The Myth of “Back-Borrowing” the Myth of the Fallen Angels

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The two major turning-points in Jewish studies, the discovery of the Cairo-Geniza at the end of the nineteenth century and the unearthing of the manuscripts of the Dead Sea, supplied a great amount of new material that contributed to a different understanding of major issues in the complex history of Judaism and its various religious manifestations. One of the topics that was enriched dramatically was the nature and the details of treatises belonging to the intertestamental Jewish pseudepigraphic literature. This is especially true insofar the so-called Enochic literature is concerned, and also regarding the metamorphoses of the constellations of ideas found in this ancient literature. The myth of the fallen angels, in fact a constellation of various motifs, enjoyed a grandiose comeback, as the numerous studies about its ancient sources and some of its avatars in the Rabbinic literatures attest, but its occurrence in the sources in the Middle Ages was much less discussed.¹ After the groundbreaking publication of the Aramaic fragments of Enoch from the Qumran, Cave 4 by J. T. Milik,² much work has been done from the textual point of view of Milik’s publication³, though only few new significant texts have been introduced in the stream of scholarly debates.⁴ However, various theories have been circulated and elaborated at length, albeit neglecting the possible relevance of many of the extant medieval texts.⁵

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Elsewhere, I dealt with some matters related to what was considered by scholars to be the earliest medieval Hebrew passage, found in R. Moshe ha-Darshan’s Bereshit Rabbati, to be referred below as ‘Midrash Shemhazai and ‘Azza’el.’⁶ It was described as having been influenced by Islam, according to John C. Reeves⁷, or by an hypothetical Greek text that was mediated by a Christian translation, as assumed by Annette Y. Reed,⁸ both cases being referred to as forms of “back-borrowing” (Reeves 2015; Reed 2005). I shall return to this tradition later in this study. The following discussions refer, let me stress, solely to the metamorphoses of this specific myth, and do not intend to discredit the possibility of other instances of back-borrowing that have been properly proven or will be proved in the future.⁹

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The ancient name of the chief of the fallen angels, known previously only from the Greek and Ethiopian versions, has been discovered in an Aramaic fragment of 1 Enoch in Cave 4 in Qumran, spelled שמיחזה.¹⁰ For the sake of scholars dealing with the topic that may have a problem reading modern Hebrew, let me summarize the proposed solution offered in a study on the origin of this name: it is the result of some phonetic process concerning two Aramaic terms, namely Shemaya’, meaning ‘heavens,’ and Haza’, a verb meaning ‘he has seen.’ As such, the name of the angel means ‘the one that has seen or watched heaven,’ referring to the state of this angel before the rebellion and fall. This etymology of this name, as being related to heaven—not to the divine name, as several scholars claim—is supported by the juxtaposition to the name of the angel that is mentioned after its name, that is related to earth, [ארע]תקף. Grounded in two consonants that have no parallels in Greek phonetics, Sh and H, the Greek transcriptions in this language as either Σεμιαζά or Σεμιαζᾶς cannot substitute them, and thus cannot be the mediating source for medieval forms in Hebrew of the name ,שמחזאי which most plausibly reflects the reverberations of the ancient name by means of a Semitic language.¹¹ The Greek letter sigma is hardly retroverted into the original Semitic ש, and the missing guttural letter ח in the ancient name cannot be inferred from the Greek forms, requiring therefore to posit a line of transmission grounded in Semitic languages—in my opinion, either in Aramaic or Hebrew. Thus, the case of the myth of the fallen angels being supposedly borrowed by some later Jewish authors from Christian or Muslim mediating texts, as formulated in recent scholarship, is nothing more than just a scholarly myth. The few pertinent stances for such a borrowing were not part of the formative developments in the emergence of literatures in medieval Ashkenaz and Spain but represented a much later and relatively marginal phenomenon.¹²

Shemhaza’el: Shlomo Simhah’s ’Aggadah and Bahya ben Asher’s Midrash

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Let me address here another variant of the name of the chief rebellious angel, embedded in two different mythical accounts that remained, as far as I am aware, unaccounted by modern treatments of the myth of the fallen angels. Evidently, also in this case, the name of the fallen angel שמחזאל reflects a Semitic form. Let me turn first to a passage written by an Ashkenazi figure¹³, transcribe and translate it, then analyze it in a series of various contexts and well as its implication for the available scholarship in the field.

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In 1294, a descendant of the famous commentator R. Shlomo Yitzhaqi, (Rashi), wrote an outstanding treatise called Sefer ha-Maskil in Troyes, Northern France. The book was described for the first time in Israel M. Ta’-Shma‘’s groundbreaking study¹⁴, and since then it has drawn the attention of other scholars.¹⁵ For the time being, this treatise is extant in a unique manuscript which in its vast majority has not been yet printed.¹⁶ Let me translated the pertinent passage for the sake of further discussions concerning the angelic name of Shemhaza’el:

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At the time that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the angels, and he created Shemhaza’el and ‘Azza,’¹⁷ as it has been explicated in the ’Aggadah, that He created them big, from the end of the Abyss to the Seat of Glory, and they were proud of their stature,¹⁸ so that they said to the Holy One, blessed be He, ‘We shall help You in the building of the world. You shall build in the East and we shall build in the West, You shall blow the winds and we shall make the dews to descend.’ Then the Holy One Blessed be He became angry with them and said in His heart: ‘If I am erasing¹⁹ them from the world, the entities of the account of creation will say that thought that they are cooperator to the Creator, that just as there is an end to them, so, God forefend, there is an end to Him who spoke and created the world.’²⁰ He decided to diminish their appearance,²¹ and He threw them in the abysses, so that people will know that the Holy One, blessed be He, is governing over every living entity, in His greatness. And since that day Shemhaza’el and ‘Azza’, who have seen the power of the Holy One, blessed be He, stood, and knew by means of what [type of] wisdom and how He operates, and taught people of the world many strategies, and the power of the [divine] names and witchcraft,²² in order to induce people of the world in sin, and draw them to them, in order to do evil.²³

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This myth is reminiscent of a variety of myths of cosmic rebellion found in the ancient Middle East,²⁴ which had been domesticated in some related versions in Rabbinic literatures where two angels oppose the divine intention to create man.²⁵ However, the above passage has some affinities also to Enochic motifs:

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1. The names of the two angels in Sefer ha-Maskil are almost identical to the names Shemahazay and ‘Azza[z]’el in several versions of the myth of fallen angels.²⁶ According to the final sentence, they are conceived to be evil, probably as inducing some form of illicit worship.

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2. The revelation of secret knowledge by angels to humans, evident in this text, is similar to, or perhaps a reverberation of, the motif of revelation of secrets to women in 1 Enoch.²⁷

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3. The gigantic size of the two angels is reminiscent of those instances in which nefilim are described as huge beings. Nonetheless, the two angels ordinarily identified with those names are the fallen sons of God; it is only their descendants, the nefilim, who are depicted as gigantic.²⁸

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4. Last but not least: the casting of the two angels into the abyss is reminiscent of the throwing of Leviathan in 1 Enoch.²⁹ Both cases refer to couples of gigantic entities.³⁰

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The presence of these four parallel motifs to Enochic material, in quite a short passage defined as ’Aggadah, as that translated above, can hardly be, in my opinion, a matter of sheer accident.

13

Let me turn to some details of the translated passage. Its gist is neither found in any of the Aggadic collections of late Antiquity or medieval compilations, nor it is referred to in other writings I am acquainted with. Nevertheless, there is no plausible reason to assume that the late thirteenth-century R. Shlomo Simhah forged it, since the contents of his treatise are far from mythical, and scholars who wrote about him considered his discussions as reliable. Thus, the reference to it as ’Aggadah seems to indicate the existence of an earlier Hebrew source, whatever its date may be, that was still extant in Northern France at that late date.

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The concept of the angelic proposal for cooperation in the acts of creation is found in a classical Rabbinic source, the Midrash Genesis Rabba’, ch.1 par. 3:

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All the people confirm that in the first day nothing was created less it may be said that Michael was stretching at the South of the firmament and Gabriel [was stretching] at its North, and the Holy One, blessed be He, measures at the middle…who was my partner in the creation of the world?³¹

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I suggest regarding this as a polemic statement, intended to neutralize views similar to what is found in R. Shlomo Simha’s ’Aggadah. An ancient theomachian approach, already domesticated in it, is further tamed in the classical Midrash. However, the ancient names for the rebellious angels disappeared and the more routine names were used.

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Let me compare the above angelocentric myth to a certain parallel found in some Rabbinic sources, without however mentioning angels. One of the versions of the Midrash Deuteronomy Rabba´ I,2, and also occurring in many other sources, includes the following passage, presented here as it was formulated in a famous late thirteenth-century Ashkenazi compilation of Midrashic texts, authored by R. Shime‘on ha-Darshan of Frankfurt:

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R. Isaac said: at the time that Israel did that deed³², [God] intended to destroy their enemies.³³ Moses said [to Him] this calf is good for assisting You. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: ‘How can it help Me.’ Moses said to Him: ‘You make the rain to fall, and it makes the dews descend, You take out the winds, and it takes out the clouds.’ He said to Moses: ‘You too err regarding the calf.’³⁴

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This third version eliminated the angelic factor, substituting it for the calf, another type of potential idolatry. Thus, the same motif of angelic cooperation in creation has two versions, while the third one neutralized the angelic factor. It is hard to establish a historical or philological relationship between the three versions, though the ’Aggadah seems to be earlier because of its archaic tone and the rare names of the angels, which hardly fit the assumption that Ashkenazi figures invented them. In any case, in Rabbinic sources there is no single accepted interpretation of cooperation proposal, and I would suggest that the ’Aggadah preserves an ancient remnant of the two huge angels having names that are reminiscent of ancient mythologies.³⁵ This means that Rabbinic attitudes should not be reduced to one single position, putatively embraced by all the Rabbis.

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As to the names of these angels: though the name Shemhaza’el is very rare, it is nevertheless found in the Middle Ages in the context of discussions about the fallen angels. So, for example, R. Bahya ben Asher Hallewah writes in Spain during the very same decade when Sefer ha-Maskil has been composed:

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I have seen in a Midrash: Sihon and ‘Og were the sons of Shemhaza’el³⁶ who was one of the sons of God.³⁷ And Shemhaza’el came to the wife of Ham before the entrance to the ark, and Sihon was born in the ark. And this is the reason why Ham had intercourse [with his wife in the ark]³⁸ in order to cover [her adultery].³⁹

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It is evident that the portrayal of Shemhaza’el is reminiscent of that of the fallen angels who had intercourse with women. Another, somewhat longer, version is found in the commentary of Rashi on BT., Niddah, fol 61a, and in the work of a younger Ashkenazi contemporary of the two authors mentioned above, R. Jacob ben Asher, active in fourteenth-century Toledo, who wrote in his Commentary on the Pentateuch: “Sihon and ‘Og, as it is written in Niddah, Sihon and ‘Og were the sons of Shemhazay and ‘Azza’el and fell from heaven in the generation of the Flood.”⁴⁰

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Despite the explicit reference to the Talmudic tract of Niddah, in the extant versions it is written only that “‘Og and Sihon were the sons of Ahyah⁴¹, the son of Shemhazay.”⁴² ‘Azza’el is not mentioned in the common version. Thus, we have another type of evidence as to the existence of a diverging version of the Talmudic passage in the early fourteenth century, somehow different from what is found in the printed editions, and closer from a certain point of view to medieval versions of the myths of the two fallen angels. It is difficult to know whether a Talmudic statement was shortened or elaborated in the Middle Ages.

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The topics in Bahya’s Midrash and in Shlomo Simhah’s ’Aggadah conspicuously reflect two totally independent discussions which do not stem from the same source and also do not depend on the “Midrash” that was mentioned above, which was deemed by scholars to be the earliest medieval version of the myth of the fallen angels. The two passages reveal the existence of at least two independent earlier Hebrew sources that were ignored in the scholarly attempts to trace the influences of Enochic motifs related to the form Shemhaza’el instead of Shemayahazeh or Shemhazay. Nevertheless, they strengthen the existence of this name in various contexts related to fallen angels.

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What is the meaning of the name Shemhaza’el in the ’Aggadah-passage translated above? While the ancient form SHMYHZH found in the Qumran fragments should be understood as referring to the angel that has seen heaven before its fall, in this case I assume that Shemhaza’el refers to someone who has seen God. This is not just a matter of explaining the form haza-’el, but also its immediate context of the names of the two angels: “Who have seen the power of the Holy One, blessed be He.”⁴³ Moreover, it seems plausible that the name of the other angel, ‘Azza’, may refer to the power of God, since ‘Azza’ could also indicate power. The form ’el means power. Since these angels are deemed to have seen the power of God, they are also imagined to be able to initiate others in powerful though illicit operations.

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From the formulation at the end of the version of Shlomo Simhah, it seems that the disclosure of secrets implies some form of idolatry, which contradicts the divine governance over all living beings. Let me point out that I am acquainted with some additional occurrences of the name Shemhaza’el in Hebrew medieval sources, in print and manuscripts, both in Spanish and Ashkenazi sources, but I do not consider them to be embedded within significantly diverging versions of the myth; I have dealt with these occurrences in detail elsewhere.⁴⁴

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Let me turn to the way the gigantic size of the two angels has been phrased: The angels are said to stretch from the lowest to the highest points in the world. As such they constitute some form of axis mundi, a perception that is attributed also to the two beasts.⁴⁵ The watery abysses became the place were powers of evil have been imagined to dwell.

Why Ashkenaz?

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The main text, the ’Aggadah in R. Shlomo Simhah’s treatise that constituted the center of our discussions above, is found in a treatise of an Ashkenazi author and in this treatise alone. Few smaller fragments cited earlier in that context also stem from Ashkenazi sources. Is this situation a matter of accident? Should we understand the preservation of such a text as a pure idiosyncratic curiosity of a non-representative figure? In fact, the “Midrash” mentioned above, representing one of the longest versions of the fallen angel, which attracted much of the attention of scholars dealing with this myth, was preserved in two Ashkenazi treatises, in Yalqut Shime‘oni and in R. Eleazar ben Asher ha-Levi’s Sefer ha-Zikhronot—to be addressed more closely below—thus statistically more than in any other center of Jewish culture in the thirteenth century. Moreover, an even longer and, in my opinion, very important version of the myth, so far unmentioned by current scholarship, has been preserved in a unique manuscript attributed to a certain R. Barukh Kohen Ashkenazi.⁴⁶ It was found, also anonymously, in print, together with some other, minor traditions concerning the fallen angels preserved in Ashkenazi’s writings, especially those stemming from the circle of R. Yehudah he-Hasid.⁴⁷ Motifs related to the myth of the two fallen angels, preserved in the magical treatise Havdalah de-R. ‘Aqivah, though indubitably an earlier, mainly Aramaic text, are extant in many Ashkenazi manuscripts and are mentioned by Ashkenazi authors incomparably more than in any other Jewish center.⁴⁸

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However, this situation is consonant with the specific nature of Ashkenazi culture in the thirteenth century, indicating a pronounced interest in angelology, which stems either from earlier magical literature or from the Heikhalot literature, preserved mainly because of the special interest of Ashkenazi authors and copyists.⁴⁹ It is in this religious milieu that some lost midrashim are known more than elsewhere, some for the first time.⁵⁰ Concerns about revelations, which are sometimes connected to angels and attributed to figures depicted as prophets, or to persons who were granted an ascent on high, are prominent in Ashkenaz—Germany and Northern France—much more than in any center in this period.⁵¹ It is in some Ashkenazi commentaries on the Pentateuch and in exegetical treatments that a certain path of interpreting the Bible according to the names of angels becomes prominent.⁵² A variety of magical treatments also flowered in this center—related to names of angels, in some cases—and there are many commentaries on divine and angelic names in which magic played an obvious role.⁵³ In some cases, magical recipes are copied at the end of some Ashkenazi prayer books.⁵⁴

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There are two main reasons for the embrace of this magical universe by many Ashkenazi figures. One is their being the recipients of literatures stemming from the Middle East, mediated by Italian territories and their preservation, across centuries, of a positive attitude toward it.⁵⁵ The other one is the poor acquaintance with scientific and philosophical writings among the Ashkenazi authors in the thirteenth century.⁵⁶ This conservative and, at times, inertial attitude was more consonant with the preservation of earlier traditions in comparison to the more scientific and philosophical attitudes prevalent among Jewish elites in the provinces in Provence, Catalonia, and Castile, which represented axial elements that increasingly prevailed over the pre-axial ones starting in the late eleventh century. In the last third of the thirteenth century, however, the Ashkenazi impact can be discerned also in some Jewish writings in both Catalonia and Castile.⁵⁷ It is also precisely in this wider cultural context that some elements of the constellation of myths of the fallen angels made their way into Ashkenazi circles. In the vast Zoharic literature, numerous discussions of the myth of the fallen angels played a rather significant role, such as the so-called Book of Enoch.⁵⁸ Let me call attention to a critical divergence between many of the Jewish sources and the Christian ones, which follow more than apocryphal descriptions: the former speak mainly about two angels while the latter speak about many fallen angels.

A Stream of Traditions

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While the more general Ashkenazi background accounts for the concern with the myths of the fallen angels, which could also explain its reception in Ashkenaz, it does not elucidate its emergence in these circles. In order to explain its surfacing in this specific center of Jewish culture, we should be aware of an even broader context, which I propose to designate as the “great transition” of a massive amount of Jewish materials from the Middle East to Europe at the turn of the first millennium CE.⁵⁹ This transition includes the transfer of most of the Halakhic corpus—namely the Mishnah, the two Talmudim, and Midrashim—of liturgical poetry, various customs, magical material, and Heikhalot literature, a gradual process that contributed to the establishment of Jewish culture in Europe and also served as the main trigger for further waves of creativity by Jewish authors on this continent. My assumption is that the various Ashkenazi reports about the fallen angels stem from material transferred as part of this great transition, and may be part of the process of textualization in this region.⁶⁰

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The interest in the myth of the fallen angels is evident before the turn of the first millennium, in a variety of reports that have not been in consideration so far taken by scholars. The most important one is the testimony of an anonymous tenth-century Karaite author about the existence, among the “Rabbanites” of Jerusalem, of a book entitled “The Book of ‘Uzza’ and ‘Azzi’el, when They Descended from Heavens,”⁶¹ mentioned among the titles of other books on magic.⁶² This testimony has been cited by a series of scholars in the past without any reservation as to its content or reliability, but curiously it has not been referred to in some of the more recent scholarship operating with the hypothesis of “back-borrowing.”⁶³ The existence of such a book, judging from its title most probably written in Aramaic, in Rabbinic circles is quite significant for the point I would like to make here, given the plausible hypothesis that it was written well before the tenth century. In fact, in a series of magical texts brought together in Yakir Paz’s study, some elements of the fallen angels myth are evident.⁶⁴ This is the case also regarding the fascinating magical text Havdalah de-R. ‘Aqivah, edited by Scholem, who proposes to see its origin in Babylonia, at the end of the Gaonate period, namely no later than the eleventh century.⁶⁵ Moreover, a short passage mentioning fallen angels is found in the so-called Damascus Document, an important treatise belonging to the Qumran sect⁶⁶ which has been preserved not only in the Qumran caves but also in two manuscripts found in the Cairo Genizah, copied by a twelfth or thirteenth-century Rabbinic copyist, thus generating an example, perhaps rare, of a continuous presence, in a literary shape, from the Qumran sects to medieval Jews living in a Rabbinic community.⁶⁷

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My last example has to do with the most widespread and influential text that attracted most attention from many scholars dealing with medieval reverberations of the myth of the fallen angels, referred to as Midrash Shemhazai and Azza’el. This text, previously privileged as an example of “back-borrowing,” has been preserved in four significantly different versions; I will list them next according to the dating of the compilations where they were preserved. The first one, [a], dated by scholars probably to tenth-century Northern Persia, appeared in an anonymous compilation entitled Pitron Torah⁶⁸; the second one, [b], is found in R. Moshe ha-Darshan of Narbonne’s eleventh century Bereshit Rabbati, written in Provence⁶⁹; the third one, [c], is included in R. Shime‘on ha-Darshan of Frankfurt’s late thirteenth century Yalqut Shime‘oni⁷⁰; and [d], the last one, occurs in the early fourteenth-century R. Eleazar ben Asher ha-Levi’s Sefer ha-Zikhronot, or under its other title, Chronicle of Yerachmiel, composed in Germany.⁷¹ A detailed examination of these printed versions, done especially by taking into consideration the earliest one and two manuscripts unknown to Milik in his meticulous edition of the passage and its English translation,⁷² elicits several observations; I will present in the following only those of them that are pertinent for my point:

1. 34

   [a] preserves a different version than the European ones; it uses the names ‘Azza’, alternatively ‘Azzah, elsewhere in the same text, and ‘Azza’el, instead of Shemhazai; this is the main reason for eliminating the hypothesis that the three later versions derived from this one.

2. 35

   [a] contains a mistake, dubbah, probably reflecting the constellation Ursa Major instead of a better version of ribbah, a maiden, occurring in the other versions.

3. 36

   [b] contains some accretions not found in [a], [c] and [d], thus precluding the possibility that it influenced [c] and [d].

4. 37

   The version in [b] is deficient at its beginning in comparison to the three other versions, again precluding it being the source of [c] and [d], which resemble [a] much more closely.

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We may therefore assume that a longer and better version which predates [a] was the origin of all the extant versions, stemming perhaps from Persia, as Józef T. Milik already suggested, provided we accept Ishtahar as the name of the maiden heroine in an early phase.⁷³ However, according to a long rendition of another version of this myth, as preserved by R. Barukh Cohen Ashkenazi, her name was ’Emzera‘, a name for the wife of Noah that occurs in the pseudepigrapha and only rarely afterwards.⁷⁴ This is the reason why I assume that there was a longer and earlier version in existence, probably stemming from late Antiquity, which was later edited in Persia and thus occurs in Pitron Torah.⁷⁵

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The variety of names attributed to the couples of names referring to the two fallen angels in Jewish literatures, especially in Ashkenaz—שמחזאל and עזא, שמחזאי and עזאל, שמחזי and עזזאל, עוזא and ,עזאל חזא and חזאל, שמחזאל and ,עוזיאל to give only some examples—preclude the possibility of positing one single source, leading us to the assumption of a stream of traditions which vary in matters of names, details, but also regarding any additional material, which could be quite significant.⁷⁶ In my opinion, the unilineal depiction of the emergence of medieval treatments of the fallen angels in Judaism, based on back-borrowing, is problematic; in its stead, I suggest turning to a multilinear theory, which allows for the existence of different traditions stemming from late Antiquity. This also needs a new way of reading some of the material available in the first millennium CE, like Bereshit Rabba, for example, which has been interpreted differently.⁷⁷ Such a new reading—I suggested in my monograph—enables us to posit the existence of different, perhaps oral, traditions that circulated for centuries in Jewish circles and which preserved much earlier material that surfaced later on in a written form, especially in medieval areas of Ashkenazi culture or, later on, among the Jews of Kurdistan.⁷⁸

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The underlying assumption of a monolithic Rabbinic culture that consistently avoided the myth of the fallen angels hardly reflects a cultural reality, since the elite culture was divided between the two main centers of Rabbinic culture, in Babylonia and in Palestine, and both elites hardly had significant control of the contents of Jewish folklore.⁷⁹ Moreover, flexibility in the treatments of important issues is evident even in the Rabbinic elite literature, as one learns also from Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s forthcoming study dealing with a cognate topic.⁸⁰ In fact, the Ashkenazi authors mentioned above, as well as R. Bahya ben Asher, are part of elite groups, and their texts do not appear to engage with the mythical aspects of the themes discussed above. The ’Aggadah, as preserved in R. Shlomo Simhah’s Sefer ha-Maskil, as well as the short Midrash quoted by R. Bahya, about Shemhaza’el, are just examples of surprises awaiting, dormant in manuscripts and in print, for a better understanding of a bigger picture of the metamorphoses of the ancient stream of traditions about the fallen angels that reverberated in some medieval writings.

Some Concluding Remarks

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With the passing of time, more frequent discussions on the myth of the fallen angels appeared in Jewish medieval and pre-modern literatures, far beyond the Ashkenazi regions in Spain and elsewhere, becoming more complex and interacting with other modes of thought, mainly of Greek and Hellenistic extraction, en vogue in some elite circles, either Muslim, Christian or Jewish, during the Middle Ages.⁸¹ Few negative reactions to the growing treatments of this myth are found in Jewish traditional sources up to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.⁸² The adverse attitude toward the Enlightenment is still visible in the scholarly treatments of the topic by the most eminent figure in the field of Midrash, Louis Ginzberg,⁸³ or by Bernard Bamberger.⁸⁴ Those and other ‘sober’ understandings of Rabbinism as a whole⁸⁵ created the space for the assumption of external formative factors that influenced medieval discussions which had a more mythical countenance as the result of influences stemming from non-Jewish texts. Gershom Scholem’s thesis about the formative impact of Gnosticism on early Kabbalah is the best known example on this topic.⁸⁶ After the collapse of this theory, room was made for another one. More recently, perhaps independently, Arthur I. Green and Peter Schäfer proposed to find in the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary in Western Europe the source of the allegedly new feminine understanding of the crucial Rabbinic term Shekhinah in Kabbalah.⁸⁷ Just as for the connections between Gnosticism and early Kabbalah, however, so far no solid evidence has been provided, and most of the discussion is circumstantial and overlooks earlier pertinent material.⁸⁸

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This is also the case underlying the “back-borrowing” of the ancient Jewish themes by Jewish medieval authors from hypothetical passages in a Greek-Christian source that allegedly mediated them.⁸⁹ All these cases rely on variations of the same underlying assumption, according to which there existed a rather monolithic Rabbinic religion, impoverished from a spiritual point of view and flourishing only when it was watered by external sources.⁹⁰ This could be the reason why some Jewish primary materials extant in Hebrew have been neglected, and thus also their possible impact or contribution to those medieval developments.⁹¹ This is also the case regarding some of the scholarly treatments of those topics, especially when written in Hebrew, which are sometimes systematically ignored since these types of sources are uncomfortable to general theories and assumptions; as a result, methodological divagations play a much more important role than careful analyses of texts.⁹² In this contribution, unlike my treatments in The Fall of the Angels,⁹³ I avoided the more methodological elaborations, referring to unacknowledged discussions found in primary sources and quoting them in the original when necessary.

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Let me point out, however, that inquiries of texts that testify to the existence of earlier traditions in a certain group do not necessarily prevent fruitful interactions in new circumstances, with a series of new ideas, which significantly broadened the intellectual scope of the earlier Jewish traditions.⁹⁴ This is also the case for the myth of the fallen angels.⁹⁵ The recurring insistence on the importance of one type of sources that influenced Jewish mysticism is too reductive an approach and does not serve just scholarly purposes.

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In general, many of the Christian ancient and medieval sources, concerned as they were with the fall of one major angel, Lucifer/Satan, and with the role that it may play in the religious life in the present as the tempting Devil, were much less concerned with the minor fallen angels.⁹⁶ Although the concern with the fallen angels is greater in early Christian sources than in contemporary Jewish sources, especially under the impact of some discussions in the New Testament, as many scholarly surveys show, it however declined in the Middle Ages,⁹⁷ while in most of the forms of Judaism it seems that the situation differs: The peak of discussions of this issue in Jewish sources is to be situated in the thirteenth century, while the concern with the crucial role played by the Devil in religious life remains rather marginal in most of the cases.⁹⁸ Those are two substantially different types of imaginaire, which parted ways and informed much of the respective attitudes to religious life.⁹⁹

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As a coda to the present analysis, let me point out that in many medieval Jewish discussions of the earlier sources, and especially in Zoharic literature, one of the two fallen angels, namely, the worse of them, is imagined as being bound in a remote underground place to which only persons who wish to be initiated in matters of witchcraft must travel.¹⁰⁰ This stark divergence between a free-floating and tempting devil, on the one hand, and a fixed one, imagined as bound in a specific location in the remote mountains of darkness, on the other hand, is formative for some aspects of the spiritual configurations of the two religions, especially in matters of asceticism, who parted ways on this important issue quite significantly, no less than regarding equally significant divergences in matters of theology.