In "Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts, Tzahi Weiss explores anew the contested history of Sefer Yeṣirah, in the process extending our knowledge of Jewish intellectual traditions excluded from rabbinic canon.

Sefer Yesira is a short, enigmatic text which has fascinated scholars since it first emerged into the light of day in the early tenth century. It was initially understood to be a philosophical text which had descended by oral tradition from Abraham himself. Consequently it was commented on by many of the major figures in the Jewish world in the early medieval period. Subsequently it was understood as a mystical text and became a crucial influence on the medieval mystical movement (the Kabbalah). More than seventy kabbalistic commentaries on it are known. It continued to be of interest to Christian kabbalists at the time of the Renaissance and to scholars of Judaism and mysticism to the present day. Peter Hayman's study provides the first comprehensive critical edition of this text. The texts of the earliest manuscripts of the three main recensions of Sefer Yesira (the Short, Long and Saadyan Recensions) are printed in synoptic columns with a critical apparatus, drawn from nineteen selected manuscripts, at the bottom of each column. There is an English translation of each of the recensions followed by a commentary discussing the variant readings of the manuscripts and the text of Sefer Yesira presupposed in the earliest commentaries on it. Both in the introduction and the commentary an attempt is made to reconstruct an early form of the text from which the later recensions have developed. There are four appendices setting out what parts of the text are attested in each of the manuscripts and in what order, a hypothetical reconstructed text and the text of the tenth century Vatican scroll of Sefer Yesira with the probable added material underlined. The introduction concludes with an attempt to outline how the text grew into the form which has come down to us from the medieval period.

The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology offers an overview of Jewish theology, an aspect of Judaism that is equal in importance to law and ethics. Covering the period from antiquity to the present, the volume focuses on what Jews believe about God and also about the relation of God to humans and the world. Parts I and II cover exciting new research in Jewish biblical and rabbinic theology, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah (mysticism), and liturgy. Parts III and IV turn to modern theology with an exploration of works by leading figures, such as Rabbi Abraham I. Kook, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the relation of theology to issues such as feminism and the Holocaust, and the relation of Judaism to other world religions. In Part V, the book explores how the insights of analytic philosophy have been integrated with Jewish theology.

The author provides the first comprehensive critical edition of a text which was a fundamental influence on Jewish thought in the medieval period and has continued to fascinate scholars and students of Judaism to the present day. With its English translation of the three earliest recensions and its commentary on the variant early texts of the work, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the growth and emergence of the Jewish mystical movement. Contents include: The fluid state of the text of Sefer Yesira, Why a new edition of Sefer Yesira?, The "original text" of SY or "the earliest recoverable text"?, Editing Jewish texts from the first millennium C.E., The Manuscripts, The rules of the edition, Abbreviations in the textual apparatus, Notes on the manuscripts, The chapter and paragraph divisions (Appendix II), the Four Pre-Kabbalistic commentaries, The Earliest Recoverable Text of Sefer Yesira and the Three Recensions, The Three Recensions of the SY Text Tradition.

The aim of the volume is to offer interdisciplinary insights unknown to many into the interior of the religious, cultural and political laboratory that is Israel. Europe can learn a lot from Israel: The handling of religious diversity within the country; the meaning of the Hebrew language; the integration of more than a million Jewish immigrants; the development of a dynamic economy; a flourishing education and science system; a rich culture in the field of literature and above all film; and last but not least the lively, constant and conflictual struggle for democracy. Additionally, the question of Israel-related anti-Semitism is debated from the perspective of Jewish studies, social sciences and Catholic theology.

This book explores the way that the Torah was appreciated and interpreted as a text and symbol in Christian and Jewish sources from the Second Temple period through the Middle Ages. It tracks the development and complex interactions of three images of Torah— “God-like,” “Angelic,” and “Messianic”— which are found in late-antique Jewish and Christian materials as well as in medieval kabbalistic and Jewish philosophic sources. It provides a unique template for tracing the development of theological ideas related to the images of Torah and offers a sophisticated and innovative analysis of the relationship between mystical experience, theology, and phenomenology.

This book is the first collection to feature histories of women in Western Esotericism while also highlighting women’s scholarship. In addition to providing a critical examination of important and under researched figures in the history of Western Esotericism, these fifteen essays also contribute to current debates in the study of esotericism about the very nature of the field itself. The chapters are divided into four thematic sections that address current topics in the study of esotericism: race and othering, femininity, power and leadership and embodiment. This collection not only adds important voices to the story of Western Esotericism, it hopes to change the way the story is told.

In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.

Provides the first comprehensive overview by world-renowned experts of what we know today of medieval Jews' engagement with the sciences.

A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature. His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter. In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.