Isaac Luria (Arizal)
View on Noahides
- Main article Judaism and Other Religions
The predominant source for these sentiments is the writings of the Kabbalist rabbi Isaac Luria who stated that gentiles do not have souls. Israel is locked into a cosmic battle of Kabbalistic redemption and earthly gentile impurity. Our continuous sins cause us to descend into the shells instead of redeeming ourselves.
For Luria, the historical situation of exile is a manifestation of the cosmic reality of rupture and evil. The gentiles are not merely the Other, or the anti-Israel, as in the less metaphysical approaches of Rashi; they are the same stuff as the evil at the beginning of creation. The internal logic of this myth leads to the radical notion – unsupported by classical Jewish texts – that non-Jews have no souls.
While the influence of Luria on subsequent Jewish history has been overstated, his notion that non-Jews lack souls was a significant, and dangerous, innovation. It moved the exclusivity of Rashi to a new and potentially dangerous realm.
Dualism has room for rereading
This dualism needs to be reread from our vantage of connection to the classic texts.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes dealt with these texts by claiming that rabbinic texts were written in a binary black and white, good and evil style for didactic purposes.[15] While this is a fine approach for dealing with rabbinic texts and it should be developed further, the demonic dualism and the dehumanization texts also need to be addressed.
An example of the possibilities of rereading can be seen in the history of the statements in Tanya written by R. Schneur Zalman of Liady, the founder of the Chabad Hasidic dynasty. He clearly states at the beginning of his work Likkute Amarim (Tanya) that, as presented in Lurianic writings, gentiles do not have souls.[16]
Nevertheless, this dualistic statement was transformed by later generations of Chabad thinkers into a historical inclusivism, in which the gentiles today are part of the messianic progress; or into a hierarchal inclusivism, in which the gentiles have greater needs to purify themselves.[17]
