Abraham Abulafia on the Messiah and the Pope ^†

Abstract

The biblical episode of the encounter between Moses and the Pharaoh turned out to be a matrix of speculations in Judaism about the messianic drama. Nahmanides contributed to it in his dispute with Paulus Christianus by assuming that the Messiah will go to the Pope as part of the messianic scenario. Some few decades later, the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240—c.1292) reports about his intention to meet the Pope in 1280. Scholars differed as to what was the purpose of this intention. The present study considers a series of passages written by the Kabbalist, which include inclusive language insofar as he was addressing not only the Jews but also other religions, in order to elucidate the succinct sentence found in one of his writings. In my opinion, those passages are related to his inclusive vision of the meaning of Yahadut, referring to religious persons who acknowledge the centrality of the divine name, and consequentially, Abulafia was concerned with some form of religious dialogue with the Pope. This more open tone is found in the claim that as a Messiah, Abulafia preached to the Gentiles and discussed esoteric topics with a Christian.

1. A Paradigmatic Mission of Moses to Pharaoh

The biblical episode about Moses’s mission to the Pharaoh according to the book of Exodus was considered in Rabbinic literature as the first redemptive type of activity. Using some form of typological approach, in several Midrashic sources, it is said “like the first redeemer [namely, Moses] so is the last redeemer.”1 In some other Midrashic sources, it is said that “like the first redeemer, so also the second redeemer.”2 Two major interpretations have been offered for this comparison: that the two redeemers will reveal themselves and then conceal themselves, which means that the act of revelation of the Messiah is not identical with the act of redemption, which will take place later, or, alternatively, that like the humble state of Moses, so will be also the humble state of the last redeemer, resorting to the verse from Zekhariah 9:9. Thus, the imaginaire of Moses became the prototype of the redeemer, just as Adam was the prototype of Jesus Christ.

Unlike the prelapsian emphasis in Christian eschatology, striving for the restoration of the Adamic perfection, the Jewish ones in Rabbinic Judaism are predominantly post-Mosaic, provided the importance of the Israelite commonwealth in the restorative enterprise as occurring in Rabbinic sources. To be sure, this does not mean that there were no attempts in Christianity to connect Jesus Christ’s activities to verses in the Hebrew Bible related to Moses (see Teeple 1957), but the major figure whose deeds should be repaired is the fallen Adam. In addition, in a Talmudic tract and in a later apocalyptic treatise, the presence of the Messiah at the gate of Rome, together with the poor and sick people, is mentioned.3 According to a Targumic view, the Messiah will come out of Rome (see Wieder 2005, p. 46).

Nevertheless, nothing in those discussions adumbrates the view of the 13th century R. Moshe ben Nahman, known as Nahmanides, in his debate with the Dominican Friar Paulus Christianus in Barcelona in 1263. This religious controversy drew a lot of scholarly attention, though the passage to be quoted below still deserves some additional remarks. It has to do with the Messiah mentioned in a certain Talmudic legend adduced by the convert Paulus Christianus in the debate that deals with his birth in the moment of the destruction of the second Temple:

“For here it is not stated that he had arrived4 [but] only that he was born on the day of the destruction [of the Temple]; for was it on the day that Moses was born that he immediately went to redeem Israel? He arrived only a number of days later, under the command of the Holy One Blessed be He, and [then] said to Pharaoh: ‘Let my people go that they may serve Me’5. So, too, when the end of time will have arrived, the Messiah will go to the Pope under the command of God and say ‘Let my people go that they may serve me’. And until that time, we will not say regarding him that he arrived for he is not [yet] the Messiah.”6

It is evident that the Pope serves here as the representative of the political power, like the image of Pharaoh in the Hebrew Bible. Nahmanides’ statement should be seen as a new contribution to the constellation of messianic ideas found in Rabbinic sources, which connected the activity of the Messiah to Rome. It introduces a typological reading of the Hebrew Bible by establishing some form of symmetry between the first and last type of redemption.7 This historical symmetry is based on the assumption that it is not the moment or the nature of the birth that is essential for the messianic role, but the specific mission that is assumed in a certain later moment. The confrontation of the Messiah with the Pope is imagined as the future counterpart of Pharaoh, and in the hoary past solely by such a confrontation, Moses became a redeemer. In other words, messianicity—to use a Derridean term—is not conceived of as congenial with the moment of birth of the person to become Messiah. By creating such a narrative for the Messiah, Nahmanides counteracts the claims for the messianic nature of Jesus Christ. The particularistic, national nature of Moses’ activity in the past, believed to be reiterated by the Messiah in the future, stands in sharp opposition to the much more universal approach to redemption in Christianity. The insistence that also in the future, the verse from Exodus 7:26 will be pronounced is remarkable and we shall return to it in a moment.

As to the question, how does he explain the birth of the Messiah at the beginning of the Common Era and his appearance to be expected later on, more than a millennium afterwards, Nahmanides perhaps resorted, as Gershom Scholem suggested,8 to the concept of metempsychosis, which is a major theory in Nahmanides’ esoteric-Kabbalistic thought (Idel 2012, pp. 5–49, vol. 73, pp. 5–44 (Hebrew). See especially pp. 154–55, n. 153.). This would mean that the soul of the Messiah has transmigrated through ages from one body to another, to be embodied in the eschaton that he believed to take place in 1368. In any case, Nahmanides responded to such a question posed by the Catalan King James, by declaring that the Messiah is now, perhaps, in Toledo.9

Was Nahmanides the first who formulated this nexus between the Messiah and the Pope? The answer is far from being a simple one. So, for example, Marc Saperstein brought two parallels stemming from philosophical sources, which may hardly be explained as a reverberation of Nahmanides’ passage.10 This is the case of a commentary on the Talmudic ’Aggadot, authored by a certain Rabbi Isaac ben Yeda‘yah, whose floruit was sometime in the later part of the 13th century, and of the early 14th century R. Levi ben Gershom, two Provencal thinkers who were not Kabbalists. May we assume the existence of an earlier tradition that was used by Nahmanides? In any case, a mid-16th century view of the great Christian Kabbalist Guillaume Postel, himself a rather messianic figure, asserts in his Restitutio omnium rerum that the Messiah will come out of Rome, just as Moses did from the desert.11

2. R. Abraham Abulafia: The Kabbalist/Prophet/Messiah, and the Pope

Abraham ben Shmuel Abulafia (1240–c.1291), a Spanish Kabbalist who declared himself in explicit terms to be also a prophet and Messiah, founded a Kabbalistic school he called prophetic Kabbalah, which means ecstatic Kabbalah.12 He offered both a rather complex and quite original theory of messianism, and operated also as a Messiah in the way he understood this mission, namely, the dissemination of techniques for achieving ecstatic experiences, conceived of as redemptive, by means of the methods he forged. Unlike some modern scholars of messianism, he assumed that there is more than one single sense to the term Mashiyah, combining as he does the more Rabbinic understanding of the human restorative Messiah in previous centuries with philosophical understanding of this term en vogue since the 12th and 13th centuries amongst some Jewish elite figures. Let me adduce a passage that I have discussed in a number of studies but which is especially pertinent to our topic here (Idel 1987, pp. 127, 140; 1989b, p. 66; 2007, p. 308; 2011, pp. 39–41, Stahl 2012, pp. 62–64, and finally Idel 2018, pp. 92–95.):

“The term Mashiyah is equivocal, [designating] three [different] matters; [a] first and foremost the true Agent Intellect [sekhel ha-po‘el] is called the Mashiyah…[b] and the man who will forcibly bring us out of the exile from under the rule of the nations due to his contact with the Agent Intellect—he will [also] be called Messiah. [c] And the material human Intellect is called Messiah. This is the hylic13 intellect that is the redeemer and has influence over the soul and all elevated spiritual powers. It can save the soul from the rule of the material kings and their people and their powers, the lowly bodily desires. [d] It is a commandment and an obligation to reveal this matter to every wise man of the wise ones of Israel in order that he may be saved because there are many things that oppose the opinions of the multitude of the Rabbis, even more so differ from the views of the vulgus.”14

Abulafia enumerates three different meanings in a descending order: [a] the first is the cosmic intellect that is a universal Messiah for the philosophers, [b] the second is the specific human redeemer of the Jewish nation, [c] the third being the individual redeemer, the human intellect that rescues the human spiritual powers. Also, the second sense of the term Mashiyah depends on an individual intellectual experience that precedes the external activity. Needless to say, he was not fond of the view of a “messianic idea” in the singular. It is evident that the Messiah is not born as such and predestined to his task, but he acquires this title by achieving a certain type of intellectual experience connected to the Agent Intellect and it is only afterward that a person may function as a national redeemer. Much less a messenger of God, he is someone who strove and attained the status of redeemer and this is conditioned by a strong noetic experience.

Here, I discern the derogatory attitude toward the more popular sense of Messiah in the popular apocalyptic imagination of Jews, but also his contempt for the “multitude of the rabbis”15 who are not counted among the “wise ones of Israel”, a clear instance of a clash between the nature of the true Messiah and the Rabbinic elite. It is evident that the secret must have something to do with the first and third senses, which are not locative, and are informed by medieval Neoaristotelian terminology, which differs strongly from the thrust of the locative type of Rabbinic messianism. Though a Maimonidean, in my opinion a radical one16, he does not renounce the more concrete aspect of redemption, though it does not stand at the top of his priorities.

Semantic multivalence, represented by the semantic phenomenon of equivocation, is indeed a famous Maimonidean game intended to install a new religious axiology, the Neoaristotelian one, on the Biblical-Rabbinic one. In our context, the way in which the first sense is introduced “first and foremost” points to Abulafia’s specific type of axiology: it is an intellectual redemption that depends on the cosmic intellect that informs the intellectual activities in the lower world. When compared with the Rabbinic worldview, this is a subversive approach, as it is also from the Christian point of view.17 Though Abulafia and his followers resorted many times to the gematria Yisra’el = 541 = sekhel ha-po‘el (See Idel 1989a, pp. 36, 38, 40, 110, 120.), the latter refers to a universal transcendental power, as we have seen above, one that transcends the individuals of a certain nation. Yisra’el would be everyone that knows how to permute all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are 231 ra’el, which are the component of Yesh + Ra’el; there are, Yesh, 231 combinations, which I designed as the nominal key, connected as it is to the linguistic practices that culminated in transforming the interpreted material in divine names (Idel 1989a, pp. 39–41.). This translation of the concept of redemption to a key noetic concept in medieval Neoaristotelianism; the Agent Intellect is part of the naturalistic reading of messianism, which is not catastrophic18, and is combined to the technique to reach a redemptive experience, the technique of combination of letters. Of great importance is paragraph [d], where Abulafia regards the revelation of the true nature of the Messiah as an obligation or a commandment that is pertinent to be known only by the few, which excludes the Rabbis, as part of the tensions between this Messianic figure and the Jewish first elite.

In another interesting passage, written much later, in 1289, Abulafia describes the convergence between the two ancient elites mentioned above:

“The prophet is necessarily called Mashiyah because he is anointed with the supernal oil that is called ‘the oil of anointing’19… with which he utilizes the Names. Actually the Mashiyah must possess two qualities: One he must first be anointed by God with wondrous prophecy and, secondly, he must continue to be consecrated by God and people, who will hail him as their great king of all times. And he will rule from sea to sea,20 and this is all due to the great intensity of his clinging21 to the divine intellect and his reception of the power, in a strong manner like the matter of Moses, Joshu‘a, David and Solomon. And the issue of Messiah will be known by everyone, and this is the reason why there is no need to announce here its issue more, because he is destined to reveal himself shortly in our days.”22

Abulafia here brings together the figures of Messiah, as king and prophet, just as he elsewhere mentions the priestly character of the Messiah, despite the fact he was not of a priestly extraction, claiming that it is his wife that descends from a priestly family.23 Like in the prior passage, also here, the Messiah is described explicitly as having his intellect united with the Agent Intellect. However, such a view, when presented in an unqualified manner, questions the uniqueness of any Messiah since the union with the cosmic intellect is not restricted by him to one person alone. This is also evident in the list of the four biblical figures mentioned immediately afterwards. The philosopher/king complex, of Platonic origin, is quite evident. However, beyond some of his discussions, the figure of Adam, as understood by Maimonides as a perfect intellectual being, looms prominently (Klein-Braslavy (1986) (Hebrew), and Berman (1980), pp. 1–15.). His mentioning the divine names refers to the technique of recitation that is an essential part of his path to reaching an ecstatic experience, understood as redemptive par excellence.

It is on this complex background, of a multiple understanding of what is designated by scholars as “the messianic idea”, that we should understand his attempt to meet the Pope in 1280. In a commentary to one of his prophetic compositions, written in 1280/81, Sefer ha-‘Edut, the Book of Testimony, he wrote24: “In the ninth year I was aroused by God to go to the great city of Rome, as I was commanded in Barcelona in the year of thirty.”25 This passage refers to a revelation in Barcelona in 1270, when Abulafia was at the age of thirty, and nine years before writing Sefer ha-‘Edut. This command resounds with strong messianic portent, since the journey to the Pope, inhabitant of Rome was established, according to the opinion of Nahmanides’ text that was discussed above, as a prerequisite of the coming of the Messiah. Elsewhere, in another prophetic book, we learn that:

“And He said that the Mashiyah will arrive immanently, for he is already born. And he continued to discourse on the entire subject, and said ‘I am that individual’. And by [means of] the ’seven luminous windows’ he indicated the secret of the seven names, and that who runs is [tantamount to] the order and the permutator. It is He who speaks to Raziel26 and informs him that he is the seventh of the prophets. At that time he was commanded to go to Rome and do all that he did, and it is clear that he is revealed this secret. And he said that during the fortieth year27 this matter returned to him and he was shown the image of a ’Son of a King’, anointed for Kingship.”28

It is not clear what Abulafia did in Rome in 1280, but from the Book of Testimony, we learn that he attempted to meet the Pope, Nicholaus III, in the city, but the latter retreated to his castle in Soriano da Cimini, north of Rome. Abulafia reports that he followed the Pope, despite the fact that he was warned that he will be burned if he insists to meet the Pope and when reaching the castle he was told that the Pope died suddenly.29 Thus the meeting never took place. In fact, all we know about Abulafia’s intention are a few words that can be translated as “to speak with him about the principle of Judaism [Yahadut].”30 Some scholars interpreted this enigmatic phrase as being intended to ask the Pope to let the Jews go, as Moses did31, or an attempt to convert the Pope to Judaism.32 However, an analysis of Abulafia’s thought, in general, and of the manner in which he uses the term Yahadut in his writings, show that neither of the two proposals can be confirmed, and a third interpretation is more salient. In my opinion, the Kabbalist wanted to speak about a spiritual/intellectual type of religion or redemption constituted by his specific type of Kabbalah, which transcends the historical religions he was acquainted with, including Rabbinic Judaism.33

However, in addition to his spiritualist understanding of messianism, which consists for him basically in a diasporic type of religiosity, which can be attained anywhere, he wrote later in an apocalyptic book dealing with visions he had about the final eschatological battles. Completed in 1288, Abulafia’s apocalypse claims in quite explicit terms that a stark upheaval is going to take place in the near future:

“The coming day is the day of Judgment

And it is called the day of remembrance

And the time of the trial has arrived

And the time of the end has been accomplished.

The heaven will become earth

And earth will become celestial

Because the Lord of the trial is called by the name YHWH.”

(See Jellinek (1887), p. 69.)

Though using widespread images from the stock of Jewish apocalypticism, which deal with corporeal resurrection, Abulafia’s statements point nevertheless to the primacy of spiritual awakening as the real form of resurrection rather than the resurrection of the body.34 The permutations of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and especially of the letters of the divine names and their pronunciation are considered the main tool of spiritual awakening in either an oral or written manner:

“And the end of delivery and the day of redemption has arrived

But no one is paying attention to this issue to-day to know it

There is no redemption but by means of the name of YHWH

And His redemption is not for those who do not request it

In accordance to His Name.

This is why I, Zekhariyahu35

……………………………

Has written this small book,

By [means of] the name of ’ADONAY the small

In order to disclose in it the secret of YHWH the great.”36

In fact, as Abulafia points out in this book, its content should be read in accordance with different ways of understanding, or two registers, one imaginative, namely, the apocalyptic one and one intellectual.37 I imagine that these registers were intended for two different types of audiences.38 Was the Pope imagined to be part of the intellectual elite, who may understand him, even better than Jews, as some Christians the Kabbalist alleged to have initiated in his views?39

Again, elsewhere in his Sefer ha-’Ot, he declared that:

“God has commanded him to speak to the gentiles, those of uncircumcised heart and uncircumcised flesh40, in His name. And he has done so, and he spoke to them, and they believed in the message of God. But they did not return to God because they relied on their sword and bow, and God has hardened their uncircumcised and impure hearts.41 This is why the nose of the Lord became angry on them, in order to destroy them, and He had mercy on Israel His people.”42

This is not an exceptional or late statement. Let me trace the entire complex of confession in the divine name when described as religion together with some universalist connotation, already in one of Abulafia’s earliest writings, Mafteah ha-Ra‘ayon, around 1274, where he writes, again in the opening poem:

“Happy are the sons of Shem, that did not forget the name [shem] of truth43—and will confess to the Rock their creator, without fantasy.

To the name [shem] you should praise by every word and verb—collect the entire speech in accordance with the delightful religion44.”

Mentioning the biblical ’Sons of Shem’ constitutes not just a pun on the “Name”—shem—but at the same time also a more general recognition of the nations descending from the biblical Shem45, which are many, as we learn also from the same opening poem beforehand46 and that means that not only the Jews are confessing the true name. In the present poem, the term shem may well stand for God and for the name, in addition to the sons of Shem, namely, three different meanings in a few lines. In any case, according to the “confessional” emphasis in the early poem on the definition of Judaism, no one can be born Jewish in the full sense of the word, since only a mature, accomplished person can become so, and this would, according to Abulafia, not be attained by most of those who are considered Jewish according to the Rabbinic perceptions. I would say that in a manner reminiscent of the way Maimonides was understood recently, the distinction between Jews and Gentiles is “institutional, social and historical, not ontological.” (See Kellner (2009), Dobbs-Weinstein et al. 2009, p. 13.) Or, as Abulafia himself put it, in his 1280 commentary on the secrets of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, entitled Sitrei Torah:

“It is impossible that the Torah will be abrogated and another one coming instead of it, but it is indubitably necessary that these secrets will be revealed during the advent of the Messianic era, by the prophets who will arise [then] and by the Messiah himself, because through them [the secrets of the Torah] all of Israel and those who are drawn to them, will become wise, as it is written (See Kellner (2009), p. 13.) ’because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest’.”47

Let me turn in this context to a pivotal though neglected discussion in scholarship that reflects Abulafia’s approach to both religion and to the centrality of the divine name. The importance of this passage for understanding this Kabbalist has been ignored:

“the differences between the nations are like the differences between the Jews, Christians and Ishmaelites, from each other. And the differences of the religions are like the difference between the religion of Moshe, and the religion of Yeshu, and the religion of Muham[m]ad, and in the three of them, Shem ha-Shem ha-Meyuhad, [the name of the distinguished name] [is found] necessarily, since there is not religion that does not point but to the essence of unicity.48 But people, because of their bad hearts, did not want to stir each other so that they would know what every religion has to say about the [divine] unity. Behold the Christians, despite their belief in the trinity by necessity they return to us and recognize our Torah, saying that He is one. And the Ishmaelites also unify God by necessity, confessing that He is one. And also we, the people of the Torah of our master Moses, blessed be his memory, confess and say always that He is one. ”49

In all the cases in this passage, the term religion translates the Hebrew dat. The consonants of the Hebrew spellings of the names Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, namely, MShH = 345, YShW = 316, MWHMD = 98 amount to 758, like the sum of the consonants of ShM = 340, HShM = 345, HMYWHD = 73.50 This peculiar gematria of the names of the three founders of the monotheistic religions is, to my best knowledge, unique in Jewish literature and its occurrence is quintessential for a correct understanding of Abulafia’s view. It reflects his extraordinary exegetical ingenuity, which is exercised to extract a preconceived view.51 Moreover, if one subtracts the letters of Moshe, the gematria of the names YShW MHMMD amount to ShM HMYHD (408), namely, the names of the heads of the two rival religions to Judaism amount to the divine name, an implication that I assume Abulafia was aware of. Though the use of gematria in general is widespread in many Jewish sources, to my best knowledge, no one reached this point either before or after Abulafia, and it constitutes a conscious effort to bring together the three names as if constituting one unit, without hinting at a hierarchy between them, and also to contend that the divine uniqueness or unity is consubstantial to the concept of religion as such. In a discussion of his technique, he also contends that the letter-consonant ’alef, is referring to the secret of uniqueness or unity, sod ha-Yihud.52

In a way, this extraordinarily gematria also reflects Abulafia’s understanding of the three rings famous parable—he actually uses the term pearl—that he interpreted in the manner I analyzed his views, that it is he alone that possesses the authentic pearl, namely, the true religion.53 All the three religions—the term dat/datot is found explicitly also in this passage—are imagined by this Kabbalist to refer not just to the unity of God, but also to be part of a phrase referring, by the dint of gematria, to the divine name. In any case, the above references to the three personalities are embedded in a discussion about the activities of the “leader of a nation” manhig ha-’ummah in general terms. In some cases, Moses was described in Abulafia’s writings as manhig, as someone who used combinations of letters.54 In any case, this is an outstanding example of inclusive discourse.

Similarly, he wrote in another, earlier poem about the divine name that “it was sent to the masters of intellect in every nation—A hope to all the Gentiles according to the secret of the quarter.”55 The message is intellectual and addressed solely to a few people, who are “masters of the intellect” in all the nations. In another opening poem, Abulafia refers to “All the prophets and all the ancients from the sages of the nations of the world, searched to know the degrees of the ladder, from the smaller ones to the greater, “56 in the context of writing books related to God. He puts together ante-Mosaic prophets and Gentile sages, without bothering to differentiate between them in a significant manner.

In a similar turn to the nations by means of an inclusive language, we read in yet another opening poem to another epistle to the effect that “All this will be revealed in the seven paths [of interpretation], where all the sciences are comprised, sealed under the seventy faces, for all the languages and all the nations.”57 This statement, like the previous one, appears prominently in the opening parts of Abulafia’s books and epistles. In my opinion, in this vein, we should interpret also the first line of the final poem of Hayyei ha-‘Olam ha-Ba’, where the claim is that the author teaches “the spirit of prophecy,—to the masters of science,” since the last category parallels the sentence “masters of the intellect in every nation” that we quoted above from another poem.58 The term ba‘alei madda‘—another rare term in Jewish literature—does not necessarily mean only Jewish philosophers or thinkers and it may well apply also to Gentiles.59 Those inclusive languages are quite exceptional in the Kabbalistic literature, but they were ignored by scholars who perceived Abulafia as a particularist thinker.60

Abulafia was indubitably acquainted with Nahmanides’ assertion articulated some few decades beforehand as part of the dispute in Barcelona, during a famous controversy with a convert to Christianity, to the effect that the Messiah will go to the Pope and ask him to let the Jews go, in a manner reminiscent of the story of Moses’ meeting with the Pharaoh.61 This is indeed the gist of Gershom Scholem’s interpretation of the intention of this Kabbalist, as a return to the Holy Land.62 Others, like Meyer Landauer and Heinrich Graetz, and some of his followers, including Adolf Jellinek, contended that Abulafia attempted in fact to convert the Pope to the rituals of Judaism.63 In a brief sentence, Israel Zinberg proposed something different, namely, that Abulafia wanted to convince the Pope that he is the messenger of God.

Elliot R. Wolfson cast doubts as to the possibility of verifying the historicity of Abulafia’s intention to meet the Pope, assuming that this is just a figment of his imagination.64

My claim as to the intention of the Kabbalist is different from those proposed by Graetz and Scholem, the two giant figures of Jewish studies. I assume that Abulafia attempted to discuss with the high prelate about his idiosyncratic, spiritualized understanding of Judaism and as to the divine names qua a universal religious option, namely, the new Torah as the divine name[s], that he mentions in the very same book, where Yahadut has been interpreted in such a way.65 I prefer to emphasize the relevance of the immediate literary context of the contention, as well as Abulafia’s claims for novelty, to a reduction of his view to one possibility or another found already in the past.

Unfortunately, all we know about Abulafia’s intention concerning this meeting consists in a few words of his that can be translated also as “to speak with him in the name of Judaism [yahadut].”66 The Hebrew formulation is somewhat irregular: לדבר איתו בשם יהדות כלל. The questions concerning the significance of this statement are as follows: What is the meaning of Judaism, of the term “in the name”, and finally, and in my opinion also important, what does the Hebrew term kelal67 mean? For Scholem’s messianic interpretation, “in the name” means that Abulafia, who considered himself to be Messiah and thus he would be speaking as a representative for a specific collective entity, namely, in the name of the people of Israel, or Jewry, probably asking the Pope to let the Jews leave the countries of Christendom as part of an eschatological scenario in the Hebrew Bible as connected to the Exodus, or one found in Nahmanides’ polemics in Barcelona (see also Lorberbaum 2011, pp. 126–27, 148–49 (Hebrew).).

For Graetz, however, Abulafia would speak about Jewish life or rituals, that he allegedly wanted to explain to the Pope, or even to convert him to Judaism, an intention he describes flatly as “mad”. Those are two different meanings of what it was imagined that the term yahadut meant: one is the national-messianic scenario, a future oriented intention, having historical repercussions, the other is the ritualistic traditional one, attempting to preserve the past. Those two interpretations are, however, equally amusing, as they stem from personal expectations or repulsions of these two giant scholars, though they are at odds with Abulafia’s tendencies when defining yahadut in the very same period, especially with his assertions in his prophetic books to the effect that he brings a new Torah or a new religion, that deal with divine names and combinations of letters. They ignore the immediate literary context and the emphatic declaration in the first series of prophetic books, that Sefer ‘Edut is part and parcel of it.

In another instance, he reports some discussions he had with a Gentile about issues related to the Bible concerning the parabolic meaning of the ladder of Jacob, and Abulafia boasts that at the end that person decided to receive issues related to secrets of the Torah from the Kabbalist. Then, the Kabbalist contended that he succeeded to “fix in his heart the arrow of the desire of the knowledge of God [or His name]68, so that he confessed that ’Moses is true and his Torah is true’69, and it is not necessary to reveal more about the Gentile.”70 Interestingly enough, though it stands to reason that the gentiles mentioned in the last quotes are Christians as the two books were written in Sicily, Abulafia preferred not to use the term Christian, but a much vaguer and more comprehensive term. It should be noted that a contemporary of Abulafia, who wrote a commentary on the Guide, had relations with a Christian scholar.71 This fact shows that Abulafia was not alone in his effort to establish a relationship with a Christian scholar, and perhaps the common denominator is the content of the Guide, in the Italian background, which was a more intellectual scene also contributed something to those relations.

I assume that Abulafia’s discussion with the Gentile and his revelation to him of the knowledge of the name—paralleled by mentioning the truth of Moses’ Torah immediately afterward72—corresponds to what he intended to speak with the reluctant Pope several years earlier. I also assume that Abulafia could, in principle, do so in a Roman language, as his many gematrias with words in Italian show,73 and as the report on the discussions with the Gentile cited earlier, may testify. In any case, no other Kabbalist until the Italian Renaissance made such an effort, and many of them even opposed the disclosure of Kabbalistic secrets, even to most of the Jews.

The decisive stage in the collection of additional details concerning the “encounter” between Abulafia and the Pope was first reached by the most important and most famous of Jewish historians, Heinrich Graetz. Basing his analysis on Landauer’s mistakes, Graetz adds his own personal touches, writing,

In the end, a spirit of madness fell upon him. He was to meet with Pope Martin IV in Rome, in an attempt to prevail upon him to remove the robes of his high office and become Jewish. The Pope heard the words of this mad Kabbalist Jew, and enraged, he put him in prison. He was incarcerated for 28 days and was released; spared from the fiery verdict of the Inquisition because, as he put it, God graced him with two mouths. There is reason to suppose that Abulafia told the Pope that in place of the ten sefirot he upholds a doctrine of three. The Pope found this at least partially satisfactory and set him free. Upon being released he was permitted to move about freely in Rome.74

Uncritically relying on Landauer, Graetz understands the purpose of Abulafia’s meeting with the Pope as an attempt to cause his conversion to Judaism. He also adds many “significant details” that do not appear in Landauer’s account. For instance, he identifies that the Pope Abulafia went to meet as Martin IV. This supplementary detail was the result of Graetz’s coming to terms with Landauer’s 5041 (1281) date for Abulafia’s meeting with the Pope, as Martin IV was elected as Pope in 1281.75

This mistake made other inventions possible: according to Graetz, the Pope indeed spoke to Abulafia and the life of the latter, so the great historian speculated, was spared thanks to the fact that his theological beliefs were found to be “partially satisfactory.” From whence did Graetz derive his details? Again, the single possible source is the passage from Landauer’s study cited above. Accordingly, it was reasonable for Graetz to assume that Abulafia confessed a belief in the Trinity in the presence of the Pope in order to survive. So, too, the interpretation of Abulafia’s expression “two mouths” as implying his partial acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity is at least in part derived from Landauer. In such a manner, a legend was created whose origin lies in Landauer’s faulty quotations from the Commentary on Sefer ha-‘Edut, in which he omits several crucial details, and the erroneous reliance on a poem of Rabbi Asher ben David—a Catalan Kabbalist of the first half of the 13th century, that has been copied in a manuscript together with Abulafia’s texts—as if reflecting Abulafia’s approach. The legend continued with Graetz’s attempt to come to terms with Landauer’s story, resulting in his filling in significant but fabricated details derived from Landauer’s “historical” evidence. The irony of this is that Graetz, the preeminent “rationalist” historian, turned himself into the composer of a legend.

Interestingly enough, in addition to this fabrication of details, it should be mentioned that it was Graetz who first published the entire Hebrew original of the Commentary to Sefer ha-‘Edut, which actually contradicts the legend he composed, and translated Abulafia’s text into German. Surprisingly enough, he noticed nothing that required substantial revision of his earlier, erroneous historical report.76 Thus, gross mistakes and even fabrications about Abulafia’s thought are not recent inventions, but rather are the result of superficial and biased readings of his writings. For this reason, I recommend serious readers of Abulafia’s books and to not rely on the picture of history as shaped in this case by some historians but rather to check everything from the very beginning. In this way one can offer one’s own picture rather than rely on the imagination of others.

Graetz’s publication of the original Hebrew text did not succeed in clarifying the true nature of this affair for scholars writing much later. For example, Israel Friedlander, an accomplished scholar of Messianic thought, writes that Abulafia “renounced his belief in the presence of the Pope [...] in order to escape death” (Neumark 1921–1929, pp. 67–68.) and David Neumark, another distinguished historian of Jewish thought, writes, in a more cautious manner, that, “according to modern writers, Abulafia formulated this doctrine (i.e., the Trinity) in order to placate his captors in Rome and save his life—indeed they set him free.”77

However, what can be shown is that Abulafia’s acknowledging the Christian Trinity was a pure invention of Meyer H. Landauer and Heinrich Graetz. In any case, his identity as a Jew was less grounded in the Rabbinic criteria and thus less endangered by other religious options such as Christianity, as has been stipulated by Sagerman’s psychoanalytic approach. To judge from Abulafia’s boastings as prophet and Messiah, where he sometimes implies that he is even higher than Moses, it is hard to extrapolate a feeling of insecurity as to his Jewish identity as he specifically understood it. At the same time, let me clarify, I do not assume that Abulafia was a predecessor of modern ecumenical dialogues or of the assumptions of some scholars that there is one universal truth behind the external forms of the different religions or mystics.

This Kabbalist believed that he was the founder of an old/new religion that possesses the true meaning of the Hebrew Bible, on both the nominal level and on the noetic one.78 Arbitrary as his exegetical practices were, the nature of this new religion transcends the particularities of the historical religions, including historical Judaism, and which, given the natural/intellectual character of his religiosity, can be embraced in principle by everyone. Though, philologically speaking, he was influenced by both types of Christianity (Orthodox and Catholic) and much more by the falsafa thinkers in Islam, he presents his eschatological revelation as being original. Such a presentation consists in his strong reinterpretations of central topics related to particularism in traditional Judaism, in a more natural and universal manner, whose major concepts were derived from Neoaristotelian philosophy, as we have seen above in the case of his understandings of the nature of the Messiah. This universalist approach has been part of the more esoteric aspects of his writings, and it already elicited, as he testifies, some critiques at the beginning of his literary activity (See Idel (2020)).

Let me address the question whether those views remained buried in manuscripts and are of interest solely for philologists concerned with archeological excavation of forgotten texts. In my opinion, the more open attitude to gentiles, accompanied by his fierce critiques of some Jews, including Rabbis, were among the reasons that some important books of Abulafia’s were translated in Latin and in Sicilian in the late decades of the 15th century and had an impact on the nascent Christian Kabbalah (For more details see Idel (2025), pp. 15–37). Moreover, it is plausible that Abulafia’s parable of the three rings had an impact on the famous Enlightenment figure Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his famous playwright, Nathan the Wise. Abulafia dedicated his major book ’Or ha-Sekhel to his disciple “Nathan the Sage”—Nathan ben Sa‘adyah Harar, an historical figure who was an inhabitant of Messina, whom he designated as Nathan ha-Navon, who authored a Kabbalistic book79—and it is in this book of Abulafia’s that his peculiar version of the three rings parable is found. Moreover, a manuscript of Abulafia’s book was found in a public library in Berlin (Idel (2020), pp. 325–26). Lessing’s Nathan, a symbol of religious toleration, was situated by the playwriter in the very period when the Kabbalist flourished. It seems that a history of interreligious relations can be depicted in a more inclusive manner, referring also to a few, though influential, aspects of Judaism.