A Castilian debate about the aims and limits of theurgic practice: rationalizing incest taboos in the Zohar, Moses de León, and Joseph of Hamadan

This study compares the rationales of the incest prohibitions in the Zohar’s homilies on the Torah and Moses de León’s Book of the Pomegranate (Sefer ha-Rimmon) with accounts of the same laws in Joseph of Hamadan’s Rationales of the Negative Commandments (Sefer Ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot lo taʿaseh), a set of texts composed in the same region during the roughly the same period. Reading these texts together reveals a heretofore unnoticed dispute between the attitudes of de León and the Zohar, on the one hand, and Hamadan, on the other, concerning the erotic parameters of theurgy. These texts show how Castilian kabbalists engaged in an intensive process of negotiation with respect to the novel theurgical framework they offered for the commandments.