The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality

Framsida
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 23 nov. 2011 - 408 sidor
An insightful collection of essays on the Kabbalah and Jewish spirituality—from the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism.

Gershom Scholem was the master builder of historical studies of the Kabbalah. When he began to work on this neglected field, the few who studied these texts were either amateurs who were looking for occult wisdom, or old-style Kabbalists who were seeking guidance on their spiritual journeys. His work broke with the outlook of the scholars of the previous century in Judaica—die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Science of Judaism—whose orientation he rejected, calling their “disregard for the most vital aspects of the Jewish people as a collective entity: a form of “censorship of the Jewish past.” The major founders of modern Jewish historical studies in the nineteenth century, Leopold Zunz and Abraham Geiger, had ignored the Kabbalah; it did not fit into their account of the Jewish religion as rational and worthy of respect by “enlightened” minds. The only exception was the historian Heinrich Graetz. He had paid substantial attention to its texts and to their most explosive exponent, the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, but Graetz had depicted the Kabbalah and all that flowed from it as an unworthy revolt from the underground of Jewish life against its reasonable, law-abiding, and learned mainstream. Scholem conducted a continuing polemic with Zunz, Geiger, and Graetz by bringing into view a Jewish past more varied, more vital, and more interesting than any idealized portrait could reveal.
from the Foreword by Arthur Hertzberg, 1995
 

Innehåll

THE MEssianic IDEA IN Kabbalism
37
THE CRisis of TRADITION IN Jewish Messianism
49
REDEMPTION THROUGH SiN
78
THE CRYPToJEWISH SECT of THE DöNMEH SABBATIANs
142
A SABBATIAN Will FROM NEW YORK
167
The NEUTRALIZATION OF THE MESSIANIC EleMENT
176
Devekut or CoMMUNION WITH GOD
203
MARTIN BUBERs INTERPRETATION of HASIDISM
228
THE TRADITION of THE THIRTYSIX HIDDEN JUST MEN
251
HISTORY OF A SYMBOL
257
REVELATION AND TRADITION AS RELIGIOUS CATEGORIES
282
THE SCIENCE of JudaismTHEN AND Now
304
AT THE COMPLETION of BUBERs TRANSLATION of THE BIBLE
314
THE GOLEM of PRAGUE AND THE GOLEM of REHOvor
335
Sources AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
365
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Om författaren (2011)

GERSHOM SCHOLEM was a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem until his death in 1982. Among his most important works are Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, and editor of Zohar, the Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah.

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