During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their ...particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes. Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition?
Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priestsexamines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the ...Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, have on rabbinic identity and authority as expressed in the Talmud? Drawing from the field of comparative religion, Jason Sion Mokhtarian addresses this question by bringing into mutual fruition Talmudic studies and ancient Iranology, two historically distinct disciplines. Whereas most research on the Talmud assumes that the rabbis were an insular group isolated from the cultural horizon outside their academies, this book contextualizes the rabbis and the Talmud within a broader sociocultural orbit by drawing from a wide range of sources from Sasanian Iran, including Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature, archaeological data such as seals and inscriptions, and the Aramaic magical bowl spells. Mokhtarian also includes a detailed examination of the Talmud's dozens of texts that portray three Persian "others": the Persians, the Sasanian kings, and the Zoroastrian priests. This book skillfully engages and demonstrates the rich penetration of Persian imperial society and culture on the Jews of late antique Iran.
Nahmanides Halbertal, Moshe; Tabak, Daniel
09/2020
eBook
A broad, systematic account of one of the most original and
creative kabbalists, biblical interpreters, and Talmudic scholars
the Jewish tradition has ever produced Rabbi Moses b.
Nahman (1194-1270), ...known in English as Nahmanides, was the
greatest Talmudic scholar of the thirteenth century and one of the
deepest and most original biblical interpreters. Beyond his
monumental scholastic achievements, Nahmanides was a distinguished
kabbalist and mystic, and in his commentary on the Torah he
dispensed esoteric kabbalistic teachings that he termed "By Way of
Truth." This broad, systematic account of Nahmanides's thought
explores his conception of halakhah and his approach to the central
concerns of medieval Jewish thought, including notions of God,
history, revelation, and the reasons for the commandments. The
relationship between Nahmanides's kabbalah and mysticism and the
existential religious drive that nourishes them, as well as the
legal and exoteric aspects of his thinking, are at the center of
Moshe Halbertal's portrayal of Nahmanides as a complex and
transformative thinker.
Abstract
In 1730, the Inquisition of Lisbon arrested José Francisco Pereira, a man raised in West Africa and enslaved in Brazil then Portugal, who had learned along his transatlantic journeys the art ...of making amulets known in the eighteenth century Portuguese-speaking world as bolsas de mandinga. Mixing European esoteric material into objects of Afro-Atlantic agency, bolsa-makers such as José Francisco created objects of trustworthy might that brought empowerment and security of body and mind to a diverse clientele. The bolsas, as well as similar empowered objects created in Atlantic Africa reveal the deep and mutually transformative spiritual and material connections that the slave trade engendered between Europeans and Africans in the early modern period. Common concerns produced similar answers, not least newly defined or redefined notions of witchcraft and fetish and, more broadly, conceptions about the nature of power and its multivalent entanglements with the material world.
This book addresses a central question in the study of Jewish mysticism in the medieval and early modern periods: why are there no known female mystics in medieval Judaism, unlike contemporaneous ...movements in Christianity and Islam? Sharon Faye Koren demonstrates that the male rejection of female mystical aspirations is based in deeply rooted attitudes toward corporeality and ritual purity. In particular, medieval Jewish male mystics increasingly emphasized that the changing states of the female body between ritual purity and impurity disqualified women from the quest for mystical connection with God. Offering a provocative look at premodern rabbinical views of the female body and their ramifications for women's spiritual development, Koren compares Jewish views with medieval Christian and Muslim views of both female menstruation and the possibility of female mystical experience.
