One of the most important scholars of our century, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) opened up a once esoteric world of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, to concerned students of religion. The Kabbalah is a rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God: its twelfth-and thirteenth-century beginnings in southern France and Spain are probed in Origins of the Kabbalah, a work crucial in Scholem's oeuvre. The book is a contribution not only to the history of Jewish medieval mysticism but also to the study of medieval mysticism in general and will be of interest to...

The way we understand particular spaces is mediated by our perceptions of the difference between the sacred and the profane. Throughout history, different peoples have revered vastly diverse spaces as sacred for vastly diverse reasons.

In Sacred Spaces, Benjamin Z. Kedar and R. J. Zwi Werblowsky have compiled a wide-ranging collection of essays exploring a broad array of ancient and contemporary holy places. The book reviews sacred spaces of the ancient religions--Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Indian and East-Asian Religions--and discusses how these spaces have been...