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11 books match the query 'Kabbalah & Mysticism'

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Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism

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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Gershom Scholem

An Intellectual Biography

Amir Engel

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was ostensibly a scholar of Jewish mysticism, yet he occupies a powerful role in today’s intellectual imagination, having influential contact with an extraordinary cast of thinkers, including Hans Jonas, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno. In this first biography of Scholem, Amir Engel shows how Scholem grew from a scholar of an esoteric discipline to a thinker wrestling with problems that reach to the very foundations of the modern human experience.

As Engel shows, in his search for the truth of Jewish mysticism Scholem molded the vast literature of Jewish mystical lore into a rich assortment of stories that unveiled new truths about the modern condition. Positioning Scholem’s work and life within early twentieth-century Germany, Palestine, and later the state of Israel, Engel intertwines Scholem’s biography with his historiographical work, which stretches back to the Spanish expulsion of Jews in 1492, through the lives of Rabbi Isaac Luria and Sabbatai Zevi, and up to Hasidism and the dawn of the Zionist movement. Through parallel narratives, Engel touches on a wide array of important topics including immigration, exile, Zionism, World War One, and the creation of the state of Israel, ultimately telling the story of the realizations—and failures—of a dream for a modern Jewish existence.

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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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Reel Kabbalah

Jewish Mysticism and Neo-Hasidism in Contemporary Cinema

Brian Ogren

Rutgers University Press, 2024

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.

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Safed, Zionist Culture, and Jewish History

Toward a New Historical Perspective

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin

Brandeis University Press, 2026

Brings the legacy of sixteenth-century Safed into modern scholarship on Zionism to propose a new model of Jewish existence.

Sixteenth-century Safed was one of the most important centers of thought and learning in Jewish history, yet Zionist historical narratives, which emphasize the continuity of Jewish presence in Palestine, have consistently downplayed or ignored it. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin investigates this strange contradiction. His new book argues that Safed articulates a model of early modern Jewish national revival, one closely connected to the land and its material geography, yet radically different from the Zionist model that emerged in the late nineteenth century. While Zionism set out to restore Biblical Jewish sovereignty, rabbinic Safed’s emphasis on the Mishnah proposed a non-sovereign Jewish connection to the land.

As much a polemic as a historical and theological analysis, Safed, Zionist Culture, and Jewish History offers a provocative new perspective on questions related to nationalism, Judaism, and Israel.

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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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Tormented Master

A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

Written by Arthur E. Green

University of Alabama Press, 1979

“If Hasidism begins in the life-enhancing spirituality of the Baal Shem Tov, it concludes in the tortuous, elitist and utterly fascinating career of Nahman of Bratslav (1722–1810) whose biography and teaching Arthur Green has set forth in his comprehensive, moving, and subtle study, Tormented Master.

“Arthur Green has managed to lead us through the thickets of the Bratslaver discourse with a grace and facility thus far unequaled in the English language literature on Hasidism. Tormented Master is a model of clarity and percipience, balancing awed respect and honor for its subject with a ruthless pursuit of documented truth. . . . Tormented Master is sufficiently open to the agonies of religion in general and the issues of modern religion in particular to make Nahman a thinker utterly relevant to our time.

“Nahman of Bratslav is unique in the history of Judaism, Green emphasizes, for having made the individual’s quest for intimacy with God the center of the religious way. He was a Kierkegaard before his time, believing in the utter abandon of the life of faith and the risk of paradoxicality. . . . He was, more than all others, the predecessor of Kafka, whose tales, like Nahman’s, have no explicit key and rankle, flush and irritate the spirit, compelling us—even in our failure to understand—to acknowledge their potency and challenge.”

—New York Times

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