"The divine philosopher”: Rebbe Pinhas of Korets’s Kabbalah as natural philosophy

This study analyses the teachings of Rebbe Pinhas of Korets, an eighteenth-century Ukrainian preacher and holy man, and proposes that his system of thought may be considered a form of natural philosophy. Using the extensive library of manuscripts that has so far been largely ignored by scholars and rejecting the assumption that Rebbe Pinhas was a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, this study challenges such contradictory conceptions of Rebbe Pinhas as exclusively an ethicist, a passionate devotee of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, and a student of philosophy-cum-kabbalist. Instead, the analysis shows how Rebbe Pinhas integrated philosophical and proto- scientific forms of thinking with kabbalistic ones in order to create an entirely new theocosmology on which he based his system of ethics, while remaining personally torn between the religious demands of intellect and piety.