“So the first kabbalist was European, not Middle Eastern — that’s interesting.”  Amund is a communications consultant from Oslo, and he’s trying to understand why I’m here in Catalonia.  It’s complicated, I’m thinking, as I search for a simple way to explain – at least he’s heard of kabbalah, and knows enough to link it to Jewish history.

Of course Jewish mysticism, what we now generally equate with kabbalah, is much older than medieval Europe, and did start with the Jewish people in the biblical land of Israel. But the cosmology and typology that is now associated with kabbalah, the Tree of Life – that famous diagram with its circles linked in various ways — and its ten sefirot, the idea of triadic relationship as the template of creation, the notion of the Shechinah as the feminine aspect of the divine, all these did indeed originate in the 12^th and 13^th century in what is now Languedoc, but was then part of the Crown of Aragon and under the control of Barcelona.

I’m slowly making my way to the neighborhood of Rabbi Isaac the Blind, considered to be the father of kabbalah. Known as Saginahar, which is Aramaic for “filled with great light”, Isaac lived in the small town of Posquieres, outside Montpellier, in the 12^th and 13^th century. His father, Rabbi Abraham Ben David, known by his acronym as the Rabad, was a famous Talmudic commentator who established an important academy in Posquieres. Isaac inherited the leadership of the academy, and established the first important circle of kabbalists among his students.

For almost a year I searched in vain to locate Posquieres on maps from various eras. Although I knew it was located in the western part of what was then called Provence; although I’d read the account of Benjamin of Tudela, early medieval traveler from Iberia who made it all the way to Kazakhstan and back, who described the Jewish center as larger and more important than the one in Montpellier; I never found it. Finally, almost by accident, as I was reading a tour guide, I learned that the town changed its name after it became part of the French kingdom, and is still known as Vauvert.

I’m on my way to Vauvert, by way of Montpellier, to see what remains of its illustrious Jewish past, when it was called Posquieres.  I’ve walked the stones of the medieval Jewish quarter in Girona, northwest of Barcelona, the quarter that was discovered by accident during house renovations and then meticulously restored by the Catalan and Spanish governments. There’s a museum and research institute on the site of the old synagogue, named for Girona’s most famous Jewish son, Rabbi Moses Ben Nachman, known as Nachmanides or the Ramban. In Girona he also goes by his Catalan name, Bonastruc da Porta.

It was all almost a millennium ago, and there have been no Jews in Girona since the expulsion of 1492. The kabbalistic circle in Girona, the first in the Iberian peninsula, was the precursor of the great flowering that resulted in the Zohar. Few know that the teachings of this circle came from Isaac the Blind, that the great flowering of Iberian kabbalah actually began in what is now Languedoc in southwestern France, was then known as Provence, is still called the ‘Provencal tradition’ in the Jewish world.

I’m on the trail of Isaac the Blind, known as Saginahar, the father of kabbalah.  I’m also on a  kind of personal quest, for there’s a story in my mother’s family that we are descended from Saginahar, that the family name Saginur came from ‘a famous kabbalist.’  My mother was the sole survivor of her large European family, all killed in various ‘aktions’ in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, at that time Poland. Only very distant cousins, many times removed, who’d earlier emigrated to North America or Israel, now remain to repeat this story.

Journalists require ‘authentication’ of a story. Anthropologists extrapolate from artifacts. Historians work with documentation – but I’m told by experts in the field that French archives only started to be kept in the 13th century, and even then they were mainly Christian.  And anyway, the Jews were expelled from France in the 14^th century – anything I find in Montpellier or Vauvert, like the famous mikveh or ritual bath in Montpellier, will likely be from a later Jewish period.

It’s complicated. I’m slowly uncovering the tangled and confusing history, via tradition and scholarship. Does anything material remain; can anything be ‘documented’?  Will I find more than a few stones or, if I’m lucky, a commemorative plaque?

(second of two parts)