Terrors of History: Medieval Kabbalah and the Lachrymose Reading of Jewish Experience

Medieval kabbalists devoted significant energy to explaining historical misfortunes. This paper will describe how medieval kabbalists used the image of the sarim, or heavenly archons of the nations, to explain Jewish subjugation to Christian and Muslim nations, and how they understood gilgul, or reincarnation, as the hidden mechanism whereby Jewish souls carry out their secret mission over the course of multiple lifetimes across the long arc of Israel’s exile. And finally, mention will be made of the ways that kabbalistic texts situated these strategies for reading Jewish history within a macro-historical concept of multiple successive worlds, according to which the present world is the most difficult of all possible manifestations of the cosmos. This paper will argue that the strategies evident in these discourses, despite their focus on negative historical events, suggest that medieval kabbalists sought to imagine Jews as the proactive agents of world history.