From Andalusia to Shanghai: Ariel Bension’s Cross-Cultural Mysticism and Cultural-Political Creativity

This article examines Ariel Bension’s reinterpretation of Jewish mysticism as a resource for modern Sephardic cultural-political renewal. Focusing on The Zohar in Moslem and Christian Spain , it argues that Bension situated the Zohar within the intercultural world of medieval Andalusia in order to recover the Eastern dimensions of Judaism and challenge Eurocentric accounts of Jewish intellectual history. Yet Bension’s engagement with Andalusia was not merely antiquarian or historical. It formed the intellectual foundation for his activity in Shanghai, where his encounter with the writings of Rabindranath Tagore enabled him to articulate a modern Jewish ethics of dialogue, spiritual universality, and cultural mediation. The article therefore reads Bension’s engagement with Islamic philosophy, especially Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān , and his reflections on Tagore as parts of a single intellectual trajectory: the transformation of Sephardic mysticism into a public language of intercultural ethics. Bension’s originality lies not in the simple identification of affinities between Jewish, Islamic, and Indian mystical traditions, but in his modern cultural-political use of these affinities as the basis for Hebrew cultural renewal and Jewish participation in a wider spiritual conversation between East and West.