Modern Jewish mysticism
The role played by Kabbala and Hasidism in the thought and spirituality of contemporary Judaism is far from insignificant, though its importance is not as great as in former times. Although there is hardly any living Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature, the personal thought of religious writers such as Abraham Isaac Kook (c. 1865–1935)—spiritual leader, mystic, and chief rabbi of Palestine—remains influential. Furthermore, religious thought in Westernized Jewish circles between the two World Wars received a powerful stimulus from the philosopher Martin Buber, whose work is in part devoted to the propagation of Hasidic ideology as he understood it. “Neo-Orthodoxy,” the theological system founded in Germany by Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), was indifferent to mysticism at the outset, but it too came to be influenced by it, especially after the rediscovery of living Judaism in Poland during World War I by Western Jewish thinkers. Also significant is the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72), a Polish Jewish theologian of distinguished Hasidic background and dual culture—traditional and Western.
Jewish mysticism has exerted influence outside the Jewish community. Kabbala, distorted and deflected from its own intentions, has helped to nourish and stimulate certain currents of thought in Christian society since the Renaissance. “Christian Kabbala,” born in the 15th century under the impetus of Jewish converts from Spain and Italy, claimed to find in the Kabbalistic documents—touched up or even forged if necessary—arguments for the truths of the Christian faith. A certain number of Christian humanist scholars became interested in Jewish mysticism, and several of them acquired a fairly extensive knowledge of it on the basis of authentic texts. Among them were Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) and Gilles of Viterbo (Egidio da Viterbo; c. 1465–1532) in Italy; Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) in Germany, who wrote one of the principal expositions of Kabbala in a language accessible to the learned non-Jewish public (De arte Cabbalistica, 1517); and the visionary Guillaume Postel (1510–81) in France. The occult philosophy of the 16th century, the “natural philosophy” of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the occult and theosophic theories that are cultivated even today and that have coloured the ideology of Freemasonry—all of these continue to borrow from Kabbala, though they rarely grasp its spirit and meaning. The same is true of most of the books on Kabbala put out by publishers of occult and theosophic literature today.
The scholarly study of Jewish mysticism is a very recent phenomenon. The state of mind and the tendencies of the founders of the “science of Judaism” (the scholarly study of Jewish religion, literature, and history) in Germany during the first half of the 19th century were too permeated with rationalism to be favourable to scholarly investigation of a movement judged to be obscurantist and retrograde. Although there were some valuable early studies, research on a large scale and application of the proved methods of philology and history of religions began only with the work of Gershom G. Scholem (1897–1982) and his disciples. This research addressed all the many areas of Jewish mysticism, but in every area the gaps in knowledge remain serious. Critical editions of mystical texts are few in number; unpublished documents are cataloged incompletely; and only a few monographs on writers and particular themes exist, though these are indispensable preliminaries to a detailed and thorough synthesis. It is to be hoped that the synthesis outlined by Scholem in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), though exceptionally valuable in its time, will be taken up again and completed.