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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.

Reel Kabbalah: Jewish Mysticism and Neo-Hasidism in Contemporary Cinema​ studies the ways in which fictional film in the first decade of the twenty-first century represents the esoteric Jewish speculative traditions known as Kabbalah and Hasidism. It examines the textual and conceptual traditions behind five important cinematic representations -- Pi (1998), Ushpizin (2004), Bee Season (2005), The Secrets (2007), and A Serious Man (2009) -- and it considers how film both stands in continuity with those traditions and modifies them in the New Age vein of what is known as neo-Kabbalah and neo-Hasidism. Brian Ogren transforms our understanding of reception history by focusing on how cinema has altered perceptions of Jewish mysticism. In showing how the Jewish speculative traditions of Kabbalah and Hasidism have been able to affect mass-consumed cinematic portrayals of ultimate Truth, this book sheds light on the New Age, pop-cultural dialectic of the particular within the universal and of the universal within the particular.

A study of the twentieth-century construction of a Jewish mystical tradition by German-Jewish intellectuals.

For most of European history, the notion of Jewish spirituality was unthinkable—buried beneath a pervasive desire to understand Judaism as uniquely material and Christianity as uniquely spiritual. In Spirit and Folk, Amir Engel tells the story of how a group of Jewish intellectuals, seeking greater involvement in political life, worked to invent a mystical tradition for Judaism amid the existential crises of twentieth-century Germany.

Beginning with Martin Buber in 1900 and ending with Gershom Scholem in 1942, Engel traces the rich debate among thinkers, both well known and forgotten, regarding the need to imagine and construct a uniquely Jewish mystical tradition from historical religious sources. This quest and the tradition that emerged developed in response to one of the most volatile questions of the last century: Can Jews be Germans? The invention of Jewish spirituality, Engel shows, was not only a religious innovation but also a political gambit—a demand to be accepted as equal contributors to the German national project.