This paper offers a novel perspective regarding the interface between law, mysticism, and social reality. The inner turn that characterizes Hasidism is often understood through a binary model defined by the Christian Hebraists, and followed by many academic scholars, in which law and spirit exist in intractable tension. We suggest, however, that in the specific contexts of Hasidism, nomos, eros, and mystical piety often merged in distinctive ways, and that these are visible in novel forms of Jewish legal method and discourse. Our appreciation of the multifaceted Jewish religious and pietistic expressions of modernity should not be made to conform to the generally accepted definition of an era of strict “Orthodox” formulation and monolithic, conservative legal stagnation. Instead, we argue that the spiritual and legal ethos of Hasidism took on new forms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as local identities became increasingly complex and new cultural fusions led to creative re-expressions of law and theology.

No abstract

No abstract

This paper investigates the eighteenth century phenomenon of the wide spread and use of Sabbaetean literature by “main stream” Jewish rabbis. For what reason did participants in the Jewish rabbinic elite posses and use copies of heretical manuscripts, while integrating them in their literally projects as well as their personal daily practice? Moreover, how did the tempestuous controversy over Jacob Frank and his believers at the middle of the eighteen century affect this status of Sabbatean texts in the rabbinic library? In this essay I will examine a particular aspect of this literary opacity from the viewpoint of two Torah scholars. By dating and revisiting lost manuscripts and short fragments, along with well-known polemics, this paper will attempt to uncover the basic attitudes of R. Ezekiel Landau of Prague and R. Pinhas Katzenellenbogen of Boskowitz toward Kabbalistic and Sabbatean literature. Several personal writings dating from 1752 to 1761 will be closely examined with the aim of tracing two opposing, yet prototypical responses to the place occupied by Sabbatean literature on the Kabbalistic-Lurianic shelf of the contemporary rabbinic library.

No abstract