Concealment and Revelation : : Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications / / Moshe Halbertal.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter PUP eBook-Package 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Halbertal, Moshe,
• TeilnehmendeR: Feldman, Jackie.
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2009]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes. Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition? Halbertal concludes that, through the medium of the concealed, Jewish thinkers integrated into the heart of the Jewish tradition diverse cultural influences such as Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticisims. And the creation of an added concealed layer, unregulated and open-ended, became the source of the most daring and radical interpretations of the tradition.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Editions Used -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The Paradox of Esotericism: "And Not on the Chariot Alone" -- Chapter 2. The Hidden and the Sublime: Vision and Restriction in the Bible and in Talmudic Literature -- Chapter 3. The Ethics of Gazing: The Attitude of Early Jewish Mysticism Toward Seeing the Chariot -- Chapter 4. Concealment and Power: Magic and Esotericism in the Hekhalot Literature -- Chapter 5. Esotericism and Commentary: Ibn Ezra and the Exegetical Layer -- Chapter 6. Concealment and Heresy: Astrology and the Secret of the Torah -- Chapter 7. Double Language and the Divided Public in Guide of the Perplexed -- Chapter 8. The Breaching of the Limits of the Esoteric: Concealment and Disclosure in Maimonidean Esotericism -- Chapter 9. From Transmission to Writing: Hinting, Leaking, and Orthodoxy in Early Kabbalah -- Chapter 10. Open Knowledge and Closed Knowledge: The Kabbalists of Gerona-Rabbi Azriel and Rabbi Ya'akov bar Sheshet -- Chapter 11. Tradition, Closed Knowledge, and the Esoteric: Secrecy and Hinting in Nahmanides' Kabbalah -- Chapter 12. From Tradition to Literature: Shem Tov Ibn Gaon and the Critique of Kabbalistic Literature -- Chapter 13. "The Widening of the Apertures of the Showpiece": Shmuel Ibn Tibon and the End of the Era of Esotericism -- Chapter 14. Esotericism, Sermons, and Curricula: Ya'akov Anatoli and the Dissemination of the Secret -- Chapter 15. The Ambivalence of Secrecy: The Dispute over Philosophy in the Early Fourteenth Century -- Chapter 16. Esotericism, Discontent, and Co-Existence -- Chapter 17. Taxonomy and Paradoxes of Esotericism: Conceptual Conclusion -- Notes -- Index