Inventing the Jew follows the evolution of stereotypes of Jews from the level of traditional Romanian and other Central-East European cultures (their legends, fairy tales, ballads, carols, anecdotes, superstitions, and iconographic representations) to that of high cultures (including literature, essays, journalism, and sociopolitical writings), showing how motifs specific to folkloric antisemitism migrated to intellectual antisemitism. This comparative perspective also highlights how the images of Jews have differed from that of other strangers such as Hungarians, Germans, Roma, Turks,...
Inventing the Jew follows the evolution of stereotypes of Jews from the level of traditional Romanian and other Central-East European cultures ...
There 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,...
There emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish elite, notes Moshe Idel, no longer made up of prophets, priests, kings, or rab...
In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah--from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism--one of the world's foremost scholars considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it. Moshe Idel takes as a starting point the fact that the postbiblical Jewish world lost its geographical center with the destruction of the temple and so was left with a textual center, the Holy Book. Idel argues that a text-oriented religion produced language-centered forms of mysticism. Against this background, the author demonstrates how various...
In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah--from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism--one of the world's foremost scholars con...
In this original study, Moshe Idel, an eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism and thought, and the cognitive neuroscientist and neurologist Shahar Arzy combine their considerable expertise to explore the mysteries of the Kabbalah from an entirely new perspective: that of the human brain. In lieu of the theological, sociological, and psychoanalytic approaches that have generally dominated the study of ecstatic mystical experiences, the authors endeavor to decode the brain mechanisms underlying these phenomena. Arzy and Idel analyze first-person descriptions to explore the Kabbalistic techniques...
In this original study, Moshe Idel, an eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism and thought, and the cognitive neuroscientist and neurologist Shahar Arzy c...
Mystics who have spoken of their union with God have come under suspicion in all three major religious traditions, sometimes to the point of condemnation and execution in the case of Christianity and Islam. Nevertheless, in all three religions the tradition of unio mystica is deep and long. Many of the spiritual giants of these three faiths have seen the attainment of mystical union as the heart of their beliefs and practices.
Despite its importance, mystical union has rarely been investigated in itself, apart from the wider study of mysticism, and even more rarely from the...
Mystics who have spoken of their union with God have come under suspicion in all three major religious traditions, sometimes to the point of condem...
