Heavenly Powers: Unraveling the Secret of the Kabbalah

by Neil Asher Silberman

Overview

Author and historian Neil Asher Silberman traces the history of the ancient Jewish spiritual tradition of the kabbalah in this lively and highly readable book. Silberman contends that the kabbalah is as much a revolutionary political doctrine as an occult system of knowledge; as he follows the story of the ancient collection of mystical writings from Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E. to Jerusalem in Jesus' time, from Medieval Europe, Golden Age Spain, and the Ottoman Empire to new age centers in the present day, Silberman explores not only the spiritual significance of the cabalistic texts but also the fascinating stories of the people and the historical events they are connected to.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780785813248
Publisher:	Book Sales, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/01/1901
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.42(w) x 8.36(h) x 1.11(d)

Editorial Reviews

According to Silberman, "the Kabbalah is and always has been a politically explosive underground tradition that speaks about power, oppression, resistance, and freedom." In a book that is part detective story and part cultural history, Silberman (The Hidden Scrolls) chronicles the tangled religious and political history that lies behind the Kabbalah. He traces the development of the Kabbalah from the ecstatic mystical visions of Ezekiel to the "territorial mysticism" of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who used the lessons of the Kabbalah to establish a political position of power in postwar 1967 Israel. Along the way, Silberman discusses such famous Kabbalists as the 16th-century Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi ("The Lion"), who was considered by many of his contemporaries to be the Messiah, and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), who suggested that the Land of Israel could be seen as an image of the "revival of the long exiled Shekhinah" (presence of God). The author also devotes a chapter to Safed, that most mystical of cities, where Kabbalah study reached its height during the 15th and 16th centuries. Silberman argues that the Kabbalah often flourishes during times of great persecution, its messianism and millenarianism offering hope. Despite the interesting subject matter, however, Silberman presents a workmanlike and pedantic history of the Kabbalah written in rather turgid academic prose. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This new book by Silberman (The Hidden Scrolls, 1994) founders on the distinction it fails to keep between history and myth, description and celebration. Ever since Gershom Scholem initiated the academic study of Jewish mysticism, books on Kabbalah have divided up between the scholarly and the devotional. Silberman tries to unite the two in this popularly written social history of Jewish mystical ideas, from the fiery chariot the ancient prophet Ezekiel beheld in a vision, to the ultranationalism of modern Israeli Kabbalists, for whom the Arab world holds the place of evil in a harsh dualism inherited from the 16th-century mystic Isaac Luria. Taking Kabbalah loosely to subsume the whole of Jewish mysticism (and so endorsing Kabbalah's own self-image), Silberman sketches correspondences between key Kabbalistic themes and the social conditions of the Jewish communities that espoused them. For example, he suggests that the famous crown-capped picture of the ten sefirot, or emanations from God, found in the Zohar, the premier text of Kabbalistic mysticism, opposes and undermines the imperialistic ideology of the 13th-century Castilian king, Alfonso X, under whose increasingly oppressive reign the Zohar was most likely composed. Although some of Silberman's analogies are stimulating and evocative, they hardly qualify as social history. Sometimes his claims are grandiose (e.g., that Isaac Newton's science, predicated as it is on unseen forces, owes a debt to Kabbalistic theory) or naively expressed: the story that Elijah the prophet served at Luria's circumcision is, says Silberman, "surely mythmaking" (could there be any doubt?). In his zeal to ground mysticism in historical and socialconditions, Silberman appears to adduce the Kabbalah itself as evidence, as though its teaching that earthly states mirror heavenly ones inversely confirmed its own source in the worldly exigencies of the Jewish people.

Kirkus Reviews