Contents

Introduction: Kabbalah and Modernity

PART I KABBALA SCHOLARSHIP: A REAPPRAISAL

Philology as Kabbalah

Beyond the Burden of Idealism: For a New Appreciation of the Visual Lore in the Kabbalah

The Future of the Kabbalah: On the Dislocation of Past Primacy, the Problem of Evil, and the Future of Illusions

PART II ROMANTIC AND ESOTERIC READINGS OF KABBALAH

Kabbalah and Secret Societies in Russia (Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries)

The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah: Adolphe Franck and Eliphas Lévi

Paul Vulliaud (1875–1950) and Jewish Kabbalah

Oriental Kabbalah and the Parting of East and West in the Early Theosophical Society

“The Sufi Society from America”: Theosophy and Kabbalah in Poona in the Late Nineteenth Century

PART III MODERN KABBALISTIC SCHOOLS

The Imagined Decline of Kabbalah: The Kabbalistic Yeshiva Sha‘ar ha-Shamayim and Kabbalah in Jerusalem in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

The Status of the (Non)Jewish Other in the Apocalyptic Messianism of Menahem Mendel Schneerson

Marriage and Sexual Behavior in the Teachings of the Kabbalah Centre

Madonna and the Shekhinah: The Playful Transgression of Gender Roles in Popular Culture

Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff and the Neurological Landscape of the Sefirot

PART IV KABBALAH AND POLITICS

‘The Great Goal of the Political Will Is Leviathan’: Ernst Jünger and the Cabala of Enmity

Pragmatism and Piety: The American Spiritual and Philosophical Roots of Jewish Renewal

Contemporary Jewish Mysticism and Palestinian Suicide Bombing

Notes on Contributors

Index of Persons

Index of Subjects