A complete and unabridged English translation of Abraham Cohen de Herrera's principal kabbalistic work, with an introduction to his life, works, and influence, and comprehensive notes on his kabbalistic and philosophical sources, by Kenneth Krabbenhoft.

With the publication of Abraham Cohen de Herrera's Gate of Heaven, a widely influential work of Jewish mysticism is available for the first time in an unabridged, annotated English edition. In this work, originally written in Spanish for the marrano community of Amsterdam, Herrera (d. 1635) follows the syncretic model of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in reconciling the teachings of the Sefer Yezirah, the Zohar, Moses Cordovero, Isaac Lurian and the Lurianic school (in particular Israel Sarug), with Aristotelian, Platonic, and Neoplatonic metaphysics, medieval Islamic and Jewish theology, and Scholasticism. This thorough synthesis explains the work's appeal to philosophers like Spinoza, Leibniz, Henry More, Hegel, and Jacob Bruckner.

In this book the author seeks to find historiographical and textual evidence that Abraham Cohen de Herrera ‘s main kabbalistic work, Puerta del Cielo, influenced Spinoza’s metaphysics as it is expounded in his later work, the Ethica. Many of the most important ontological topics maintained by the philosopher, like the concept of the first cause as substance, the procession of the infinite modes, the subjective or metaphorical reality of the attributes, and the two different understandings of God, were anticipated in Herrera’s mystical treatise. Both shared a particular consideration of panentheism that entails acosmism. This influence is proven through a comparative examination of the writings of both authors, as well as a detailed research on previous Jewish philosophical thought.

This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).

Once a prophet of critical, “other” thought, Heidegger has now for many become the epitome of the unthinkable, in the light of the Black Notebooks controversy. The unthinkable here is anti-Semitism. The encounter between Heidegger and the Jews has thus come to signify – very much in the spirit of Heidegger’s own anti-Judaism – the end of thought. The present volume resists this view by positing not only Heidegger but also the Jewish people as representing thought. The encounter between Heidegger and various traditions of Jewish thought is conceived here as a conversation inter alia, an exchange between real or perceived “others”: others to the philosophical tradition, to mainstream modernity, to Western Christian metaphysics, to each other, and even to themselves. The conversation takes shape in this volume as a symposium of seventeen essays by leading scholars both of Heidegger’s philosophy and of Jewish Studies.

The book Redemption in the Lurianic Kabbalah and Its Branches deals with a little known aspect of Rabbi Luria’s mystic teaching, about Redemption. The author of the book is grateful to Prof. Ronit Meroz from Tel Aviv University for her book on this subject which was Prof. Meroz’s doctoral work at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1988. The author of this book has taught this subject to US students at the University in Prague for several semesters. Rabbi Luria influenced in an immense way not only Judaism, but even some Christian thinkers, as for example the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz and the modern theologian Jürgen Moltmann. Everybody will agree that our world needs improvement, and the teaching of Rabbi Luria offers a sort of hope for a better world.

The present volume offers a fresh look at the crucial role which Christan Hebraism played in the development of the humanities and modern philology. Christian theology, Jewish tradition and linguistic interest had an irreversible impact on the understanding of holy texts and language.

This monograph is the first to analyze Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Exotericae Exercitationes (1557). Though hardly read today, the Exercitationes was one of the most successful philosophical treatises of the time, attracting considerable attention from many intellectuals with multifaceted religious and philosophical orientations. In order to make this massive late-Renaissance work accessible to modern readers, Kuni Sakamoto conducted a detailed textual analysis and revealed the basic tenets of Scaliger’s philosophy. His analysis also enabled him to clarify the historical provenance of Scaliger’s Aristotelianism and the way it subsequently influenced some of the protagonists of the “New Philosophy.” The author thus bridges the historiographical gap between studies of Renaissance philosophy and those of the seventeenth-century.

In Portuguese Jews, New Christians and ‘New Jews’ Claude B. Stuczynski and Bruno Feitler gather some of the leading scholars of the history of the Portuguese Jews and conversos in a tribute to their common friend and a renowned figure in Luso-Judaica, Roberto Bachmann, on the occasion of his 85th birthday. The texts are divided into five sections dealing with medieval Portuguese Jewish culture, the impact of the inquisitorial persecution, the wide range of converso identities on one side, and of the Sephardi Western Portuguese Jewish communities on the other, and the role of Portugal and Brazil as lands of refuge for Jews during the Second World War. This book is introduced by a comprehensive survey on the historiography on Portuguese Jews, New Christians and 'New Jews' and offers a contribution to Luso-Judaica studies

Until recently, Spinoza's standing in Anglophone studies of philosophy has been relatively low and has only seemed to confirm Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's assessment of him as "a dead dog." However, an exuberant outburst of excellent scholarship on Spinoza has of late come to dominate work on early modern philosophy. This resurgence is due in no small part to the recent revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy and to the increased appreciation of Spinoza's role as an unorthodox, pivotal figure - indeed, perhaps the pivotal figure - in the development of Enlightenment thinking. Spinoza's penetrating articulation of his extreme rationalism makes him a demanding philosopher who offers deep and prescient challenges to all subsequent, inevitably less radical approaches to philosophy. While the twenty-six essays in this volume - by many of the world's leading Spinoza specialists - grapple directly with Spinoza's most important arguments, these essays also seek to identify and explain Spinoza's debts to previous philosophy, his influence on later philosophers, and his significance for contemporary philosophy and for us.