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Through the theme of metempsychosis as discussed by scholars in Renaissance Italy, this book addresses the problematic question of the roles of Jews who lived in Italy in the development of Renaissance culture in its Jewish and its Christian dimensions.

Explores the unacknowledged psychological element in Maimonides' work, one which prefigures the latter insights of Freud. Is Moses Maimonides an unacknowledged ancestor of the psychoanalytic movement? In this book, David Bakan, Dan Merkur, and David S. Weiss look at the great medieval Jewish philosopher's prescription for the cure of souls and its psychological significance. In the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides, who was also a physician, describes the soul's illness: when sinners rationalize evil as good, they limit their capacities to reason, imagine, and behave well, which also produces physical symptoms. The cure depends on repentance in love and fear of God that is attained through philosophical knowledge, the interpretation of dreams and visions, and mystical contemplation. The authors look at the Aristotelian background of Maimonides' psychology, Maimonidean mysticism, his beliefs about prophecy and sexuality, and what is known of Maimonides' client population. A final chapter discusses Maimonides and Freud, noting that many distinctive features of the cure of souls are shared by Freud's original formulation of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the many points of convergence suggest Freud's direct or indirect contact with Maimonides' legacy.

The Ba‘al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism (known by the acronym, the “BeShT”), was a charismatic teacher with extraordinary impact. While hasidic traditions record his vehement opposition to documentation of his teachings, his disciples nevertheless wrote what they remembered, and hasidic literature is suffused with traditions about him and conveyed by him.

This article examines a sugya in BT Berakhot about interactions between the living and the dead and argues that attention to gender is crucial to discerning theological themes that animate it. Bodies in this sugya are vividly gendered and pointedly juxtaposed. The sugya's editors construct a striking contrast between living (male) rabbis, who adorn themselves with distinctively male ritual objects (phylacteries and fringes), and a dead (female) innkeeper, who yearns for objects needed for female adornment (comb and makeup). I argue that the sugya's editors communicate the urgency of using the (male) body to respond to divine command while still living by juxtaposing it to a female body in the realm of the dead.

The set of Jewish mystical teachings known as Kabbalah are often imagined as timeless texts, teachings that have been passed down through the millennia. Yet, as this groundbreaking new study shows, Kabbalah flourished in a specific time and place, emerging in response to the social prejudices that Jews faced. Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain, a place where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise and Jewish political power was on the wane.Kabbalistic Revolutionproposes that, given this context, Kabbalah must be understood as a radically empowering political discourse. While the era's Christian preachers claimed that Jews were blind to the true meaning of scripture and had been abandoned by God, the Kabbalists countered with a doctrine that granted Jews a uniquely privileged relationship with God. Lachter demonstrates how Kabbalah envisioned this increasingly marginalized group at the center of the universe, their mystical practices serving to maintain the harmony of the divine world. For students of Jewish mysticism,Kabbalistic Revolutionprovides a new approach to the development of medieval Kabbalah. Yet the book's central questions should appeal to anyone with an interest in the relationships between religious discourses, political struggles, and ethnic pride.

When the state of Israel was founded, many of its citizens spoke Yiddish and Arabic. After Hebrew was named the official language, there was danger that rich traditional folk stories and rabbinic myths passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation for thousands of years could disappear. Luckily, Hebrew University in Jerusalem recorded many of them. Those spoken stories serve as one of many sources for \"Tree of Souls,\" the new reference book on Jewish mythology by [Howard Schwartz], a professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. \"God has a tree of flowering souls in Paradise. The angel who sits beneath it is the Guardian of Paradise, and the tree is surrounded by the four winds of the world. From this tree blossom forth all souls. . . . And from the roots of this tree sprout the souls of all the righteous ones whose names are inscribed there. When the souls grow ripe, they descend into the Treasury of Souls, where they are stored until they are called upon to be born. From this we learn that all souls are the fruit of the Holy One, blessed be He.

This month, [Howard Schwartz] offers a vast study called \"Tree of Souls,\" heralded by Oxford University Press as \"the first anthology of Jewish mythology in English.\" He will discuss it at this year's Jewish Book Festival. (A complete listing of this year's St. Louis Jewish Book Festival is on STLtoday.com and will appear in Wednesday's Everyday section.) The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is a concise text, Schwartz says. Rabbis and other Jews have tried to explain the writings, and out of their explanations grew myths. In the Jewish tradition, God dictated the Written Torah to Moses, who wrote it down. But there is also the tradition of an Oral Torah, which explained the Written Torah and was finally recorded as laws and lore in the Talmud. In \"Tree of Souls,\" Schwartz separates the hundreds of myths he retells into 10 primary categories: Myths of God, Myths of Creation, Myths of Heaven, Myths of Hell, Myths of the Holy Word, Myths of the Holy Time, Myths of the Holy People, Myths of the Holy Land, Myths of Exile and Myths of the Messiah.

Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world—an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century. The experience of eighteenth-century Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not fit the pattern of integration and universalization—in short, of westernization—that historians tend to place at the origins of Jewish modernity. Hundert puts this experience, that of the majority of the Jewish people, at the center of his history. He focuses on the relations of Jews with the state and their role in the economy, and on more \"internal\" developments such as the popularization of the Kabbalah and the rise of Hasidism. Thus he describes the elements of Jewish experience that became the basis for a \"core Jewish identity\"—an identity that accompanied the majority of Jews into modernity.

In recent years the role of religion in the avant-garde has begun to attract scholarly interest. The present volume focuses on the work of the Romanian Jewish poet and visual artist Isidore Isou (1925–2007) who founded the lettrist movement in the 1940s. The Jewish tradition played a critical part in the Western avant-garde as represented by lettrism. The links between lettrism and Judaism are substantial, yet they have been largely unexplored until now. The study investigates the works of a movement that explicitly emphasises its vanguard position while relying on a medieval religious tradition as a source of radical textual techniques. It accounts for lettrism's renunciation of mainstream traditions in favour of a subversive tradition, in this case Jewish mysticism. The religious inclination of lettrism also affects the notion of the avant-garde. The elements of the Jewish tradition in Isou's theories and artistic production evoke a broader framework where religion and experimental art supplement each other.