Book Reviews	Print

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Moshe Idel 's Kabbalah: New Perspectives is a major new academic work on the kabbalah, which means that it will immediately be held suspect by those who, having read Gershom Scholem's works, are suspicious of any approach to the Kabbalah which proceeds from a vantage point outside Orthodox Jewish tradition. Idel, himself, is quite straightforward: academic students of the Kabbalah (himself presumably included) are in the main secular Jews who approach their subject much like a historian or anthropologist approaches a foreign culture. Nevertheless, Idel's book is surprisingly in harmony with the traditional view of Jewish mysticism. There are several reasons for this. The first is that, in contrast to Scholem, Idel takes a phenomenological as opposed to a purely textual and historiographic approach to the Kabbalah, and his point of view is one which is, therefore, close to that of the kabbalist's themselves. The second reason is that, in contrast to his predecessors, Idel takes the notion of an oral kabbalistic tradition quite seriously and holds that there are indeed important gaps in the written documents. This, in part, enables him to speak of a relatively ?organic evolution of Jewish mysticism,? in which ideas which appear in written form at a late date are seen as evolving out of older ?oral? traditions. Idel buttresses his view of the ?organicity^- of the Kabbalah by referring to material in various layers of Jewish literature,some of it apparently quite remote from mystical concerns. Kabbalah, according to Idel, is certainly not a Judaification of foreign (Gnostic and Neoplatonic) ideas, but a genuine Jewish phenomenon. Finally, Idel acknowledges that ?contact with kabbalists who both study and conduct their lives in accordance with the requirements of the Kabbalah can enrich the academic vision of what Kabbalah is.? Indeed, he criticizes Israeli academicians for their failure to dialogue with contemporary kabbalists who are at their own doorsteps in Jerusalem. While recognizing the tensions involved in such an encounter, Idel states that his own experience has been one of mutual enrichment, in which the academic gains a better understanding of the kabbalistic experience and the kabbalist is made aware of written manuscripts and printed texts which are today extant only in university libraries.