Monographs by Agata Paluch
Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2014; Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 43, 21... more Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2014; Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 43, 216 pp., in English, ISBN 1-933379-46-4
Edited Volumes by Agata Paluch
Aschkenas: Volume 34, Issue 2, 2024
Open access: https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/asch/34/2/html
This special issue focuses on ... more Open access: https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/asch/34/2/html
This special issue focuses on the multiple forms of exchanges of esoteric knowledge and practices among Jews in the early modern period, with special reference to the formation and circulation of textual traditions reflective of esoteric ideas in the so-called Ashkenaz. Through eight in-depth case studies, this volume sets out to explore the wealth of the postmedieval literary corpus of esoteric and kabbalistic texts available in the Ashkenazi cultural area and place it within the wider context of early modern history of knowledge. As a methodological challenge, this volume seeks to interrogate the forms of textual manifestations and kabbalistic expressions that appeared in reaction to prior texts and artefacts, from the vantage point of text technologies, media, and materiality of kabbalistic knowledge in postmedieval (i. e., post-1500) Eastern-Central Europe.
European Journal of Jewish Studies, Special Issue: Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfers in Early Mode... more European Journal of Jewish Studies, Special Issue: Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfers in Early Modernity, edited by Patrick Benjamin Koch and Agata Paluch
Volume 16 (2022): Issue 1
https://brill.com/view/journals/ejjs/16/1/ejjs.16.issue-1.xml
IJS Studies in Judaica, Volume: 21 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 2021
https://brill.com/view/title/58518 Representing Jewish Thought originated in the conference, conv... more https://brill.com/view/title/58518 Representing Jewish Thought originated in the conference, convened in honour of Professor Ada Rapoport-Albert in 2015, on the theme of visual representations of Jewish thought from antiquity to the early modern period. The volume encompasses essays on various modes and media of transmitting and re/presenting thought, pertinent to Jewish past and present. It explores several approaches to the study of the transmission of ideas in historical sources, zooming in on textual and visual hermeneutics to material and textual culture to performative arts. The volume has brought together scholars from different subfields of Jewish Studies, covering thousands of years of Jewish history, who invite further scholarly reflection on the expression, transmission, and organisation of knowledge in Jewish contexts.
Articles by Agata Paluch
Aschkenas 34.2, 2024
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: https... more This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/asch-2024-2019/html
As a methodological challenge, this introduction seeks to interrogate the forms of textual manifestations and kabbalistic expressions that appeared in reaction to prior texts and artefacts, from the vantage point of text technologies, media, and materiality of kabbalistic knowledge in postmedieval (i. e., post-1500) Eastern-Central Europe. As textual production of the so-called Ashkenazi kabbalah has been characterised in early scholarship as unoriginal, repetitive, or simply receptive of the innovations that originated outside of the Ashkenazi world, this volume posited to question the interpretations of kabbalistic textual and cultural dynamics beyond the binaries of the ostensible »authentic/original« and »copy/reproduction«. Instead, this volume critically re-evaluates the practices of copying, imitation, reproduction, transmission, recurrence, or translation in the history of the kabbalistic textuality in Eastern-Central Europe, with an eye to the transformative qualities and broader conditions of these textual and cultural processes.
Editing Kabbalistic Texts (Studies in Magic and Kabbalah 2; Harrassowitz), ed. Bill Rebiger, Gerold Necker, 2024
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license
Whose pres... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license
Whose presence necessitates which absences in the narratives of historical kabbalistic pasts?
In an effort to make historical narratives fuller of elided actors and labour, the work of remediations and the practices of philology directed at kabbalistic culture needs to reckon with the political significance of voices occulted and misrecognised in the processes of materialising, facsimileing, and editing of texts.
Early Science and Medicine, 2024
European Journal of Jewish Studies, 2024
Review Essay
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license... more Review Essay
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license
https://doi.org/10.1163/1872471x-bja10076
Jewish Quarterly Review 113.4, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1353/jqr.2023.a913343
An inclination to preserve a predictable and orderly, ca... more https://doi.org/10.1353/jqr.2023.a913343
An inclination to preserve a predictable and orderly, calculable and predetermined structure of nature has forever accompanied the scientific and philosophical pursuit to understand the universe’s ways, much as it has with many natural theologies. These theologies and their derivative universal theories find confirmation of divine existence and perfection in the orderly regularity of nature’s work. But the question of randomness and fortuity challenges the idea of a divine universe of perfect order and predictability. This incongruity comes to the fore most sharply in games of chance.
Harvard Theological Review 116.2, 2023
Full article in open access at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816023000147
This study centers ... more Full article in open access at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816023000147
This study centers on a multiple-text and composite codex, Oxford-Bodleian MS Michael 473, and throws into relief the dynamics of circulation of various kabbalistic traditions in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. Showcasing a single textual unit, Qabbalat ‘Eser Sefirot, that MS Michael 473 contains, this article focuses on the position of practical kabbalistic texts and practices within the spectrum of kabbalistic traditions of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, ushered in by the contemporary modes of reading and transcription of texts.
By zooming in on a single codex, this study foregrounds the hermeneutic potential of contextual reading of texts in complex manuscripts and of interpreting material choices taken by their cocreators. It does so with a methodological agenda that goes beyond tracing of authorial genealogies, and beyond the sociology of texts and their producers, toward exploring the interpretive relations of literary and material form in early modern handwritten kabbalistic texts.
Entangled Religions: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer, 2022
https://er.ceres.rub.de/index.php/ER/article/view/9519
This essay explores the construction o... more https://er.ceres.rub.de/index.php/ER/article/view/9519
This essay explores the construction of interpretive authority as a process of both creation and recreation of meanings, and their self-legitimization in texts. The process of interpretation in that sense does not simply replace one set of meanings with another but rather metonymically enlarges the pool of signifiers by juxtaposing the traditional and the innovative, thus safeguarding the whole range of possible meanings of texts. The cluster of topoi relating to Enoch-Metatron, a supreme angel featuring in Jewish textual traditions, has often been employed in Jewish exegesis and magical practices in a manner that enabled the new interpretation to nest within the set of older imaginaire, the authority of which is never denied nor supplanted but rather empowers the new reading. This article explores the uses the Enoch-Metatron cluster of motifs as a textual device that served as an organizing principle of interpretive process and conferred authority to new interpretations and new compilations of texts in multiple-text handwritten volumes. The article thus foregrounds a mode of reading and refashioning of earlier Jewish textual traditions of commenting on angelic names, such as that of Enoch-Metatron. It forefronts the perspective of the producers of individual practical compilations as participants in the collective enterprise of authorship and authorization of textual units comprised in each handwritten multiple-text volume.
European Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 16 (2022): Issue 1, Special Issue: Kabbalah and Knowle... more European Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 16 (2022): Issue 1, Special Issue: Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfers in Early Modernity, edited by Patrick Benjamin Koch and Agata Paluch
https://doi.org/10.1163/1872471X-11411104
Print Culture at the Crossroads: The Book and Central Europe, ed. Elizabeth Dillenburg, Howard Paul Louthan, and Drew B. Thomas; Library of the Written Word, Volume: 94, 2021
See full article at https://brill.com/view/title/59642
Representing Jewish Thought: Proceedings of the 2015 Institute of Jewish Studies Conference Held in Honour of Professor Ada Rapoport-Albert, ed. Agata Paluch, Leiden: Brill, 2021
https://brill.com/view/title/58518
The fourteenth-century Sefer Berit ha-Menuhah, or its slightl... more https://brill.com/view/title/58518
The fourteenth-century Sefer Berit ha-Menuhah, or its slightly later abridgement of Sefer Heshek, acquires novel and different senses when read contextually, placed within the forms it assumes in early modern or later manuscripts, produced in their specific cultural and material settings. To appreciate these senses beyond a mere tracing of variations of the assumed earliest and most complete recension of a given work is the aim of this essay, which sets forth from the pervasiveness of Sefer Heshek material in early modern kabbalistic manuscripts of Ashkenazi provenance. By turning to the multiplicity of textual connotations entailed by the engagement of each scribe and each subsequent reader in an act of (re)reading and (re)writing of text, expressed within the boundaries of each discrete manuscript unit, a materially attuned reading might recover the variegated epistemological assumptions that led to creation, copying, and re-copying of each textual unit in its particular literary arrangement and material format.
Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 2019
Kavanot, or mystical intentions, have acquired varied meanings and interpretations in kabbalistic... more Kavanot, or mystical intentions, have acquired varied meanings and interpretations in kabbalistic literatures, from the practice of harmonising one’s mind with the requirement of performed ritual to elaborate processes of mental focus, exercised during prayer and other ritual acts, on divine attributes signified by divine names and stipulated meticulously in kabbalistic prayer-books. Early modern practical kabbalistic manuals also, to no surprise, abound with instructions which recommend a variety of kavanot. In many of these manuals and books of recipes, it is the intention that enables extending of one’s mind toward matter, and builds a new type of continuity between the practitioner and the outside world. Intentionality in kabbalistic practice thus channels the emergence of the performing, knowledgeable self, engaged in shaping the material world, a development which runs parallel to the emergence of new configurations of knowledge in the early modern period. This rise of intentional self, manifest in kabbalistic practices as expressed in early modern handwritten books of recipes of East-Central European provenance, will be the focus of this article.
Conference Presentations by Agata Paluch
Conference/Workshop: "Recipes and Recipe Books Across Manuscript Cultures," University of Hamburg, Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, April 12-13, , 2021
In the last few years the study of Kabbalah in the early modern period, including the complex his... more In the last few years the study of Kabbalah in the early modern period, including the complex histories of Lurianic tradition and its dispersion beyond its birthplace in Palestinian Safed, have become a rapidly growing field. As opposed to focusing solely on its theoretical or theological framework, scholars have become interested in new methodological approaches to study early modern kabbalah as a set of religious and cultural practices.
The EAJS conference “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfer in the Early Modern World” aims at recognizing and evaluating the part that kabbalistic literatures, in a variety of their written formats, played in the transfer of knowledge in the early modern world. The event will gather participants to contribute a series of case studies that will help critically reassess the role and consequences of a variety of texts and practices deemed esoteric for the early modern transmission of knowledge. The conference will be focused on contextualized readings of primary texts presented by each of the participants with the aim to highlight variant patterns of the diffusion of kabbalistic traditions in changing cultural and historical circumstances, and their role in the formation and transformation of contemporary knowledge systems.
The event is open to the public, with advance registration via e-mail: agata.paluch@fu-berlin.de or patrick.benjamin.koch@uni-hamburg.de
Sponsored by the European Association for Jewish Studies
A collaboration of: Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Hamburg, Selma Stern Zentrum Berlin-Brandenburg and the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Conveners: Agata Paluch, Patrick B. Koch
In the last few years the study of Kabbalah in the early modern period, including the complex his... more In the last few years the study of Kabbalah in the early modern period, including the complex histories of Lurianic tradition and its dispersion beyond its birthplace in Palestinian Safed, have become a rapidly growing field. As opposed to focusing solely on its theoretical or theological framework, scholars have become interested in new methodological approaches to study early modern kabbalah as a set of religious and cultural practices.
The EAJS conference “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfer in the Early Modern World” aims at recognizing and evaluating the part that kabbalistic literatures, in a variety of their written formats, played in the transfer of knowledge in the early modern world. The event will gather participants to contribute a series of case studies that will help critically reassess the role and consequences of a variety of texts and practices deemed esoteric for the early modern transmission of knowledge. The conference will be focused on contextualized readings of primary texts presented by each of the participants with the aim to highlight variant patterns of the diffusion of kabbalistic traditions in changing cultural and historical circumstances, and their role in the formation and transformation of contemporary knowledge systems.
The event is open to the public, with advance registration via e-mail: agata.paluch@fu-berlin.de or patrick.benjamin.koch@uni-hamburg.de
Sponsored by the European Association for Jewish Studies
A collaboration of: Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Hamburg, Selma Stern Zentrum Berlin-Brandenburg and the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Conveners: Agata Paluch, Patrick B. Koch
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Monographs by Agata Paluch
Edited Volumes by Agata Paluch
This special issue focuses on the multiple forms of exchanges of esoteric knowledge and practices among Jews in the early modern period, with special reference to the formation and circulation of textual traditions reflective of esoteric ideas in the so-called Ashkenaz. Through eight in-depth case studies, this volume sets out to explore the wealth of the postmedieval literary corpus of esoteric and kabbalistic texts available in the Ashkenazi cultural area and place it within the wider context of early modern history of knowledge. As a methodological challenge, this volume seeks to interrogate the forms of textual manifestations and kabbalistic expressions that appeared in reaction to prior texts and artefacts, from the vantage point of text technologies, media, and materiality of kabbalistic knowledge in postmedieval (i. e., post-1500) Eastern-Central Europe.
Volume 16 (2022): Issue 1
https://brill.com/view/journals/ejjs/16/1/ejjs.16.issue-1.xml
Articles by Agata Paluch
As a methodological challenge, this introduction seeks to interrogate the forms of textual manifestations and kabbalistic expressions that appeared in reaction to prior texts and artefacts, from the vantage point of text technologies, media, and materiality of kabbalistic knowledge in postmedieval (i. e., post-1500) Eastern-Central Europe. As textual production of the so-called Ashkenazi kabbalah has been characterised in early scholarship as unoriginal, repetitive, or simply receptive of the innovations that originated outside of the Ashkenazi world, this volume posited to question the interpretations of kabbalistic textual and cultural dynamics beyond the binaries of the ostensible »authentic/original« and »copy/reproduction«. Instead, this volume critically re-evaluates the practices of copying, imitation, reproduction, transmission, recurrence, or translation in the history of the kabbalistic textuality in Eastern-Central Europe, with an eye to the transformative qualities and broader conditions of these textual and cultural processes.
Whose presence necessitates which absences in the narratives of historical kabbalistic pasts?
In an effort to make historical narratives fuller of elided actors and labour, the work of remediations and the practices of philology directed at kabbalistic culture needs to reckon with the political significance of voices occulted and misrecognised in the processes of materialising, facsimileing, and editing of texts.
https://brill.com/view/journals/esm/29/3/article-p271_3.xml?ebody=pdf-117260
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license
https://doi.org/10.1163/1872471x-bja10076
An inclination to preserve a predictable and orderly, calculable and predetermined structure of nature has forever accompanied the scientific and philosophical pursuit to understand the universe’s ways, much as it has with many natural theologies. These theologies and their derivative universal theories find confirmation of divine existence and perfection in the orderly regularity of nature’s work. But the question of randomness and fortuity challenges the idea of a divine universe of perfect order and predictability. This incongruity comes to the fore most sharply in games of chance.
This study centers on a multiple-text and composite codex, Oxford-Bodleian MS Michael 473, and throws into relief the dynamics of circulation of various kabbalistic traditions in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. Showcasing a single textual unit, Qabbalat ‘Eser Sefirot, that MS Michael 473 contains, this article focuses on the position of practical kabbalistic texts and practices within the spectrum of kabbalistic traditions of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, ushered in by the contemporary modes of reading and transcription of texts.
By zooming in on a single codex, this study foregrounds the hermeneutic potential of contextual reading of texts in complex manuscripts and of interpreting material choices taken by their cocreators. It does so with a methodological agenda that goes beyond tracing of authorial genealogies, and beyond the sociology of texts and their producers, toward exploring the interpretive relations of literary and material form in early modern handwritten kabbalistic texts.
This essay explores the construction of interpretive authority as a process of both creation and recreation of meanings, and their self-legitimization in texts. The process of interpretation in that sense does not simply replace one set of meanings with another but rather metonymically enlarges the pool of signifiers by juxtaposing the traditional and the innovative, thus safeguarding the whole range of possible meanings of texts. The cluster of topoi relating to Enoch-Metatron, a supreme angel featuring in Jewish textual traditions, has often been employed in Jewish exegesis and magical practices in a manner that enabled the new interpretation to nest within the set of older imaginaire, the authority of which is never denied nor supplanted but rather empowers the new reading. This article explores the uses the Enoch-Metatron cluster of motifs as a textual device that served as an organizing principle of interpretive process and conferred authority to new interpretations and new compilations of texts in multiple-text handwritten volumes. The article thus foregrounds a mode of reading and refashioning of earlier Jewish textual traditions of commenting on angelic names, such as that of Enoch-Metatron. It forefronts the perspective of the producers of individual practical compilations as participants in the collective enterprise of authorship and authorization of textual units comprised in each handwritten multiple-text volume.
https://doi.org/10.1163/1872471X-11411104
The fourteenth-century Sefer Berit ha-Menuhah, or its slightly later abridgement of Sefer Heshek, acquires novel and different senses when read contextually, placed within the forms it assumes in early modern or later manuscripts, produced in their specific cultural and material settings. To appreciate these senses beyond a mere tracing of variations of the assumed earliest and most complete recension of a given work is the aim of this essay, which sets forth from the pervasiveness of Sefer Heshek material in early modern kabbalistic manuscripts of Ashkenazi provenance. By turning to the multiplicity of textual connotations entailed by the engagement of each scribe and each subsequent reader in an act of (re)reading and (re)writing of text, expressed within the boundaries of each discrete manuscript unit, a materially attuned reading might recover the variegated epistemological assumptions that led to creation, copying, and re-copying of each textual unit in its particular literary arrangement and material format.
Conference Presentations by Agata Paluch
The EAJS conference “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfer in the Early Modern World” aims at recognizing and evaluating the part that kabbalistic literatures, in a variety of their written formats, played in the transfer of knowledge in the early modern world. The event will gather participants to contribute a series of case studies that will help critically reassess the role and consequences of a variety of texts and practices deemed esoteric for the early modern transmission of knowledge. The conference will be focused on contextualized readings of primary texts presented by each of the participants with the aim to highlight variant patterns of the diffusion of kabbalistic traditions in changing cultural and historical circumstances, and their role in the formation and transformation of contemporary knowledge systems.
The event is open to the public, with advance registration via e-mail: agata.paluch@fu-berlin.de or patrick.benjamin.koch@uni-hamburg.de
Sponsored by the European Association for Jewish Studies
A collaboration of: Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Hamburg, Selma Stern Zentrum Berlin-Brandenburg and the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Conveners: Agata Paluch, Patrick B. Koch
The EAJS conference “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfer in the Early Modern World” aims at recognizing and evaluating the part that kabbalistic literatures, in a variety of their written formats, played in the transfer of knowledge in the early modern world. The event will gather participants to contribute a series of case studies that will help critically reassess the role and consequences of a variety of texts and practices deemed esoteric for the early modern transmission of knowledge. The conference will be focused on contextualized readings of primary texts presented by each of the participants with the aim to highlight variant patterns of the diffusion of kabbalistic traditions in changing cultural and historical circumstances, and their role in the formation and transformation of contemporary knowledge systems.
The event is open to the public, with advance registration via e-mail: agata.paluch@fu-berlin.de or patrick.benjamin.koch@uni-hamburg.de
Sponsored by the European Association for Jewish Studies
A collaboration of: Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Hamburg, Selma Stern Zentrum Berlin-Brandenburg and the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Conveners: Agata Paluch, Patrick B. Koch
This special issue focuses on the multiple forms of exchanges of esoteric knowledge and practices among Jews in the early modern period, with special reference to the formation and circulation of textual traditions reflective of esoteric ideas in the so-called Ashkenaz. Through eight in-depth case studies, this volume sets out to explore the wealth of the postmedieval literary corpus of esoteric and kabbalistic texts available in the Ashkenazi cultural area and place it within the wider context of early modern history of knowledge. As a methodological challenge, this volume seeks to interrogate the forms of textual manifestations and kabbalistic expressions that appeared in reaction to prior texts and artefacts, from the vantage point of text technologies, media, and materiality of kabbalistic knowledge in postmedieval (i. e., post-1500) Eastern-Central Europe.
Volume 16 (2022): Issue 1
https://brill.com/view/journals/ejjs/16/1/ejjs.16.issue-1.xml
As a methodological challenge, this introduction seeks to interrogate the forms of textual manifestations and kabbalistic expressions that appeared in reaction to prior texts and artefacts, from the vantage point of text technologies, media, and materiality of kabbalistic knowledge in postmedieval (i. e., post-1500) Eastern-Central Europe. As textual production of the so-called Ashkenazi kabbalah has been characterised in early scholarship as unoriginal, repetitive, or simply receptive of the innovations that originated outside of the Ashkenazi world, this volume posited to question the interpretations of kabbalistic textual and cultural dynamics beyond the binaries of the ostensible »authentic/original« and »copy/reproduction«. Instead, this volume critically re-evaluates the practices of copying, imitation, reproduction, transmission, recurrence, or translation in the history of the kabbalistic textuality in Eastern-Central Europe, with an eye to the transformative qualities and broader conditions of these textual and cultural processes.
Whose presence necessitates which absences in the narratives of historical kabbalistic pasts?
In an effort to make historical narratives fuller of elided actors and labour, the work of remediations and the practices of philology directed at kabbalistic culture needs to reckon with the political significance of voices occulted and misrecognised in the processes of materialising, facsimileing, and editing of texts.
https://brill.com/view/journals/esm/29/3/article-p271_3.xml?ebody=pdf-117260
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license
https://doi.org/10.1163/1872471x-bja10076
An inclination to preserve a predictable and orderly, calculable and predetermined structure of nature has forever accompanied the scientific and philosophical pursuit to understand the universe’s ways, much as it has with many natural theologies. These theologies and their derivative universal theories find confirmation of divine existence and perfection in the orderly regularity of nature’s work. But the question of randomness and fortuity challenges the idea of a divine universe of perfect order and predictability. This incongruity comes to the fore most sharply in games of chance.
This study centers on a multiple-text and composite codex, Oxford-Bodleian MS Michael 473, and throws into relief the dynamics of circulation of various kabbalistic traditions in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. Showcasing a single textual unit, Qabbalat ‘Eser Sefirot, that MS Michael 473 contains, this article focuses on the position of practical kabbalistic texts and practices within the spectrum of kabbalistic traditions of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, ushered in by the contemporary modes of reading and transcription of texts.
By zooming in on a single codex, this study foregrounds the hermeneutic potential of contextual reading of texts in complex manuscripts and of interpreting material choices taken by their cocreators. It does so with a methodological agenda that goes beyond tracing of authorial genealogies, and beyond the sociology of texts and their producers, toward exploring the interpretive relations of literary and material form in early modern handwritten kabbalistic texts.
This essay explores the construction of interpretive authority as a process of both creation and recreation of meanings, and their self-legitimization in texts. The process of interpretation in that sense does not simply replace one set of meanings with another but rather metonymically enlarges the pool of signifiers by juxtaposing the traditional and the innovative, thus safeguarding the whole range of possible meanings of texts. The cluster of topoi relating to Enoch-Metatron, a supreme angel featuring in Jewish textual traditions, has often been employed in Jewish exegesis and magical practices in a manner that enabled the new interpretation to nest within the set of older imaginaire, the authority of which is never denied nor supplanted but rather empowers the new reading. This article explores the uses the Enoch-Metatron cluster of motifs as a textual device that served as an organizing principle of interpretive process and conferred authority to new interpretations and new compilations of texts in multiple-text handwritten volumes. The article thus foregrounds a mode of reading and refashioning of earlier Jewish textual traditions of commenting on angelic names, such as that of Enoch-Metatron. It forefronts the perspective of the producers of individual practical compilations as participants in the collective enterprise of authorship and authorization of textual units comprised in each handwritten multiple-text volume.
https://doi.org/10.1163/1872471X-11411104
The fourteenth-century Sefer Berit ha-Menuhah, or its slightly later abridgement of Sefer Heshek, acquires novel and different senses when read contextually, placed within the forms it assumes in early modern or later manuscripts, produced in their specific cultural and material settings. To appreciate these senses beyond a mere tracing of variations of the assumed earliest and most complete recension of a given work is the aim of this essay, which sets forth from the pervasiveness of Sefer Heshek material in early modern kabbalistic manuscripts of Ashkenazi provenance. By turning to the multiplicity of textual connotations entailed by the engagement of each scribe and each subsequent reader in an act of (re)reading and (re)writing of text, expressed within the boundaries of each discrete manuscript unit, a materially attuned reading might recover the variegated epistemological assumptions that led to creation, copying, and re-copying of each textual unit in its particular literary arrangement and material format.
The EAJS conference “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfer in the Early Modern World” aims at recognizing and evaluating the part that kabbalistic literatures, in a variety of their written formats, played in the transfer of knowledge in the early modern world. The event will gather participants to contribute a series of case studies that will help critically reassess the role and consequences of a variety of texts and practices deemed esoteric for the early modern transmission of knowledge. The conference will be focused on contextualized readings of primary texts presented by each of the participants with the aim to highlight variant patterns of the diffusion of kabbalistic traditions in changing cultural and historical circumstances, and their role in the formation and transformation of contemporary knowledge systems.
The event is open to the public, with advance registration via e-mail: agata.paluch@fu-berlin.de or patrick.benjamin.koch@uni-hamburg.de
Sponsored by the European Association for Jewish Studies
A collaboration of: Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Hamburg, Selma Stern Zentrum Berlin-Brandenburg and the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Conveners: Agata Paluch, Patrick B. Koch
The EAJS conference “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfer in the Early Modern World” aims at recognizing and evaluating the part that kabbalistic literatures, in a variety of their written formats, played in the transfer of knowledge in the early modern world. The event will gather participants to contribute a series of case studies that will help critically reassess the role and consequences of a variety of texts and practices deemed esoteric for the early modern transmission of knowledge. The conference will be focused on contextualized readings of primary texts presented by each of the participants with the aim to highlight variant patterns of the diffusion of kabbalistic traditions in changing cultural and historical circumstances, and their role in the formation and transformation of contemporary knowledge systems.
The event is open to the public, with advance registration via e-mail: agata.paluch@fu-berlin.de or patrick.benjamin.koch@uni-hamburg.de
Sponsored by the European Association for Jewish Studies
A collaboration of: Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Hamburg, Selma Stern Zentrum Berlin-Brandenburg and the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Conveners: Agata Paluch, Patrick B. Koch
Jom Tow Lipmann Heller, Zwój Nienawiści (przekład i opracowanie A. Paluch)
in The Visual Commentary of Scripture ed. by Ben Quash. (London: The Visual Commentary on Scripture Foundation). [Accessed 21.11.2022]