Table Of ContentKabbalah and Modernity
Aries Book Series
Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism
Editor
Marco Pasi
Editorial Board
Jean-Pierre Brach
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
Wouter Hanegraaff
Advisory Board
Roland Edighoffer – Antoine Faivre
Olav Hammer – Andreas Kilcher
Arthur McCalla – Monika Neugebauer-Wölk
Mark Sedgwick – Jan Snoek
Michael Stausberg – György Szo˝ nyi
Garry Trompf
VOLUME 10
Kabbalah and Modernity
Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations
Edited by
Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2010
Cover: Mantua, Biblioteca Comunale, Ms. ebr. 24, fol. 63r
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kabbalah and modernity : interpretations, transformations, adaptations / edited by
Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad.
p. cm. — (Aries book series, ISSN 1871–1405 ; v. 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18284-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Cabala—History—
19th century. 2. Cabala—History—20th century. I. Huss, Boaz. II. Pasi, Marco.
III. Stuckrad, Kocku von, 1966– IV. Title. V. Series.
BM526.K315 2010
296.8’330904—dc22
2010005004
ISSN 1871-1405
ISBN 978 90 04 18284 4
Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
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Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS
Introduction: Kabbalah and Modernity .......................................... 1
Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi & Kocku von Stuckrad
PART I
KABBALA SCHOLARSHIP: A REAPPRAISAL
Philology as Kabbalah ....................................................................... 13
Andreas B. Kilcher
Beyond the Burden of Idealism: For a New Appreciation of the
Visual Lore in the Kabbalah ......................................................... 29
Giulio Busi
The Future of the Kabbalah: On the Dislocation of Past Primacy,
the Problem of Evil, and the Future of Illusions ........................ 47
Eric Jacobson
PART II
ROMANTIC AND ESOTERIC READINGS
OF KABBALAH
Kabbalah and Secret Societies in Russia (Eighteenth to
Twentieth Centuries) ..................................................................... 79
Konstantin Burmistrov
The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah: Adolphe Franck and
Eliphas Lévi ..................................................................................... 107
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Paul Vulliaud (1875–1950) and Jewish Kabbalah .......................... 129
Jean-Pierre Brach
Oriental Kabbalah and the Parting of East and West in the Early
Theosophical Society ..................................................................... 151
Marco Pasi
“The Sufi Society from America”: Theosophy and Kabbalah in
Poona in the Late Nineteenth Century ....................................... 167
Boaz Huss
vi contents
PART III
MODERN KABBALISTIC SCHOOLS
The Imagined Decline of Kabbalah: The Kabbalistic Yeshiva
Sha‘ar ha-Shamayim and Kabbalah in Jerusalem in the
Beginning of the Twentieth Century ........................................... 197
Jonathan Meir
The Status of the (Non)Jewish Other in the Apocalyptic
Messianism of Menahem Mendel Schneerson .......................... 221
Elliot R. Wolfson
Marriage and Sexual Behavior in the Teachings of the
Kabbalah Centre ............................................................................ 259
Jody Myers
Madonna and the Shekhinah: The Playful Transgression of
Gender Roles in Popular Culture ................................................. 283
Kocku von Stuckrad
Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff and the Neurological Landscape of the
Sefirot ............................................................................................... 301
Sara Møldrup Thejls
PART IV
KABBALAH AND POLITICS
‘The Great Goal of the Political Will Is Leviathan’: Ernst Jünger
and the Cabala of Enmity ............................................................. 329
Steven M. Wasserstrom
Pragmatism and Piety: The American Spiritual and Philosophical
Roots of Jewish Renewal ............................................................... 357
Shaul Magid
Contemporary Jewish Mysticism and Palestinian Suicide
Bombing .......................................................................................... 389
Gideon Aran
Notes on Contributors ....................................................................... 415
Index of Persons ................................................................................. 423
Index of Subjects ................................................................................ 433
INTRODUCTION: KABBALAH AND MODERNITY
Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi & Kocku von Stuckrad
. Introduction
In his celebrated Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), Gershom
Scholem, “founder” of the modern academic study of Kabbalah, wrote
about the relevance of kabbalah for modern times:
At the end of a long process of development in which Kabbalism, para-
doxical though it may sound, has infl uenced the course of Jewish history,
it has become again what it was in the beginning: the esoteric wisdom
of small groups of men out of touch with life and without any infl uence
on it.1
Twenty years later, in his 1963 article ‘Th oughts on the Possibility of
Contemporary Jewish Mysticism’, he was even more explicit: ‘When
all is said and done, it may be said that in our time, for the most
part, there is no original mysticism, not in the nation of Israel and not
among the nations of the world’.2 Although Scholem was aware of the
fact that both in Europe and in Israel the twentieth century witnessed
a renaissance of kabbalistic thinking, along with the establishment of
new schools and the adaptation of traditional doctrine to new condi-
tions and questions, he refused to acknowledge these currents as “real
kabbalah”.3 In what can be called an act of purgation he discriminated
a high-standing mystical tradition that fl ourished in medieval and early
modern times from a “fallen” kabbalah that was contaminated with
the infl uences of “modernity”.4 Th e impact of this act of purgation on
academic research into modern kabbalah has been enormous. Only
recently have scholars of religion began to turn their attention to the
many-faceted roles that kabbalistic doctrines and schools have played
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. Oft en, and n ecessarily,
1 Scholem, Major Trends, 34.
2 Scholem, Devarim be-Go, 71 (our translation).
3 See Kilcher, ‘Figuren des Endes’.
4 Huss, ‘Ask No Questions’.
2 boaz huss, marco pasi & kocku von stuckrad
this new interest and openness went along with a contextualization
and revaluation of Gershom Scholem’s approach to kabbalah.
. The Chapters of the Present Volume
Th e present volume is largely based on an international conference
on ‘Kabbalah and Modernity’, which was held at the University of
Amsterdam in July 2007. Th is collection of essays brings together lead-
ing representatives of the ongoing debate on kabbalah and modernity,
in order to break new ground for a better understanding and concep-
tualization of the role of kabbalah in modern religious, intellectual,
and political discourse. Th e volume is divided into four thematic fi elds:
a reappraisal of modern scholarship devoted to kabbalah; Romantic
and esoteric readings of kabbalah; modern kabbalistic schools; and the
relationship between kabbalah and politics in modern times. Although
these fi elds intersect in many ways, each of them highlights a separate
aspect of kabbalah vis-à-vis modernity.
2.1. Kabbalah Scholarship: A Reappraisal
With the rise of an academic study of Judaism in the nineteenth cen-
tury, many scholars depicted kabbalah and Hasidism as a by-gone
tradition of Jewish “superstition” that was contrasted with Jewish
enlightenment (Haskalah) and emancipation. It was through the infl u-
ence of Protestant scholars—particularly in the context of the infl uen-
tial Wissenschaft des Judentums—that kabbalah was introduced as a
legitimate fi eld of historical research, albeit with many biased, polemi-
cal assumptions. Negative evaluations stood side by side with Roman-
tic images of Hasidic culture. Scholars such as H. Graetz, A. Jellinek,
A. Franck, or E. Bischoff can be regarded as important precursors of
subsequent research on kabbalah. G. Scholem doubtlessly is the major
fi gure of the academic study of kabbalah in the fi rst half of the twen-
tieth century. His approach to Jewish mysticism is strongly informed
by the conditions of German culture aft er World War I and the search
for primordial, “pure” religion that was set against the predicaments
of modernity.5
5 Wasserstrom, Religion aft er Religion; Hamacher, Gershom Scholem; Hayoun,
Gershom Scholem; Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane.
introduction 3
Th e fi rst section of this volume contextualizes these early ‘mappings’
of kabbalah and addresses their implication for contemporary schol-
arship. Andreas B. Kilcher, in his chapter on philology and kabbalah,
looks at the intertwinement of science and metaphysics, of secular
philology as the historical science of texts, and of a re-theologized
philology as an ultimately messianic project. Kilcher examines the pre-
modernist model of kabbalistic philology of Knorr von Rosenroth’s
work on the book of Zohar and the kabbalistic philology of Johann
Georg Hamann that takes an anti-modern stance against historicizing
philology. He then focuses particularly on the kabbalistic philology
of the young Gershom Scholem, which pushes the dialectics of the
methods of historical criticism and theological rigor to their limits by
viewing philology as the continuation of kabbalah.
Giulio Busi’s chapter on the visual lore in kabbalah examines the
failure of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars of kabbalah to
appreciate the visual elements of Jewish mysticism. Busi explains that
this failure should be seen in light of the German background of the
study of kabbalah, which underestimated all elements that do not
belong to the “higher” level of philosophy, an approach still marked
by idealistic philosophy. Busi argues that reconstructing the develop-
ment of kabbalistic thought without taking into account its visual fea-
tures has impaired the eff ectiveness of the philological method, and
he suggests that the study of the graphic dimension of kabbalistic
works enables us to understand better otherwise obscure works and
to rethink whole chapters in the history of Jewish mysticism.
In his contribution, Eric Jacobson examines the clandestine affi nity
of kabbalah with modernity. He argues that kabbalah and modernity
share a commonality when narratives of the former unexpectedly rise
to the surface of intellectual and cultural life in the fi n de siècle of the
twentieth century. According to Jacobson, the dislocation of m odernity
parallels the religious anarchism of kabbalah, and for this reason the
study of kabbalah harbors not only historical or descriptive narratives,
but also normative impulses. Its normative value, he claims, lies in the
fact that it is part of a greater movement within modernity which is
engaged with dislocation and relocation; in particular, the dislocation
of the canon and the introduction of the margins into the center.
2.2. Romantic and Esoteric Readings of Kabbalah
More or less outside traditional Judaism, various Romantic move-
ments embraced kabbalistic notions and incorporated them into
4 boaz huss, marco pasi & kocku von stuckrad
philosophical, literary, and artistic discourses. While many aspects of
these infl uences have been the subject of recent research,6 the large fi eld
of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century esotericism, and its adapta-
tions of kabbalah, have largely been ignored by historians of religion.
Th is is astonishing insofar as kabbalah has fi gured prominently in the
works of Eliphas Lévi, French occultism, the Th eosophical Society,
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (S.L. MacGregor Mathers),
Aleister Crowley, Vladimir Soloviev, traditionalism, and other repre-
sentatives or currents of modern Western esotericism. Th e second sec-
tion of this volume off ers fi ve studies that shed further light on this
marginalized area. It traces the multi-leveled infl uences of Romanti-
cism and esotericism on the modern formations of kabbalah.
In his contribution, Konstantin Burmistrov focuses on the recep-
tion of kabbalah in Russian masonic and Rosicrucian groups since
the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. Burmistrov
shows how the history of this reception is closely related to politi-
cal and social factors. Whenever not aff ected by condemnations and
persecutions these groups proliferated and contributed signifi cantly to
introduce kabbalistic works and ideas in Russia, oft en with erudite
studies and translations. Even if much of this material remains still
unexplored and unpublished today, its variety and richness deserves
close attention, also because it seems to be dependent only in part on
western European sources. Burmistrov also argues that the attitude
towards kabbalah in Russian esoteric circles changed over time, going
from hopes of using it as a tool towards social regeneration in the
eighteenth century, to a more circumscribed application to magical
practices in the early twentieth.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff compares in his chapter two diff erent, but
closely related, readings of kabbalah in nineteenth-century France,
that of one of the pioneers in the scholarly study of kabbalah, Adolphe
Franck, and that of the founder of modern occultism, Eliphas Lévi.
Hanegraaff highlights the fact that, despite their diff erences, both read-
ings were based on the idea of a “universal kabbalah”, where the Jew-
ish element plays an important, but not exclusive role, and signifi cant
emphasis is given to Zoroaster as ultimate source for this esoteric tra-
6 Goodman-Th au et al. (eds.), Kabbala und Romantik; Goodman-Th au et al. (eds.),
Kabbala und die Literatur der Romantik; Kilcher, Die Sprachtheorie der Kabbalah,
239–327.
