Bücher von Elliot R. Wolfson

This book deals with the issue of gender in Jewish mysticism showing the thematic correlation of eroticism and esotericism that is central to the kabbalah.

Offering a treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. It shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.

Explores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, the author seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists.