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R. J. ZWI WERBLOWSKY (1924-2015):

THE SPARK OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION

In a joking reference to his long-standing involvement in the

study of Kabbalah, his adult children affectionately called him
among themselves The Spark. Zwi Werblowsky, who passed away
in Jerusalem on 9 July 2015, seemed to have a constant spark in his
eyes. During his lectures, one was under the impression that his
eyes were not scanning the room but the whole world, past and
present, in search of examples and counter examples for the
phenomena he had just been describing to his students, covering
the whole spectrum of religious beliefs and myths, ritual practices
and traditions. On the campus of the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Zwi Werblowsky cut for decades quite an impressive,
singular figure: tall, elegant, he was never to be caught without a
red carnation in his lapel -except, of course, when donning his
kimono at home. (I doubt very much whether any one else in Israel
was following that old world habit of manly elegance). Werblowsky
was an insatiable global traveller, and his lectures and seminars
would take his baffled and enchanted students from the sexual life
in the Trobriand islands, as studied by Malinowski, to Japans new
religions, from Pascals Jansenism to Levy-Strausss Mythologiques,
from comparisons between Jewish and Christian mysticism, or
Christian and Buddhist monasticism to psychoanalysis and religion.
Carl Gustav Jung even wrote a Preface to his first book, Lucifer and
Prometheus, a Study of Miltons Satan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1952).
Coming from Manchester and Leeds, Werblowsky had followed
in the mid-1950s a Ruf to establish (together with the late
Neutestamentler and Judaist David Flusser) a Department of
Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University. (It is a sad fact that
to this day, and despite far reaching transformations in the Israeli
academic system, this Department remains the only one of its kind
in the country).
In order to be fully understood, he taught, religious
phenomena should always be studied both in context (that goes
without saying) and comparatively, with similar phenomena, from
other times and other cultures. It was obvious to him, as to any
student of comparative religion, that differences between such
phenomena matter much more than the similarities between them.
In his way, he was challenging the academic establishment, which

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insisted on clear-cut boundaries between the disciplines with, as a
consequence, entrenched fields and little inter-disciplinary
cooperation. No culture is an island was perhaps the most obvious
message Werblowsky intended and succeeded - to impart to the
many students who attended his lectures. In those years, Israeli
society remained very much isolated, and travel abroad was still
difficult and expensive.
The French Jewish historian of religion Salomon Reinach once
said that while being religious is not a precondition for the study of
religions, it may be useful for the scholar to have been religious at
some point in his (or her) life. As an adolescent, he had studied at
the Ponevezh Yeshiva, a rigorous and highly respected Talmudic
academy relocated in the 1940s from Lithuania to Palestine, and
thus knew as an insider what religious virtuosity meant. But when
asked about his religion, Werblowsky used to answer: My religion is
comparative religion. This was meant not only as a spirited retort
to a prying question, or mainly pour pater les bourgeois. By this,
Werblowsky wanted to insist on the categorical imperative of the
study of religion (and for him any serious study of religion was
comparative by nature): in order to flourish the study of religion,
historically an offshoot of Christian theology, needs to distance itself
from theology; in order to exist, Religionswissenschaft must become
totally independent from theology. To his students, this might sound
as an obvious truth, no longer in need of proof. Yet, his passionate
plea, made more than half a century ago (Marburg And After?
Numen 7 [1060], 215-120) is still relevant in our postmodern days,
when so many departments of Religious Studies throughout the
world remain unsure of their own identity and methodological
legitimacy. The delicate complexity of the study of religious
phenomena, between empathy and objectivity, between the emic
and the etic, is well known, and striving toward the right balance
may be illusory; but for Werblowsky, it was clear that theological
preoccupation is detrimental to the study of religion. His argument
in favor of a Husserlian epoche of ones own religious feelings and
beliefs in order to approach the study of religion was as strict as can
be.
Werblowskys activity, like that of any serious intellectual, was
felt simultaneously on various fronts. The first was the home front of
the Hebrew University, where he was both a teacher and a capable
administrator: for three years in the late 1960s, he served as the
Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. His own home was generously
open to his students. He established in Jerusalem both the Israel
Interfaith Committee (in 1958) and the Rainbow Club, where for a

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generation Jewish, Christian and Muslim intellectuals could meet
and talk in a serene and non-polemical atmosphere. As an Israeli
patriot, born in Frankfurt in a generation that both witnessed the
horrors of Nazi Germany and suffered from them, he fought religious
bigotry both at home and abroad, and through his Dutch
connections (he had spent years in Amsterdam as a young man) he
helped in planting the seeds of contacts between Israel and
Indonesia. But his great love was devoted to the traditional culture
of Japan, and he was very influential in starting the academic
interest in Japanese religion in Israeli universities.
He was also a leading actor on the international academic
scene. There is hardly a distinguished university or research
institution abroad, on all continents, which has not seen him as a
guest lecturer or visiting professor. He served as the Editor of
Numen for many years, and was the Secretary General (1975-1985)
and the Vice-President (1985-1995) of the International Association
for the Study of Religion. From 1984 to 1988, he was also the VicePresident of UNESCOs Conseil International de la Philosophie et des
Sciences Humaines.
Throughout his years of intense activity on these different
fronts, Werblowsky never let the many demands of vita activa
weaken his thirst for vita contemplativa. He regularly retreated into
monasteries (often the Trappist monastery of Latrun in Israel) for
periods of spiritual withdrawal and contemplation. He was
particularly proud of his continued connection to his Zen master
from Japan, who had overseen his months-long stay in his
monastery.
In the end, however, a scholars main accomplishment is
neither public activity nor meditative powers. A scholars legacy
remains essentially her or his published writings. The editors of
Werblowskys Festschrift Gilgul: Essays on Transformation,
Revolution and Permanence in the History of Religions, edited by
Shaul Shaked, David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa (Studies in the
History of Religions [Supplements to Numen] 50; Leiden: Brill, 1987)
listed 135 items in his bibliography and since then Werblowsky has
of course published much more. The topics of his articles, written in
English, Hebrew, German, French or Dutch, reflect the huge
spectrum of his many interests. It would be at once pedantic and
tedious to even mention them all here. Let me therefore limit myself
to what I consider to have been his most important intellectual
contributions.
Joseph Karo, Lawyer and Mystic (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1960; 2nd. ed. New York, Jewish Publication Society, 1976)

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studies the mystical writings of a sixteenth-century Rabbi living in
Galilean Safed, whose huge Shulhan Arukh, a highly detailed Codex
of halakha, or religious law, came to represent the Summa of Jewish
practice, and remains to this day the main guide of religious
orthodoxy. Working on his Hebrew Codex during the day, Karo was
at night composing a mystical text, the Maggid Mesharim, also in
Hebrew, which is said to have been dictated to him by his Maggid, a
companion angel. In his important monograph, Werblowsky provides
a detailed and elegant analysis of this complex text, and offers a
sophisticated understanding of the odd unio personalis between a
legalist and mystical mind. Doing so, he undermines the traditional
but simplistic opposition between mysticism and religious law. Such
conclusions have an obvious bearing on our understanding of
mystical phenomena, far beyond Judaism. Werblowsky had started
his study as a young scholar, while still in Manchester. For anyone
interested in Jewish mysticism at the time, coming to Jerusalem
meant becoming a disciple of Gershom Scholem. While Werblowsky
had not been one of Scholems students, he soon became deeply
impressed by Scholems oeuvre and approach to mystical
phenomena. He took it upon himself to translate Scholems
magnum opus on Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth-century false
messiah of Smyrna, into English (Sabbetai Sevi, the Mystical
Messiah 1626-1676 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973]).
This translation is itself a masterpiece, and only someone as versed
in the Jewish tradition as Werblowsky could have so successfully
introduced a leading figure of early modern Judaism to the
comparative study of religion.
As should now be amply clear, however, Werblowskys
intellectual interests encompassed all religious continents. His
Jordan Lectures at SOAS became Beyond Tradition and Modernity:
Changing Religions in a Changing World (London: Athlone Press,
1976), a book devoted to the multifaceted transformation of
religious traditions in all contemporary cultures. The dedication, to
his five children, presented them as heirs, victims and re-makers of
both tradition and modernity.
Werblowskys interest in Asian religions was not limited to
Japan. Over the years, his fascination for popular religions in China
was reflected in a number of scholarly articles. In his later years, he
devoted many efforts to work on J. J. M. de Groots intellectual
legacy. His monograph on the famous Dutch Sinologist, who had
taught in Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century, entitled The
Beaten Track of Science: The Life and Work of J. J. M. de Groot was
published by Harrassowitz (Wiesbaden, 2002).

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For all his achievements, Werblowsky was awarded the EMET
Prize, one of the most prestigious academic prizes awarded in Israel.
Paraphrasing the Roman playwright Terentiuss famous sentence,
Werblowsky could easily have said about himself: Homo sum,
religiosi nihil a me alienum puto.

Guy G. Stroumsa
Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Emeritus of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions,
University of Oxford
(guy.stroumsa@mail.huji.ac.il)