Old Worlds New Mirrors

In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Moshe Idel turns his gaze on figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel and George Steiner to reflect on their relationships to Judaism in a cosmopolitan, mostly European, context.

Moshe Idel, the Max Cooper Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute, is a world-renowned scholar of the Jewish mystical tradition. His historical and phenomenological studies of rabbinic, philosophic, kabbalistic, and Hasidic texts have transformed modern understanding of Jewish intellectual history and highlighted the close relationship between magic, mysticism, and liturgy. A recipient of two of the most prestigious awards in Israel, the Israel Prize for Jewish Thought (1999) and the Emmet Prize for Jewish Thought (2002), Idel’s numerous studies have uncovered persistent patterns of Jewish religious thought that challenge conventional interpretations of Jewish monotheism, while offering a pluralistic understanding of Judaism. His explorations of the mythical, theurgical, mystical, and messianic dimensions of Judaism have been attentive to history, sociology, and anthropology, while rejecting a naïve historicist approach to Judaism.

InGerman-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife,Vivian Liska innovatively focuses on the changing form, fate and function of messianism, law, exile, election, remembrance, and the transmission of tradition itself in three different temporal and intellectual frameworks: German-Jewish modernism, postmodernism, and the current period. Highlighting these elements of theJewish tradition in the works of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan, Liska reflects on dialogues and conversations between themandonthereception of their work.She shows how this Jewish dimension of their writings is transformed, but remains significant in the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida and how it is appropriated, dismissed or denied by some of the most acclaimed thinkers at the turn of the twenty-first century such as Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj i ek, and Alain Badiou.

This book consists of a range of essays covering the complex crises, tensions and dilemmas but also the positive potential in the meeting of Jews with Western culture. In numerous contexts and through the work of fascinating individuals and thinkers, the work examines some of the consequences of political, cultural and personal rupture, as well as the manifold ways in which various Jewish intellectuals, politicians (and occasionally spies!) sought to respond to these ruptures and carve out new, sometimes profound, sometimes fanciful, options of thought and action. It also delves critically into the attacks on liberal and Enlightenment humanism. In almost all the essays the fragility of things is palpably present and the book touches on some of the ironies, problematics and functions of responses to that condition. The work mirrors the author's ongoing fascination with the always fraught, fragile and creatively fecund confrontation of Jews (and others) with European modernity, its history, politics, culture and self-definition. In a time of increasing anxiety and feelings of fragility, this work may be helpful in understanding how people at an earlier (and sometimes contemporary) period sought to come to terms with a similar predicament.

A wide-ranging analysis of heavenly twin imagery in early Jewish extrabiblical texts. The idea of a heavenly double—an angelic twin of an earthbound human—can be found in Christian, Manichaean, Islamic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Scholars have long traced the lineage of these ideas to Greco-Roman and Iranian sources. In The Greatest Mirror, Andrei A. Orlov shows that heavenly twin imagery drew in large part from early Jewish writings. The Jewish pseudepigrapha—books from the Second Temple period that were attributed to biblical figures but excluded from the Hebrew Bible—contain accounts of heavenly twins in the form of spirits, images, faces, children, mirrors, and angels of the Presence. Orlov provides a comprehensive analysis of these traditions in their full historical and interpretive complexity. He focuses on heavenly alter egos of Enoch, Moses, Jacob, Joseph, and Aseneth in often neglected books, including Animal Apocalypse, Book of the Watchers, 2 Enoch, Ladder of Jacob, and Joseph and Aseneth, some of which are preserved solely in the Slavonic language. “This book is the first complete effort to show how some pseudepigraphical works develop several unique traditions about heavenly counterparts. It is particularly important for many scholars who do not have control of the Slavonic originals of the Ladder of Jacob and 2 Enoch. Orlov also draws on a broad range of unfamiliar sources, including Manichaean and Mandaean materials, which were often neglected by experts who previously investigated the heavenly counterpart imagery.” — Alexander Kulik, coauthor of Biblical Pseudepigrapha in Slavonic Tradition

This title describes recent discoveries and insights into the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the modern day. From mystical outpourings in ancient Palestine to the Kabbalah Centre, this volume explores the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present day.

This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).

The Weimar Moment’s evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and “community” – or, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, “race” – cannot but appeal to us today. This appeal –its historical grounding and content, its complexities and tensions, its variegated expressions across the networks of power and thought – is the essential context of the present volume, whose basic premise is unhappiness with Hegel’s remark that we learn no more from history than we cannot learn from it. The challenge of the papers in this volume is to provide the material to confront the present effectively drawing from what we can and do understand.