Authors: Moshe Idel
ISBN-13: 9780300082883, ISBN-10: 0300082886
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Yale University Press
Date Published: May 2000
Edition: 1st Edition
In this book, one of the world's leading scholars of Jewish thought examines the long tradition of Jewish messianism and mystical experience. Moshe Idel calls upon his profound knowledge of ancient and medieval texts and of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Eastern sources to uncover new perspectives on the nature and development of Jewish messianism. He shows that, contrary to Gershom Scholem's view that mysticism and messianism are incompatible religious tendencies, they are in fact closely related spiritual phenomena. Messianism regularly emerges from mystical experiences, Idel contends.
[An] arresting new study, Moshe Idel argues that messianism deserves a central place in Jewish intellectual history. More than that, he insists that there are close ties between messianism and the Kabbalah. -- Lingua Franca Book Review
Preface | ||
Introduction: The Sources of Messianic Consciousness | 1 | |
Ch. 1 | Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Forms of Messianism | 38 |
Ch. 2 | Abraham Abulafia: Ecstatic Kabbalah and Spiritual Messianism | 58 |
Ch. 3 | Concepts of Messiah in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Theosophical Forms of Kabbalah | 101 |
Ch. 4 | Messianism and Kabbalah, 1470-1540 | 126 |
Ch. 5 | From Italy to Safed and Back, 1540-1640 | 154 |
Ch. 6 | Sabbateanism and Mysticism | 183 |
Ch. 7 | Hasidism: Mystical Messianism and Mystical Redemption | 212 |
Ch. 8 | Concluding Remarks | 248 |
App. 1 | Ego, Ergo Sum Messiah: On Abraham Abulafia's Sefer ha-Yashar | 295 |
App. 2 | Tiqqun Hatzot: A Ritual between Myth, Messianism, and Mysticism | 308 |
App. 3 | Some Modern Reverberations of Jewish Messianism | 321 |
Notes | 327 | |
References | 429 | |
Indexes | 443 |