Kabbalah Mysticism
Impact Of Kabbalah
Due to the dissemination of Christian Kabbalah, and the impact of modern scholarship of Kabbalah represented in the seminal studies of Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), elements of kabbalistic thought have been integrated in a variety of modern intellectual and literary realms. Well-known figures in European thought had been attracted to Kabbalah, like the seventeenth-century Cambridge Neoplatonists, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), and Salomon Maimon (1753–1800).
In literature Kabbalah influenced writers like William Blake (1757–1827), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Ivan Gol, Paul Celan (Paul Antschel; 1920–1991), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991), Umberto Eco (b. 1932), and, on the Israeli scene, Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888–1970), David Shahar (1926–1997), and Uri Tzvi Greenberg, as well as some literary criticism and philosophy of text by Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), Harold Bloom (b. 1930), Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), George Steiner (b. 1929), and Eco. In modern philosophy kabbalistic elements are conspicuous in the speculative systems of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), Joseph Baer Soloveitchik, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995).
A revival of interest in Kabbalah was visible at the turn of the twenty-first century in a return of role of kabbalists in some segments of Israeli society, and the resort to kabbalistic ways of thought used by some New Age thinkers in the United States, like Rabbi Zalman Schechter. Even orthodox kabbalists, active basically only in Israel, are inclined now to allow a previously unthinkable large-scale dissemination of this lore in large audiences, by a new politics of printing and teaching.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dan, Joseph. Jewish Mysticism. Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1998–1999.
Giller, Pinchas. Reading the Zohar. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Ginsburg, Elliot. The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
Green, Arthur, ed. Jewish Spirituality. New York: Crossroad, 1986–1987.
Halamish, Mosheh. An Introduction to the Kabbalah. Translated by Ruth Bar-Ilan and Ora Wiskind-Elper. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Idel, Moshe. Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.
——. Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
——. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988.
——. Messianic Mystics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.
——. The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
Liebes, Yehuda. Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism. Translated by Batya Stein. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
——. Studies in the Zohar. Translated by Arnold Schwartz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Ruderman, David. Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: Quadrangle, 1974.
——. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken, 1961.
——. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Schocken, 1965.
——. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Schocken, 1991.
——. Origins of the Kabbalah. Translated by Allan Arkush. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
——. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Tishby, Isaiah, and Fischel Lachower. The Wisdom of the Zohar. 3 vols. Translated by David Goldstein. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. An anthology of texts arranged and rendered into Hebrew by Lachower and Tishby, with introductions and explanations by Tishby.
Wolfson, Elliot R. Abraham Abulafia—Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Theosophy, and Theurgy. Los Angeles: Cherub, 2000.
——. Along the Path. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
——. Circle in the Square. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
——. Through a Speculum That Shines. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Moshe Idel
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- Kabbalah Mysticism - Bibliography
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