GRICORIY MARGOVSKIY
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.
We
ask for God to bless you and encourage you, my dear son, to continue
to contribute to the strengthening and enhancement of the foundation of
religion with the same energy and indefatigableness. You can always count
on our special blessing in this regard». While cracking down on «new Christians»
with tortures and executions (he had a mania of suspecting them of hidden
preferences to Judaism) the Supreme Inquisitor, in the long run, was sharpening
his fangs against the Jewish community of Spain. That rallying for national
and religious unification served as a superb disguise for his screwed libido's
craving for revenge. That old scar of the Dominican's heart had never completely
cicatrized; as a young man, Torkvemada had fallen in love with a pretty
Moorish girl, but naturally she preferred a son of Islam. You may ask,
though, how it is related to his antisemitism, and from a naive standpoint
the question is legitimate. This is the whole trick of the fundamentalism-seeking
Christian mentality of those days that felt itself squeezed by Moorish
and Turkish vice on both eastern and western flanks: in its profound depression
the Catholicworld could not help reacting to the myth of internal enemies,
it instinctively developed a stratagem (or perhaps a first geopolitical
concept in history) according to which the Jews were hidden collaborators
of the Islamic world, external resemblance of culture and lifestyle and
the Spanish refugees' being welcome in the Ottoman empire seemed to be
just additional pieces of evidence to that. The formation of this extremely
superficial «world model» was probably influenced by Byzantine refugees,
such as Andrea Paleologue, brother of the Russian Tsarina Sophia, who embarked
on feeble flirtation with the royal couple of Aragon and Castille and even
conceded his hereditary rights of the Eastern Empire to Ferdinand and Isabella.
It is well known that Greek-speaking intellectuals had in their possession
the most ancient and detailed treatises on scientific antisemitism. We
also should keep in mind that as early as 1439, the union agreement between
Catholic and Orthodox churches on conditions of papal supremacy was concluded
at the Council in Florence. Joseph the 3rd, Patriarch of Constantinople
passed away the same year in Spain. It is possible that he could foresee
the spiritual and political crash of Byzantium fifteen years in advance;
he could indoctrinate some of the Spanish Catholic bureaucrats with the
millenialist expectations of the sound of Archangels' trumpets as he was
matching his own despair with monk Panadorus' calendar.
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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