Volume 34, Issue 2 - Themenheft Kabbalistic Afterlives: Copies, Reproductions, and Textual Circulation in the Making of Kabbalah in Postmedieval Ashkenaz Hg. von Agata Paluch

This essay examines Sefer Razi’el ha-Mal’akh, a complex work reflecting diverse textual sources and literary layers, as a crucial channel for transmitting early esoteric traditions in Ashkenazi religious culture. It emphasizes the »nominal register« related to the exegesis and uses of divine names as a key part of the Ashkenazi esoteric tradition. The popularity of Sefer Razi’el ha-Mal’akh in Ashkenaz, especially during the Hasidic renaissance, highlights the essential role of practical and magical mentality developed in Ashkenazi culture and traditions. Additionally, a Romanian translation of Sefer Razi’el ha-Mal’akh by Menachem Mendel Stein, who engaged in occult practices during the World War II, showcases the book’s varied reception and long durée.

Despite the importance the kabbalistic tradition ascribes to oral transmission, many early modern kabbalists complained about a lack of access to personal tutoring and described a crisis of kabbalistic transmission. This article explores the concept of »transmission crisis« in the writings of the Ashkenazi scholar Moshe Isserles (Kraków, d. 1572), contextualizing it in a broader sixteenth-century Jewish discourse. Isserles believed that the full, esoteric meaning of kabbalah is inaccessible to us, devoid as we are of oral tradition. He insisted, however, on interpreting kabbalah on an exoteric level, without the pretense of an ultimate mystical understanding. This gave rise to Isserles’ »hermeneutics of immanence«, in which kabbalistic depictions of the divine are translated into the mundane realm. Isserles represents a model of a sixteenth-century Ashkenazi scholar, striving to make sense of the Sephardic kabbalistic tradition, which newly arrived in Poland and filled the study halls with admiration and bewilderment.

This study offers a bibliographic history of the manuscript evidence and printed editions of the compilation Shushan Sodot , arranged by Moshe of Kyiv (1449–c. 1520). Positioned within a larger inquiry of numbered compilations of short-form texts of Jewish esoteric literature, Shushan Sodot is one of the largest and most well-known compilations. Following a review of scholarship, the study describes the features of various manuscripts, including those in Byzantine and Spanish script and those produced in later Ashkenazi script. It then focuses on the circulation of a particular format of the text copied by a scribe, with these copies now housed in collections at YIVO and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The manuscripts produced in early modern Ashkenazi script were copied from the YIVO manuscript, which also served the printers in Koretz who edited and abbreviated its contents to their tastes. The article concludes with suggestions about how and why this compilation was so well-received in Ashkenazi reading communities and how it became a staple of Jewish esoteric literature in the early modern period.

This article explores Moses Cordovero’s (1522–1570) commentary on the Rosh Hashanah liturgy and its reception among Italian and East-Central European Jews, highlighting its intersections with broader issues in early modern Jewish history, such as manuscript and print cultures, individual mobility, and the dissemination of knowledge. Through an in-depth analysis of three documents—an annotated printed Mahzor and two manuscripts written in Ashkenazi script—the article demonstrates how individuals enhanced and adapted Cordovero’s kabbalistic intentions for their own liturgical practices. The study traces the journey of Cordovero’s commentary from manuscript to print and back into manuscript, emphasizing the personal stories and material transformations that made this text a practical tool for prayer. Ultimately, the article provides insights into the dynamic interplay between Cordoverean kabbalah and local liturgical rites, illustrating how early modern Jews actively engaged with and reshaped their devotional texts.

The article discusses Sefer ha-Temunah , a key kabbalistic text on the twenty-two letters of the Torah, and emphasizes the need for philological research to address its textual challenges and variations. The article explores the editing practices of early modern Ashkenazi kabbalistic copyists and the influence of Koretz printing house editors on the text’s history and reception. Finally, this article underscores the dynamic nature of kabbalistic literatures and its continuous evolution through scholarly and editorial efforts.

This article examines the traditions of copying and reading a medieval Ashkenazi treatise, Hokhmat ha-Nefesh (»Wisdom of the Soul«) by Eleazar of Worms (1176–1238) in Renaissance Rome. It delves into a manuscript copied in 1515 by Jewish scholar Elias Levita (1469–1549), commissioned by Levita’s patron, Neoplatonist and Hermetic scholar Egidio da Viterbo (1469–1532). In addition to copying the text, Egidio had Jewish interpreters translate Hokhmat ha-Nefesh into vernacular Italian. The treatise discusses the heavenly nature of the soul, its connections with the angelic world, its prophetic abilities, and its fate and retribution in the afterlife. What role did this Ashkenazi text play in the early modern tradition? How can this text be seen as a testament to kabbalistic perspectives in Renaissance Italy? How did Egidio’s collaborators handle their scribal and translation tasks, and the relationship between the Hebrew original and the vernacular translation of Hokhmat ha-Nefesh ? This essay addresses these questions.

The Old Yiddish literature printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century abounds with references to kabbalah. This study focuses on the monolingual and, for the vast majority, bi- or trilingual (Aramaic, Hebrew, Yiddish) collections of Tikkunim connected to kabbalistic prayers and rituals. These collections contain fragments from the Bible, midrashim, Sefer ha-Zohar , Lurianic customs, and collections of mystical stories. The article provides a typology of Yiddish chapbooks of prayers for the less educated readers, centering on Tikkunei ha-Mo’adim by Aryeh ben Yehuda Seligman of Binswangen. In considering the question of the authorship and readership of this chapbook, the article presents several prayers and excerpts from kabbalistic texts adapted into Yiddish.

The present text analyzes two Hebrew copies of a Lurianic dissertation used by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth for the Latin translation printed in 1677 in Kabbala denudata as Tractatus I. Liber Druschim. This article first identifies the Hebrew source for Knorr von Rosenroth’s translation and offers new insights into his style and method of translation, contributing to a better understanding of Rosenroth’s approach to kabbalistic tradition. Secondly, this article contributes to the history of the transmission of Lurianic manuscripts and posits Sulzbach as an important center for the circulation and translation of kabbalistic knowledge.

Joseph Jacob Gumprecht, MD, 1772–1838, is the first Jew known as a university lecturer (Privatdozent) at a German university. This biographical article analyses the network of family, friends and colleagues, in which his life course was embedded. It shows his achievements, failures and partial successes. When his career at the University of Göttingen was blocked, he moved to Hamburg, practised as a physician and man-midwife. He was not successful economically, and his family broke up. But he made noteworthy contributions to the emergent discipline of obstetrics, both as an author and editor of periodicals. Moreover, he was active in establishing associations in several fields: for the profession of medical men, and in the context of the Jewish reform movement. Gumprecht’s example shows that German Jews not just integrated themselves into the middle class, but that they actively contributed to shaping civil society and the culture of the middle class.