Recipes for Pure Mind: The Ethics of Mind–Body Control & Kabbalistic Textual Practices in Early Modern Ashkenaz

Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century manuscripts and printed books with kabbalistic content often contain short handwritten additions with guidelines for the proper preparation for study and other ritual performances. These texts frequently take a textual format of short recipes. Compilations of such recipes concerned with welfare of men and psycho- and somatosensory preparation for ritual became standard in self-standing recipe books, be them handwritten or printed, in early modern Ashkenaz. In such compilations, recipes frequently prescribed meditations on divine names (e.g. to repel sexual temptations or prevent night pollutions, in the Lurianic theory deemed impure and of huge metaphysical consequences) and so became an important tool to shape kabbalistic chastity and decorum. Handwritten recipes, be them as marginalia or in the form of compilations, afforded flexible adaptations of kabbalistic knowledge—an extension or reduction of its theoretical frameworks. Such recipes testify to the processes of the scientification of religious knowledge, adding to the popularisation of the practical facet of kabbalah.

This paper focuses on how volumes of/with recipes functioned as practical material texts that could circulate across a variety of reading audiences. Premodern knowledge discourses considered practical textuality in such a way that resulted in practical differences in textual and codicological formats; these effected distinct and gendered reading practices. Various formats of kabbalistic recipes thus added to the wide-spreading and fashioning of Lurianic-pietistic ideals of conduct that affected different layers of Jewish society. Rather than understanding kabbalistic recipes as cultural products associated with any one layer of social or intellectual hierarchy, this paper will propose to interpret them as practical and material texts that were used across the spectrum of literacy in early modern Ashkenaz.