THE NEW AGE OF KABBALAH

In recent years, a remarkable revival of interest in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism has taken place in Israel, the United States and other, mostly Western, countries. This revival, which includes a resurgence of kabbalistic and hasidic doctrines and practices and an integration of kabbalistic themes in various cultural fields, coincides with the emergence of the New Age and other related spiritual and new religious movements in the Western world in the last decades of the twentieth century. New Age themes appear in various contemporary kabbalistic and Neo‐hasidic movements, and there are significant similarities between these movements, the New Age and other recent spiritual and religious revival movements. This article will examine the contemporary revival of Kabbalah and investigate the relationship between contemporary Kabbalah and New Age phenomena. It will demonstrate that central characteristics of the new spiritual culture appear not only in contemporary Kabbalah and Neo‐hasidic groups that explicitly use New Age themes, but also among kabbalistic and hasidic movements that are perceived as presenting more traditional forms of Jewish mysticism. The shared characteristic of contemporary Kabbalah and New Age, it will be argued, are not dependent only on the direct impact of the New Age movements on contemporary Kabbalah, but rather on the postmodern context and nature of both these phenomena. The emergence and constructions of contemporary Kabbalah, the New Age and other related new spiritual movements, which can be described as “postmodern spiritualities”, is dependent on the global economic and social changes in the late twentieth century. This article will claim that these new cultural formations reflect the cultural logic of late global capitalism and respond to the new social conditions in the postmodern era.     

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and the Kabbalah

Medieval Jewish mysticism was a multiform project in which Maimonides played different roles, for different mystical streams, and at different times. Maimonides' impact on Kabbalah was such that understanding the histories of both medieval Jewish philosophy and mysticism requires a more integrative approach than is usually adopted. The investigation into the activities of Abraham Abulafia as Maimonidean commentator and publicist undertaken here illustrates this point.     

Freud's Ironically Jewish Science: Commentary on Paper by Jill Salberg

In his commentary on Jill Salberg's integrative and contextualizing article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited,” Aron examines several ideas related to Freud's ironically “Jewish science.” First, this commentary takes up the question of what it has meant to speak of a “Jewish science” historically, and what it might mean today. Shockingly, Aron shows that the rise and fall of psychoanalysis has been traced to Jewish influence. He then expands on Salberg's article by reviewing the relationship between circumcision and castration and considers the impact of Freud's Jewish identity and his anxiety about anti-Semitism on the structure of the psychoanalytic method and specifically on Freud's discovery of the “royal road.”     

EINSTEIN AND MYSTICISM

Albert Einstein deliberately and repeatedly expressed his general religious views. But what were his views of mysticism? His statements on the subject were few, relatively obscure, and often misunderstood. A coherent answer requires setting those statements in historical, cultural, and theological context, as well as examining Einstein's philosophical and religious views. Though the Einstein that emerges clearly rejected supernatural mysticism, his views of “essential” mysticism were—though largely implicit—more nuanced, more subtle, and ultimately more sympathetic than “mere appearance” suggests.     

Emmanuel Levinas and the New Science of Judaism

This article addresses Emmanuel Levinas's re‐conceptualization of Jewish identity by examining his response to a question he himself poses: “In which sense do we need a Jewish science?” First, I attend to Levinas's critique of modern science of Judaism, particularly as it was understood in the critical approaches of the nineteenth‐century school of thought, Wissenschaft des Judentums. Next, I detail Levinas's own constructive proposal that would, in his words, “enlarge the science of Judaism.” He retrieved classical textual sources that modern Judaism had neglected, while at the same time he enlarged Judaism's relevance beyond a historical community by turning to phenomenology as a rigorous science. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the broader implications of this new science of Judaism for Jewish ethics and identity in a post‐war period.     

FINDING ROTHKOWITZ: THE JEWISH ROTHKO

While Mark Rothko's canvases are renowned for their rich, monumental expanses of colour, he has insisted that his paintings should be appreciated on more than an aesthetic level. “The people who weep before my pictures,” he commented in 1956, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” While various critics and scholars have recognized the importance of this remark, just what Rothko meant by “religious experience” has been highly contested. In this article I will argue that Rothko's Jewish identity—informed by his experiences in Russia and New York—influenced his understanding of “religious experience” in subtle but powerful ways. I will not attempt to spot a raft of Jewish symbols and references in Rothko's work, an endeavour that has yielded spurious results in previous studies. Instead, I will examine Rothko's sense of “religious experience” as an evolving concept in his thought and painting; a process which finds its culmination in the Rothko Chapel, a space informed but not defined by the artist's Jewishness.     

Luther: A Mystic

Understanding Martin Luther means looking at a medieval monk heavily influenced by his confessor, John of Staupitz. Staupitz inspired Luther and his friends to read the sermons of the late medieval mystic John Tauler. Here Luther found a theology of grace, the idea that faith is the only remaining point to a grace‐full God. Tauler's most obvious influence, his understanding of penance, shaped the first and second of Luther's Ninety‐five Theses. Another influence, that of passion mysticism, Luther explored and developed in his early tracts. Over the years, while Luther would stress the importance of Scripture over mystical experience, this was more a slight but meaningful transformation rather than a complete break with mysticism.     

PHILOSOPHY AND SALVATION: THE APOPHATIC IN THE THOUGHT OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

The mystical apotheosis of Schopenhauer's thought is intimately connected to his immanent definition of philosophy. An analysis of the philosophical progression to salvation via aesthetic contemplation, compassion, and asceticism, illuminates Schopenhauer's advocacy of Eckhartian‐style mysticism. Schopenhauer's mysticism, like Eckhart’s, relies on the structures of negation facilitated by a particular metaphysics. Both therein transcend the tradition of theological discourse which holds it possible to construct propositions that express the essence of the divine. That has led to both being associated with atheism. However, in tracing the mechanism by which Schopenhauer's philosophy reaches its mystical apotheosis, it becomes apparent that it would be mistaken to charge him (and Eckhart) with atheism on the basis of an alleged inability to distinguish between an “atheistic non‐existence of God” and a “hyper‐thingness of God”. Rather than attack Schopenhauer in this manner, and hence also Eckhart, it is more appropriate to target their underlying metaphysical preconceptions, which in the case of Schopenhauer, is to take issue with his Critical conception of philosophy.     

BETWEEN TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY

Translation played an important role in the history of Old Yiddish literature. To highlight the problems posed by translation, I have chosen to analyse an ethical-mystical bilingual text, the Kav ha-Yosher by Tsvi Hirsh Koidanover (Frankfurt, 1705 and 1709). This text demonstrates the popularization of Kabbalah in Jewish Ashkenazi culture (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries). I analyse the discrepancies between the Hebrew and the Yiddish texts. The vernacular text is a midrashic commentary, which intertwines the literal adaptation of the original Hebrew text and interpretative extensions. I study the discursive structures, the changes due to the shifts of readership and the differences in cultural tradition between “lay” and “learned” tradition, especially concerning magic, demonology, social criticism, tales, legends and censorship. The Kav ha-Yosher is a remarkable laboratory for an understanding of the nature of translation in vernacular Jewish literature.     

Speaking of Possibilities: The Theistic Actualism of Anselm's Divine Locutio

In his Monologion, Anselm represents God's knowledge of his creative possibilities, not in the intellectualist and Platonic terms of Augustine's divine ideas, but in the linguistic, poetic, and semi‐Stoic terms of a divine “utterance” or “expression” (locutio). Through his shift in theological metaphor, Anselm makes a subtle yet significant departure from the prevailing, “possibilist” model of divine possibility in western theology—according to which God's possibilities are known prior to and independently of any act or intention to create—towards a radically alternate, analogical and “actualist” appreciation of God as the sovereign speaker and inventor of his own possibilities.     

Aquinas's Opposition to Killing the Innocent and its Distinctiveness within the Christian just War Tradition

This essay argues that Aquinas's position regarding the killing of innocent people differs significantly from other representatives of the Christian just war tradition. While his predecessors, notably Augustine, as well as his successors, from Cajetan and Vitoria onward, affirm the legitimacy of causing the death of innocents in a just war in cases of necessity, Aquinas holds that causing the death of innocents in a foreseeable manner, whether intentionally or indirectly, is never justified. Even an otherwise legitimate act of just war cannot legitimate causing the death of innocent people, as this can never advance the common good. This stance also contrasts sharply with much modern and contemporary double effect theorizing in relation to jus in bello. In this regard, Aquinas's position, shaped decisively by his biblical and theological commitments, may point the way towards an ethical orientation beyond the typical divisions of “pacifism” and “just war.”     

Freud's atonement

The authors explore Freud's preoccupations with death and dying. In particular, they focus on the day of Freud's death, which was the Jewish Day of Atonement and the Jewish Sabbath. The significance of this event, which the authors think was “planned,” was not just in order to obliterate years of pain and suffering from cancer, but also to overcome a lifelong burden of conflict and guilt about his relations with his family and colleagues as well as his Jewish cultural/religious upbringing. The authors consider whether the timing of Freud's death represented a premeditated return to his cultural and religious roots.     

Hugo Kauder's unexpressed philosophical concept: Schelling's transcendence,Nietzsche's visions and Buber's Israel

Hugo Kauder, born in 1888 near Prague, composer, instrumentalist, theoretician and music-philosopher, came to Vienna in 1905, left Austria after the Novemberpogrom 1938 and reached New York via the Netherlands and England in 1940. In 1938 Tel Aviv was also one of his intended havens (parts of Kauder's estate are kept at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem). Engaged in the crisis discourse in Vienna's postwar period of the early 1920s, Kauder drafted his philosophical ideas under the influence of Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Nietzsche, also speculating on music-teleology, mysticism and cosmology. Corresponding with the German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz, with the authors Karl Wolfskehl and Erich von Kahler, Kauder expressed his Jewishness – much more as a mindset than an active Jewish identity. Coming from a system of transcendental and natural philosophy combined with Christian ideas, Kauder moved to a more complex syncretism also reflecting on Jewish topics. Kauder did not organize his ideas into a concept, they are, rather, the theoretical framework of his educational books and are widespread in his essays and letters.     

Introduction

With the death of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in December 2009, the world of Jewish studies lost one of its most distinguished practitioners. Yerushalmi undertook pathbreaking research in a number of different fields of Jewish history that reflected the breadth of his erudition. This issue of Jewish History explores several key branches of Yerushalmi’s scholarly labor including his study of conversos and his ongoing interest in the “royal alliances” of the Jews. It also explores Yerushalmi’s reputation beyond the United States, focusing in particular on France and Germany, where he achieved wide renown in the 1980s and 1990s.     

Jung and the Kabbalah

Jung's use of Kabbalistic symbols and ideas as well as his personal Kabbalistic vision are critically examined. It is argued that as great as Jung's acknowledged affinity is to the Kabbalah, his unacknowledged relationship was even greater. Jung has been accused of being a contemporary Gnostic; however, the interpretations Jung placed on Gnosticism and the texts Jung referred to on alchemy were profoundly Kabbalistic, so much so that one would be more justified in calling the Jung of the Mysterium Coniunctionis and other late works a Kabbalist in contemporary guise. Although Jung, at least during the 1930s, appears to have had powerful motives that limited his receptivity to Jewish ideas, his highly ambivalent and at times reproachable attitude toward Judaism should not prevent one from appreciating the affinities between Jungian psychology and Jewish mystical thought.     

Misers or lovers? How a reflection on Christian mysticism caused a shift in Jacques Lacan’s object theory

In his sixth seminar, Desire and Its Interpretation (1956–1957), Lacan patiently elaborates his theory of the ‘phantasm’ ($?a), in which the object of desire (object small a) is ascribed a constitutive role in the architecture of the libidinal subject. In that seminar, Lacan shows his fascination for an aphorism of the twentieth century Christian mystic Simone Weil in her assertion: “to ascertain exactly what the miser whose treasure was stolen lost: thus we would learn much.” This is why, in his theory, Lacan conceptualizes the object of desire as the unconsumed treasure—and, in that sense, the “nothing”—on which the miser’s desire is focused. But the more Lacan develops his new object theory, the more he realizes how close it is to Christian mysticism in locating the ultimate object of desire in God, in a sevenfold “nothing” (to quote the famous last step in the ascent of the Mount Carmel as described by John of the Cross). An analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet allows Lacan to escape the Christian logic and to rearticulate the object of desire in an ‘unchristian’ tragic grammar. When he replaces the miser by the lover as paradigm of the subject’s relation to its object of desire, he substitutes a strictly Greek kind of love—eros, not agape—for the miser’s relationship to his treasure. Even when, in the late Lacan, “love” becomes a proper concept, its structure remains deeply “tragic.”     

Science as a Paradigm for Halakhic Thought: an Introduction to the Theology of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik

In the 20th century there was a single individual whose personality provided the inspiration for, and whose writings defined the parameters of, what came to be known as Modern Orthodox Judaism. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903?–?1993) served as the Rosh Yeshiva (Senior Talmudic Scholar) of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and Professor of Philosophy at Yeshiva University for almost 50 years. He was widely acknowledged, by all segments of the Jewish community, as the outstanding Talmudic scholar of his generation. At the same time, concern for the interface of tradition with modernity was central and pivotal to Soloveitchik's thought. In spite of his profound impact on American Orthodox Judaism, Soloveitchik's work is relatively unknown outside of this community. This article explores the implications of Soloveitchik's work for epistemology and methodology within the “science and religion” dialogue.     

When Joseph met Zuleika – the theo-political underpinning of Joseph in Shlonsky's early poetry and its critique of the halutz ethos

Rabbinic, kabbalist and hasidic traditions perceive Joseph as an emblem of righteousness, a guardian of the Covenant, a symbol of Sefirat Yesod and a divine representation of the earthly zaddik. In various sources, Joseph's struggle with Zuleika, Potiphar's wife, is elevated to a mythological struggle of the righteous with the forces of evil, manifested as a seductive, demonic woman. Zuleika casts her net to capture Joseph and break the divine union of God and “Knesset Israel.” Avraham Shlonsky's account of the charged relationships between Joseph and Zuleika is a metaphor and a prism for his critical view of the Zionist-halutz ideology and its concepts of body, masculinity and sexuality. Reading Shlonsky's early poetry collected in the book titled Bagalgal (In the Wheel, 1927) while applying hermeneutical methods taken from the field of Jewish thought brings the array of references and allusions to Jewish traditional texts to the surface. These references range from the Bible through the Talmud and Midrash to Hasidism. This method yields two important contributions; first, it highlights the unique contribution of Shlonsky's poetry. Second, the reconstruction of the theo-political elements of Shlonsky's early poetry deepens our understanding of the theological undercurrents of what is considered “secular Zionist culture” and demonstrates the unique role of the modern Hebrew poet as a secular prophet of the Jewish national revival.