Musings on S&P and kabbalah. On the subject of SandP and kabbalah - it is constantly reiterated that S&P tradition is anti-kabbalistic. I don't buy it. Too many important Spanish rabbis were kabbalists. Even so-called anti-kabbalistic rabbis appear to have embraced kabbalah. For example Jacob ben Aaron Sasportas who was virulently anti-Sabbatean, was also apparently a kabbalist of some note. You see the same confluence in other traditions - for example, the anti-Hasidic text of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin is a very kabbalistic text, yet is anti-Hassidic - and I see a strong parallel here with the approach of Sasportas - embracing kabbalah, but rejecting certain strands of thought. Then you have key Spanish texts like Rabbi Yosef ben Abraham Gikatilla's Shangarei Orah - whose kabbalistic world-view underpins the theology of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov. So - I remain on the fence about this. Anti Shabbatean did not,it appears,equate with anti-kabbalistic viewpoints. To say that Amsterdam and London rejected kabbalistic thinking wholesale seems to me to maybe have happened quite recently, and then this worldview, once adopted, has been projected back into the past, as though it was always thus....Comments?