Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss Jeremy Phillip Brown Boaz Huss. Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality. Translated by Elana Lutsky. Oxford Series in Western Esotericism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 200 pp. Boaz Huss has made original contributions to research on medieval Kabbalah, the long reception of the Zohar, North African Kabbalah, new religious movements, contemporary Kabbalah, and Jewish spirituality. Mystifying Kabbalah, which runs the gamut of Huss's research agenda, is ably translated by Elana Lutsky from Huss's 2018 Hebrew monograph, The Question of the Existence of Jewish Mysticism: The Genealogy of Jewish Mysticism and the Theologies of Kabbalah Research. The title of the Hebrew original drives from a 1906 letter written by Martin Buber, in which the grandson of the Maskil Solomon Buber made a fledgling argument for "the [mere] existence of Jewish mysticism." The letter is an apt point of reference for a book dealing with the "invention" of Jewish mysticism. Synthesizing several articles composed by Huss going back at least as far as 2007, Mystifying Kabbalah examines the discursive formation of Jewish mysticism as a modern category of analysis, an approach that finds inspiration, per the author's express claims, in the work of Talal Asad, Russell McCutcheon, and Timothy Fitzgerald. Huss's project is comprised of five main trajectories: (1) a genealogy of the modern construction of mysticism, which, per Huss, is based upon universalist presuppositions of a theological order, presuppositions congenial to imperialist sponsorship; (2) a reconstruction of how modern Jewish scholars, with Buber and Gershom Scholem in leading roles, assimilated this construction of mysticism [End Page 427] when casting Kabbalah and Hasidism as "Jewish mysticism" to promote Jewish national consciousness; (3) a daring account of how persevering in their use of a putatively uncritical category has served the interests of the author's own teachers and colleagues; (4) an analysis of how the scholarly construction of "Jewish mysticism" has nourished contemporary spirituality; and (5) a methodological indictment of the category, which seeks to liberate research on Kabbalah and Hasidism from its subordination to "Jewish mysticism." The book is structurally analogous to the conceptual genealogies of other scholars who have leveraged foundational interventions in the study of religion, such as Karen King's 2003 What Is Gnosticism?, or more recently, Daniel Boyarin's 2018 Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion. In this sense, the analytical mood assumed by Huss fits, like the modern concept of mysticism itself, within a broader historical moment of scholarly discourse. It is a moment, however, dedicated to exposing how broadly organizational categories of research are constructed in historically and epistemically contingent ways. To further qualify Mystifying Kabbalah's relationship to previous scholarship, the book is much indebted to the methodology modeled by Wouter Hanegraaff's 1998 New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Huss also takes a similar approach to Steven Wasserstrom's 1999 Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Eranos, but does not invoke this watershed critique of mystocentrism in the History of Religions. One criticism of this otherwise dynamic book is that it operates with a thin concept of theology. While Huss is precise in pinpointing many reasons that the category of Jewish mysticism is wrongheaded (perhaps the most urgent reason being that it generates artificial affinities in the comparative phenomenology of religion), exposing the tacit assumptions of research as "theological" does not in itself articulate the ideological limitations of scholarship. Critical theologians who are certainly practiced in the kind of genealogical analysis offered here may find this line of argumentation inadequate. Similarly, Huss supposes an automatic correlation of theological research commitments with apologetical tendencies. He claims, for example, "The relative lack of criticism toward Kabbalistic androcentrism and misogyny is connected to the theological paradigm of research, which demands an empathetic approach to the research data and glorifies Jewish mysticism as a liberating force in Jewish culture" (96–97). This claim is not just unpersuasive because theology is supposed to determine apologetical outcomes, but also because the research conditions in which the paradigm of "Jewish mysticism" prevailed have produced...