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The thirteenth-century Jewish mystical classic Sefer ha-Zohar (The
Book of Splendor), commonly known as the Zohar, took shape against
a backdrop of rising anti-Judaism in Spain. Mystical Resistance
reveals that in addition to the Zohar's role as a theological
masterpiece, its kabbalistic teachings offer passionate and
knowledgeable critiques of Christian majority culture. During the
Zohar's development, Christian friars implemented new missionizing
strategies, forced Jewish attendance at religious disputations, and
seized and censored Jewish books. In response, the kabbalists who
composed the Zohar crafted strategically subversive narratives
aimed at diminishing Christian authority. Hidden between the lines
of its fascinating stories, the Zohar makes daring assertions that
challenge themes important to medieval Christianity, including
Christ's Passion and ascension, the mendicant friars' new
missionizing strategies, and Gothic art's claims of Christian
dominion. These assertions rely on an intimate and complex
knowledge of Christianity gleaned from rabbinic sources, polemic
literature, public Church art, and encounters between Christians
and Jews. Much of the kabbalists' subversive discourse reflects
language employed by writers under oppressive political regimes,
treading a delicate line between public and private, power and
powerlessness, subservience and defiance. By placing the Zohar in
its thirteenth-century context, Haskell opens this text as a rich
and fruitful source of Jewish cultural testimony produced at the
epicenter of sweeping changes in the relationship between medieval
Western Europe's Christian majority and its Jewish minority.
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