Mantova E La Qabbalah

This volume brings together leading representatives of the recent debate about the persistence of kabbalah in the modern world. It breaks new ground for a better understanding of the role of kabbalah in modern religious, intellectual, and political discourse.

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. This volume is a record of the proceedings of an international conference, organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies at Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), and Mantua’s State Archives. It consists of contributions on Moscato and the intellectual world in Mantua during the 16th and 17th centuries.

In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanis—a businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynasty—sought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truth—especially historical truth—can be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.

Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah presents eight case studies of manuscripts, ritual objects and folk art developed by Hasidic masters in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, whose form and decoration relate to sources in the Zohar, German Pietism, and Safed Kabbalah.

Through the theme of metempsychosis as discussed by scholars in Renaissance Italy, this book addresses the problematic question of the roles of Jews who lived in Italy in the development of Renaissance culture in its Jewish and its Christian dimensions.

This book brings together a number of contributions that throw a new light on the history of Jewish communities in late-medieval and early modern Italy (15th-18th centuries). The different, monographic approaches form a homogeneous interpretation of this history, a collective and original reflection on the question of Jewish minority in a broader (Christian) society. Both the Christian and the Jewish sides are taken into consideration, and an important number of chapters consider concrete situations, Jewish texts and authors very rarely studied in the research on Jewish-Christian relation.