: An Intellectual Portrait

Jonathan Garb

Moshe Idel, the Max Cooper Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of , is one of the most acclaimed figures in the short yet rich history of Israeli academia, in addition to enjoying wide recognition in Europe and North America. Over the last four decades, Idel has had a dramatic impact on the place of research in the contemporary intellectual landscape. Whereas previously the reception of Kabbalah in both Jewish Studies and the wider intellectual world had been dominated by the towering figure of (d. 1982), Idel has played an important role, together with other major Kabbalah scholars, in a far more diverse, complex, and yet widespread appreciation of this difficult and fascinating corpus. Idel’s strong identification with the academic study of Kabbalah renders him, at first glance, a surprising candidate for inclusion in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers. However, this introduction will show that Idel has made a conscious and consistent contribution to the academic discipline of Religious Studies and to the history of ideas in general. His innovative re-reading of kabbalistic texts has markedly transformed our understanding of the place of Kabbalah in Jewish religiosity. In so doing, Idel has led us to reconsider accepted notions about the contours of the Jewish tradition and the relationship between its many facets, yielding a richer and more complex picture. In particular, Idel has brought academic writing on Judaism into closer dialogue with more traditional understand- ings of religion, especially regarding the construction of collective identity through ritual practice. Idel’s extensive teaching experience in three Israeli universities, his wide-ranging international activity, and his advising of numerous graduate students have positioned him centrally within a broad network of schol- ars and thinkers worldwide. However, since Idel’s corpus is rather vast and intellectually challenging—the bibliography of 1997 lists three hundred items and the online bibliography of 2007 lists fifty-four books and transla- tions into several European languages1—this essay makes no attempt to

1 Daniel Abrams, Bibliography of the Writings of Professor Moshe Idel: A Special Volume Issued on the Occasion of His Fiftieth Birthday (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1997) [Hebrew]; http://jsri.ro/ojs/index.php/jsri/article/view/450. 2 moshe idel: an intellectual portrait provide a detailed analysis of his oeuvre or discuss its scholarly impact. Instead, Idel’s writing will be examined in terms of their thematic coher- ence and ideational consistency. Idel’s work exhibits a rare combination of meticulous philological- historical investigation—identifying, translating, and analyzing thousands of unknown texts extant in manuscripts—with broader theoretical, meth- odological, and hermeneutical moves. This introduction, like the chapters that follow, focuses on the second aspect of his work because it is more relevant for his contribution to thought and philosophy more generally. Furthermore, one of the trademarks of Idel’s innovation within Kabbalah research is a shift in emphasis from the erstwhile focus on history and phi- lology to the phenomenological approach that he describes in Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988), his first English book. The exact meaning of the term for Idel (and its relationship to the twentieth-century strand of phi- losophy known by that name) has already been much debated.2 Here, the phenomenological approach will be treated as a reading of kabbalistic texts with an eye to discerning patterns of meaning and experience, rather than locations within a historical narrative, or variants on a textual record. While Idel is best known as a scholar of Jewish mysticism, especially medieval Kabbalah, he has written, advised, and taught on many other aspects of Jewish thought, starting with the Bible and moving through vari- ous corpora of late-antique Judaism through medieval Jewish philosophy, Hasidism in the early modern period, all the way to twentieth-century Jewish philosophy. Such a broad scope manifests Idel’s expressed pluralistic understanding of Judaism, which seeks to uncover broad “panoramas” and locate “inter-corporal” connections. This innovative, wide, and complex method led Idel to use such terms, together with others that readers will encounter below, as part of an idiosyncratic scholarly terminology, char- acterizing his writing and rendering it somewhat challenging for neophyte readers. Idel’s inclusive view of Judaism has changed our understanding not only of the place of Kabbalah within Jewish culture, but also of central themes in Jewish theology and philosophy. I wish to stress that his global view of Judaism, which encompasses many periods, geographical centers, and ide- ational streams of Judaism, is rooted in the in-depth investigation of many texts in their original languages. This blend of close philological analysis and thematic generalizations enables Idel’s readers to appreciate the sheer

2 See, e.g., Daniel Abrams, “Phenomenology of Jewish Mysticism: Moshe Idel’s Method- ology in Perspective,” Kabbalah 20 (2009): 7–146.