the
Torah by the infant.51 However, nothing related to a musical element is found in
these sources. However, in the book of the Zohar, there is a discussion that ela-
borates on the Rabbinic statement, and it assesses that the Torah someone is learn-
ing in this world is that that he forgot before this persons descent in the body.52
The presence of such a view in Castile in late 13th century may be related to
sources that influenced also Angelet and in any case it explains the nexus between
the Torah, mentioned at the beginning of the passage, and musical anamnesis. A
comparison of the content of Angelets passage with the material referred above
shows that it is closer to Iamblichuss text rather than to any of the extant Arabic
texts, and I assume that there was a perhaps lost version in Arabic, which
mediated between the Neoplatonic author and the Kabbalist.
Angelets Livenat ha-Sappir was a Kabbalistic book that remained on the mar-
gin of the interest of many Kabbalists, and even its authors name has been forgot-
ten. However, the passage quoted above attracted the interest of a major Kabbalist
of the first part of the 16th century, Rabbi Meir ibn Gabbai, an expellee from
Spain who wrote his books in the former Greek part of the Ottoman Empire.53
It is a rather verbatim quote that helped the dissemination of the views found
in Angelets text in much larger audiences, since ibn Gabbais text has been
printed already in the 16th century.54 In his quite influential book Avodat ha-Qo-
desh, which has been printed already in the 16th century, he refers to views of the

50 See my preface to E. GOTTLIEB , The Hebrew Writings of the Author of Tiqqunei Zohar

and Raaya Mehemna, Jerusalem, 2003, pp. 25-28 (Hebrew).

51 BT, Niddah, fol. 30b. See also E.E. URBACH , The Sages, Their Concepts and Beliefs, tr. I.

Abrams, Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1979, p. 248.

52 Zohar III, fol. 61ab, and I. TISHBY , The Wisdom of the Zohar, cit., p. 751.

53 On this author see R. GOETSCHEL , R. Meir Ibn Gabbai, Le Discours de la Kabbale espag-

nole, Leuven, Peeters, 1981.

54 See below the passage in R. Yehudah Moscato, as well as in R. Sabbatai Lipshitzs Segullot

Yisrael (Muncacz, 1905), fol. 118a, R. AVRAHAM OF VILNIUS, Rav Pealim, Warsau, 1894, p. 75,
Y. EISENSTEIN, Otzar ha-Midrashim, New York, 1915, I, p. 265, and Rabbi Z.W. ASHKENAZI, the
commentator on Rabbi H. VITALs Shaarei Qedushah, Jerusalem, 1926, p. 61. References to ibn
Gabbai passage are more numerous in more recent books, which are written by compilators.
ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 399

ancient philosophers as to the cosmic music as cited and rejected by Maimonidess

Guide of the Perplexed.55 Though he agrees to the Pythagorean view, he believes
that it is not well-founded in the philosophical sources and he refers to Rabbinic
discussions as to the voices of astral bodies, which are in his eyes much more reli-
able.56 Then he quotes most of the passage of Angelet, referring explicitly to his
source, though ignoring passage [c], despite the fact that he was one of the most
elaborated Kabbalists dealing with what I called theurgy.57
What is important in ibn Gabbais discussion is that he openly rejects Maimo-
nides critical stand as to the existence of the music of the spheres. The Jewish phi-
losopher, following the path of Aristotle and the Muslim philosophers he admired,
Al-Farabi and Avicenna,58 was quite reticent toward the Pythagorean traditions in
general, while the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalists adopted an opposite posi-
tion, their resort to the anamnesis-music theme being just one example out of
many.59 Like in other cases, one of the Kabbalists sources was Maimonides
Guide, where he criticized the view of musica mundana.
Angelets passage reverberates, rather verbatim, for example in an early 17th
century Italian Kabbalist, Rabbi Aharon Berakhiah of Modena: 60
There is a palace on high that is hidden, and it is not opened but by means of the mel-
ody 61... and the soul is taking pleasure from the melody because it is accustomed to the
melodies, the songs of the servant angels and the song of the spheres. And when she is
in the body and listens to melodies, she is taking pleasure as she is was accustomed when
she was cleaving to her root, and out of her great joy she merits that the spirit of God will
dwell [upon her], according to her behavior and her root.62

55 II, 8. Cfr. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, tr. Sh. Pines, Chicago, Chicago

University Press, 1963, II, p. 267. On Maimonides rejection of Pythagoras see his letter to the
translator of the Guide, Rabbi Samuel ibn Tibbon. For another instance of polemic with Maimo-
nides in ibn Gabbai see I. TISHBY, The Wisdom of the Zohar, II, cit., pp. 678-679.
56 Avodat ha-Qodesh, part III ch. 10, Jerusalem, 1973, fol. 68c.

57 For music and theurgy according to ibn Gabbai see M. IDEL , The Magical and Theurgical

Interpretations, cit., pp. 46-49. On theurgy in general in this Kabbalistic book see CH. MOPSIK,
Les grands textes de la cabale, pp. 364-382, GARB, Manifestations of Power, pp. 232-248.
58 See E. WERNER I. SONNE , The Philosophy and Theory of Music in Judaeo-Arabic Litera-

ture, HUCA, vol. 16, 1941, p. 291.

59 Nota Bene: Abulafias Kabbalah, where music plays an important role as part of his tech-

niques to achieve prophecy, does not operate with the assumption of the musica mundana, as he
was on this point a faithful follower of Maimonides.
60 On this Kabbalist see I. TISHBY , Studies in Kabbalah and Its Branches, Jerusalem, Magnes

Press, 1982, I, pp. 177-254 (Hebrew), and IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, cit., pp. 332-334.
61 Cfr. Tiqqunei Zohar, Tiqqun XI, ed. R. Margoliot, Jerusalem, 1978, fol. 26b.

62 R. AHARON BERAKHIAH OF MODENA , Maavar Yaboq, Part I, ch. 31, Vilnius, 1896, fol. 77b.

R. Aharon brings also the discussion on David as in Livenat ha-Sappir. It seems that this is the
source for similar discussions, e.g., R. MOSHE OF ZLASHIN, Siddur Tiqqun Shabbat, Warsau,
1927, fol. 84b, R. AVNER AFGIN, Divrei Shalom, Jerusalem, 2006, p. 141, and see also ELIAQUM
400 MOSHE IDEL

Here in addition to the theme of anamnesis, there is also a theurgical quality of

music, which attributes to musical performance the power to open a hidden pa-
lace on high. This is part of a much longer discussion about the extraordinary
power of music to affect the divine and other supernal realms, which combines
mainly the discussions in Tiqqunei Zohar with Angelet, without however, mention-
ing the latter by name. Rabbi Aharons passage, like that of ibn Gabbais has been
copied by several later writers, as indicated in the previous footnote.

4. Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi Alqabetz

An important Kabbalist that started his career in the Greek part of the Ottoman
Empire, and was a younger contemporary of Rabbi Meir ibn Gabbai, was Rabbi Shlo-
mo ha-Levi Alqabetz (1505-1584).63 In the early forties of the 16th century he moved
from there to Safed and was one of the members of the first group of Kabbalists that in
some few decades put the small Galilean town on the map as the major center of Kab-
balah in the world. In his commentary on the book of Esther he wrote:
I heard from an elderly man...[a] why melody and music 64 are pleasant to the soul?
Because she was accustomed to listen to it on high, as it is known to whoever does not
deny the meaning of the [biblical] verses and their truth. And the supernal angels open
their mouth, bless and aggrandize 65 etc., by a clear language 66 etc., and I heard
the voice of their wings etc.67 [b] And there are persons to whom this will be so pleasant
that their senses will be obliterated, and they do not know where they are. [c] And there are
others, that a sleep will fall upon them, since they separated [or concentrated] 68 their soul
in order to listen to the song, so that their body will lay down like a dead corpse, since she
[the soul] is watching over it [the body] and when she will separate herself it will remain as
if it is nothing, sleeping and falling asleep like the infants who are suckling, since they will
not sleep if they do not listen to the voice of the song, and when they listen to it, they rest on
their beds and their sleep is sweet, since the sound of the voice and the pleasure is still
found within their soul, because of the little time of their separation from it.69

DEVORKERS, Bi-Shvilei ha-Minhag, Jerusalem, 1998, III, p. 13, the Hasidic journal Qovetz Beit
Aharon ve-Yisrael, vol. XII, 1997, p. 142 and notes 92, 93, R. SHMUEL ABRAHAMI, Tzedeq Eido-
teikha, Jerusalem, 2009, introduction, and R. DAVID FALK, Be-Torato Yehegeh, II, Jerusalem,
2003, p. 482, where some of the sources adduced here are mentioned together.
63 On this Kabbalist see B. SACK , The Mystical Theology of Solomon Alkabez, Waltham, Ph.

D. Thesis, Brandeis University, 1977 (Hebrew), R. KIMELMAN, The Mystical Meaning of Lekhah
Dodi Kabbalat Shabbat, Los Angeles, Cherub Press-Jerusalem, the Magnes Press, 2003 (Hebrew).
64 Alqabetz uses the term music in transliteration in Hebrew letters.

65 This is part of the doxology of the Eighteen Benedictions.

66 Zephania 3, 9.

67 Ezekiel 1, 24.

68 See above note 15.

69 Namely of the souls of the children, from the supernal source of their soul. In R. SHLOMO
ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 401

The unknown elderly person who informed Alqabetz,70 or he himself, took the
discussions found in Kabbalah one step farther: the nexus of cosmic music and
anamnesis as mentioned in [a] is not just the view of the Rabbis, as ibn Gabbai
would say but in fact that meaning of some biblical verses. From this point of view
we have an attempt to interpret different verses as pointing to the existence of a
musica mundana, whose existence was, as seen above, a matter of dispute in the
Middle Ages.
The effect of listening to music may be twofold: one [b] when a person loses
his sense while others [c] will fall asleep, namely had a sort of lethargic state, and
its senses being obliterated. At the end of the translated passage, the assumption is
that infants fall easier asleep when listening to music since the trace of the supernal
melodies are fresher in their memory than in the case of the more mature persons.
Unlike the somehow more inspirational oriented passage in Angelet, namely the
descent of the divine spirit, it is much more an ecstatic experience that is de-
scribed here.

5. Yohanan Alemanno and Yehudah Moscato

From Spain, the most important center of Kabbalah in the 13th century,
Kabbalists and Kabbalistic traditions radiated in other centers of the Jewish world,
and encountered other cultural backgrounds, creating new centers of Kabbalah.
One of the most fertile of these new centers was Italy. There the tradition adduced
by Angelet was known only much later on, since the second part of the 16th cen-
tury, as seen above. However, it seems that the view as found in the Maxims of the
Philosophers, had a certain impact on Rabbi Yohanan ben Yitzhaq Alemanno
(c. 1435-c. 1522), was born in Mantua and became one of the most erudite Jewish
authors living in Florence in the last two decades of the 15th century, and one of
the teachers of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.71 In his Commentary on the Song

HA-LEVI ALQABETZ, Menot ha-Levi, Jerusalem, 1983, fols. 38b-39a, and the discussion of ADLER,
HWCM, pp. 49-50, as to parallels to the passage. See also R. MOSHE OF ZLASHIN, Siddur Tiqqun
Shabbat, fol. 85a.
70 I am not sure if we can identify the person but it is not implausible to assume that he

refers to ibn Gabbai, who was active in the same area, namely in Greece, from where Alqabetz
came to Safed.
71 See, e.g., M. IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510, A Survey, New Haven, Yale University

Press, 2010, pp. 177-192, 340-348; ID., The Anthropology of Yohanan Alemanno: Sources and in-
fluences, in Topoi, vol. 7, 1988, pp. 201-210; F. LELLI, Yohanan Alemanno, Hay Ha-Olamim
(LImmortale), Firenze, Olschki, 1995; ID., Leducazione ebraica nella seconda meta del 400, in
Poetica e scienze naturale nel 400, Poetica e scienze naturali nel Hay Ha-Olamim di Yohanan Ale-
manno, Rinascimento, XXXVI, 1996, pp. 75-136, A. LESLEY, The Song of Solomons Ascents,
Love and Human Perfection according to a Jewish Associate of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
Ph. D. Thesis, Berkeley, 1976; or B.C. NOVAK, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Jochanan Ale-
manno, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XLV, 1982, pp. 125-147.
402 MOSHE IDEL

of Songs entitled Hesheq Shelomo, written with the encouragement of Pico, he ela-
borated on the views found in the Hellenistic doxography mentioned above or in
Shem Tov ibn Falaqueras passage.72 In an interesting passage dealing first with
the animal soul, Alemanno wrote:
...[p]rovided that this desire 73 is spiritual and the special pronunciation 74 operate in a
manner similar to the chord of a violin that by his harmonious voice 75 moves the straw
or the trash that is found on the corresponding chord of another violin that is placed on
a certain distance because of a certain correspondence that is found between them, as it
has been examined many times in order to move her 76 foundation and her palace 77
to whatever it wishes and there is nothing that can withstand it, so it will happen to the
intellectual soul that knows how to play melodies because of a special quality she has, which
are saddening 78 the powers of nature and its acts, by her separation from the materials [ho-
marim], so that they will not recollect [lizeqor] her spiritual world that is illumining in every
direction, when she is conceptualizing [be-tzayyrah] the world of the sefirah,79 that pours
blessing, knowledge, intellect and influx.80

Music is understood here as capable to placate the attraction of nature and

thus liberate the soul. Recollection is not described here as induced by music,
but this act is the result of some form of contemplation of the supernal world,
and then the two lower ones. However, it is obvious that there is a structural si-

72 It should be pointed out that Falaquera, though a commentator of Maimonides Guide of

the Perplexed, was also quite interested in Neoplatonism he translated excerpts from ibn Ga-
birols Fons Vitae, from Arabic to Hebrew, and was acquainted with the Pseudo-Aristotelian
Theology of Aristotle but also quoted from a famous magical book, ibn Wahsyahs Nabbatean
Agriculture. A similar case is also the 14th century Rabbi Moshe Narbonis writings, which com-
bine Neoaristotelianism with magic and with some forms of philosophical spiritualism. He also
was one of the favorites of Alemannos who taught one of his books to Giovanni Pico. Thus, the
diversity of sources and themes and the composite type of discourse, though not necessarily a
simple type of eclecticism that constitute different schools in the history of Kabbalah, can be
discerned also in the literature that is conceived of as Jewish philosophy, especially in the period
of the Renaissance. This composite nature was, to be sure, also part of the doxographies of Gre-
co-Hellenistic origins.
73 Hesheq. This is a term privileged by Alemanno, as the title of his book shows, as well as

many other usages of this term in his other books. See also M. IDEL, The Sources of the Circle
Images in Dialoghi dAmore, in Iyyun, vol. 28, 1978, pp. 156-166 (Hebrew), and my Kabbalah
& Eros, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 186-188.
74 Higayon segulli (the translation is tentative).

75 Qolo ha-mityahes.

76 Of the animal or vital soul.

77 Foundation and palace mean the body, here the body of the world, which is operated by

the anima mundi.

78 Maatzivot. The same term is used in the passage from Maxims of the Philosophers that

was quoted above.

79 This is Alemannos idiosyncratic way to refer to the world of sefirot, understood as the

instruments of the divine action.

80 See ADLER, HWCM, p. 44, M. IDEL , The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations, cit.,

pp. 38-39.
ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 403

milarity between the soul and the supernal world, as the latter is referred as her
world that she would like to remember would not the powers of nature distract
her from doing so. Moreover, the special quality of singing or playing, inherent in
the soul point to some substantial affinity between the human music and musica
mundana.
The basic metaphor is drawn from the well-known experiment of the reso-
nance between the chords of two violins remote from each other, an experiment
mentioned many times in Jewish sources since Alemannos generation.81 He em-
phasizes the importance of the knowledge of the correspondences between levels
of beings found in the three worlds, and he considers this knowledge as the high-
est one, attributing it to Moses and Solomon.82 Music is therefore part of a more
complex vision of the universe as building on a series of correspondences, which
may be manipulated by someone who knows them. From this point of view, Ale-
manno is reminiscent of the attitude of his contemporary Marsilio Ficino.83 As
Stephane Toussaint has pointed out recently in an important study, Ficino uses
also two writings stemming from the Spanish-Jewish culture, which attracted also
the attention of Alemanno.84 It should be mentioned that Alemanno was espe-
cially fond of Rabbi Shem Tov Falaqueras writings, from which we quoted above
an important passage.85
In the penultimate decade of the 16th century, a lengthy discussion of musica
mundana has been printed as a sermon of Rabbi Yehudah Moscato, a famous
preacher in Mantua (1532-1590).86 This treatment represents the most complex
treatment of this theme in Jewish texts to that date,87 and we shall address only
the aspects that are related to the topic under scrutiny here. The famous preacher

81 See the various occurrences of the resonance between two violins in Jewish texts in

M. IDEL, The Magical and Theurgical Interpretations, cit.

82 See the text printed ivi, p. 37.

83 On Ficino and music see G. TOMLINSON , Music in Renaissance Magic, Toward a Histor-

iography of Others, Chicago, London, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 101-144.
84 S. TOUSSAINT , Ficinos Orphic Magic or Jewish Astrology and Oriental Philosophy? A Note

on spiritus, the Three Books on Life, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Zarza, Accademia, vol. II, 2000,
pp. 19-33. See also now his Kabbalah and Concordia in Two of Giovanni Pico della Mirandolas
Orphic Theses, Accademia, vol. XII, 2010, pp. 13-26.
85 See M. IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, pp. 342-343, 461, notes 16, 33, 462, note 36.

86 On this figure see the recent collection of studies edited by G. Veltri and G. Miletto,

Rabbi Judah Moscato and the Jewish Intellectual World of Mantua in the 16th and 17th Centuries,
Leiden, Boston, Brill, 2012.
87 See now G. MILETTO , The Human Body as a Musical Instrument in the Sermons of Judah

Moscato, in The Jewish Body, Corporeality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Mod-
ern Period, ed. by M. Diemling, G. Veltri, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2009, pp. 377-393, and my Judah
Muscato, A Late Renaissance Jewish Preacher, in Preachers of the Italian Ghetto, ed. David B. Ru-
derman, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 41-66, where I dealt with some as-
pects of the first sermon of Nefutzot Yehudah. For an annotated reprint of his sermon on music
see also ADLER, HWCM, pp. 221-239.
404 MOSHE IDEL

quotes verbatim ibn Gabbais rendition of Angelets discussion, but what is more
interesting is the framework of this citation. Before quoting ibn Gabbai, without
mentioning his name, he wrote:
we cannot overlook the perfection of the composition of man, in number and in very pro-
portionate weight, in his body and in soul that is constituted out of pleasant and propor-
tionate melodies, in the likeness of the soul of the sphere that we mentioned as the opinion
of Plato and according to the discourse of the ancient philosopher Pythagoras. Indeed, the
source of the soul is from the supernal entities where joy is found in their residence 88
with pleasant melodies, as we mentioned, since this is the reason why according to some
philosophers the person is enjoying very much the science of music, as it is written in
the book Livenat ha-Sappir.89

This is a fine Pythagorean-Platonic passage, which however has to resort to the

Kabbalistic passage in order to make the point of the anamnesis clearer. The Man-
tuan preacher mentions Pythagoras several times beforehand in this sermon, as
dealing with music.90 It seems, therefore, that Moscato is the first thinker to bring
together Angelets passage with the conceptual Greco-Hellenistic background that
nourished it. He could do so only because of Marsilio Ficinos vast and influential
project of translation that he initiated from Greek to Latin, and indeed Moscato
mentions him elsewhere by name.91 However, in the line of many of his Jewish
predecessors, he envisioned the origins of music not with Pythagoras, as he was
well aware from Hellenistic sources he refers, but with the biblical Tuval Cain,
thus working in the vein of a unilinear theory of prisca theologia, giving therefore
priority to a biblical figure over Pythagoras.92

6. Modern Reverberations

Many of the texts discussed above have been collected and brought together
in modern times, by a variety of authors, as mentioned in footnotes above. This is
part of the canonization of the above themes, given the authoritative status of
some of the Kabbalists we have surveyed. However, very little original discussion
has been added to the substance of the above quotations, which have been ad-
duced in many books in order to demonstrate the high status that melodious

88BT, Ketubbot, fol. 8a.

89Nefutzot Yehudah, Sermon I (Venice, 1589), fol. 2b. See also ADLER, HWCM, pp. 221-239.
90 Ibid., fols. 1a, 1b.

91 See his Qol Yehudah (Warsau, 1880), part IV, section 42, part V, section 72.

92 Nefutzot Yehudah, fol. 1a-1b. On the unilinear vision of prisca theologia in Jewish sources

see M. IDEL, Prisca Theologia in Marsilio Ficino and in Some Jewish Treatments, in Marsilio Fi-
cino, His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. by M.J.B. Allen, V. Rees, Leiden, Brill, 2001,
pp. 137-158.
ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 405

prayer occupies in Judaism. This absence of originality is evident also in 18th and
19th centuries several Hasidic resorts to these texts, despite the great emphasis this
movement put on prayer, voice, and music.
An interesting reverberation of the theme of pre-natal listening to music and re-
collection is found in the famous Russian poet Mikhail Lermontovs poem entitled
The Angel that was written in 1831, in the English translation of Yevgheny Bonver:
At midnight an angel was crossing the sky,
And quietly he sang;
The moon and the stars and the concourse of clouds
Paid heed to his heavenly song.
He sang of the bliss of the innocent souls
In heavenly gardens above;
Of almighty God he sang out, and his praise
Was pure and sincere.
He bore in his arms a young soul
To our valley of sorrow and tears;
The young soul remembered the heavenly song
So vivid and yet without words.
And long did it struggle on earth,
With wondrous desire imbued;
But none of the tedious songs of our earth
Could rival celestial song.

For the time being I am not aware of affinities between the Russian poet and
Kabbalah and I have not explanation for the emergence of the nexus between the
two concepts in the poem and in the Kabbalistic sources. Nevertheless, I assume
that some form of nexus between the poem and sources discussed above presum-
ably there were.
Another interesting avatar of the nexus between the musica mundana and ana-
mnesis is found in the speech of the famous Israeli writer Shmuel Y. Agnon, with
the occasion of his reception of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966.93 Inter alia,
he told there the following story:
I always regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem. In a dream, in a vision of
the night, I saw myself standing with my brother-Levites in the Holy Temple, singing with
them the songs of David, King of Israel, melodies such as no ear has heard since the day our
city was destroyed and its people went into exile. I suspect that the angels in charge of the
Palace of Music,94 fearful lest I sing in wakefulness what I had sung in dream, made me
forget by day what I had sung at night; for if my brethren, the sons of my people, were to

93Thanks to Dr. Avital Davidovich-Eshed for drawing my attention to Agnons speech.

94This is the term taken from Tiqqunei Zohar. See above the text of R. Aharon Berakhiah
of Modena.

8
406 MOSHE IDEL

hear, they would be unable to bear their grief over the happiness they have lost. To console
me for having prevented me from singing with my mouth, they enable me to compose songs
in writing.95

This nostalgic confession is part of a self-identification that Agnon, actually a na-

tive of the town Buczacz in the Galician part of Ukraine, cultivated also in other
cases in his writings.96 Being of a Levite family, which means that his ancestors
in the biblical times were singing in the temple, Agnon developed the above myth
about his nocturnal experiences. As he was well acquainted with Kabbalistic litera-
ture, which he perused for decades, and being a close friend of Gershom Scholem
he spent months in his apartment that hosted the best library of Kabbalistic books
there is no problem to assume that he knew at least some of the Hebrew sources
mentioned above.97 However, he removed the cosmic aspects of the musical treat-
ments in order to emphasize his innovative understanding of celestial music and
anamnesis: there is some form of sublime music that is sung during the night in a
dream, but forgotten during the day, in order to prevent the anguish of the Jews
in exile. The Paradisiacal state in the earlier sources was changed here for the noc-
turnal, oneiric experience, while the descent of the soul in the body became here
the diurnal experience. What was however allowed was writing poetry,98 an act
that may convey only a part of the lost splendor of the ancient Temple musical ri-
tuals. Here the individual moment found in the texts above has been dislocated
with the national or communal one, changing the musica mundana into the Levite
songs, which are considered to be lost. This is part of what I called a prisca theologia
gravitating around music.99 The restorative propensity of this approach is obvious.
Agnons speech in Stockholm was, however, not the last manifestation of the
above passage; the above passage has been printed in its Hebrew original on the
Israeli banknote of fifty Sheqel, whose diffusion is even greater than the speech he
gave or the printing of this speech in one of his popular books.

7. The Possible Historical Significance of the Anamnesis-Music Theme

The examination of a minor theme in Kabbalistic texts shows that an ancient

Greek theme found its way, via Arabic and Jewish philosophical sources into Kab-

95 Printed in SH . Y. AGNON , Me-Atzmi el Atzami, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Schocken, 1976,

p. 85 (Hebrew).
96 E. SHILOH , The Kabbalah in the Works of S.Y. Agnon, Ramat Gan, Bar Ilan University

Press, 2011, pp. 82-83 (Hebrew).

97 See, e.g., the references to ibn Gabbai in SHILOH , ivi, pp. 116, 169, 174, 189, 205, 237-

238, 355, 366.

98 In Hebrew the term Shir means both song and poem.

99 IDEL , Conceptualizations of Music, pp. 161-169.

ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 407

balah. This is part of a much greater stream of traditions, a great part of it belonging
to what I propose to call the Greco-Hellenistic reservoir, which includes not only the
classical forms of Aristotelianism and Platonism, but also other components like
Pythagoreanism and Stoicism, as well as Hermeticism, magic and astrology.100 It
seems that the distribution between the purer forms of classical Greek thought,
namely that of Plato and Aristotle, and the different amalgams between them and
the other forms of less classical ways of thought, like in the case of Iamblichus,
and their common impact on the nascent Kabbalah, still necessitate further investi-
gations. By paying the due attention to the complexities of these various amalgams
and to their impact in the Middle Ages on Jewish authors, some other solutions to
the problem of the sources of Kabbalah, than those dominant in the theories ema-
nating from Gershom Scholems school, gravitating mainly around a synthesis be-
tween Gnosticism and Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages, may be articulated.
Tracing the itinerary of the theme in Kabbalah shows that there is a clear dis-
tribution between the theosophical-theurgical schools that adopted the combined
theme of musica mundana and anamnesis, on the one hand, and the ecstatic Kab-
balah that rejected it implicitly, on the other. Indubitably, these divergent atti-
tudes reflect the dialectical impact of Maimonides attitude, and our discussions
above should be added to earlier analyses of the emergence of Kabbalah as part
of a polemic with Maimonidess special Neoaristotelian interpretation of Rabbinic
esotericism.101 It seems that many of the Greco-Hellenistic elements that found
their ways in Judaism before Maimonides, like Hermeticism, magic, astrology or
Pythagoreanism, in a variety of Jewish writings like those of Rabbi Moshe ibn
Ezra, Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra and Rabbi Yehudah ha-Levi for example, have
been used by Kabbalists in building their more comprehensive alternatives to Mai-
monidess theological views, which opposed those themes.102 This antithetic ten-
dency is not always expressed in an explicit manner, neither are the non-Jewish
sources that have influenced the Kabbalists mentioned. Moreover, traces of antag-
onism toward the Great Eagles thought can be traced also in the 15th and 16th
centuries among Kabbalists.103 The appropriation of a variety of Pythagorean
themes, like metempsychosis, the centrality of number speculations, especially
the role of the tetraktis, the importance of symbolism, and finally the acceptance
of the existence of the music of the spheres, shows therefore that Pythagoreanism,

100 See my analysis of the impact of astrology in Saturns Jews: On the Witches Sabbat and

Sabbateanism, London, New York, Continuum, 2011.

101 See M. IDEL, Maimonides and Kabbalah, in Studies in Maimonides, ed. by I. Twersky,

Cambridge, Mass., 1990, pp. 31-64.

102 See also M. KELLNER , Maimonides Confrontation with Mysticism, Oxford, Portland,

Littmann Library, 2006.

103 M. IDEL, Maimonides and Kabbalah, cit., pp. 52-53, and ID ., Astral Dreams in R. Yoha-

nan Alemannos Writings, in Accademia, vol. I, 1999, pp. 126-128 as well as our discussion of ibn
Gabbais approach above.
408 MOSHE IDEL

obscure and diffuse as its traditions were indeed, was nevertheless one of many
sources that gave to Kabbalah its special conceptual configuration, as different
from the general mode of Maimonidean thought.
The synthesis, and to a certain extent eclectic nature of Kabbalah from the
conceptual point of view, was not presented as such in the Kabbalistic sources,
which preferred to present their lore as an ancient, exclusively Jewish tradition.
Thus, a complex mixture of a variety of approaches like theosophy and theurgy,
with speculative sources, like Neoplatonism, Hermeticism,104 magic or Pythagor-
eanism,105 is a matter that is visible since the 13th century, and was transmitted in
an even more eclectic manner in the late 15th and early 16th centuries works of
Yohanan Alemanno.106 The affinities between Kabbalistic schools and those types
of non-Jewish views, which attracted the attention of some Renaissance figures like
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola or Johannes Reuchlin were, therefore, not always
an artificial type of comparison between topics that were historically speaking un-
related. Both Kabbalists and the Renaissance figures thought that Kabbalah is an
ancient theology, and the antiquity of the founding figures of speculative litera-
tures like Pythagoreanism or Hermeticism, triggered speculations about influences
that happen already in hoary antiquity. However, the historical explanations they
offered were faulty, believing as they were on the theory of prisca theologia, one
basic theory unifying diverse speculative corpora.107
Thus, we may envision the various forms of theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah
as a conglomerate of theories, which combined different aspects of the Greco-Hel-

104 M. IDEL , Hermeticism and Kabbalah, in Hermeticism from Late Antiquity to Humanism,

ed. by P. Lucentini, I. Parri and V.P. Compagni, Thournout, Brepols, 2004, pp. 389-408; ID.,
Hermeticism and Judaism, in Hermeticism and the Renaissance, ed. by I. Merkel and A. Debus,
Cranbury, New Jersey, 1988, pp. 59-76.
105 See above note 26.

106 See the pioneering survey of E. ROSENTHAL , Yohanan Alemanno and Occult Science, in

Prismata, Naturwissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien, Festschrift fuer Willy Hartner, ed. by Y.

Maeyama und W.G. Saltzer, Wiesbaden, 1977, pp. 349-361.
107 See, e.g., D.P. WALKER , The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the

Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London, Duckworth, 1972); CH. SCHMIDT, Prisca theologia e
philosophia perenis: Due temi del rinascimento italiano e loro fortuna, in Il pensiero Italiano del
Rinascimento e il tempo Nostra, Firenze, 1970, pp. 21-236; P.O. KRISTELLER, Renaissance
Thought and its Sources, ed. by Michael Mooney, New York, Columbia University Press,
1979, pp. 196-210; CH. TRINKAUS, In Our Image and Likeness, Humanity and Dignity in Italian
Humanistic Thought, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1995, pp. 726-742, 754-756;
J. HANKINS, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Leiden, Brill, 1990, pp. 459-463; B. TAMBRUN, Mar-
sile Ficin et le Commentaire de Plethon sur les Oracles Chaldaiques, Accademia, vol. I, 1999,
pp. 9-48, CH. WIRSZUBSKI, Pico della Mirandolas Encounter with Jewish Mysticism, Cambridge,
Mass.-London, Jerusalem, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 198, note 41, F. LELLI, Jews, Hu-
manists, and the Reappraisal of Pagan Wisdom Associated with the Ideal of the Dignitas Hominis,
in Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. by
A.P. Coudert and J. Shoulson, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. 49-70, as
well as IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy, pp. 164-176 and the bibliography mentioned in the correspond-
ing footnotes.
ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 409

lenistic conceptual reservoir, mediated mainly by the contributions of Muslim

translators and thinkers. If the Florentine speculative Renaissance is a matter of
the renascence of mainly Platonic and Hellenistic literary corpora that reached
Florence coming from the East, namely from the cultural center of the former By-
zantine empire, we may regard many of the Kabbalistic corpora created in Spain,
as a conceptually synthetic Renaissance, in part connected to the translations stem-
ming from the Alfonsine renaissance, two centuries before the Florentine Renais-
sance, but emerging much earlier in the West, and brought to Florence, and of
which were translated into Latin and disseminated together with Ficinos transla-
tions of the Greco-Hellenistic library. This geographical transition from the Iber-
ian Peninsula to the Apennine one was mediated, among others, by members of
Yohanan Alemannos family, which arrived to Italy from Aragon sometime in
the first decades of the 15th century. Yohanans father, Yitzhaq ben Eliyahu,
was most probably a dealer with Hebrew manuscripts, and Alemannos own writ-
ings and his autograph booknote display his most important sources that are per-
meated with speculative material written in the 13th-15th centuries, stemming from
Spain.108 Alemannos synthetic and sometimes eclectic approach combined a vari-
ety of Kabbalistic views with different magical and philosophical approaches, in-
cluding some Hermetic views 109 though what he could know from the Hermetic
or Pythagorean themes from Spanish Jewish heritage was much poorer than the
treatises Ficino translated from Greek, and the proportional role the factors
played in Spain is different from the more prominent presence in the Italian Re-
naissance.
This hybridic approach to Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah changes the man-
ner in which the term Kabbalah should be used in the studies of the Renaissance:
not just one homogeneous lore was adopted and adapted but a variety of books,
themes, and approaches, some of the latter composite, which interacted with other
composite writings translated by Ficino. Though Italy was an especially rich and
vibrant center of culture, also in other centers of Jewish culture like the Ottoman
Empire, Northern Africa or Germany, the synthetic approach should be adopted.
This is the reason why the basic assumption of Dame Frances Amelia Yates as to
the novelty of the conjugation of Kabbalah on the one hand, and Hermeticism and
other Greco-Hellenistic views on the other hand, by the Renaissance Florentine
figures, needs therefore some form of qualification: 110 Such a synthesis took place

108 I hope to elaborate on these issues elsewhere. See meanwhile IDEL, Kabbalah in Italy,

pp. 177-178.
109 See my Golem, Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions On the Artificial Anthropoid, Al-

bany, SUNY Press, 1990, pp. 167-175, and Kabbalah in Italy, pp. 281-284.
110 See her The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London, 1979, p. 1, and IDEL,

Kabbalah and Hermeticism in Dame Frances A. Yatess Renaissance, Esoterisme, Gnoses & Ima-
ginaire Symbolique: Melanges offerts a Antoine Faivre, ed. by R. Caron, J. Godwin, W.J. Hane-
graaf, J-L. Vieillard-Baron, Louvain, Peeters, 2001, pp. 71-90.
410 MOSHE IDEL

already in Spain, and it reverberated in the writings of Alemanno, some of which

have been written while he was living in Florence.
To be sure: I do not assume that Alemannos views necessarily influenced Fi-
cinos interest in astro-magical music or his musical practices in a significant man-
ner, if at all, or that Ficinos translations or practices did influence his views in a
decisive manner. For the time being, the available material cannot point in any of
the two directions. I rather assume that both authors gave expression to views
found in similar sources, which they read in different languages stemming from
different lines of transmission. Nevertheless, the geographical and temporal con-
comitance reflect some forms of more general phenomenon of osmosis, of mutual
interests and sources, shared by the two authors active in Florence.

8. Nostalgia of Paradise and Judaism

We have concentrated above on the topic of a restorative experience pro-

voked by listening to harmonious music. In some cases, music is understood as
counteracting what has been designated as Nature, namely the impact of the ma-
terial aspects of man, by liberating the soul from the body as a prison, this being
the meaning of the plaintive songs. In the vein of the Orphic-Pythagorean-Pla-
tonic approach, music is temporarily facilitating the retrieval of the lost perfection
of the soul before her embodiment. This is a move from the present to the pre-
natal past. Such an approach is reminiscent of Mircea Eliades claim as to the im-
portance of the nostalgia for the Paradise as essential for religion and especially
mysticism and he indeed claimed that he works within the Platonic conceptual fra-
mework.111 He also repeatedly and rather sharply distinguished between this re-
ligious approach, which was conceived of as being also archaic and cosmic and
in his opinion more authentic and what he considered to be the Jewish and
Christian general attitudes that were imagined to have been concerned much more
with uniqueness of events in history, and with the future, and as much less cos-
mic.112
However, the examination of the material adduced above about anamnesis,
shows that though indeed the Jewish texts were influenced by the Greco-Hellenis-
tic material, it seems that it is in the framework of this religion that the most ex-
plicit elaborations on the retrieval role of music may be discerned. The theory of a
pre-natal existence of the soul, that entered Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity
from Platonic sources, prepared the ground for the adoption of additional views

111 See M. ELIADE, Myth and Reality, New York, etc., Harper, 1975, pp. 50-53 and his

Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities,
tr. P. Mairet, New York, 1975, pp. 59-72. See also above note 3.
112 See especially his widely read The Myth of Eternal Return.
ANAMNESIS AND MUSIC 411

that emerged in early Middle Ages in Pagan and Muslim texts, in some the Middle
Ages forms of Judaism. Given the fact that Angelet conceived the theory of mu-
sical anamnesis relevant and presumably applicable to the Torah, namely the read-
ing of the Torah probably in some form of chanting,113 and to melodious prayer,
we may assume that later on in Jewish history this approach was considered to be
part of the Jewish rituals, at least as an ideal. The numerous reverberations of his
view in recent books dealing with prayer and Hasidism, as pointed out in the foot-
notes, are a clear proof of this appropriation in most orthodox audiences in Juda-
ism. Such an understanding of two important rituals in Kabbalah that were as-
sumed to be performed daily, shows that an approach to Judaism as an
anamnetic religion was found in several Jewish texts, at least since the Middle
Ages. Therefore, too strong phenomenologies of religion are successful generaliza-
tions because they drastically simplify the rich material under scrutiny, but hardly
help a more serious engagement with specific texts and their history.114 The ex-
istence of important future-oriented aspects of Judaism, which can be described as
eschatological or messianic, did not preclude the adoption and the dissemination
of the restorative approach to personal experiences stemming from the Greco-
Hellenistic sources, understood in some cases as the meaning of important reli-
gious ways of behavior in Judaism. Moreover, in the vein of the above portrayal
of some forms of Judaism as more hybridic, any attempt of distinguishing Judaism
as a whole from the archaic, Greek and cosmic religiosity, is precarious.

MOSHE IDEL

ABSTRACT The present study traces the vestiges of an ancient connection be-
tween the Platos theory of anamnesis and the Pythagorean view of cosmic music.
The earliest evidence to such a nexus is found in a passage of the Neoplatonian
and Neoplatonism thinker, Jamblichus. However, the first substantial treatments
of such a nexus are found in Arabic literature, which served as a vehicle that trans-

113 The melodies emerging by the loud reading of the Torah in accordance to the special

intonations, based on cantillation signs, is a well-known issue that cannot be elaborated here.
See, e.g., SCHWARTZ, Music in Jewish Thought, pp. 210-211, and for Kabbalah, e.g., IDEL, Con-
ceptualizations of Music, pp. 168-170, and E. WOLFSON, Biblical Accentuation in a Mystical Key:
Kabbalistic Interpretations of the Teamim, Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy, XI, 1988/89,
pp. 1-16, XII, 1989/90, pp. 1-13. For the noise in the context of the Torah see M. IDEL, Die laut
gelesen Tora, Stimmengemeinschaft in der juedischen Mystik, in Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbar-
ung, Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme, ed. by Th. Macho und S. Weigel, Berlin, Aka-
demie Verlag, 2002, pp. 19-53, ID., The Voiced Text of the Torah, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift
fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, LXVIII [Sonderheft], 1994, pp. 145-166; ID.,
Enchanted Chains, pp. 221-223.
114 For a critique of Eliades understanding of Judaism see M. IDEL, Mircea Eliade, From

Magic to Myth (New York, Peter Lang, 2014), ch. 4 (Forthcoming).

412 MOSHE IDEL

mitted to Kabbalistic treatises since early 14th century, especially in the influential
passage of the Spanish Kabbalist Rabbi Joseph Angelet, found in his Livenat ha-
Sappir. Several Kabbalists reverberated his view as to music as triggering the mem-
ory of the music heard by the soul before the descent in this world. Some other
Kabbalists in the 16th and 17th centuries, include treatments of the same nexus,
but independent of Angelets book. In modern times, the musical anamnesis is evi-
dent in a poem of Lermontov and in the Nobel Prize speech of the Israeli writer
Shmuel Y. Agnon.
 CITTA DI CASTELLO . PG
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