Sepher ha-Peli’ah (Attributed to Rabbi Nechunyah ben Hakaneh)

Sepher ha-Peliah, on the Torah portion of Bereshith, was first published in Koretz (Korzec) in 1784. For many years it, together with its companion volume Sepher Ha-Kaneh, were attributed to R. Avigdor Kara of Prague. Of late, scholars tend to attribute both works to an anonymous Byzantine (Greek) author. Sepher ha-Peli’ah was held in high esteem by the sixteenth-century kabbalists of Safed. This is evidenced by the recent discovery of a fragment of a lengthy commentary on Sepher ha-Peli’ah by R. Moses ben Joseph Trani (MaBIT) (JNUL ms. 8º 5637). See facsimile in Meir Benayahu, Yosef Behiri (Jerusalem, 1991), p. 133. In 1980, Israel Ta-Shema published a groundbreaking article concerning the origin of Sepher ha-Peli’ah. Based on the fact that the prayers therein follow the Romaniote (Byzantine or Greek rite)—coupled with the fact that the first authors to cite from Sepher ha-Peli’ah were Jews of the region, R. Elijah Mizrachi (Responsa R. Elijah Mizrachi) and R. Moses of Kiev (Shoshan Sodoth)—Ta-Shema was also able to establish a Byzantine provenance. That would make the date of composition mid-fifteenth century. See I. Ta-Shema, “Where were the Books ha-Kaneh and Ha-Pliah Composed?” in: Studies in the History of Jewish Society in the Middle Ages and in the Modern Period (Jacob Katz Festschrift) (Jerusalem, 1980), pp. 56-63. In that same year (1980), Michal Kushnir-Oron submitted to Hebrew University her doctoral dissertation, “The Kabbalistic Books ha-Peliah and ha-Qanne: Elements, Religious and Social Views, and Literary Design.” It is recorded that the only books of kabbalah studied by the pseudo-messiah Shabbetai Zevi in his formative years in Izmir were Zohar and Sepher ha-Kaneh (the collective name for both Sepher ha-Kaneh and Sepher ha-Peli’ah). Prof. Moshe Idel finds this of enormous significance because Sepher ha-Peli’ah contains an entire work of Abraham Abulafia, Sepher Gan Na’ul. It also quotes verbatim from Abulafia’s Sepher Hayei ha-Nefesh a lengthy discussion about the nature of prophecy, the combinations of the letters of the various Divine names and their pronunciation as a way to be in contact with God. Shabbetai Zevi’s infamous act of blasphemy, for which he was excommunicated, was pronouncing aloud in the synagogue the four-lettered Divine name. M. Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven, 1998), pp. 185-187. Perhaps for this reason, Sepher ha-Peli’ah enjoyed great popularity in Sabbatian circles, as attested to by the many Sabbatian manuscripts of the work. See Meir Benayahu, The Shabbatean Movement in Greece (Jerusalem, 1971-1977), pp. 350-354 (Hebrew). A new edition of Sepher ha-Pe’iah (in a set called “Torath ha-Kaneh”) was published in Jerusalem, 1997. Our ms. reaches as far as the bottom of the first column on p. 655 of the printed edition (out of a total of 670 double-columned pp.). We are also missing the author’s introduction (“Said Elkanah son of Yeroham son of Avigdor…”) which runs a couple of pages.