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Martin Buber's embrace of Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century was instrumental to the revival of this popular form of Jewish mysticism. Hoping to instigate a Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance, Buber published a series of anthologies of Hasidic teachings written in German to introduce the tradition to a wide audience. This book closely analyzes his writings and sources to explore his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism. For Buber, Hasidic legends and teachings were not a static, canonical body of knowledge, but were dynamic and open to continuous reinterpretation. The author argues that this representation of Hasidism was essential to the Zionist effort to restore a sense of unity across the Jewish diaspora as purely religious traditions weakened—and that Buber's anthologies in turn played a vital part in the broad movement to use cultural memory as a means to reconstruct a collective identity for Jews. As the author unravels the rich layers of Buber's vision of Hasidism, Buber emerges as one of the preeminent thinkers on the place of religion in modern culture.

Jews are no longer only Jews. They have acquired multiple identities. These identities are often discontinuous. One’s professional, social, political, and cultural affiliations may engender an identity that might not overlap with one’s inherited identity. As much as they may enrich one personally, this whirl of discontinuous identities might also yield a destabilizing tension with one’s self-understanding as a Jew. The following essay considers this dialectical tension as it is manifest in the expansion of the Jew’s cultural horizons beyond those established by rabbinic tradition. Under the rubric of post-traditional identities (which may still be informed by religious sensibilities and concerns, nor are they necessarily indifferent to traditional Jewish teachings and precept), the volume explores the existential and cognitive ramifications of the resulting cultural disjunctions. These reflections are guided by overarching concern how post-traditional Jews may circumvent the Scylla of a cosmopolitan syncretism and the Charybdis of ethnic patriotism.

This book reads translation history through the lens of Jewish–Christian difference, which, conversely, it views as an effect of translation. Subjecting translation to a theological-political analysis, the author asks how the charged Jewish–Christian relationship—and more particularly the dependence of Christianity on the texts and translations of a rival religion—has haunted the theory and practice of translation in the West. Bringing together central issues in translation studies with episodes in Jewish–Christian history, the book considers a range of texts, from the Bible to Elie Wiesel's Night, delving into such controversies as the accuracy of various Bible translations, the medieval use of converts from Judaism to Christianity as translators, the censorship of anti-Christian references in Jewish texts, and the translation of Holocaust testimony. It ultimately reveals that translation is not a marginal phenomenon but rather a crucial issue for understanding the relations between Jews and Christians, and indeed the development of each religious community.

Fragile Finitude is an original work of contemporary Jewish theology, philosophy, and hermeneutics, achieved through a creative, innovative appropriation of traditional Jewish Bible interpretation at four interconnected levels: plain, historical sense, peshat; legal and theological rabbinic exegesis, derash; philosophical or ethical practices of self-development, remez; and mystical vision or cosmic consciousness, sod. These four dimensions tally with four levels of theological and lived experience, and each is explored with specific texts and interpretations, producing a multidimensional spectrum of theological engagements with life and experience. The natural world is the fundamental ground of this project, but the social events of this world and the reading of texts open new vectors towards transcendence in multiple ways. Reality is experienced theologically as suffused with divine presence, manifest as the diversity of experiences that reveal the mystery of existence. The author uses a poetic religious language that mediates between the expressible and the ineffable, and it takes account of the modern reality of human finitude. The core of the work is to inculcate a spirit of humility before our earthly projects and show how the divinely sponsored events of existence may reorient the individual towards their compelling claims, requiring decision and action. Traditional Jewish thought and ritual are read as compelling cultural exemplars of this universal call to attentiveness and responsibility. The revelation of creation is therefore a primary concern, and undergirds other paradigms of revelation in Jewish life and thought.

Between 1780 and 1937, Jews in Germany produced numerous new translations of the Hebrew Bible into German. Intended for Jews who were trilingual, reading Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, they were meant less for religious use than to promote educational and cultural goals. Not only did translations give Jews vernacular access to their scripture without Christian intervention, but they also helped showcase the Hebrew Bible as a work of literature and the foundational text of modern Jewish identity. Although the translators were major figures, these translations have received scant attention. This book is the first in English to offer a close analysis of German Jewish translations as part of a larger cultural project. It focuses on four distinct waves of translation in historical context, describing each translator's priorities and methods and examining sample verses in each work. It argues that German Jewish Bible translation was a religious enterprise, undertaken in dialogue with Christian translation practices and with culture, aesthetics, and contemporary views of language. Modern German Jewish translations had roots in the pre-modern Yiddish translation tradition in Ashkenaz; they were influenced by Luther and, equally, by those who rejected Luther’s approach. Over three centuries, translations in the German Jewish context responded to multiple uses of translation in the majority culture. Studying the history of successive translations provides new insight into the opportunities and problems the Bible posed for different generations and a new perspective on modern German Jewish history.

The first Jewish woman to leave her mark as a writer and intellectual, Sarra Copia Sulam (1600?–41) was doubly tainted in the eyes of early modern society by her religion and her gender. This remarkable woman, who until now has been relatively neglected by modern scholarship, was a unique figure in Italian cultural life, opening her home, in the Venetian ghetto, to Jews and Christians alike as a literary salon. For this bilingual edition, the author has collected all of Sulam's previously scattered writings—letters, sonnets, a Manifesto—into a single volume. He has also assembled all extant correspondence and poetry that was addressed to Sulam, as well as all known contemporary references to her, making them available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Featuring rich biographical and historical notes that place Sulam in her cultural context, this book offers insights into the thought and creativity of a woman who dared to express herself in the male-dominated, overwhelmingly Catholic Venice of her time.

In contemporary French political culture, the guarantee of universal equality and state secularism (or laïcité) is commonly seen as necessitating the elimination of minority difference from the public sphere. This book argues that the universal and the particular have not always been so opposed. Examining how major French thinkers have struggled with the problem of how to integrate Jews into French society from the time of the French Revolution to the present day, the book shows both how a hard-line, assimilationist notion of universalism came to dominate after the Dreyfus Affair, as well as how other, more pluralistic attitudes toward minority difference were conceived in opposition to this model. By recovering the forgotten history of French universalism and the Jews, the book points toward new ways of moving beyond France’s current ethnic and religious dilemmas involving the integration of Jews and Muslims. One of the main methodological goals of the book is to argue for a more open, inclusive view of what constitutes political discourse in France, one that includes not only political speeches and tracts, but also novels, plays, philosophical essays, and films in the conversation about French universalism and minority difference.

This book explores the shamanic dimensions of Jewish mysticism. The author integrates methods and models from the social sciences, comparative religion, and Jewish studies to offer a view of the early modern kabbalists and their social and psychological contexts. Through close readings of numerous texts—some translated here for the first time—he draws a picture of the kabbalists, showing them to be as concerned with deeper states of consciousness as they were with study and ritual. The kabbalists developed physical and mental methods to induce trance states, visions of heavenly mountains, and transformations into animals or bodies of light. To gain a deeper understanding of the kabbalists' shamanic practices, the book compares their experiences with those of mystics from other traditions as well as with those recorded by psychologists such as Milton Erickson and Carl Jung. Finally, the text examines the kabbalists' relations with the wider Jewish community, uncovering the role of kabbalistic shamanism in the renewal of Jewish tradition as it contended with modernity.

For the first time, Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah takes up one of the most central topics in modern Kabbalah, as well as modern mysticism in general: Psychological thought. Tracing the manifold understandings of the soul and the heart over five centuries of kabbalistic writing, the book demonstrates that modern Kabbalah has a rich psychological thought of its own, and does not need to be interpreted through the lens of psychoanalysis. Rather, both psychoanalysis and modern Kabbalah are expressions of the process of European modernization. The modernization of Kabbalah is described as a multifaceted process that plays a central role in the development of modern Judaism, responding to socialism and existentialism and influencing the course of Zionism. One of the central claims of the book is that although the soul is usually perceived as divine in modern Kabbalah, nonetheless it is also made and remade through human activity. Through the central topic of psychological thought, readers are introduced to the rich variety of schools, developments, central figures and texts of modern Kabbalah (including Hasidism), from sixteenth century Galilee to twenty-first century New York. All along, close textual reading is combined with social scientific analysis, especially utilizing the tool of social psychology and engaging psychoanalytical thought. This analysis often leads into reflection on the socio-political implications of the historical developments traced here, especially in the twentieth century.