Download or read book The Scandal of Kabbalah written by Yaacob Dweck and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-26 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Jewish culture war over Kabbalah began The Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition. From its medieval beginnings as an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah spread throughout the early modern world and became a central feature of Jewish life. Scholars have long studied the revolutionary impact of Kabbalah, but, as Yaacob Dweck argues, they have misunderstood the character and timing of opposition to it. Drawing on a range of previously unexamined sources, this book tells the story of the first criticism of Kabbalah, Ari Nohem, written by Leon Modena in Venice in 1639. In this scathing indictment of Venetian Jews who had embraced Kabbalah as an authentic form of ancient esotericism, Modena proved the recent origins of Kabbalah and sought to convince his readers to return to the spiritualized rationalism of Maimonides. The Scandal of Kabbalah examines the hallmarks of Jewish modernity displayed by Modena's attack—a critical analysis of sacred texts, skepticism about religious truths, and self-consciousness about the past—and shows how these qualities and the later history of his polemic challenge conventional understandings of the relationship between Kabbalah and modernity. Dweck argues that Kabbalah was the subject of critical inquiry in the very period it came to dominate Jewish life rather than centuries later as most scholars have thought.
Download or read book Origins of the Kabbalah written by Gershom Scholem and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the publication of The Origins of the Kabbalah in 1950, one of the most important scholars of our century brought the obscure world of Jewish mysticism to a wider audience for the first time. A crucial work in the oeuvre of Gershom Scholem, this book details the beginnings of the Kabbalah in twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France and Spain, showing its rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God. The Origins of the Kabbalah is a contribution not only to the history of Jewish medieval mysticism, but also to the study of medieval mysticism in general. Now with a new foreword by David Biale, this book remains essential reading for students of the history of religion.
Download or read book Kabbalah Secrecy Scandal and the Soul written by Harry Freedman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of the mystical Jewish system known as Kabbalah, from its earliest origins until the present day. We trace Kabbalah's development, from the second century visionaries who visited the divine realms and brought back tales of their glories and splendours, through the unexpected arrival of a book in Spain that appeared to have lain unconcealed for over a thousand years, and on to the mystical city of Safed where souls could be read and the history of heaven was an open book. Kabbalah's Christian counterpart, Cabala, emerged during the Renaissance, becoming allied to magic, alchemy and the occult sciences. A Kabbalistic heresy tore apart seventeenth century Jewish communities, while closer to our time Aleister Crowley hijacked it to proclaim 'Do What Thou Wilt'. Kabbalah became fashionable in the late 1960s in the wake of the hippy counter-culture and with the approach of the new age, and enjoyed its share of fame, scandal and disrepute as the twenty first century approached. This concise, readable and thoughtful history of Kabbalah tells its story as it has never been told before. It demands no knowledge of Kabbalah, just an interest in asking the questions 'why?' and 'how?'
Download or read book The Rebellion of the Daughters written by Rachel Manekin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Origins of the "Daughters' Question" -- Religious Ardor: Michalina Araten and Her Embrace of Catholicism -- Romantic Love: Debora Lewkowicz and Her Flight from the Village -- Intellectual Passion: Anna Kluger and Her Struggle for Higher Education -- Rebellious Daughters and the Literary Imagination: From Jacob Wassermann to S. Y. Agnon -- Bringing the Daughters Back: A New Model of Female Orthodox Jewish Education.
Download or read book Lifting the Veil written by Joseph Michael Levry and published by . This book was released on 2002-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Rebbe the Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference written by David Berger and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history, an indictment, a lament, and an appeal, focusing on the messianic trend in Lubavitch hasidism. It records the shattering of one of Judaism's core beliefs and the remarkable equanimity with which the standard-bearers of Orthodoxy have allowed it to happen. This is a development of striking importance for the history of religions, and it is an earthquake in the history of Judaism. David Berger describes the unfolding of this historic phenomenon and proposes a strategy to contain it.
Download or read book Dissident Rabbi written by Yaacob Dweck and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1665, as Jews abandoned reason for the ecstasy of enthusiasm for self-proclaimed Messiah Sabbetai Zevi, Jacob Sasportas watched in horror. Dweck tells the story of the Sephardic rabbi who challenged Sabbetai Zevi's improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers..
Download or read book Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah written by Jonathan Garb and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory of shamanism, trance, and modern Kabbalah -- The shamanic process: descent and fiery transformations -- Empowerment through trance -- Shamanic Hasidism -- Hasidic trance -- Trance and the nomian.
Download or read book The Kabbalah written by Adolphe Franck and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a scholarly study of the origin and evolution of the Kabbalah. Originally published in French in 1843, with a second French edition in 1889, this book traces the origins of the philosophical concepts of the Kabbalah to the ancient Zoroastrians. Franck goes into fascinating detail about the doctrine of the Kabbalah, as expressed in the Sepher Yetzirah and the Zohar. He uses internal evidence to trace the origins of these texts many centuries prior to their first known publication in the thirteenth century C.E. Franck carefully compares the philosophy of the Kabbalah with Greek philosophy, the Alexandrians, Philo, and the Gnostics, and concludes that, although there are similarities, none of them can claim to be the source of the Kabbalah. However, he does find many more similarities with the ancient Zoroastrian beliefs. By this process of elimination, he comes to the conclusion that the doctrines of the Kabbalah had their origin during the Babylonian exile circa 500 B.C.E., which was also the time when Zoroaster was active in the same geographical region. This thesis is worth considering, and potentially adds more weight to the already numerous contributions of Zoroastrianism to world culture.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Heresy written by Elisheva Carlebach and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rabbi Moses Hagiz, one of the most prominent and influential Jewish leaders of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, devoted his career to restoring rabbinic authority. His most prominent talent was as a polemicist, and he campaigned ceaselessly against Jewish heresy in an attempt to unify the rabbinate. During Hagiz's lifetime there was an overall decline in rabbinic authority, which the author argues was the result of migration and assimilation.
Download or read book Open Secret written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by conflicting tendencies, Schneerson was a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda, a reclusive contemplative who built a hasidic sect into an international movement, and a man dedicated to the exposition of mysteries who nevertheless harbored many secrets. Schneerson astutely masked views that might be deemed heterodox by the canons of orthodoxy while engineering a fundamentalist ideology that could subvert traditional gender hierarchy, the halakhic distinction between permissible and forbidden, and the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile. While most literature on the Rebbe focuses on whether or not he identified with the role of Messiah, Elliot R. Wolfson, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and the phenomenology of religious experience, concentrates instead on Schneerson's apocalyptic sensibility and his promotion of a mystical consciousness that undermines all discrimination. For Schneerson, the ploy of secrecy is crucial to the dissemination of the messianic secret. To be enlightened messianically is to be delivered from all conceptual limitations, even the very notion of becoming emancipated from limitation. The ultimate liberation, or true and complete redemption, fuses the believer into an infinite essence beyond all duality, even the duality of being emancipated and not emancipated--an emancipation, in other words, that emancipates one from the bind of emancipation. At its deepest level, Schneerson's eschatological orientation discerned that a spiritual master, if he be true, must dispose of the mask of mastery. Situating Habad's thought within the evolution of kabbalistic mysticism, the history of Western philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism, Wolfson articulates Schneerson's rich theology and profound philosophy, concentrating on the nature of apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality.
Download or read book Trust No One written by Paul Cleave and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jerry Grey is known to most of the world by his crime writing pseudonym, Henry Cutter. His twelve books tell stories of brutal murders. Suffering from early onset Alzheimer's, Jerry confesses that he committed the crimes in his stories. Those close to him, insist that dementia is toying with his memory. But why are people dying?
Download or read book The Mixed Multitude written by Paweł Maciejko and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-03-08 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1756, Jacob Frank, an Ottoman Jew who had returned to the Poland of his birth, was discovered leading a group of fellow travelers in a suspect religious service. At the request of the local rabbis, Polish authorities arrested the participants. Jewish authorities contacted the bishop in whose diocese the service had taken place and argued that since the rites of Frank's followers involved the practice of magic and immoral conduct, both Jews and Christians should condemn them and burn them at the stake. The scheme backfired, as the Frankists took the opportunity to ally themselves with the Church, presenting themselves as Contra-Talmudists who believed in a triune God. As a Turkish subject, Frank was released and temporarily expelled to the Ottoman territories, but the others were found guilty of breaking numerous halakhic prohibitions and were subject to a Jewish ban of excommunication. While they professed their adherence to everything that was commanded by God in the Old Testament, they asserted as well that the Rabbis of old had introduced innumerable lies and misconstructions in their interpretations of that holy book. Who were Jacob Frank and his followers? To most Christians, they seemed to be members of a Jewish sect; to Jewish reformers, they formed a group making a valiant if misguided attempt to bring an end to the power of the rabbis; and to more traditional Jews, they were heretics to be suppressed by the rabbinate. What is undeniable is that by the late eighteenth century, the Frankists numbered in the tens of thousands and had a significant political and ideological influence on non-Jewish communities throughout eastern and central Europe. Based on extensive archival research in Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel, Germany, the United States, and the Vatican, The Mixed Multitude is the first comprehensive study of Frank and Frankism in more than a century and offers an important new perspective on Jewish-Christian relations in the Age of Enlightenment.
Download or read book Dante s Equation written by Jane Jensen and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Judgment Day and creator of the popular Gabriel Knight computer games comes an edge-of-the-seat science-fiction thriller that weaves together elements of the Kabbalah and physics with doorways to other worlds.
Download or read book The Murderous History of Bible Translations written by Harry Freedman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1535, William Tyndale, the first man to produce an English version of the Bible in print, was captured and imprisoned in Belgium. A year later he was strangled and then burned at the stake. His co-translator was also burned. In that same year the translator of the first Dutch Bible was arrested and beheaded. These were not the first, nor were they the last instances of extreme violence against Bible translators. The Murderous History of Bible Translations tells the remarkable, and bloody, story of those who dared translate the word of God. The Bible has been translated far more than any other book. To our minds it is self-evident that believers can read their sacred literature in a language they understand. But the history of Bible translations is far more contentious than reason would suggest. Bible translations underlie an astonishing number of religious conflicts that have plagued the world. Harry Freedman, author of The Talmud: A Biography describes brilliantly the passions and strong emotions that arise when deeply held religious convictions are threatened or undermined. He tells of the struggle for authority and orthodoxy in a world where temporal power was always subjugated to the divine. A world in which the idea of a Bible for all was so important that many were willing to give up their time, their security and often their lives.
Download or read book Philosophy and Kabbalah written by and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Khirbet Khizeh written by S. Yizhar and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Exhilarating . . . How often can you say about a harrowing, unquiet book that it makes you wrestle with your soul?" —Neel Mukherjee, The Times (London) It's 1948 and the Arab villagers of Khirbet Khizeh are about to be violently expelled from their homes. A young Israeli soldier who is on duty that day finds himself battling on two fronts: with the villagers and, ultimately, with his own conscience. Published just months after the founding of the state of Israel and the end of the 1948 war, the novella Khirbet Khizeh was an immediate sensation when it first appeared. Since then, the book has continued to challenge and disturb, even finding its way onto the school curriculum in Israel. The various debates it has prompted would themselves make Khirbet Khizeh worth reading, but the novella is much more than a vital historical document: it is also a great work of art. Yizhar's haunting, lyrical style and charged view of the landscape are in many ways as startling as his wrenchingly honest view of modern Israel's primal scene. Considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece, Khirbet Khizeh is an extraordinary and heartbreaking book that is destined to be a classic of world literature.
