There emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish elite; notes Moshe Idel; no longer made up of prophets; priests; kings; or rabbis but of intellectuals and academicians working in secular universities or writing for an audience not defined by any one set of religious beliefs. In Old Worlds; New Mirrors 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.Idel—himself one of the world's most eminent scholars of Jewish mysticism—focuses in particular on the mystical aspects of his subjects' writings. Avoiding all attempts to discern anything like a single "essence of Judaism" in their works; he nevertheless maintains a sustained effort to illumine especially the Kabbalistic and Hasidic strains of thought these figures would have derived from earlier Jewish sources. Looming large throughout is Gershom Scholem; the thinker who played such a crucial role in establishing the study of Kabbalah as a modern academic discipline and whose influence pervades Idel's own work; indeed; the author observes; much of the book may be seen as a mirror held up to reflect on the broader reception of Scholem's thought.
#3728055 in Books University of Pennsylvania Press 1996-04-01Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.02 x .81 x 5.98l; 1.30 #File Name: 0812215850360 pages
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