Jewish Art in Paris, and Encountering Sufism

This week I’m writing from Paris, where I’m visiting a friend of mine who studies Sufism, a mystical tradition within Islam. We visited the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, which is large, has multiple stories, and highlights episodes from throughout Jewish history in diaspora. One case held medieval Jewish wedding rings, which are shaped like tiny gold houses built on top of rings ornamented with fine jewels. The room regarding Ottoman Jews contains beautiful hats, clothing, and jewelry; across from a glass case holding earrings and arm cuffs is one full of silver rimmonim, the silver hats that adorn the tips at either end of a Torah scroll. I laughed when we entered this room, thinking how these might have been some of the most precious objects in their milieu at the time that they were used; now, they sit here in a glass case surrounded by each other, so much luxurious silver all gathered in the same place, priceless objects no longer rare or hard to find.

In contrast to the museum in Cluj-Napoca which I wrote about last week, this museum spends very little time on the Holocaust. There is a great deal of material regarding the Dreyfus affair, which, to my surprise, also took up a very unwarranted (in my opinion) amount of space in the Musee D’Orsay. Evidently, the Dreyfus affair—in which a high-ranking Jewish military officer was accused of treason in 1894—was an origin, or at least an important historical juncture, for the French values of universality and pluralism. At least one would presume this is the reason that art museums consider it so important historically. Due to my own personal predilections, I was most pleased by the room in the Jewish Museum that discusses Eastern Europe, which contained gravestones from several cemeteries as well as small-scale reproductions of important Hasidic synagogues in Ukraine. The painting which hangs in this room, called Le cimitiere juif by Samuel Hirzenberg (Munich, 1892,) depicts three mourners in dramatic motions of prayer and lament in a Jewish cemetery. It reminded me of the experience I described in the last newsletter, walking through the Jewish cemetery in Cluj-Napoca.

I also had occasion this week to read a comparative work about Sufism and Kabbalah, which my friend here recommended and lended from his bookshelf. This monograph is called Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari, by Diana Lobel. Judah or Yehuda Ha-Levi is one of the most prominent medieval Jewish poets, who wrote in Arabic in Al-Andalus. As my teacher Gil Anidjar discussed in his book Our Place in Al-Andalus, medieval Muslim Spain is often looked back upon sentimentally as an ideal moment of creative coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. I myself have certainly fallen prey to this retrospective simplification. What makes Lobel’s book on Ha-Levi so masterful is the way it demonstrates the complicated interplay between Jewish and Muslim ideas from this time period.

Because Ha-Levi was writing in Arabic, he had no choice but to use key terms from Islamic vocabulary and apply them to the Jewish experience. This work, the Kuzari, is composed of a 5-parts. Part 1 is a dialogue between a pagan king, a philosopher, a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew. By the end of Part 1, the pagan king is convinced by the Jew, and the remaining 4 books show the Jewish speaker, called the chaver, explicating ideas in Judaism so that the king can impute them to his people. When the chaver describes Jewish beliefs, he uses terms that gain their meaning from the Sufi tradition. 

One chapter of Lobel’s work discusses the idea of relationship in the Kuzari. As we may know, an important theme in mystical Judaism is the notion of the relationship between an individual and God, as well as the relationship between all of Israel (the community of Jews) and God. Martin Buber’s work of Jewish philosophy, I and Thou, is entirely about this relationship. According to the Kabbalah, particularly as it is interpreted by the Hasidim who influenced Buber, Jews are called to engage in a meditative practice called devequt, which literally means “cleaving” to God. However, an essential aspect of devequt is the inherent impossibility of it ever being truly or permanently achieved. While it is possible for an adept to experience binding one’s consciousness with God, this is always a transitory exalted state. A Jew in devequt must always come back to Earth, so to speak, ascending the ladder to commune with Source and descending back down again to participate in human community. Moreover, in Jewish theology, God is inherently separate from us as individuals. This very separation is the reason that devequt is possible at all: you can’t approach or cleave to something that isn’t fundamentally separate from you. Accordingly, devequt can never “undo” that inherent separation. We can never truly, finally, become one with God.

Fascinatingly, in Sufism, this is not the case. In the Kuzari, Judah Ha-Levi uses the Arabic terms ittisal and wusul (which come from the same root, w-s-l) to describe relationship, connection, and arrival with God, as Lobel points out in her book. The root word wasala means “to connect, join, unite, combine, or link; and also to arrive at or reach, perhaps through a process of connection” (Lobel 21). A point of difference between the Jewish and Sufi traditions emerges here: for Sufis, union with God (or with the Active Intellect) is attainable and reached partially through practices of asceticism, depriving oneself of connection and sustenance. Sufis are popularly portrayed as nomadic, impoverished monks who have given up all Earthly attachments in order to bind themselves with the Beloved. However, as Ha-Levi describes in Kuzari, Judaism does not consider asceticism, abstaining from nourishment and community to meditate without distraction, to be a legitimate pathway to God; rather, it can be injurious and result in harm for the practitioner as well as his community. Jews must participate in human community, because we also engage with God communally as Israel and covenantally through the commandments Moses received at Sinai. Individual yearning or connection to God does not supercede this collective relationship.

Fascinatingly, Lobel claims that Book One of the Kuzari lays out the history of the Jewish people as the history of Ittisal. Adam is described as having a capacity for ittisal that dwells beyond the intellect, a natural capacity, whereas Sufis and philosophers typically only arrive here through a long path of spiritual development. Because of this, Adam’s descendants were an elite line of men who could have contact with the divine, stretching down to Abraham and his many sons. Abraham himself, Ha-Levi writes, pioneered a new form of connection with the divine where he obeyed and trusted in God, participating in the covenant. All of these figures, from Adam to Abraham, experienced variations on ittisal which distinguish the term from its traditional associations in Sufism.

While this may well be a contrived remark, I find it important to say that Jewish and Muslim self-conceptions of our history are tremendously intertwined. Popular culture today paints these as two religions at war, a gross and inaccurate generalization which justifies warfare and militarization. And yet Lobel demonstrates that Jews have documented and theorized our own history using Arabic terms which gained their meaning from Islamic tradition. How much more complicated and realistic would it be, how much more would it facilitate both interpersonal and divine connection, if we recognized that the way we define our own history relies on the history of others?