Kabbalah

New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co, 1974. Presumed First Western Hemisphere Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. [10], 492 pages Frontis illustration. Illustrations. Bibliography. DJ has wear, tears, soiling and chips. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. This is on of the The New York Times Library of Jewish Knowledge series. Part One: Kabbalah. Part Two: Topics. Part Three: Personalities. Includes Notes, Abbreviations, Glossary, Illustration Credits, General Index, and Index of Books. Professor Scholem's studies on this subject have become classic. In this book he presents a summary of his life's studies. It covers the whole history of the Kabbalah with special sections devoted to its major concepts and fascinating figures, such as Shabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century pseudo-messiah and his followers, who continued to believe in him even after he adopted Islam. Professor Scholem's studies on this subject have become classic. In this book he presents a summary of his life's studies. It covers the whole history of the Kabbalah, with special sections devoted to its major concepts and fascinating figures, such as Shabbetai Zevi, the 17th century pseudo-messian and his followers, who continued to believe in him, even after he adopted Islam. Gershom Scholem (December 5, 1897 - February 21, 1982), was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern, academic study of Kabbalah. He was the first professor of Jewish Mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His close friends included Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss, and selected letters from his correspondence with those philosophers have been published. He was also friendly with the author Shai Agnon and the Talmudic scholar Saul Lieberman. Scholem is best known for his collection of lectures, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and for his biography Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah (1957). His collected speeches and essays, published as On Kabbalah and its Symbolism (1965), helped to spread knowledge of Jewish mysticism among both Jews and non-Jews. Drawn to Zionism and influenced by Buber, he immigrated in 1923 to the British Mandate of Palestine.[3] He became a librarian, heading the Department of Hebrew and Judaica at the National Library. In 1927 he revamped the Dewey Decimal System, making it appropriate for large Judaica collections. He became a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Scholem taught the Kabbalah and mysticism from a scientific point of view and became the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the university in 1933, working in this post until his retirement in 1965, when he became an emeritus professor. Scholem directly contrasted his historiographical approach on the study of Jewish mysticism with the approach of the 19th-century school of the Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Science of Judaism"), which sought to submit the study of Judaism to the discipline of subjects such as history, philology, and philosophy. According to Jeremy Adler, Scholem's thinking was "both recognizably Jewish and deeply German," and "changed the course of twentieth-century European thought." Jewish mysticism was seen as Judaism's weakest scholarly link. Scholem told the story of his early research when he was directed to a prominent rabbi who was an expert on Kabbalah. The analysis of Judaism carried out by the Wissenschaft school was flawed in two ways, according to Scholem: It studied Judaism as a dead object rather than as a living organism; and it did not consider the proper foundations of Judaism, the non-rational force that, in Scholem's view, made the religion a living thing. In Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mystical components were at least as important as the rational ones, and he thought that they, rather than the minutiae of Halakha, were the truly living core of Judaism. In particular, he disagreed with what he considered to be Martin Buber's personalization of Kabbalistic concepts as well as what he argued was an inadequate approach to Jewish history, Hebrew language, and the land of Israel.