Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism.

• Author: Giller, Pinchas

A new generation of scholars of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, is building upon the foundations left by the field's founder, Gershom Scholem. Of these students, there is an older group, including Joseph Dan and the late Isaiah Tishby, who have defended most of Scholem's scholarly conclusions. Scholem had defined the shape of the Kabbalah's history. In the process, he announced many desiderata and conceived many likes and dislikes, the better to organize his own thinking.

A second generation of scholars has begun to review and counter many of these conclusions. Dr. Moshe Idel has reexamined areas which were glossed over or given short shrill in Scholem's work. Idel commonly champions figures denigrated by Scholem or viewed as marginal, such as the Hasidic sage Yizhak Eizik of Komarno or the thirteenth-century mystic, Abraham Abulafia. Idel has also addressed methodological areas neglected by Scholem, such as the place of Kabbalah in the phenomenology of religious mysticism.

Now, the State University of New York Press has done a great service to English-speaking students of mysticism and Jewish studies by collecting and translating (in the face of the author's evident reluctance) the works of Yehuda Liebes, another of the second generation of Scholem's students. In the apportioning of material which characterizes the "Jerusalem School" of Kabbalah studies, Liebes claimed the Zohar, the most classical of Kabbalistic works, as his field of doctoral study. He produced a partial lexicon of that work's most important Aramaicisms, "Chapters in a Zohar Lexicon" (in Hebrew; Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1976). He has subsequently contributed a brilliant study on the Zohar's charter of messianic dynamism ("The Messiah of the Zohar") and also analyzed the process of the Zohar's composition ("How was the Zohar Written?").(1) This latter essay is far more subtle than Scholem's famous expose of the Zohar's pseudepigraphic nature in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.(2) Liebes continues in the tradition set forth by Yizhak Baer (see "The Historical Context of the Ra aya Meheimna," Zion 5 (1940): 1-144) of identifying possible points of contact between the Zohar and medieval Christian mysticism, as opposed to the conclusions of Wilhelm Bacher ("Judaeo-Christian Polemics in the Zohar," Jewish Quarterly Review 3 (1891): 781-84) which argued for unmitigated enmity between the two communities. In the present volume, Liebes identifies a formal relationship...