Overview

This book uncovers the unstated assumptions and expectations of scribes and scholars who fashioned editions from manuscripts of Jewish mystical literature. This study offers a theory of kabbalistic textuality in which the material book -- the printed page no less than hand-written manuscripts -- serves as the site for textual dialogue between Jewish mystics of different periods and locations. The refashioning of the text through the process of reading and commenting that takes place on the page in the margins and between the lines blurs the boundaries between the traditionally defined roles of author, reader, commentator and editor. This study shows that kabbalists and academic editors reinvented the text in their own image, as part of a fluid textual process that was nothing short of transformative.

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9781933379180

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Daniel Abrams is professor of Jewish Mysticism in the Department of Jewish Thought at Bar Ilan University and is editor of Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts. In 2010, he was awarded the Gershom Scholem Prize for excellence in scholarship of Jewish mysticism. He is the author of numerous books and editions of Jewish mystical literature, which include: Ten Psychoanalytic Aphorisms on the Kabbalah; The Female Body of God in Kabbalistic Literature: Embodied Forms of the Love and Sexuality of the Divine Feminine; Sexual Symbolism and Merkavah Speculation in Medieval Germany; R. Asher ben David: His Complete Works and Studies in his Kabbalistic Thought and The Book Bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts.

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