A Novel Look at Moshe Idel’s East-West Problem

Abstract

A Novel Look at Moshe Idel’s East-West Problem David N. Myers Moshe Idel.Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 336. For many of us in the field of Jewish studies, but not in the field of Kabbalah studies, our first encounter with Moshe Idel came in 1988 with the publication of his major work in English, Kabbalah: New Perspectives. Although he had been working in the field for more than a decade, from the time of his 1976 dissertation at the Hebrew University on Avraham Abulafia, it was Kabbalah: New Perspectives that brought Idel to wide public attention, announcing his own substantial methodological and substantive disagreements with the towering figure of modern Kabbalah studies, Gershom Scholem. Since then, Idel has gone on to attain a position of international distinction, publishing at a staggering rate in Kabbalah studies, and many fields beyond. In the process, he—like Scholem before and Wolfson and others after him—has used the study of Kabbalah as a gateway of inquiry into important methodological, theoretical, hermeneutical, philosophical, and historical questions. This leads us to the book at hand, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought, which is indeed an inquiry into important methodological, theoretical, philosophical, and historical questions. It reflects Idel’s brilliant, capacious, probing, and wildly imaginative mind, as it ranges over terrain somewhat less familiar to him and his usual readers, but of critical significance to his overarching intellectual and cultural Weltanschauung. What I propose to do in these remarks is to undertake three tasks: first, to sketch out briefly the structure of the book and point to a major argumentative strand in it; second, to identify two central motifs that surface in the book—and that make for a surprising, counterintuitive, [End Page 289] and even troubling read; and finally, to adopt a literary conceit to read the book against the analytic and stylistic grain, as a way of getting at some of the intriguing psychodynamics involved in it. I Old Worlds, New Mirrors is a collection of previously published essays on modern Jewish thought divided into four parts. The first section deals with a number of renowned Central European scholars and intellectuals who belong to what Idel calls in the introduction to the book “a new Jewish elite” (p. 6). The second section contains three of Idel’s papers on one of the chief figures of that new elite, his own long-standing master, foil, and nemesis: Gershom Scholem. The third section offers up a wideranging assembly of pieces that deal with the place that Kabbalah played in the thought of a number of other members of the new cultural elite including Kafka, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Celan. The fourth and final section of the book deals with modern scholarly views of Hasidism, which since the late eighteenth century has been the most important site of ongoing kabbalistic activity and practice. Although disparate in focus and length, the four sections and thirteen chapters do betray a consistent theme. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to state that they present a consistent set of oppositions that add up to a theme and in fact, spell out a decided cultural stance on the author’s part. Among the recurring oppositions in the book are: i. Eastern European vs. Central European Jewish cultures ii. tradition vs. innovation iii. continuity vs. rupture iv. rootedness vs. cosmopolitanism v. homeland vs. galut (exile) vi. Jerusalem vs. Athens (or perhaps in its more modern incarnation, Hebrew vs. German) These oppositions, all of which circulate throughout the book, lend considerable weight to Idel’s critique of “the new Jewish elite”—the largely Central European Jewish intellectuals whose most famous constellation arose in Weimarera Berlin but which continued to exert itself up to the present through figures like the French literary critic Jacques Derrida and the arch cosmopolitan Jewish elitist (and diasporist, to boot) George Steiner. In casting his gaze on these figures, Idel positions himself as their cultural opposite, recalling his own origins in a small shtetl in northern [End Page 290] Romania that was “largely untouched...