Judaism and the Belief in Reincarnation
Earlier, I reflected on the fact that despite a rich history of ascetic practice in Judaism, it is commonly assumed that Jewish tradition is one that eschewed asceticism in all its forms. Precisely the same observation can be made in connection with the question of the transmigration of souls. Transmigration is a conception associated especially with Asian religious traditions, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism. Yet the fact is that we find in Judaism an extensive and significant history of teachings about this subject, although it must be acknowledged that belief in transmigration -outside of certain kabbalistic communities- never achieved the kind of normative status it occupies in Buddhist and Hindu traditions. The earliest ideas about transmigration of souls in Judaism predate Kabbalah and appear to have emerged among Jews living in the Near East, especially Iraq, in the eighth through tenth centuries, perhaps under the influence of Mutazilite Muslims and Gnostics of an Ismailian orientation. Proclivities of this type among some Jews inspired polemical rejection of the doctrine of transmigration on the part of the great tenth-century Baghdad Jewish authority Saadia Gaon, who bitterly denounced it as “madness and confusion.” Anan ben David, to whom Karaite tradition attributed the beginnings of the Karaite schism with rabbinic authority in the eighth century, appropriated the idea of transmigration. It was in the earliest circles of Kabbalah in Provence and Spain, however, that metempsychosis took root in a truly significant way, ultimately providing legitimacy to teachings that had hitherto existed exclusively at the margins of Jewish life. We find in kabbalistic sources widely varying notions about transmigration with respect to just about every aspect of the idea. The Sefer ha-Bahir, the earliest extant work of Kabbalah, which appeared anonymously in southern France in the last third of the twelfth century, taught the doctrine of transmigration as a mystery upon which only initiates ought to reflect. On the other hand, the author of the Bahir apparently felt no need to defend or justify these teachings, unlike the Cathars, who developed such ideas at precisely the same time and place, and who were condemned for doing so by the Catholic Church, which had formally rejected the doctrine of transmigration. In the thirteenth century, Spanish kabbalists continued to teach metempsychosis, including Nahmanides, according to whom Job had been required to suffer in this life so as to atone for the sins committed in an earlier one. Another, more positive explanation for transmigration in the thirteenth century had to do with the biblical notion of the Levirate marriage, according to which the brother of a man who dies without having a child must offer to marry his brother’s widow; a son created through such a marriage contains within him the soul of the deceased husband, thus providing an opportunity to fulfill his obligation to procreate through his brother’s (and former wife’s) son! This was the primary interest of the Gerona circle of kabbalists in the notion of metempsychosis. As far as the Zohar is concerned, Moshe de Leone taught the doctrine of gilgul, but he also tended to be especially interested in transmigration in connection with a man who had died childless.
- Lawrence Fine (Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship, pages 304-305). Emphases added.
