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Idel, Moshe : THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE IN ABRAHAM ABULAFIA

Albany : State University of New York Press., 1988.

8vo. 246 pages. First edition. SUBJECT (S) : Cabala – history; Ecstasy (Judaism) ; Abulafia, Abraham ben Samuel, 1240-ca. 1292. CONTENTS: Techniques for attaining ecstasy -- Music and ecstatic Kabbalah -- The mystical experience -- Erotic images for the estatic experience. SERIES: SUNY series in Judaica. ISBN: 0887065538. “Idel [b. 1947] was born in Romania and immigrated to Israel in 1963. He became a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1977 and was subsequently Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought. From 1990 he was also a fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. In 1999 he was awarded the Israel Prize in Jewish thought. ...Idel expanded Scholem's distinction between "theosophical" and "ecstatic" forms of Kabbalah into a phenomenological distinction between two main kinds of Kabbalah. At the same time he stressed the theurgical practice attendant on theosophical discourse. In his book on Hasidism, Idel developed a "panoramic" account of the history of Kabbalah as the interplay of three models: theosophical, ecstatic, and magical. These models transformed the previous "monochromatic" picture of Kabbalah into a more complex view of tensions between schools and combinations between models, as evidenced in Idel's book on Messianism... Besides his broader contributions, Idel's writing includes many historical discoveries, such as the scope and influence of the writings of Ecstatic Kabbalist R. Abraham Abulafia, the uniqueness of the Italian kabbalists, as well as identification and dating of dozens of texts. ” (EJ, 2007) Ex library, otherwise very good condition. (RAB-26-11)xx

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