Modern Kabbalah

Though the academic study of Kabbalah began in the late 19th century, the definitive contributions of Gershom Scholem, beginning in the 1920s, truly set the field into motion. His studies modeled a text-driven history of ideas approach to rabbinic Judaism’s esoteric sciences, chronicling their appearance in the Middle Ages, and their manifold evolutions into the modern period. However, due in part to Scholem’s ambivalence with respect to the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time, the academic study of modern and contemporary forms of Kabbalah has only emerged as an independent area of investigation since the scholar’s death. Scholars are divided on how to pinpoint a precise historical moment when the medieval Kabbalah became modern. They are similarly divided over what criteria should determine the modernity of Kabbalah. Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity and Ha-ḳabalah ba-’et ha-ḥadashah ke-teḥom meḥkar otonomi (Modern Kabbalah as an Autonomous Domain of Research) make the case that the Kabbalistic fellowships of the early modern period (see Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies article Safed) (16th-17th centuries) introduced sociological and psychological innovations to classical Kabbalistic paradigms of theology and religious practice which, they propose, already exemplify Jewish modernity. Without attempting to arbitrate the disputed criteria of Kabbalistic modernity, this bibliography focuses heuristically on developments from the 18th century onward. According to Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Kabbalah found itself in a difficult position in the aftermath of the Sabbatian movement, a putative messianic “heresy” whose chief ideologues based their beliefs upon doctrines of the Safed kabbalist R. Isaac Luria. Was post-Sabbatian Kabbalah, then, heretical by association? Even the participation of some proponents of Lurianic traditions in anti-Sabbatian polemic, discussed in The Kabbalistic Culture of Eighteenth-Century Prague: Ezekiel Landau (The ‘Noda Biyehudah’) and His Contemporaries, could not shore up latter-day enthusiasm for the dissemination, study, and creative development of the teachings attributed to Luria. The vigorous rise of Hasidism in eastern Europe in the 18th century, by far the most represented development in the scholarship of modern Jewish mysticism, is the clearest evidence that the widespread condemnation of the Sabbatian movement did not cork-up the spirit of Kabbalistic creativity. Because such cognate topics are represented by separate Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies entries (current or forthcoming), this article does not directly cover Safed, Sabbatianism, or Hasidism. Nor does this article cover the important topic of Christian Kabbalah, which merits a full bibliography of its own. Rather, it highlights the principal trajectories of modern and contemporary Kabbalah—construed mainly as confessionally-Jewish phenomena—from the 18th century to the present day. It covers the major trends of rabbinic mysticism from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, Kabbalistic elements in popular religion during the modern era, Kabbalah in modern Jewish thought, the production and consumption of Kabbalistic texts, as well as contemporary manifestations of Kabbalah. Other topics covered include the modern study of Jewish mysticism, as well as Kabbalah, science, and modern psychology.