Author(s):

Gershom Scholem started working on Sefer habahir in his doctorate, and he devoted an important place to it in his later writings and in his teaching. He saw it as a collective work incorporating layers of esoteric traditions that were compiled and edited by later redactors, and he read it as a Gnostic book. Its styling as a disjointed, cryptic, pseudepigraphic midrash supported him in reaching this conclusion. In this article, Joseph Dan shows that since Scholem arrived at his conclusions, several of the basic assumptions that guided his work have been undermined. Although Sefer habahir draws inspiration from the Sefer yetzirah and from early Jewish homiletical and mystical literature, its approach is original and independent. Several of its innovative concepts and ideas – the Tree of divinity, the feminine element in the world of the Godhead, and the system of ten utterances as divine hypostases – constitute turning points in the history of Jewish thought. Dan consequently proposes seeking the source of its innovations in the spiritual surroundings within which Sefer habahir itself emerged: the Franco-German Jewish milieu (Ashkenaz) in the late twelfth century. From the point of view of its style, too, Sefer habahir seems to be a unified work. It is therefore worth examining the possibility that an individual author with a distinctive style wrote Sefer habahir as an expression of his spiritual world.