Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature.
His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter.
.
In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation.
Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.
Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
Previews available in: English
Showing 2 featured editions. View all 2 editions?
Edition | Availability |
---|---|
1
Through a Speculum That Shines
November 24, 1997, Princeton University Press
Paperback
in English
0691017220 9780691017228
|
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
2
Through a speculum that shines: vision and imagination in medieval Jewish mysticism
1994, Princeton University Press
in English
0691073430 9780691073439
|
aaaa
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [401]-437) and index.
Classifications
The Physical Object
ID Numbers
Source records
Scriblio MARC recordIthaca College Library MARC record
Internet Archive item record
amazon.com record
marc_claremont_school_theology MARC record
Better World Books record
Library of Congress MARC record
marc_claremont_school_theology MARC record
Internet Archive item record
Promise Item
marc_columbia MARC record
Excerpts
Community Reviews (0)
Feedback?July 15, 2024 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
March 31, 2021 | Edited by Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten | subject |
August 4, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
July 27, 2020 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
December 10, 2009 | Created by WorkBot | add works page |