Kabbalistic Texts as Evidence of Medieval Jewish-Christian Intellectual Exchange

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel analyzes early kabbalistic texts as evidence of medieval Jewish-Christian intellectual exchange, primarily on the Iberian peninsula. Through a comparison of Christian religious texts including devotional poetry and sermons by monastics, mendicants, and public preachers to Jewish kabbalistic texts including the Zohar, Tiqqunei Zohar, and individual kabbalists from their milieu, these papers trace patterns of influence by the dominant Christian culture as well as Jewish responses. These responses not only reframe the dominant Christian discourse for their Jewish audience but can also be seen as reframing Jewish beliefs, practices, and literary methods as a response to that discourse, speaking not only to Jews but also to Christians, if in absentia. Eitan Fishbane's paper focuses on literary form and examples of Christian devotional poetry as providing a new genre context for reading the Zohar. Jeremy Brown investigates the kabbalistic revival of rabbinic piety in the context of monastic and mendicant pietism. Ellen Haskell locates the Zohar's description of the Messiah as dark and ugly within the Christian physiognomic discourse. Jeffrey Amshalem ties these and other themes together to present the developing conception of the Shekhinah as divine embodiment and her overlap with the figure of the Messiah as a response to Christian conceptions of the Incarnation and the Marian revival. Together, these three papers treat form, practice, and ideology.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Mysticism

Chair

• Judith Weiss, Ben Gurion University

Individual Presentations

• Zohar as Mystical Poetry: A Kabbalistic Lyric of the Sublime - Eitan Fishbane, Jewish Theological Seminary

• Prayer of the Destitute and Other Case Studies in the Christian Context of Castilian Kabbalah - Jeremy Brown, University of Notre Dame

• "And Everything the Reverse”: The Seed of David in Zoharic Physiognomy - Ellen Haskell, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• The Shekhinah as Redemption Incarnate - Jeffrey Amshalem, Independant Scholar

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 14