Kabbalah in Italy: 1280-1510, A Survey

Kabbalah in Italy: 1280-1510, A Survey

This survey of the history of Kabbalah in Italy represents a major contribution from one of the world's foremost Kabbalah scholars. Idel charts the ways that Kabbalistic thought and literature developed in Italy and how its unique geographical situation facilitated the arrival of both Spanish and Byzantine Kabbalah.

Moshe Idel

Kabbalah : introductory remarks -- Abraham Abulafia and ecstatic kabbalah -- Abraham Abulafia's activity in Italy -- Ecstatic kabbalah as an experiential lore -- Abraham Abulafia's hermeneutics -- Eschatological themes and divine names in Abulafia's kabbalah -- Abraham Abulafia and R. Menahem ben Benjamin : thirteenth-century kabbalistic and Ashkenazi manuscripts in italy -- R. Menahem ben Benjamin Recanati -- Menahem Recanati as a theosophical-theurgical kabbalist -- Menahem Recanati's hermeneutics -- Ecstatic kabbalah from the fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries -- The kabbalistic-philosophical-magical exchanges in Italy -- Prisca theologia : R. Isaac Abravanel, Leone Ebreo, and R. Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano -- R. Yohanan ben Yitzhaq Alemanno -- Jewish mystical thought in Lorenzo il Magnifico's Florence -- Other mystical and magical literatures in Renaissance Florence -- Spanish kabbalists in Italy after the expulsion -- Diverging types of kabbalah in late-fifteenth-century Italy -- Jewish kabbalah in Christian garb -- Anthropoids from the Middle Ages to Renaissance Italy -- Astromagical pneumatic anthropoids from medieval Spain to Renaissance Italy -- The trajectory of eastern kabbalah and its reverberations in Italy -- Concluding remarks.

Book