Gondelman, Mark
Junior Fellow: October 2019–September 2020
Research Project: The Ethical and Political Dimensions of Abraham Miguel Cardozo’s Mystical Scepticism
Abraham Miguel Cardozo, a prominent Kabbalist of converso descent, exhibited a peculiar mixture of two types of scepticism. He exhorted his readers that to attain redemption, they had to surrender their futile and misleading attempts to know the unknowable God of Philosophers, which he called the First Cause. At the same time, he claimed that redemption depended on Jews eliminating doubts about the God of Israel. This would enable the struggling God of Israel to incarnate the First Cause and redeem Israel from bondage. Such an inconsistent approach indicates a profound split in Cardozo’s system: he asserts the utter unknowability of the God of the Philosophers and its fundamental difference from the God of Israel. At the same time, he claims that the God of the Philosophers can become known through belief in the God of Israel, thereby indicating their ontological identity.
To provide a fuller understanding of the configuration of Cardozo’s ideas and their inconsistency, this project will investigate his intellectual background, the epistemological basis of his theology, and its ethical and political implications. Cardozo wrote a great deal about the boundaries of knowability that produce a different solution every time to the problem of the God of the Philosophers versus the God of Israel. Cardozo saw himself as a messianic figure whose mission was to restore true knowledge of God.
Mark Gondelman is currently a doctoral candidate at NYU. His dissertation project is about the Sabbatian mystic, philosopher, and messiah Abraham Miguel Cardozo (1627–1706), exploring early modern epistemological inconsistency in his biographical, Kabbalistic, and philosophical writings.