Le Mal dedans et dehors. Mythologies du Malin dans la littérature et la mystique du rabbinisme ancien.

This essay examines the concept of Evil and its evolution in the literature and spirituality of Rabbinic Judaism from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The foundations of the typically rabbinic concept of yetzer ha-ra‘ (“evil instinct”) are first examined in the Hebrew Bible and in the Pseudepigrapha. The myth of the rebellion of the angels against God – an explanation of the origin of Evil that was alternative to the Yahwist myth of Adam and Eve’s transgression – is revisited in the homiletic tradition (Pirqe de-Rabbi Eli‘ezer). Finally, the numerous survivals and declinations of the Enochic paradigm on the origin and structure of Evil, and the rich and varied demonology that characterised it, are investigated in late antique and early medieval rabbinic mysticism (Sefer Yetzirah, Zohar, and Yitzḥaq ben Ya‘aqov ha-Kohen’s Treatise on the Left Emanation). Evil came to be conceived (especially in the Zohar) as inherent to the personality of God himself, and finally exteriorized, in an act of authentic dividuation (in the Jungian sense of the term) through which it becomes God’s “other side,” a “counter-world ruled by Satan” (according to Gershom Scholem’s definition). The problem of Evil was elaborated in Rabbinic Judaism by retrieving myths from different ancient traditions and recomposing them in different frameworks, according to new reciprocal relationships.