Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought »

Moshe Idel is Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He is the winner of many awards and prizes, including the EMET Prize, given by the Prime Minister of Israel; the Israel Prize for Jewish Thought; the Gershom Scholem Prize for research in Kabbalah, given by the Israeli Academy for Sciences and Humanities; and the Jewish National Book Award. Among his many books are Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation, and Kabbalah and Eros.

In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Moshe 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, context.

Introduction 1

I Intellectual Conceptualizations of Judaism

1 Arnaldo Momigliano and Gershom Scholem on Jewish History and Tradition 17

2 Eric Voegelin's Israel and Revelation 31

3 George Steiner: A Prophet of Abstraction 52

II Scholem's Conceptualizations of Kabbalah

4 The Function of Symbols in Gershom Scholem 83

5 Hieroglyphs, Mysteries, Keys: Scholem Between Molitor and Kafka 109

6 Subversive Catalysts: Gnosticism and Messianism in Scholem's View of Jewish Mysticism 133

III Kabbalah in Some Twentieth-Century Thinkers

7 Franz Rosenzweig and Kabbalah 159

8 Abraham Abulafia, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin on Language 168

9 Jacques Derrida and Kabbalistic Sources 176

10 Paul Celan's "Psalm": A Revelation Toward Naught 193

IV Understanding Hasidism

11 Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism 205

12 Abraham Heschel on Mysticism and Hasidism 217

13 White Letters: From R. Levi Isaac of Berdichev to Postmodern Hermeneutics 234

List of Abbreviations and Sources 249

Notes 255

Index 311

Acknowledgments 325