Shituf : Primordial Partnership as Ontological Structure and Discursive Strategy in Medieval Spain

This study examines the central category of shituf in the medieval kabbalistic treatise, Ma‘arekhet ha-elohut . I argue that shituf is fundamental to the metaphysics of the Ma‘arekhet and demonstrate its significance to the hermeneutics, sefirotic theosophy, doctrine of emanation, and cosmology of this seminal work. This reflects its importance in the anonymous author’s historical context, even as his usage betrays undeniable idiosyncratic transvaluations that distinguish it from its functions in other contemporary texts—in the halakhic writings of his milieu, in Tibonine translations of medieval philosophical texts, and in the polemical writings of his apparent teacher, Shlomo Ibn Aderet. By comparing and contrasting its meanings in these variegated literary milieus, I expose the unusual discourse of unity found in the Ma‘arekhet , which betrays the author’s apparent intention to shift the orientation of the key term from its dominant usage in the era. Despite the novelty with which the author deploys the term shituf , I argue that polemical and halakhic associations lurk behind it and cast his unusual approach to the question of divine unity in sharp relief. The distinctive use of shituf in the Ma‘arekhet thus reflects a fraught moment in the early history of kabbalah, in which a kabbalist chose to deal with the issue of divine unity in a manner all his own. This examination thus provides a heretofore unexposed vantage point for the current reassessment of the intersectionalities of philosophy, theology, religious polemics, and kabbalah in this period.