A Novel Look at Moshe Idel's East-West Problem

A Novel Look at Moshe Idel's East-West Problem MOSHE IDEL. Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and TwentiethCentury Thought. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 336.

FOR MANY OF us in the field of Jewish studies, but not in the field of Kabbalah studies, our first encounter with Moshe Idei came in 1988 with the publication of his major work in English, Kabbalah: New Perspectives. Although he had been working in the field for more than a decade, from the time of his 1976 dissertation at the Hebrew University on Avraham Abulafia, it was Kabbalah: New Perspectives that brought Idei to wide public attention, announcing his own substantial methodological and substantive disagreements with the towering figure of modern Kabbalah studies, Gershom Scholem.

Since then, Idei has gone on to attain a position of international distinction, publishing at a staggering rate in Kabbalah studies, and many fields beyond. In the process, he - like Scholem before and Wolfson and others after him- has used the study of Kabbalah as a gateway of inquiry into important methodological, theoretical, hermeneutical, philosophical, and historical questions.

This leads us to the book at hand, Oß Worßs, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth -Century Thought, which is indeed an inquiry into important methodological, theoretical, philosophical, and historical questions. It reflects Idel's brilliant, capacious, probing, and wildly imaginative mind, as it ranges over terrain somewhat less familiar to him and his usual readers, but of critical significance to his overarching intellectual and cultural Weltanschauung.

What I propose to do in these remarks is to undertake three tasks: first, to sketch out briefly the structure of the book and point to a major argumentative strand in it; second, to identify two central motifs that surface in the book- and that make for a surprising, counterintuitive, and even troubling read; and finally, to adopt a literary conceit to read the book against the analytic and stylistic grain, as a way of getting at some of the intriguing psychodynamics involved in it.

I

Old Worlds, New Mirrors is a collection of previously published essays on modern Jewish thought divided into four parts. The first section deals with a number of renowned Central European scholars and intellectuals who...