Description
Book SynopsisThere emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish elite, notes Moshe Idel, no longer made up of prophets, priests, kings, or rabbis but of intellectuals and academicians working in secular universities or writing for an audience not defined by any one set of religious beliefs. In Old Worlds, New Mirrors 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.
Idel—himself one of the world''s most eminent scholars of Jewish mysticism—focuses in particular on the mystical aspects of his subjects'' writings. Avoiding all attempts to discern anything like a single essence of Judaism in their works, he nevertheless maintains a sustained effort to illumine especially the Kabbalistic and Hasidic strains of thought these figures woul
Trade Review
"A brilliant and often illuminating exposition and critique of the role that Jewish mysticism has played in much of twentieth-century Western thought. Idel uncovers the many ways in which external sources, rather than traditional texts and practices, have informed accounts of Jewish mysticism." * Jewish Review of Books *
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
I. INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF JUDAISM
1. Arnaldo Momigliano and Gershom Scholem on Jewish History and Tradition
2. Eric Voegelin's Israel and Revelation
3. George Steiner: A Prophet of Abstraction
II. SCHOLEM'S CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF KABBALAH
4. The Function of Symbols in Gershom Scholem
5. Hieroglyphs, Mysteries, Keys: Scholem Between Molitor and Kafka
6. Subversive Catalysts: Gnosticism and Messianism in Scholem's View of Jewish Mysticism
III. KABBALAH IN SOME TWENTIETH-CENTURY THINKERS
7. Franz Rosenzweig and Kabbalah
8. Abraham Abulafia, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin on Language
9. Jacques Derrida and Kabbalistic Sources
10. Paul Celan's "Psalm": A Revelation Toward Naught
IV. UNDERSTANDING HASIDISM
11. Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism
12. Abraham Heschel on Mysticism and Hasidism
13. White Letters: From R. Levi Isaac of Berdichev to Postmodern Hermeneutics
List of Abbreviations and Sources
Notes
Index
