A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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in order that what he was seeking by means of finger nails moistened with some sort of sacred oil or crism, or of the smooth polished surface of a basin, might be made manifest to him by information imparted by us. And so after pronouncing names which by the horror they inspired seemed to me, child though I was, to belong to demons, and after administering oaths of which, at God’s instance, I know nothing, my companion asserted that he saw certain misty figures, but dimly, while I was so blind to all this that nothing appeared to me except the nails or basin and the other objects I had seen there before. As a consequence I was adjudged useless for such purposes, and, as though I impeded the sacrilegious practices, I was condemned to have nothing to do with such things, and as often as they decided to practice their art I was banished as if an obstacle to the whole procedure. So propitious was God to me even at that early age.192
The Pietists might likewise have observed captoptromantic divination firsthand, but they could equally have been exposed to discussions of “natural magic” in the Hebrew translations of Christian scientific encyclopedias that circulated during their time period. Y. Tzvi Langermann, for example, has called attention to a Hebrew translation of William of Conches’s Summa Philosophica, fragments of which are still extant in two medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts.193 Interestingly, the extant sections deal, among other topics, with “natural magic,” including various methods of divination and augury. While denigrating divination via demonic adjuration, what the Pietists would have called ov ve-yidoni, this text described matter-of-factly the mechanics of hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, and so on.194 If the Pietists read texts like this one, they would have been exposed not only to specific magical techniques, but also to the same ethos of magic as a natural, though occult, sphere of inquiry that they manifest in their discussions of magical “remembrances.”
While the precise means by which the Pietists absorbed sarei kos u-bohen thus remains open to question, we are on firmer ground when it comes to their knowledge of another divinatory method. We have seen above that the Secretum secretorum, erroneously attributed to Aristotle (“the Philosopher”), was perhaps the most important medieval “book of secrets,” and that its magical contents were consumed by clerics and university teachers alongside more mainstream scientific and philosophical writings. Given the centrality of this text to the culture inhabited by the Pietists’ “philosophers,” it is thus noteworthy that the Pietists seem to have had direct access to the Secretum secretorum, and to have incorporated some of its contents into their own theological tracts. In a section of the Secretum secretorum dealing with the ways in which a ruler can be guaranteed success in battle, the author (“Aristotle”) counsels the addressee (“Alexander the Great”):
Know, Alexander, that this is the secret which I would perform for you whenever you went out to confront your enemies … and it is one of the divine secrets with which God has graced me. I have tested its truthfulness, and discovered its benefit, and succeeded on account of it…. [The secret is] that you should never go out to confront your enemies without first ensuring you will defeat them, by using this [method of] calculation. If the sum [you arrive at] does not favor you, calculate using your servants’ names, and send out against the [opposing] army whoever results in a winning calculation. You should calculate the name of your opponent and your own name using this system, and carefully guard the sum you arrive at for each [combatant]. Afterwards, divide the sum you have arrived at for each person by nine. Whatever remainder of less than nine is left over for each name should be … investigated according to the sums I have written for you.195
The Secretum secretorum here provides a system for calculating the names of the combatants in a battle, and hence for predicting the outcome of that battle. The alphanumerical sums arrived at for each name should be divided by nine, and the remainders should be compared with one another. This passage is followed by an extensive chart that contains every possible permutation, revealing who will succeed if a person whose name generates a certain remainder confronts a person whose name generates a different remainder—thus “one and eight, the eight will defeat the one; one and seven, the one will defeat the seven,” and so on.
The Pietists betray their familiarity with this system several times in their oeuvre. In Hokhmat ha-Nefesh, for example, a discussion of the properties of the number nine leads Eleazar to the following aside:
Also, in the “sums of the philosophers” (heshbonot shel filosofim), they calculate by nines, and determine the future based on the remainder. When comparing two similar things, you follow the higher remainder, and when comparing two dissimilar things, you follow the lower one…. What is meant by two similar things? Like two Jews, who have the same faith and the same Torah, or two gentiles who have the same [religion]—when you calculate the name of one of them and divide by nine, and six remains, and [when you divide] the other [name] five remains, then if the two of them fight with one another, whichever fighter has a higher remainder will be victorious. But if a gentile fights with a Jew, the one with a remainder of five, that is, a lower one, will be victorious…. Thus claim the philosophers.196
In Sefer Gematriyot, Judah utilizes the same system for determining the outcome of a different sort of battle—that between a husband and wife. When the numerical equivalents of the names of a man and woman are added together, then divided by nine, each possible remainder is equated with a certain astrological outcome, such that the future success or failure of the match can be determined in advance.197
The “sums of the philosophers,” then, were adapted from the Secretum secretorum, a work attributed to “the Philosopher” (Aristotle), and one in vogue among contemporary “philosophers,” scholars learned in natural philosophy and occult sciences. Of course, the Pietists were enamored of gematriyah in general, and so a system that prognosticated on the basis of alphanumerical equivalences must have particularly piqued their interest. But the fact that in this instance, as in their use of sarei kos u-bohen, they sought out divinatory practices specifically from among “the philosophers” indicates that their predilection for gematriyah is not a sufficient explanation for the presence of this practice in their writings. Indeed, while the Secretum secretorum was translated into Hebrew during the medieval period (as Sod ha-Sodot), the earliest attestations of the latter are from the early to mid-fourteenth century,198 while the manuscript of Sefer Gematriyot is likely from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth.199 Thus, the citations from the Secretum secretorum in the Pietistic works may well be the earliest on record. Alternatively, the Pietists could have been exposed to the contents of Secretum secretorum even before it had been translated into Hebrew, or at least into the version that has survived. (Indeed, it is striking to note that Eleazar titled his own magnum opus Sodei Razya, the “Secret of Secrets.”)
While oral transmission of these contents seems most plausible, it is not impossible that the Pietists had access to, and could have read, Latin or vernacular texts of the Secretum secretorum—which, as we have seen above, were extremely widespread. After all, Sefer Hasidim is replete with tales of Jews who come into possession of grimoires, collections of magical spells,200 and there is some evidence that certain Ashkenazic Jews in the Pietists’ circles knew Latin and even read Christian texts. According to one exemplum in Sefer Hasidim: “A certain man told his friend, ‘I dressed like a priest and passed myself off as a gentile’ [during a period of persecution] so that they would think he was a priest and not hurt him. Another said, ‘I studied Christian books (sefer galhim),’ and when he was among the gentiles he would recite hymns in their language.”201 Casual references to Pietistic knowledge of Latin, and of details of Christian belief and observance, appear in other passages as well. Thus, Judah is well aware of the fact that Christians recite Psalms in their liturgy and is troubled by the fact that “the book of Tehilim, which David composed for the sake of heaven, and transmitted to the Levites to sing over the sacrifices [in the Temple], are used by [Christian] priests, who recite them before their idolatry.”202 Yet Judah himself unselfconsciously refers to mizmorim (chapters of Tehilim) as “Psalms”203 (שמלש). Further evidence from Sefer Hasidim indicates that Christian maidservants would sing Christian hymns (shir shel avodah zarah) as lullabies to the Jewish