Workshop “‘Cabala Christiana’ as a Discursive Space of Transfer” (organised by Birgit Emich, Elke Morlok, and Níels Eggerz)

Start

10.10.2023

End

12.10.2023

Location

Bad Homburg, Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften

This workshop investigates the polysemy of the term Kabbalah among early modern Christians in the broadest sense, thus also including religious dissenters, Freemasons and other groups that were active within the domain of early modern Christendom. It focuses less on exploring in detail the works of individual Christian Kabbalists but rather on how they perceived Kabbalah and thus on the more general intellectual and cultural implications of their engagement with Jewish mysticism. In so doing, the workshop intends to disconnect Christian Kabbalah from modern (religious, academic, and popular) notions of Kabbalah that often cloud its proper understanding as well as from anachronistic views of authenticity with the aim of transitioning from the static concept of one Christian Kabbalah to the dynamic, polysemic, and multi-perspective paradigm of Cabala Christiana. To achieve this goal, the workshop analyzes various discursive spaces of transfer that the early modern non-Jewish preoccupation with Kabbalah created within different geographical, cultural, political, and socio-religious contexts. It thus unfolds the multi-layered processes of transfer and transformation of supposedly esoteric cultural heritage from the Jewish to the non-Jewish domain (and their reverberation back into Judaism) within European intellectual history.

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