Representing the spectrum of subfields within Jewish Studies, the contributing scholars to this volume use beginnings as a hermeneutic stance to analyze texts in their area. While each essay is a significant contribution to its own subfield - Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah, Modern Jewish Thought, Feminist and Cultural Studies - the essays taken as a whole present new possibilities for exploring the space that is Jewish Studies and beginning an inquiry into what might constitute a definable hermeneutics of Jewish texts.

Maimonides' vision of Judaism was deeply elitist, but at the same time profoundly universalistic. He was highly critical of the regnant Jewish culture of his day, which he perceived as so heavily influenced by ancient Jewish mysticism as to be debased. While focusing on that critique, Kellner skilfully and accessibly demonstrates how Maimonides used philosophy in order to purify a corrupted and paganized religion and to present distinctions fundamental to Judaism as institutional, sociological, and historical, rather than ontological. In Maimonides' hands, metaphysical distinctions are translated into moral challenges.

The religious communities of early modern Eastern Europe?particularly those with a mystical bent?are typically studied in isolation. Yet the heavy Slavic imprint on Jewish popular mysticism and pervasive Judaizing tendencies among Christian dissenters call into question the presumed binary quality of Jewish-Christian interactions. In Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, editor Glenn Dynner presents twelve essays that chart contacts, parallels, and mutual influences between Jewish and Christian mystics. With cutting-edge research on folk healers, messianists, Hasidim, and Christian sectarians, this volume presents instances of rich cultural interchange and bold border transgression. Holy Dissent is divided into two sections: "Jewish Mystics in a Christian World" and "Christianizing Jews, Judaizing Christians." In these essays, readers learn that Jewish and Christian folk healers consulted each other and learned from common sources; that the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel Ba'al Shem Tov, likely drew inspiration from Christian ascetics; that Christian peasants sought and obtained audience with Hasidic masters; that Jewish mystics openly Christianized; and that Christian mystics openly Judaized. In contrast to prevailing models that present Jewish and Christian cultures as either rigidly autonomous or ambiguously hybrid, Holy Dissent charts specific types of religio-cultural exchange and broadens our conception of how cultures interact. The scholarship in this volume is notably fresh and significant and makes an important contribution across disciplines. Jewish and Christian studies scholars as well as historians of Eastern Europe will benefit from the analysis of Holy Dissent.

A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature.

"While many scholars have noted Martin Heidegger’s indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, as well as his affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, Elliot R. Wolfson expands connections between Heidegger’s thought and kabbalistic material. By arguing that the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger, Wolfson presents an alternative way of understanding the history of Western philosophy. Wolfson’s comparison between Heidegger and kabbalah sheds light on key concepts such as hermeneutics, temporality, language, and being and nothingness, while yielding surprising reflections on their common philosophical ground. Given Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language, these innovative readings are all the more remarkable for their juxtaposition of incongruent fields of discourse. Wolfson’s entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions"--back cover.

This book deals with aspects of the gender imaging of God in a variety of medieval kabbalistic sources. It provides the key to understanding the phenomenological structures of mystical experience as well as the thematic correlation of esotericism and eroticism that is central to the kabbalah. The author examines the role of gender utilizing current feminist studies and cultural anthropology. He explores the themes of the feminization of the Torah, the correlation of circumcision and vision of God, the phallocentric understanding of divine creation as a process of inscription mythologized as an act of sexual self-gratificatin, and the phenomenon of gender-crossing in kabbalistic myth and ritual, Collectively, the studies explore in great depth the androcentric phallocentrism that is characteristic of medieval Jewish mysticism.

This book explores the fundamental issues in Jewish mysticism and provides a taxonomy of the deep structures of thought that emerge from the texts.