Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought

by Moshe Idel

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.

Genres: Judaism

336 pages, Hardcover

First published December 7, 2008

Reviews

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hervorragendes Resümee zur Forschung und Rezeption jüdischer Mystik im 20. Jahrhundert. Gleichsam einen Blick hinter die Kulissen egstattent, wirft Moshe einen Blick auf diverse Kollegen und bedeutenden jüdischen intellektuellen des vorigen Jahrhunderts und sucht zu ergründen, was die persönlichen Hintergründe ihrer jeweiligen Interpretationen waren. Angenehm zu lesen, wenn auch zeitweise etwas widerholend, da es sich hier weniger um eine konzentrierte Monographie als ume ien Sammlung getrennter Aufsätze handelt.

[Stas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally, what I took away from this volume:
Idel's suggestion that, I paraphrase, 'there is less Kabbala in Kafka, than there is Kafka in Scholem's reconstructions of Kabbala'. That Scholem often introduces innovations in his interpretations, without making it clear that his readings are novel, rather than resuscitation of traditonal readings.
ALso, that Scholem's school of followers is a little ossified orthodoxy, which enshrined the master's words as some dogma, rather than pioneering attempts at interpretation which must be checked and re-checked.
He is a little too tough on Steiner, I think, almost accusing him of calling forth a new Holocaust by his privileging of the figure of a displaced, cosmopolitan Jew as a perennially critical thorn in the side of Gentile cultures. As if such a figure was all too common today.
All in all, if you are obsessed with the minutae of politico-theological and philosophical in the German-Jewish tradition, you will find this volume alternately tedious and inspiring, as I did.