“As the History of Knowledge blog aims to facilitate scholarly exchange related to the field, the editors wish to highlight this recent special issue about “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfers in Early Modernity” by reproducing the editors’ foreword here with the permission of Brill, the journal’s publisher. The foreword explains the history of knowledge perspective that the contributors applied to […]
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Magic, Kabbalah, and Everything In Between
Fresh off the press: “On Practical Uses of Ten Sefirot” in Harvard Theological Review 116.2 (open access) “By the end of the sixteenth century, textual manifestations of kabbalah—a variety of Jewish mysticism that first emerged in medieval Provence and Catalonia—achieved the status of elite but authoritative lore in Eastern and Central Europe, even if at times […]
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We are delighted to invite applications for the Hebrew Manuscript Studies: Codicology, Palaeography, Art History summer workshop, taking place from 26 June to 7 July 2023 and led by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (OCHJS and Corpus Christi College), Agata Paluch (Freie Universität Berlin / EsKnow) and César Merchán-Hamann (OCHJS and Bodleian Library). The Summer Workshop in Oxford […]
Intensive Summer Workshop in Hebrew Manuscript Studies at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (a collaborative project between the University of Oxford and Free University Berlin), 4-8 July 2022
We are pleased to announce the publication of “Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfers in Early Modernity,” a special issue of the European Journal of Jewish Studies 16.1 (2022). Edited and with a foreword by Agata Paluch and Patrick Benjamin Koch and contributions by Magdaléna Jánošíková, Saverio Campanini, Flavia Buzzetta, Hanna Gentili, J. H. Chajes, Gerold Necker, Andrea Gondos, Avinoam J. Stillman, […]
Ever wondered how people of the past tried to regulate their emotions or find solutions to complex problems, but in an efficient and available-to-all manner? One textual format persists throughout the ages and offers a glimpse into many ways in which people have confronted a variety of their problems and daily challenges: a recipe. You […]
“Alongside formal compositions, blanks spaces were used to record family histories, economic woes, and ritual practices. From the historian’s point of view, this means that even kabbalistic manuscripts – devoted to esoteric theological, cosmological, and ritual speculations – can be valuable sources for social and cultural history.”
This event has been postponed to 2022! Save the date! We’re co-organising workshops on early modern Hebrew Mss with OCHJS at the Bodleian Library. First time in a new format, more info via: https://www.ochjs.ac.uk/summer-workshop-medieval-and-early-modern-hebrew-manuscript-studies/
The Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) in cooperation with the DFG-Emmy Noether Research Group ‘Patterns of Knowledge Circulation’ (FU Berlin) cordially invites you to a workshop on Recipes and Recipe Books Across Manuscript Cultures. Recipes are most generally associated with lists of ingredients, accompanied by a set of instruc- tions for their use. They have recently experienced a […]
This international working group aims to be a forum for graduate students and early stage post-doctoral researchers who study the materiality of Jewish texts – for example, Hebrew manuscripts, printed Yiddish books, Iberian archival materials, or other artefacts – and the gamut of knowledges cultivated therein – from kabbalah to the natural sciences, from halakhic […]
Agata Paluch Mapping the Hand: Not Only Maniculae The visual model of hands has been well recognised as a vital element of the medieval and early modern representation of abstract concepts and cognitive processes. It played an important role as a teaching device in a variety of subjects, from rhetoric to mathematics to music, being […]
Kabbalistic traditions in the early modern period have been mostly examined by previous generations of scholars along the historical lines of investigation defined by Gershom Scholem and his students. Only in the last generation, following Moshe Idel, have scholars become interested in new methodological approaches to study early modern kabbalah as a set of religious […]
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 […]
Agata Paluch [First published: https://historyofknowledge.net/2019/04/11/practical-kabbalah-and-practical-knowledge-kabbalistic-manuals-and-natural-knowledge-in-early-modern-east-central-europe/ ] An impressive handwritten codex at the National Library of Israel embodies the intricacies and peculiarities of crafting, reading, and transmitting practical knowledge in early modern Jewish contexts. The volume, known today as manuscript NLI 8º 1070, was likely produced in the 1730s somewhere in the Polish territories. A variety […]