The return of the Kabbalah

The translation that Michel Attali offers us from Heaven gate (rather than Heaven to translate the original title of Puerta del Cielo) by R. Abraham Cohen de Herrera (1562-1635) constitutes in itself a small event. The book indeed represents, with the Divinity house (Or Casa of the Divinidad), one of the two main works by Abraham Cohen de Herrera whose work had never been translated in French before and still remains largely unknown to the general public but also most often in the university environment. Now what a direct way to learn about your thought than to start with a work as imposing as it Heaven gateas much by its material dimensions (nearly 700 dense pages) as by its properly spiritual ambition ? The task that the work assigns is indeed nothing less than describing precisely God and his relationship to the world or, more exactly, to understand what we can know of it and what must remain unknowable to our intelligences.

Multiple sources and influences

However, the reader must be warned, and a fortiori the novice reader, that reading the Heaven gate is far from easy. It is that, like the hectic life of its author (whose introduction specifies that he was born in Italy, lived in Hamburg and then in London as a Spanish prisoner before settling in Amsterdam) , the work is located at the crossroads of several influences and is drunk with multiple sources. Abraham Cohen de Herrera borrows as much from the authors of antiquity as in those of the neoplatonic heritage of the Renaissance revisited by Christian performers like Marcile Ficin or Pic de la Mirandole for example. But the general perspective in which he reads philosophers is that of the Kabbalistic tradition, and above all, as we will come back to it, that of the lourianic kabbalah. The result is a syncretic work that can be judged unclassifiable and delicate to apprehend ; But this difficulty, which is commensurate with the monumental character of the company to which Abraham Cohen de Herrera is engaged in, is also what makes it interest.

The influence that this Heaven gate is almost as eclectic as its sources are since it is found both in Jewish circles and in Christian circles, in Kabbalistic circles as in philosophical circles (Leibniz, Henry More, d’Alembert, Hegel), especially thanks To the partial Latin translation that the German theologian Christian Knorr von Rosenroth gave it in 1678 in his anthology Kaballa Denudata. The fact, however, that Originally Abraham Cohen de Herrera deliberately chose to write his treaty in Spanish rather than in Latin or in Hebrew was nothing trivial and showed his concern to address his contemporaries in their language daily, in other words to touch as closely as possible conversos And all those who, having been able to turn away from the values ​​of the Jewish religion, could wish to return to it by questioning or deepening its spiritual foundations: from this point of view, and whatever the differences that separate them, the project of the Heaven gate is not without affinity with that of Equaled guide from Maimonides.

A contemporary of Spinoza

Among all the authors with whom we compared Abraham Cohen de Herrera, however, there is one that comes out particularly, namely Spinoza. The comparison is indeed inevitable, first for obvious chronological reasons: having lived the last fifteen years of his life in Amsterdam within the Sephardim Community, it goes without saying that there is nothing absurd to Consider that Spinoza was led to know and frequent the herrerian work directly. We have accused Herrera, moreover, of having inspired Spinozist pantheism. Is this accusation seriously founded, in the sense that it would be possible to detect and precisely identify an influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera on the Spinozist work and in particular on theEthics ? This is not the place to decide here and only a scholarly study could answer this question. In his introduction, Michel Attali was convinced but, rather than supporting his thesis, he is content to recall in a factual way that the Heaven gate “” was translated for the first time in Hebrew (in 1655) by Rabbi Ytsh’ak Aboab da Fonseca, the same one who signed (in 1656) the excommunication stop- H’erem – of a certain Baruch Spinoza (Introduction, p. X-XI). Besides, we know that Spinoza himself seems to have been quite hostile with regard to the Kabbalah. We must therefore remain cautious in the matter, because if the two authors share a common culture, the orientations of their respective philosophy, between the immanentism of one and the accent carried by the other on divine transcendence, oppose them diametrically.

D ‘Eïn SOF has Adam Kadmon by going through the Tsimtsoum

In fact, the concepts that Abraham Cohen de Herrera uses are less those of traditional philosophy (even scholastic) or even theosophy than those of Kabbalale proper, in other words of this Jewish tradition which seeks to understand God to Starting from an esoteric and symbolic interpretation of the Torah. The central object of Heaven gate East Eïn SOF Or in-finish, namely the absolutely first, sovereign and itself incizzor cause. Perfect, one, good and intangible – in the manner of the Platonic good, because Abraham Cohen de Herrera likes to confront theological concepts and philosophical concepts – but also hidden, unknown and transcendent, Eïn SOF cannot give himself to knowing as it is: so “ By simple emanation, sequence and spur, which is not strictly speaking a creation, birth or a shaping of work, like a huge sun which projects itself by irradiating infinite rays or lights, Eïn SOFthe primary cause produced the ten sovereigns Sephiroth With all that they contain in themselves, and which are, as we have said, the attributes, denominations and names by which Eïn SOF is represented and manifested, the instruments by which he acts, creating, governing and perfecting everything (P. 13). But the Sephiroth themselves appear only by the direct and immediate effect that is Adam Kadmon (p. 261), in other words man (“ Adam ») Primordial, this first anthropomorphic representation of God or Imago Dei, if one can say, which makes the transition between one and the multiple and which is the subject of the eighth book of the Heaven gate (p. 285-355).

Abraham Cohen de Herrera is therefore essentially based on the traditional terms of Jewish mysticism, of Zohar and the kabbalah from the teachings of the great thinker Yitzhak louria Ashkenazi (1534-1572), which does not exclude the originality of the use he makes of it. The fascinating notion of Tsimtsoumdeveloped by Louria to explain the creation (or rather the emanation: Atsilouth) as self-contract or self-retractation of God in order to make within its place for the world as by an air call, is thus interpreted by Abraham Cohen de Herrera not as the creation of an empty physical space or of a concrete place but, in a metaphorical and non-literal way, as a self-limitation of divine power.

A remarkable scientific edition

This is only a brief and superficial seen very tight discussions to which Abraham Cohen de Herrera is engaged in, and which are often delicate to follow in all their subtle developments. It is only necessary to greet the admirable work of Michel Attali from the Spanish manuscript. Certainly, the Heaven gate had already been the subject of a translation in 1974 in German (from the first Hebrew translation) and more recently in 2002 in English. But, despite some difficult slags to avoid in such a considerable company, this publication surpasses them and offers the French -speaking public a scientific edition, with useful annotations and a very precise glossary, which strives as much as possible to facilitate the work of the reader. This one remains nonetheless demanding, which is probably enough to explain that the work, which has remained inconvenient, has fallen for some time in a certain forgetfulness. We bet that this beautiful publication puts an end to this negligence.