BiblioVault - Books about Cabala

Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism

Pillars, Lines, Ladders

Moshe Idel

Central European University Press, 2005

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.

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Games of Inheritance

Kabbalah, Tradition, and Authorship in Jorge Luis Borges

Yitzhak Lewis

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Games of Inheritance explores the thought of Argentine author and public intellectual Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) on questions of authorship and literary tradition. The book focuses on Borges’s engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions, highlighting the role of this engagement in developing and expressing his views on these questions. The book argues that the primary relevance of Borges’s persistent reference to “the Judaic” is not for understanding his attitude toward Jews and Judaism but for understanding his position in contemporary Argentinian debates about nationalism and literature, empire and postcolonialism, and populism and aesthetics. By broadening the frame of Borges and the Judaic, this book shifts the scholarly focus to the poetic utility of Borges’s engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions. This allows a better understanding of the nuance of his views on the issues that most animate his oeuvre: authorship and writing, literature and tradition.

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Kabbalah and Art

Léo Bronstein

University Press of New England, 2002

Told as a series of reflections, this study traces links between cultures as diverse as pre-Vedic India and late 19th-century France. An array of unrelated artists are all in fact linked by the Kabbalah and the correlation between art and this mystic Jewish thought.

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Kabbalah, Magic and Science

The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician

David Ruderman

Harvard University Press, 1988

In describing the career of Abraham Yagel, a Jewish physician, kabbalist, and naturalist who lived in northern Italy from 1553 to about 1623, David Ruderman observes the remarkable interplay between early modern scientific thought and religious and occult traditions from a wholly new perspective: that of Jewish intellectual life.

Whether he was writing about astronomical discoveries, demons, marvelous creatures and prodigies of nature, the uses of magic, or reincarnation, Yagel made a consistent effort to integrate empirical study of nature with kabbalistic and rabbinic learning. Yagel's several interests were united in his belief in the interconnectedness of all thing—a belief, shared by many Renaissance thinkers, that turns natural phenomena into “signatures” of the divine unity of all things. Ruderman argues that Yagel and his coreligionists were predisposed to this prevalent view because of occult strains in traditional Jewish thought He also suggests that underlying Yagel's passion for integrating and correlating all knowledge was a powerful psychological need to gain cultural respect and acceptance for himself and for his entire community, especially in a period of increased anti-Semitic agitation in Italy.

Yagel proposed a bold new agenda for Jewish culture that underscored the religious value of the study of nature, reformulated kabbalist traditions in the language of scientific discourse so as to promote them as the highest form of human knowledge, and advocated the legitimate role of the magical arts as the ultimate expression of human creativity in Judaism. This portrait of Yagel and his intellectual world will well serve all students of late Renaissance and early modern Europe.

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Kabbalistic Revolution

Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain

Lachter, Hartley

Rutgers University Press, 2014

The set of Jewish mystical teachings known as Kabbalah are often imagined as timeless texts, teachings that have been passed down through the millennia. Yet, as this groundbreaking new study shows, Kabbalah flourished in a specific time and place, emerging in response to the social prejudices that Jews faced.

Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain, a place where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise and Jewish political power was on the wane. Kabbalistic Revolution proposes that, given this context, Kabbalah must be understood as a radically empowering political discourse. While the era’s Christian preachers claimed that Jews were blind to the true meaning of scripture and had been abandoned by God, the Kabbalists countered with a doctrine that granted Jews a uniquely privileged relationship with God. Lachter demonstrates how Kabbalah envisioned this increasingly marginalized group at the center of the universe, their mystical practices serving to maintain the harmony of the divine world.

For students of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalistic Revolution provides a new approach to the development of medieval Kabbalah. Yet the book’s central questions should appeal to anyone with an interest in the relationships between religious discourses, political struggles, and ethnic pride.

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On the Edge of the Abyss

The Jewish Unconscious before Freud

Clémence Boulouque

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A history of the unconscious in public discourse before Freud and its significance for Jewish emancipation.

When Sigmund Freud published his theory of the unconscious, in 1899, he popularized an idea that had fascinated generations of Jewish philosophers before him. In this book, Clémence Boulouque charts the development of the pre-Freudian unconscious from subcultural inquiry to dominant discourse during the long nineteenth century. Although Freud’s scientific notion differed from Schelling’s mythical description of the abyss from which creation springs, its resonance with older ideas was celebrated as an opportunity to express specifically Jewish contributions to modernity. Indeed, Boulouque shows that the pre-Freudian unconscious emerged from conversations in Jewish mysticism about otherness and coexistence. In the hopeful years before World War I, Boulouque argues, such reflections offered the possibility of emancipation not only to Jews but to all.

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Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism

Chaim Wirszubski

Harvard University Press, 1989

Here is a major contribution to the history of Christian kabbalism by an eminent authority. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a central figure in Lorenzo de' Medici's Platonic Academy, was the first notable Christian humanist to become learned in the Kabbalah; and the two sets of kabbalistic theses he wrote started Kabbalah on its Christian career. This is a study of those theses, their meaning, and their relation to the Hebrew texts Pico studied.

Chaim Wirszubski establishes which Hebrew texts Pico used and identifies the sources for individual theses. In the process he provides special insight into Jewish Kabbalah and its several schools. Pico's goal was to use Jewish Kabbalah to confirm Christian theology. In his analysis of Conclusiones Cabalisticae, Wirszubski elucidates this Christian kabbalistic doctrine and shows how it was tied to other currents in Renaissance thought, especially platonism and magic. This study will be valued by students of mysticism and of Renaissance thought.

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Sepher Ha-Razim

The Book of Mysteries

Michael A. Morgan

SBL Press, 1983

Michael A. Morgan translates Mordecai Margaliath’s text of Sepher Ha-Razim, a fourth century CE magical text, into English. Sepher Ha-Razim includes a story about the book’s transmission from the angel Raziel to Noah eventually down to Solomon, six sections describing the nature, function, magical praxis and angelic inhabitants of six of the heavens, and the divine throne in the seventh heaven. With parallels to Talmudic passages, Enochic literature, and Hekhaloth literature, Sepher Ha-Razim sheds light on Greco-Roman magic in general and more specifically Jewish life in the early centuries CE.

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Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah

Jonathan Garb

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Bringing to light a hidden chapter in the history of modern Judaism, Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah explores the shamanic dimensions of Jewish mysticism. Jonathan Garb integrates methods and models from the social sciences, comparative religion, and Jewish studies to offer a fresh view of the early modern kabbalists and their social and psychological contexts.

Through close readings of numerous texts—some translated here for the first time—Garb draws a more complete picture of the kabbalists than previous depictions, revealing them to be as concerned with deeper states of consciousness as they were with study and ritual. Garb discovers that they developed physical and mental methods to induce trance states, visions of heavenly mountains, and transformations into animals or bodies of light. To gain a deeper understanding of the kabbalists’ shamanic practices, Garb compares their experiences with those of mystics from other traditions as well as with those recorded by psychologists such as Milton Erickson and Carl Jung. Finally, Garb examines the kabbalists’ relations with the wider Jewish community, uncovering the role of kabbalistic shamanism in the renewal of Jewish tradition as it contended with modernity.

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Yearnings of the Soul

Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah

Jonathan Garb

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In Yearnings of the Soul, Jonathan Garb uncovers a crucial thread in the story of modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism more generally: psychology. Returning psychology to its roots as an attempt to understand the soul, he traces the manifold interactions between psychology and spirituality that have arisen over five centuries of Kabbalistic writing, from sixteenth-century Galilee to twenty-first-century New York. In doing so, he shows just how rich Kabbalah’s psychological tradition is and how much it can offer to the corpus of modern psychological knowledge.

Garb follows the gradual disappearance of the soul from modern philosophy while drawing attention to its continued persistence as a topic in literature and popular culture. He pays close attention to James Hillman’s “archetypal psychology,” using it to engage critically with the psychoanalytic tradition and reflect anew on the cultural and political implications of the return of the soul to contemporary psychology. Comparing Kabbalistic thought to adjacent developments in Catholic, Protestant, and other popular expressions of mysticism, Garb ultimately offers a thought-provoking argument for the continued relevance of religion to the study of psychology.

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