traditionsPractical Kabbalahקַבָּלָה מַעֲשִׂית

Begin with what it is not. Halakha forbids divination and soothsaying, and the Talmud lists condemned divining practices at a frequency that historians read as evidence of how common they were. What became practical Kabbalah is, in Gershom Scholem's account, not an outgrowth of the speculative Kabbalah at all: historically a large part of its content predates the speculative branch and does not depend on it, being an agglomeration of the magical practices that developed in Judaism from Talmudic times through the Middle Ages, in which the doctrine of the Sefirot hardly ever played a decisive role. Amulet-making using the esoteric names of angels dates from Talmudic times.

The split is dated. By the beginning of the 14th century the mystical and the magical had been separated into Kabbalah Iyyunit and Kabbalah Ma'asit, and the great majority of Kabbalistic writing thereafter belongs to the contemplative branch; most of the practical branch's writings stayed unpublished. Abraham Abulafia condemned it outright. A practical tradition flourished in Spain in the second half of the 15th century around a text called Sepher ha-Mashiv, whose practitioners Moshe Idel describes as interested in demonology and in coercive incantations to summon demons, angels and even God, in order to hasten the Messianic Age; Joseph Della Reina's failure at that, with his students, was held up by later Kabbalists as a warning.

Then the prohibition that matters most. In 16th-century Safed, Isaac Luria opposed Kabbalah Ma'asit and forbade his students to write amulets, developing instead a form of exorcism that moved the techniques from the practical side to the speculative. His reasoning was purity: without the Temple and the ashes of the Red Heifer to purify with, pursuit of the practical realm by a person with an impure body is very detrimental. Because Luria is the central teacher of modern Kabbalah and the foundation of later Hasidism, that is not an opinion in a dispute — it is the position with authority behind it. The medieval Rabbi Yaakov ben Moshe Levi Moelin had already put a different objection: the person using a formula may lack the grounding, and the rite would then do nothing.

It continued anyway, at the border, and the people who continued it are named. The Baal Shem healers worked between the practical and the meditative, amulets included: Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm (1550–1583), the Baal Shem of London (1708–1782). Yisrael Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760) began as one, used amulets, and by the end of his life wrote only his own name on them — Yisrael ben Sara, Yisrael ben Eliezer — and no names of God. The Vilna Gaon recorded that he had attempted a golem in his youth and stopped when he perceived an impurity in it. In the 1750s Jacob Emden accused Jonathan Eybeschütz of being a secret Sabbatean, chiefly on his reading of amulets Eybeschütz had written; an amulet was the evidence in a dispute that split European Jewry. Rabbi Hirsch Fraenkel was sentenced to prison in Germany in 1713 for owning a library said to hold oaths and amulets for overcoming demons, seeing the future and speaking to the dead.

And there is a permission inside the prohibition, which is why the tradition never quite closed. The Talmud mentions charms used for healing, and a wide range of magical cures were sanctioned by rabbis; the ruling that any practice actually producing a cure was not to be dismissed opened the door that segullot — folk remedies — have walked through in Jewish communities across time and geography ever since.

Inference — two things follow for an atlas. First, this is the only tradition here whose own central teacher forbade its objects and whose objects went on being made; that is worth stating flatly rather than resolving. Second, a tradition whose writings mostly stayed unpublished cannot be described from its writings, so this record describes its argument, its people and its dates, and leaves the contents of the amulets where its authorities left them.

Structure only. A name — divine, angelic, or a combination worked from letters — is written by a person the client trusts, on parchment prepared to the standards Jewish law sets for sacred writing, or cut into silver, and then enclosed and worn or hung. Who may write one is exactly the contested question above: the elite, under conditions the tradition calls holy and pure, in one account; nobody, in Luria's. Hasidism displaced the whole apparatus with a different mechanism — the tzaddik altering the divine will through deveikut, cleaving to God — which Dov Ber of Mezeritch was at pains to distinguish from a magical process, though some Hasidic leaders kept using traditional amulets at the border.

Two distinct presents, and they should not be run together. One is the continuing use of segullot and of written amulets in Jewish communities, unbroken and largely private. The other is the retail red string, popularly attached to Kabbalah and sold to pilgrims and tourists in the Old City of Jerusalem and, from the late 1990s, to celebrities outside Israel — a wave usually linked to Philip Berg's Kabbalah Centre. The Torah, Halacha and the Kabbalistic texts contain no requirement to tie one, and Michael Laitman's published position is that practical Kabbalah has no use for red strings. Both facts belong in the same paragraph; neither is this atlas's verdict.