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Colours and Their Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Gersbom Scholem

Extract

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With this area of the second triad contrasts above all the last sefirah, in which all these colours, as well as the various nuances of white-red, red-white, and a mixture of both, flash all together or one after the other, as they did already in Azriel and often in the Zohar. Since she represents the divine power closest to the created world—in part even immanent in it, she is the richest in symbolism, and in colour symbolism as well. Here the Kabbalah returns, in mystical correlations and transformations, to older motifs, some of which we have already discussed above.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 28 , Issue 109 , March 1980 , pp. 64 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

* The first part of this article appeared in Diogenes No 108.

75 See e.g. Azriel § 9; also in Sod ha-Sefiroth, p. 133b, and Cordovero, § 3-end; he assigns to the 9th sefirah, Jesod, some of the sapphire colour which he calls transparent.

76 As to details of the symbolism of the 10th sefirah, see my Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit (1962), pp. 152-188, also in the Eranos Yearbook 21, 1953, pp. 67-104; however, I didn't enter into the colour symbolism.

77 See Talmud Shekalim VI, end of Halakha I and parallels.

78 See my Ursprung und Anfänge, pp. 253-4, as well as On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism.

79 Tikkune Zohar (introduction), leaf 14b. These four colours are mentioned already in the description of Paradise in the main part of the Zohar II, 209b, as the colours of the sky over Paradise. The Zohar ascribes the same colours to the pillars which join the Paradise of the Blessed to the superterrestrial one. See also Zohar Khadash, leaf 3a (Mathnithin).

80 The interpretation comes from the Tract. Jebamoth 49b; the two mirrors are degrees of prophetic vision.

81 Moses de León, Shekel ha-Kodesh, London 1911, p. 123, and Zohar I, 97a, 147.

82 Zohar I, 226a.

83 Massekheth Derekh Erets, ed. M. Higger, Brooklyn 1935, pp. 150-51. The Kabbalist Azriel included this midrash in his collection of cosmologically significant Aggadoth: Perush Aggadoth, ed. Is. Tishdy, Jerus. 1943, p. 60.

84 Zohar II, 139a and 149b.

85 Bahir, § 62 and 65.

86 Bereshith Rabbah 15, § 7; see also the forbidden fruit and its nature in L. Ginzberg The Legend of the Jews V (1925), pp. 97-98.

87 See G. Vajda Le commentaire d'Ezra de Gérone sur le Cantique des Canti ques, Paris 1969, p. 67; Azriel ed. Tishby, p. 36; Zohar I, 85a; II, 122a and III 286b.

88 The image goes back to tract. Ta'anith 29b where the field in Gen. 27: 27 is interpreted as apple field. Azriel loc cit., p. 35, Zohar II, 60b; III 84a; Midrash ne'elam for Ruth in Zohar Khadash, leaf 85 c. In Isaak Luria's famous hymn the mystic enters on Sabbath Eve the area of the "holy apple field."

89 Zohar I, 71b; Tikkune Zohar Nr. 69, leaf 110a. We find the same interpre tation of this verse as referring to the penis in various versions in Talmudic sources, but with another motivation.

90 So writes unequivocably Isaak ben Jacob Kohen in his "Perush ha-Merkabah" Tarbiz II (1931) p. 200; and for further explanation of this expression using the colours of the rainbow, see his disciple Moses of Burgos, Tarbiz V (1934), p. 183.

91 Zohar I, 18a/b. See also my above-mentioned note (43) Inselbuch, pp. 75-76. Likewise in the Zohar III, 215a, 230b; Tikkune Zohar N. 6, leaf 24b, as well as Bakhiah ben Asher's commentary to Genesis 9:13 (ed. Venice 1544), leaf 20d. In the Tikkunim these three colours of the rainbow are also associated with the three colours in the eye, and with the three primeval sounds as well, which, according to the Kabbalistic idea, the shofar brings forth from the primeval language matter.

92 See latest edition of Cordovero's Commentary to the Tikkunim, Jerusalem 1972, I, leaf 59a.

93 Cod. Hebr. 305, leaf 59b-62b. The authorship can be deduced from a close relationship of style and of many details, particularly at the beginning and at the end, to Gikatilla's Sha'are Orah and his other works.

94 "Absolute" here as contrast to the relative mercy, the synthesis of love and discipline, which is ascribed to the central sefirah of "Tif'ereth."

95 Cordovero mentions this opinion, but he rejects it.

96 The author ends his observations: "Thus you can deduce from every passage in the Torah in which appears one of these colours, from which sefirah it originates. And where two colours are mixed together you will know which sefirah is here mixed with the last one, Malkhuth, and manifests itself through it." (leaf 62b).

97 See e.g. Zohar I, 41b-45a; also in the commentaries to Ezechiel's Merkabah vision; we possess the most important and original of them in the Zohar Khadash, in Moses de León's Mishkan ha-Eduth, as well as in some of the writings of Jacob ben Jacob ha-Koen, his brother Isaac Kohen, Moses of Burgos and Joseph Ghikatilla. The latter, in his essay Sod ha-Khashmal, in the collection Artsei Levanon (Venice 1601, leaf 41b), speaks of the symbolism of the seven coloures of the radiant "light" (Nogah) of the Merkabah, and their mixtures. He mentions the existence in the Merkabah of seventy-two nuances of white colour alone. I shall only refer to another passage in the Zohar II, 92a, about colour symbolism. In a dissertation about the Sabbath it speaks of two pearls, set in a buckle, which shine on this day, one colourless and one in seven colours from red to white. It means probably the light of the Bireah and of the seven lower sefiroth gathered in the last one. Both these sefiroth play always a particularly important role in the Sabbath symbolism.

98 See the strange passage in Abraham Halevy's Massoreth ha-Khokhmah, written ca. 1490, quoted in the collection Zekher Nathan, ed. Coronel, Vienna 1872, leaf 1b. Perhaps I should mention that so far I haven't found anything like it in any of Abraham Abulafia's writings about the theory and practice of meditation, where we could rightly expect citations about the symbolism of light in such a connection.

99 I mean the passage in tract. Kethuboth III b. in which the contradiction between these two verses is discussed for the first time and the question asked: It is at all possible for man to "cleave" unto the Shekhinah, i.e. communicate with God? Our master's answer to a question leading to the very border of mysticism is quite an anticlimax of sobriety: "one should marry one's daughter to a Talmudic scholar."

100 This comes from tract. Joma 21b.

101 In the continuation of this story (Zohar I, 51b), the interpretation of the blue colour as representing the death principle, is based on the afore-mentioned Talmud passage (see Footnote 21), according to which in our dreams blue represents an unlucky or death-presaging omen.

102 Zohar I, 50b-51a. The translation of this tale in Ernst Müller's Der Sohar, das heilige Buch der Kabbala, Vienna 1932, pp. 321-323, is misrepre sentative, because every time the Aramaic original says "have a part in" or "link up with," the translator simplifies both expressions into "unite."

103 This passage is to be found in a voluminous, title-less manuscript about the ten sefiroth (written before 1290), preserved in the Munich Handschrift Hebr. 47, 373b—376b. In his Shekel ha Kodesh, p. 124, Moses de León mentions this passage in a short, concise sentence. I have published part of it in my essay on this Munich manuscript Eine unbekannte, mystische Schrift des Mose de León, Monatschrift für Gesch. und Wiss. des Judentums 71 (1927), pp. 120-21.

104 About the ambivalence of the last sefirah, i.e. the Shekhinah, see Scholem Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit, pp. 183-186.

105 Zohar I, 51b, speaking of the blue colour in dreams. In I, 154b the "Tree of Death" is already interpreted as a symbol of the "other side" as well, i.e. of the domain of the daemonic.