Major trends in Jewish mysticism

'Previously published: New York: Schocken Books, 1961. With new foreword.'. 'Foreword by Robert Alter, c1995.'. '...is based on the Hilda Strook Lectures delivered by Professor Scholem at the Jewish Institute of Religion, New York.'

First lecture -- general characteristics of Jewish mysticism. Second lecture -- Merkabah mysticism and Jewish gnosticism. Third lecture -- Hasidism in mediaeval Germany. Fourth lecture -- Abraham Abulafia and the doctrine of prophetic Kabbalism. Fifth lecture -- the Zohar I. -- the book and its author. Sixth lecture -- the Zohar II. -- the theosophic doctrine of the Zohar. Seventh lecture -- Isaac Luria and his school. Eighth lecture -- Sabbatianism and mystical heresy. Ninth lecture -- Hasidism -- the latest phase

'[Scholem] constantly proposes large imaginative interpretations of the texts he invokes and of their relation to their sundry historical settings. At least some of his views have been seriously contested by recent scholars, like his understanding of Lurianic Kabbalah as a reflection of the traumatic expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and his argument for a vital connection between the Sabbatian underground and the Hebrew Enlightenment's secularizing drive for emancipation. His demonstration, however, of the time, place, and authorship of the Zohar, as well as much of the more implicit spadework in the grand sweep of this book from the Jewish Gnosticism of late antiquity to the Hasidism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a scholarly edifice that will stand the test of time.' --Foreword

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