The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century

The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Coudert
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004679146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
"If he had lived among the Greeks, he would now be numbered among the stars." So wrote Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his epitaph for Francis Mercury van Helmont. Leibniz was not the only contemporary to admire and respect van Helmont, but although famous in his own day, he has been virtually ignored by modern historians. Yet his views influenced Leibniz, contributed to the development of modern science, and fostered the kind of ecumenicalism that made the concept of toleration conceivable. The progressive nature of van Helmont's thought was based on his deep commitment to the esoteric doctrines of the Lurianic Kabbalah. With his friend Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, van Helmont edited the Kabbala Denudata (1677-1684), the largest collection of Lurianic Kabbalistic texts available to Christians up to that time. Because the subject matter of this work appears so difficult and arcane, it has never been appreciated as a significant text for understanding the emergence of modern thought. However, one can find in it the basis for the faith in science, the belief in progress, and the pluralism characteristic of later western thought. The Lurianic Kabbalah thus deserves a place it has never received in histories of western scientific and cultural developments. Although van Helmont's efforts contributed to the development of religious toleration, his experience as a prisoner of the Inquisition accused of "Judaising" reveals the problematic relations between Christians and Jews during the early-modern period. New Inquisitional documents relating to van Helmont's imprisonment will be discussed to illustrate the difficulties faced by anyone advocating philo-semitism and toleration at the time.

The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century

The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Coudert
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004679146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
"If he had lived among the Greeks, he would now be numbered among the stars." So wrote Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his epitaph for Francis Mercury van Helmont. Leibniz was not the only contemporary to admire and respect van Helmont, but although famous in his own day, he has been virtually ignored by modern historians. Yet his views influenced Leibniz, contributed to the development of modern science, and fostered the kind of ecumenicalism that made the concept of toleration conceivable. The progressive nature of van Helmont's thought was based on his deep commitment to the esoteric doctrines of the Lurianic Kabbalah. With his friend Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, van Helmont edited the Kabbala Denudata (1677-1684), the largest collection of Lurianic Kabbalistic texts available to Christians up to that time. Because the subject matter of this work appears so difficult and arcane, it has never been appreciated as a significant text for understanding the emergence of modern thought. However, one can find in it the basis for the faith in science, the belief in progress, and the pluralism characteristic of later western thought. The Lurianic Kabbalah thus deserves a place it has never received in histories of western scientific and cultural developments. Although van Helmont's efforts contributed to the development of religious toleration, his experience as a prisoner of the Inquisition accused of "Judaising" reveals the problematic relations between Christians and Jews during the early-modern period. New Inquisitional documents relating to van Helmont's imprisonment will be discussed to illustrate the difficulties faced by anyone advocating philo-semitism and toleration at the time.

The Scandal of Kabbalah

The Scandal of Kabbalah PDF Author: Yaacob Dweck
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691162158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition. From its medieval beginnings as an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah spread throughout the early modern world and became a central feature of Jewish life. Scholars have long studied the revolutionary impact of Kabbalah, but, as Yaacob Dweck argues, they have misunderstood the character and timing of opposition to it. Drawing on a rang.

Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy

Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy PDF Author: Kirsten Macfarlane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192654152
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This book provides a new account of a distinctive, important, but forgotten moment in early modern religious and intellectual history. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars were investing heavily in techniques for studying the Bible that would now be recognised as the foundations of modern biblical criticism. According to previous studies, this process of transformation was caused by academic elites whose work, whether religious or secular in its motivations, paved the way for the Bible to be seen as a human document rather than a divine message. At the time, however, such methods were not simply an academic concern, and they pointed in many directions other than that of secular modernity. Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy establishes previously unknown religious and cultural contexts for the practice of biblical criticism in the early modern period, and reveals the diversity of its effects. The central figure in this story is the itinerant and bitterly divisive English scholar Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), whose prolific writings in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English offer a new and surprising image of Protestant intellectual culture. In this image, scholarly advances were not impeded but inspired by strict scripturalism; criticism was driven by missionary ideals, even as actual proselytization was sidelined; and learned neo-Latin texts were repackaged to appeal to ordinary believers. Seen through the eyes of Broughton and his neglected colleagues and followers, the complex and unexpected contributions of reformed Protestant intellectuals and laypeople to longer-term religious and cultural change finally become visible.

Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought

Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought PDF Author: Lenn Evan Goodman
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791413395
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
This book deals primarily with the problem of the one and the many. The problems of creation, of evil, of revelation, and of ethics are all treated as special cases of the general problem of relating the finite to the infinite, the many to the one. The authors focus on the unifying theme of mediation, the means by which the Absolute relates to the here and now. The principal figures studied include Philo, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Isaac Israeli, Avicenna, Ibn Gabirol, Al-Ghazâlî, Abraham Ibn Daud, Maimonides, Averroes, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, Gersonides, Nahmanides, Ibn Falaquera, Narboni, Albalag, Leone Ebreo (Judah Abarbanel), and Spinoza, as well as such Kabbalistic thinkers as Bahir, Cordovero, Luria, Moses de Leon, Ya'akov ben Sheshet, Isaac the Blind, Menahem Renanti, Shem Tov ben Shem Tov, Azriel of Gerona, Alemanno, Luzzato, Cordovero, and Abraham Herrera. The authors include David Winston, John Dillon, Carl Mathis, Bernard McGinn, Arthur Hyman, Alfred Ivry, Lenn E. Goodman, Menachem Kellner, David Burrell, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, David Bleich, Seymour Feldman, Steven Katz, Moshe Idel, David Novak, Hubert Dethier, Richard Popkin, and Robert McLaren. Taken together, these essays offer an impressive historical survey of the ideas, achievements, and philosophic struggles of a group of men who worked to form a unique and durable tradition that bridged the gap between rival confessions and sects--mystics, rationalists, and empiricists; Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This is a philosophic source whose vitality is not yet exhausted.

From Metaphysics to Midrash

From Metaphysics to Midrash PDF Author: Shaul Magid
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000378
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In From Metaphysics to Midrash, Shaul Magid explores the exegetical tradition of Isaac Luria and his followers within the historical context in 16th-century Safed, a unique community that brought practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into close contact with one another. Luria's scripture became a theater in which kabbalists redrew boundaries of difference in areas of ethnicity, gender, and the human relation to the divine. Magid investigates how cultural influences altered scriptural exegesis of Lurianic Kabbala in its philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical perspectives. He suggests that Luria and his followers were far from cloistered. They used their considerable skills to weigh in on important matters of the day, offering, at times, some surprising solutions to perennial theological problems.

Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy

Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy PDF Author: Lynette Bowring
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253060087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.

The Cultures of Maimonideanism

The Cultures of Maimonideanism PDF Author: James T. Robinson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004174508
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
In the history of Jewish thought, no individual scholar has exercised more influence than Maimonides (1138-1204) philosopher and physician, legal scholar and communal leader. This collection of papers, originating at the 2007 EAJS colloquium, places primary emphasis on this influence not on Maimonides himself but the many movements he inspired. Using Maimonideanism as an interpretive lens, the authors of this volume representing a variety of fields and disciplines develop new approaches to and fresh perspectives on the peculiar dynamic of Judaism and philosophy. Focusing on social and cultural processes as well as philosophical ideas and arguments, they point toward an original reconceptualization of Jewish thought.

Religion, Science, and Magic

Religion, Science, and Magic PDF Author: Jacob Neusner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195079116
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Every culture makes the distinction between "true religion" and magic, regarding one action and its result as "miraculous," while rejecting another as the work of the devil. Surveying such topics as Babylonian witchcraft, Jesus the magician, magic in Hasidism and Kabbalah, and magic in Anglo-Saxon England, these ten essays provide a rigorous examination of the history of this distinction in Christianity and Judaism. Written by such distinguished scholars as Jacob Neusner, Hans Penner, Howard Kee, Tzvi Abusch, Susan R. Garrett, and Moshe Idel, the essays explore a broad range of topics, including how certain social groups sort out approved practices and beliefs from those that are disapproved--providing fresh insight into how groups define themselves; "magic" as an insider's term for the outsider's religion; and the tendency of religious traditions to exclude the magical. In addition the collection provides illuminating social, cultural, and anthropological explanations for the prominence of the magical in certain periods and literatures.

Religion, Science, and Magic : In Concert and in Conflict

Religion, Science, and Magic : In Concert and in Conflict PDF Author: Jacob Neusner Professor of Religion University of South Florida
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199729336
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Every culture makes the distinction between "true religion" and magic, regarding one action and its result as "miraculous," while rejecting another as the work of the devil. Surveying such topics as Babylonian witchcraft, Jesus the magician, magic in Hasidism and Kabbalah, and magic in Anglo-Saxon England, these ten essays provide a rigrous examination of the history of this distinction in Christianity and Judaism. Written by such distinguished scholars as Jacob Neusner, Hans Penner, Howard Kee, Tzvi Abusch, Susan R. Garrett, and Moshe Idel, the essays explore a broad range of topics, including how certain social groups sort out approved practices and beliefs from those that are disapproved--providing fresh insight into how groups define themselves; "magic" as an insider's term for the outsider's religion; and the tendency of religious traditions to exclude the magical. In addition the collection provides illuminating social, cultural, and anthropological explanations for the prominence of the magical in certain periods and literature.

Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. 2017

Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. 2017 PDF Author: Bill Rebiger
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110528096
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
The Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies mirrors the annual activities of staff and visiting fellows of the Centre as well as scholars of the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at the University of Hamburg and reports on symposia, workshops, and lectures. Although aimed at a wider audience, the yearbook also contains academic articles and book reviews on scepticism in Judaism and scepticism in general.