Moshe Idel

In this prizewinning new interpretation of Jewish mysticism, Moshe Idel emphasizes the need for a comparative and phenomenological approach to Kabbalah and its position in the history of religion. Idel provides fresh insights into the origins of Jewish mysticism, the relation between mystical and historical experience, and the impact of Jewish mysticism on western civilization. "Idel's book is studded with major insights, and innovative approaches to the entire history of Judaism, and mastery of it will be essential for all serious students of Jewish thought."--Arthur Green, New York Times Book Review "Moshe Idel's original, scholarly, and stimulating study of Kabbalah contains the promise of a masterwork."--Elie Wiesel "Moshe Idel's book can help the nonspecialized reader to reconsider the whole of Kabbalistic tradition in comparison with many aspects of contemporary thought."--Umberto Eco "There can be no dispute about the importance and originality of Idel's work. Offering a wealth of complementary insights to Gershom Scholem and his school, it will command a great deal of attention and serious discussion."--Alexander Altmann

New Perspectives

Kabbalah

Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth addresses a series of topics that have been neglected in scholarship. The book looks at the early Romanian background of some of Eliade's ideas, Eliade's attitude toward Judaism, his association with the Romanian extreme right movement known as the Iron Guard, and assessing the impact of Eliade's personal experiences on the manner in which he presented religion.

From Magic to Myth

Mircea Eliade

Bernard McGinn

An Ecumenical Dialogue

Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith

In this book, the world's foremost scholar of Kabbalah explores the understanding of erotic love in Jewish mystical thought. Encompassing Jewish mystical literatures from those of late antiquity to works of Polish Hasidism, Moshe Idel highlights the diversity of Kabbalistic views on eros and distinguishes between the major forms of eroticism. The author traces the main developments of a religious formula that reflects the union between a masculine divine attribute and a feminine divine attribute, and he asks why such an "erotic formula" was incorporated into the Jewish prayer book. Idel shows how Kabbalistic literature was influenced not only by rabbinic literature but also by Greek thought that helped introduce a wider understanding of eros. Addressing topics ranging from cosmic eros and androgyneity to the affinity between C. J. Jung and Kabbalah to feminist thought, Idel's deeply learned study will be of consuming interest to scholars of religion, Judaism, and feminism.

Kabbalah and Eros

This book focuses on Abraham Abulafia's esoteric thought in relation to Maimonides, Maimonideans, and Islamic thought in the line of Leo Strauss' theory of the history of philosophy. A survey of Abulafia's sources leads into an analysis of the esoteric meaning on the famous parable of the three rings, considering also the possible connection between this parable, which Abdulafia inserted into a book dedicated to his student, the 13th century rabbi Nathan the wise, and the Lessing's Play "Nathan the Wise." The book also examines Abulafia's universalistic understanding of the nature of the Bible, the Hebrew language, and the people of Israel (or the Sinaic revelation). The universal aspects of Abulafia’s thought have been put in relief against the more widespread Kabbalistic views which are predominantly particularistic. A number of texts have also been identified here for the first time as authored by Abulafia.

Secrets and Doubts

Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism

Daniel J. Schroeter

Jewish Museum (New York, N.Y.)

Ami Bouganim

Explores the conundrum of Jewish Moroccan identity, from the earliest times to the present day.

Jews and Art in a Muslim Land

Morocco

"Moshe Idel increasingly is seen as having achieved the eminence of Gershom Scholem in the study of Jewish mysticism. Ben, his book on the concept of sonship in Kabbalah, is an extraordinary work of scholarship and imaginative surmise. If an intellectual Judaism is to survive, then Idel becomes essential reading, whatever your own spiritual allegiances."-Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University While many aspects of sonship have been analyzed in books on Judaism, this book, Moshe Idel's magnum opus, constitutes the first attempt to address the category of sonship in Jewish mystical literature as a whole. Idel's aim is to point out the many instances where Jewish thinkers resorted to concepts of sonship and their conceptual backgrounds, and thus to show the existence of a wide variety of understandings of hypostatic sons in Judaism. Through this survey, not only can the mystical forms of sonship in Judaism be better understood, but the concept of sonship in religion in general can also be enriched.

Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism

Ascensions on high took many forms in Jewish mysticism and they permeated most of its history from its inception until Hasidism. The book surveys the various categories, with an emphasis on the architectural images of the ascent, like the resort to images of pillars, lines, and ladders. After surveying the variety of scholarly approaches to religion, the author also offers what he proposes as an eclectic approach, and a perspectivist one. The latter recommends to examine religious phenomena from a variety of perspectives. The author investigates the specific issue of the pillar in Jewish mysticism by comparing it to the archaic resort to pillars recurring in rural societies. Given the fact that the ascent of the soul and pillars constituted the concerns of two main Romanian scholars of religion, Ioan P. Culianu and Mircea Eliade, Idel resorts to their views, and in the Concluding Remarks analyzes the emergence of Eliade's vision of Judaism on the basis of neglected sources.

Pillars, Lines, Ladders

Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism

Between Ecstasy and Magic

Hasidism

Idel's thesis is that the role of the golem concept in Judaism was to confer an exceptional status to the Jewish elite by bestowing it with the capability of supernatural powers deriving from a profound knowledge of the Hebrew language and its magical and mystical values.

Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid

Golem

An Ecstatic Kabbalist [two Studies]

Abraham Abulafia

Abraham Abulafia, the founder of the ecstatic Kabbalah, exposed a mysticism that includes a deep interest in language as a universe in itself, to be studied as the philosophers study nature, in order to attain higher knowledge than natural science and speculative philosophy. The status of Hebrew as the natural, intellectual, and primordial language is discussed against the background of the medieval speculations regarding this topic. Abulafia proposed an elaborate hermeneutical system, unique in the whole Kabbalistic literature, for both its systematic exposition and the eccentric exegetical devices it describes. Various versions of this sevenfold system occur in several manuscripts that are collected and analyzed here in detail for the first time. Torah was regarded by Abulafia as the most important text, reflecting the constitution of the intellectual world and being identical with the Active intellect and even to God Himself. On the other hand, Torah was interpreted in Abulafia's Kabbalah as an allegory to the psychological processes of the mystic, an approach different from the regular Kabbalistic interpretation of this text as a symbolic corpus reflecting the divine intrasefirotic life.

Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia

This book constitutes the first attempt to address the category of Sonship in Jewish mystical literature as a whole &– a category much more vast than ever imagined. By this survey, not only can the mystical forms of Sonship in Judaism be better understood, but the concept of Sonship in religion in general can also be enriched>

Ascensions on high took many forms in Jewish mysticism and they permeated most of its history from its inception until Hasidism. The book surveys the various categories, with an emphasis on the archetectural images of the ascent, like the resort images of pillars, lines, and ladders.

The first wide-scale presentation of a major Jewish mystic, the founder of the ecstatic Kabbalah.

Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, The

This survey of the history of Kabbalah in Italy represents a major contribution from one of the world's foremost Kabbalah scholars. Idel charts the ways that Kabbalistic thought and literature developed in Italy and how its unique geographical situation facilitated the arrival of both Spanish and Byzantine Kabbalah.

A Survey

Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510

Shahar Arzy

Die Kabbala ist als ein wesentlicher Bestandteil der jüdischen Mystik, vielfältig überliefert und gedeutet. Gemeinhin hat man mystische Erfahrungen theologisch, soziologisch oder psychoanalytisch betrachtet, hier jedoch unternehmen zwei Wissenschaftler den Versuch, die Gehirnleistungen der so gedeuteten Phänomene zu entschlüsseln. Für dieses Unternehmen haben sich Moshe Idel, der bedeutende Forscher jüdischer Mystik, und sein Jerusalemer Kollege, der Neurowissenschaftler und Arzt Shahar Arzy zusammengetan, um die Kabbala aus einer ganz neuen Perspektive zu erforschen: der des menschlichen Gehirns. Arzy und Idel analysieren die Beschreibungen jüdischer Mystiker von Körperphänomenen wie Ekstase, Entrückung oder Verdoppelung und stellen sie jüngsten neurologischen Untersuchungen des Gehirns gegenüber. Kann man die Erfahrungen der Kabbalisten mit den Ergebnissen moderner Laborexperimente vergleichen? In Der Dibbuk im Gehirn wird zum ersten Mal versucht, mit Hilfe neurowissenschaftlicher Methoden die Techniken der Kabbalisten bei ihren ekstatischen, mystischen Erfahrungen zu erklären. Eine bahnbrechende Studie.

Kabbala und Neurowissenschaft

Der Dibbuk im Gehirn

This book presents important topics regarding the more mystical trend of Kabbalahthe ecstatic Kabbalah. It includes the mystical union, the world of imagination, and concentration as a spiritual technique. The emphasis in the text is on the interaction between the original Spanish stage of Kabbalah and Muslim mysticism in the East, mainly in the Galilee. The influence of the Kabbalistic-Sufic synthesis on the later developments of Jewish mysticism is traced, thereby providing a more precise understanding of the history of Kabbalah as an interplay between the theosophical and ecstatic mystical experiences.

Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah

In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah—from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism—one of the world’s foremost scholars considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it. Moshe Idel takes as a starting point the fact that the postbiblical Jewish world lost its geographical center with the destruction of the temple and so was left with a textual center, the Holy Book. Idel argues that a text-oriented religion produced language-centered forms of mysticism. Against this background, the author demonstrates how various Jewish mystics amplified the content of the Scriptures so as to include everything: the world, or God, for example. Thus the text becomes a major realm for contemplation, and the interpretation of the text frequently becomes an encounter with the deepest realms of reality. Idel delineates the particular hermeneutics belonging to Jewish mysticism, investigates the progressive filling of the text with secrets and hidden levels of meaning, and considers in detail the various interpretive strategies needed to decodify the arcane dimensions of the text.

Kabbalah and Interpretation

Absorbing Perfections

I primi versetti della "Genesi" costituiscono da sempre un'arena di scontro per esegeti, filosofi e mistici. Tutto ruota intorno all'oggetto d'indagine della teodicea, quella branca della teologia che studia l'origine del male: si tratta di una realtà presente nella creazione e addirittura in Dio? Preesiste al bene, così come le tenebre preesistono alla luce? È una scorza dura che protegge un frutto succoso dagli attacchi di chi lo vuole distruggere? In antichi testi ebraici si legge che Satana fu il primogenito di Dio, o che il primogenito di Adamo, Agrimas, potenza primordiale malvagia, prese in moglie una "lilit", una demonessa, la quale gli generò novecentomila figli che avrebbero invaso il mondo e imposto la loro supremazia se non fosse intervenuto Matusalemme a sterminarli con una spada magica. La storia della generazione del male da un principio positivo appare già nel IX secolo in un passo del vescovo Agobardo di Lione, dove si attribuisce agli ebrei la credenza in un Dio il quale, seduto sul suo trono sorretto da quattro bestie in una sorta di grande palazzo, «fa pensieri superflui e vani che, data la loro inanità, si trasformano in demoni» – una formulazione destinata a riverberarsi in molte forme della tradizione cabbalistica medioevale. Basandosi sull'analisi di testi perlopiù ignoti, ignorati o fraintesi dalla ricerca contemporanea, Moshe Idel indaga in pagine dense e coinvolgenti i processi che portarono all'adozione nel giudaismo di tradizioni dualistiche iraniche o gnostiche e all'elaborazione di gerarchie ontologiche in cui i due princìpi opposti di bene e male sono comunque intesi come entità subordinate al loro creatore. E solo di rado il male appare in forme diaboliche, perché in fondo esso deve la sua vitalità alle scintille di Dio che vi si trovano incluse, senza le quali sarebbe incapace di agire o addirittura di esistere.

Moshe Idel

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