Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism

see also https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/katz-center-fellow-hadar-feldm...
Hadar Feldman Samet

https://epdf.pub/studies-in-jewish-myth-and-jewish-messianism.html
Ada Rapoport-Albert "sabbetean"
https://www.amazon.com/Messianic-Sabbatai-1666-1816-Littman-Civilization...

Christians had also tended to stress the legalistic, antimystical dimension of Jewish religion. As I shall show, my view is that Sabbateanism was chiefly concerned with spiritual redemption: the redemption of religion, the redemption of God, and personal, mystical redemption. These ideas crystallized through the development of an alternative approach to the study of Kabbala. Rather than placing the main emphasis on its abstract, ideological aspects, as if Kabbala were a philosophy, this method connects it to the personal experiences of those who created it and wonders about their true religious concerns (I discuss this method extensively elsewhere). 1 I am not alone in adopting this method and these ideas; it seems to me that other scholars have recently arrived at much the same conclusions when faced with similar problems in their use of the previous method. First among them I note my friend Moshe Idel, with whom I have been discussing these questions for the last twenty years. This volume is a selection from my articles in these fields. "De Natura Dei" and "The Kabbalistic Myth as Told by Orpheus" represent my discussions on the problems of myth in Judaism, as well as its antiquity. I have written on these questions in a long series of articlesnot included in this bookstretching over a long period, from a book on talmudic mysticism2 to a comparison between the kabbalistic myth and the "Canaanite" myth as they appear in the modern poetry of Jonathan Ratosh.3 I would like to single out my article on "Myth vs. Symbol," where I attempt to show that the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbala do not differ, as is commonly held, in the content of their myths but rather in their patterns of thought, in their use of language, and in the type of link they assume with the Supreme Entity.4 The articles on messianism and Sabbateanism have been chosen from among more than a dozen dealing not with the concrete details of the movement's history but rather with Sabbatean Kabbala or its messianic, theoretical foundations. The articles on Sabbateanism, in their original Hebrew version, are due to appear in book form (published by Mossad Bialik, Jerusalem). Furthermore, I have recently edited a large collection of Hebrew articles on Sabbateanism written by Gershom Scholem, published by Am-Oved. I also direct the reader to the English version of my lengthy article "The Messiah of the Zohar," due to appear in my forthcoming book, Studies in the Zohar, published by the SUNY Press. The present book includes articles originally published in Hebrew, the language in which I produce all my work. I do this not only because Hebrew is my tongue but also because it is the language

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