This study both reveals and resolves a basic problem elided by the historiography of early kabbalah. The problem is that scholarship has followed obsolete research from the 1940s by putting a single fragmentary text to a task that it is unfit to perform. More than eighty years ago, Gershom Scholem adduced a short fragment copied in sixteenth-century Italy to show that the kabbalists’ signature doctrine of divine androgyny goes all the way back to the earliest medieval authority to whom kabbalistic knowledge is traditionally ascribed, namely, the Provençal sage Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières (the Rabad, per his acronym). After reviewing the contents of the fragment and exposing its paratextual relationship to the Rabad’s Baʿale ha-nefesh, this study provides ample grounds for dismissing the fragment’s ascription to the Rabad, and, more generally, for rejecting the attribution of any kabbalistic writing to this foundational figure. The study then proceeds to collate the fragment with an early-fourteenth-century family of texts associated with Shem Ṭov ben Abraham Ibn Gaon—texts expounding the wisdom of Naḥmanides—to establish the late provenance of a fragment, thought heretofore to date to twelfth-century France, espousing a doctrine that scholars believed had shaped the tradition from the beginning. The conclusion, which discusses the ramifications of removing the (Pseudo-)Rabad fragment from the archive of early kabbalah, is followed by an appendix containing a suite of paleographic evidence supporting the arguments advanced in the study.

Canada’s grand railway hotels are a celebrated building type. However, historians have paid little attention to the economic strictures of the hotel type in Canada, or to their role in inscribing networks of commerce and finance onto the North American landscape. This article proposes the Newfoundland Hotel as an exemplary case study to explore these networks. Born of a late nineteenth-century desire to diversify Newfoundland’s economy away from the fishery, the hotel later suffered insolvency and from the prerogatives of corporate investment interests. The building was also involved in a series of changes to the organisation of Newfoundland as a political state, which saw ownership of the hotel pass from private to public hands and elevated it from a provincial to a national concern. Designed by the preeminent Montreal firm of Ross and Macdonald in 1926, the Newfoundland Hotel attempted to consolidate a class-based vision of financial modernity in a resource-dependent economy. In discussing the hotel’s construction, use and demolition, this essay explores how a series of contestations over class, culture and nationhood were manifest in the project’s turbulent financial affairs. It highlights the need to study the financial history of buildings alongside their material and social features to understand more fully how economic pressures shape the valuation of buildings over time.