Search Results (34)

In her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot (1819–1880) repeatedly stages moments in which gentile characters project expectations onto Jewish women, drawing on inherited cultural representations from literature, history, and the performing arts. These moments reveal how limited their real-world knowledge of Jews—particularly Jewish women—was, and how readily they relied on cultural templates rather than lived experience. George Eliot herself, however, had undertaken extensive study of Jewish history, religion, and culture in preparation for the novel, including research into the Talmud, Mishna, kabbalah, and halacha (Jewish law). Yet this knowledge is purposefully not afforded to her characters. This article examines George Eliot’s increasing understanding of Jewish society, and her shifting attitudes towards Judaism, and explores how allusions to Jewish women in history, literature, and performance shape the gentile characters’ othering of Mirah Lapidoth, a young Jewish woman fleeing enforced familial exploitation, whom Daniel rescues from drowning in the Thames. Two significant conceptual terms underpin my argument. Objectification refers here not only to eroticisation or aestheticisation, but to the broader process by which Mirah is perceived as a symbolic figure—as an image, a type, or role—rather than a fully realised person. Othering denotes the interpretative habit by which gentile characters position Mirah through pre-existing stereotypes or literary precedents, instead of understanding her as a subject with her own history and interiority. Rescue describes the narrative mechanisms by which Mirah is brought into focus, first through Daniel’s intervention, then through her placement within the Meyrick household, and finally through marriage, though always within structures that continue to idealise, discipline, or contain her. I argue that George Eliot’s deployment of familiar stereotypes does not reinforce them; instead, she exposes them as cultural constructions that must be deconstructed or exorcised before she reconstructs her own version of Jewish culture and identity, which she referred to as “the inner life of modern Judaism” in her notebooks. I also argue that Daniel’s rescue of Mirah, rather than an act of pure benevolence, becomes a further site of objectification, othering her as an idealised model of Jewish womanhood rather than acknowledging her as an autonomous individual. Full article

This essay conducts a comparative analysis of the literary use of kabbalistic motives in the two seemingly very distant authors: Jacques Derrida and Philip K. Dick. It shows how the Lurianic “fable,” conceived in the Derridean terms as a literary récit, shapes their understanding of time as an open-ended game whose outcome remains unknown. It thus wants to prove that Derrida’s essay Given Time, based on the little prose by Charles Baudelaire called “The False Coin,” and the penultimate book by Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion, tell the same story which is also a meta-story: a speculative meditation on the nature of temporality and story-telling, which involves the messianic “theology of risk.” In both cases we deal with what the essay terms as an “inverted Gnosticism”: while the traditional Gnostic doctrine envisions time as the factor of the world’s decay and imperfection, Derrida and Dick, inspired by the Lurianic kabbalah, see it as the chance of the world to verify itself, that is, to make itself real and true in the process of “unprejudiced becoming.” Full article

This article investigates the case of Jewish Spiritual Renewal (JSR) to illuminate the evolving landscape of Jewish textuality and therapeutic literacies shaped by spiritual, neoliberal, and therapeutic discourses. Based on qualitative methodology, utilizing case studies and long-term field work, it highlights the continuing importance of texts in contemporary Jewish expressions of devotion. Despite JSR’s primary focus on embodied spiritual experience, the article shows how Jewish texts are integrated into study sessions, workshops, courses, and rituals, to promote therapeutic insights and spiritual development. Aligning with other modern forms of Jewish spirituality, JSR posits that Jewish texts are valuable insofar as they facilitate personal growth and self-transformation. This is achieved through the intentional selection and performance of texts, particularly those from Jewish esoteric traditions, Kabbalah, Hasidism, and ethical literature (Musar), often interpreted in a psychological context. Full article

As first-hand testimonies and accounts of the Holocaust fade, scholars and artists alike have struggled to depict and contextualize the genocide’s monumental violence. But depicting violence and its aftermath poses several problems, including the question of how to recall loss without artificially filling in or effacing the absence so central to its understanding. In essence, remembering the Holocaust is a paradox: the preservation of an absence. Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of postmemory addresses this paradox and asks questions about memorial capacity in the twenty-first century. This essay considers Hirsch’s postmemory in the context of W.G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, which uses a combination of prose and photography to engage the difficulties inherent in memory work without access to eyewitnesses. Through the interaction of printed text and images, Austerlitz subtly references Lurianic mysticism’s concept of tikkun and Tree of Life (ilanot) diagrams. The result is a depiction of memory that is both process-based and embodies absence. My reading of Austerlitz traces a Jewish heritage within the work of a non-Jewish German author by attending to a tradition of mystical thought embedded in the novel. This situates Sebald’s fiction in a much longer Jewish history that stretches out on either end of the event of the Holocaust. Structurally, Sebald develops a tikkun-like process of (re)creation which relies on gathering material scraps of the past and imaginatively engaging with their absences in the present. Images, just as much as text, are central to this process. Reading Austerlitz in the context of Kabbalah reveals an intellectual and artistic link to a Jewish history that, while predating the Holocaust, nonetheless sheds light on post-Holocaust memories of loss. Full article

In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing so, the creators of these works evoke the Lurianic notion of millin setimin or “secreted words”—utterances that transcend the communicative function of everyday speech and partake in some profound revelations. I hope to show that from Allen Ginsberg, through Tony Kushner, to the Coen Brothers and beyond, Jewish–American creators have been evoking Jewish tongues both as symbols of a lost past and as millin setimin that aspire to restore the connection to that past, within the Jewish–American community and beyond. Full article

Ritual has long served as a central axis of religious life, not only structuring practice but also transmitting meaning across generations. This article offers a new perspective on how Hasidic thought reconfigures the medieval Jewish genre of ta‘amei ha-mitzvot—meanings for the commandments—by transforming halakhah into a sustained mnemonic system for theological transmission and communal continuity. Focusing on Rabbi Nathan Sternhartz’s Likkutei Halakhot, a 19th-century Hasidic commentary on the Shulḥan Arukh, the study explores how Bratslav Hasidism embeds the kabbalistic teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav within the legal framework of Jewish ritual practice. It argues that Rabbi Nathan developed a distinctive mnemonic strategy that integrates symbolic and theological meaning into halakhic detail, enabling the internalization of Bratslav theology through repeated ritual action. Through close textual analysis, historical contextualization, cognitive theory, and a case study of Kiddushin rituals, this article demonstrates how halakhah becomes not only a vehicle for theological cognition but also a mechanism for sustaining religious identity and memory within a post-charismatic Hasidic community. More broadly, the study contributes to discussions of ritual, memory, and symbolic reasoning in religious life. Full article

The following article aims at highlighting the theurgical tendencies in the teachings of the great Andalusī Muslim mystic Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (560/1165–638/1240). By “theurgy” is meant the influence of man on Divinity in its manifest external dimension, that is to say, the dimension of God that creates beings and is involved with their lives and fortunes, as opposed to His hidden essence. The category “theurgy/theurgical” is adopted from the modern academic study of Kabbalah, and is ultimately derived from Late Antique Neoplatonism. The bulk of this article is dedicated to analyzing relevant texts from Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre and elucidating the theurgical elements reflected in them, while the last two sections (5–6) present preliminary observations on the relevant links between Ibn al-ʿArabī, Kabbalah, and Late Antique Neoplatonism. It is argued that these three traditions should be studied together, as they shed light on one another. Full article

This research challenges the prevailing consensus in the field of Jewish meditation that there is no longstanding tradition of Jewish meditation, but rather a plethora of independent, unrelated techniques. By applying a context-sensitive research methodology, this study reconsiders the common understanding of Hitbodedut as ‘concentration’ and suggests instead a new view of Hitbodedut as a three-step solitary meditation technique, used as a means for Devekut (cleave to God). Drawing on the work of past scholars, this research demonstrates the potential transmission of Hitbodedut from the school of Jewish Egyptian Pietists to the 13th-century Kabbalists of Acre, then to the 16th-century Kabbalists of Safed, and eventually to 18th-century Hasidism. Full article

Freud chose the myth of Oedipus as the foundation for his understanding of human development, obedience to the law, and his theory of civilization, and he wrote that he saw no psychological value in analyzing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on biblical interpretation, the Kabbalah, and the work of C. G. Jung, it is argued that Adam and Eve’s transgression serves as an archetype for an “Eden Complex” that provides a broad and useful paradigm for understanding the dynamics of individual development, parent–child conflict, morals and values, and both psychotherapeutic and societal change. Full article

This essay reflects on the concept of the death of God as part and parcel of modern philosophical theology: a genre of thinking that came into existence with Hegel’s announcement of the “speculative Good Friday” as the most natural expression of die Religion der neuen Zeiten, “the religion of modern times”. In my interpretation, the death of God not only does not spell the end of the era of atheism but, on the contrary, inaugurates a new era of characteristically modern theism that steers away from theological absolutism. The new theos is no longer conceived as the eternal omnipotent Absolute but as the Derridean diminished Infinite: contracted and self-negated—even “unto death”. Such God, however, although coming to the foremost visibly in modernity, is not completely new to the monotheistic religions, which from the beginning are engaged in the heated debate concerning the status of the divine power: is it absolute and unlimited or rather self-restricted and conditioned? I will enter this debate by conducting a comparison between the two traditional models of divine self-restriction—Christian kenosis and Jewish-kabbalistic tsimtsum—and then present their modernised philosophical variants, most of all in the thought of Hegel. Full article

Recent advancements in studying the Ars Notoria, notably through Julian Véronèse’s critical edition, have provided insights into its manuscripts and various interpretations. This progress sets the stage for exploring a less examined area: the Jewish reception of the Ars Notoria, a topic ripe for investigation in the current scholarly landscape. This article explores the Jewish engagement with this Christian text, particularly through its Hebrew translation Melekhet Muskelet, as well as a notable discovery that links the Ars Notoria’s notae to the Kabbalistic ten sefirot. This connection suggests an early Jewish interest in this Christian magical text. The study, using textual and visual analysis, offers insights into the interplay between medieval Jewish Kabbalah and Christian magical texts, underscoring the need to reevaluate their mutual influences during the 13th and 14th centuries. Full article

This article examines the earthly journey of the saints in early Jewish and Daoist hagiographies. The major texts for comparative reading are Sefer Shivchei Ha-Ar”i and Shenxian Zhuan, namely, the foundation stones of each hagiographical tradition. Emphasis is laid on the most significant phases in the process of making saints while the candidates dwell in the worldly domain as quasi-divine beings: (1) Mystical Birth, (2) Life in Seclusion, and (3) Divine Encounters. During these stages of transition, the sages were imparted with the esoteric wisdom and the godly features that rendered them extraordinary exemplars of religiosity. My investigation demonstrates that this recipe is shared by both hagiographical traditions, despite the distance in time and space, to construct the image of saints, each expressed with culturally distinct characteristics of their own. I argue that both traditions display a pattern of human-centered sainthood instead of the divine-endorsed type—while the birth myth shows a discernible degree of predestined sagehood, painstaking periods, such as self-isolation and learning with the true masters, are more crucial to the sages’ transformation of identity in the realm of Earth, the dynamic incubator that breeds holiness for the most qualified souls. Full article

This article compares two biblical accounts: the description of the construction of the Tabernacle (Ex. 25–40), and its connection to the myth of Eve’s creation (Gen. 2). I aim to reveal the literary and symbolic links between “feminine” attributes in these two formative accounts, from their development in biblical literature to their appearances in rabbinic midrash and medieval Kabbalah. My reading seeks to combine gender, myth, and literary study, to explore how erotic images of the sacred were developed and proliferated over generations. Full article

This paper examines transreligiosity in the context of the transmission of South Asian concepts of spirituality to the UK in the 20th century. Between the 1920s and 1990s, Indian teacher and author Phiroz Mehta (1902–1994) crossed borders in a colonial and postcolonial shuttling between India and the UK but also transgressed conceptual and practice borders of religion, teaching Indian religious concepts to post-Christian spiritual seekers in 1970s–80s South London. Mehta cultivated an elasticity between many religious and philosophical traditions, recognising the post-institutional fatigue of subjects who sought alternative forms of ‘belonging without believing’. Privileging the domestic space for teaching, as well as transitory ‘camp’ gatherings in the UK and Germany, Mehta often operated in the social margins, combining teachings from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity with Zoroastrianism, Judaism (specifically Kabbalah), and Daoism. He offered his tutees the freedom to practice religion in whatever way they chose by drawing on a broad range of traditions concurrently to create a transreligiosity. This paper examines Panagiotopoulos and Roussou’s ‘transgressional webs of practising individualised forms of alternative spirituality’ in relation to Mehta’s followers in the 1970s-1980s and asks how transreligiosity relates to other theoretical analyses, such as religious exoticism, bricolage, religious appropriation, cultural re-articulation or assemblage. This paper focuses on qualitative interviews with original members of the Mehta community conducted between 2021 and 2022. Full article

In the Kabbalah creation myth, God creates the universe by “stepping back”, releasing ten holy vessels with his light—only to have those vessels shatter with shards of divine light, or “shards” scattered throughout the earth. In a parallel approach, this paper suggests that the sacred must be sought in diverse encounters within everyday life and professional practice. In counseling or other therapeutic support, the definition of and search for spiritual dimensions must be broadened to thoughtfully incorporate the diverse experiences and expressions of people with intellectual disabilities. Similarly, those who seek to understand people’s relationship with the divine and support meaning in their lives must welcome a wide range of “artistic” engagements, an approach exemplified in grief and loss intervention. This article concludes by pointing towards resonance as a helpful concept to reconceptualize accessible spirituality in future work. Full article