On the Censorship of Anti-Christian Polemic in Early Kabbalah: In Memoriam: Gershon David Hundert (1946–2023)

Abstract: Focusing mostly on texts from Castile and the corpus of Abraham Abulafia, previous studies have explored how representations of Jesus, Mary, Rome, Christians, Christianity, and Christendom function in the esoteric symbolism of Kabbalah, its ontology of evil, and its eschatology. Some studies have touched on the subject of anti-Christian polemic in the earliest texts from Provence and Catalonia, but evidence adduced for these contexts has been too subtle to demonstrate historicity. The present study reaches into the reserves of censored knowledge to recover and contextualize the earliest unambiguous record of anti-Christian polemic in the history of Kabbalah—restoring early evidence from Catalonia, from the writings of Ezra of Gerona, and coordinating it with what is already known of attitudes toward Christianity in Castile. In so doing, the study examines the role of censorship in shaping the longitudinal transmission of kabbalistic approaches to Christianity from an earlier phase than heretofore established.