Quick Answer
For fifty years one man's account of Jewish mysticism was the account, and this is the book that opened it up. Idel argues that Gershom Scholem's picture, built around theosophy, myth and historical crisis, missed the practical and ecstatic strands that were there all along in manuscripts nobody had published. It is a demanding scholarly monograph, it presumes you know the position it is arguing with, and it permanently changed the field.
Key Takeaways
- A reply to Scholem, and you need Scholem first.
- Practice over speculation is the central reversal.
- Abulafia restored from the margin to the centre.
- Theurgy is not a footnote: human action acting on the divine.
- Manuscripts did the work. The argument rests on unpublished sources.
🕑 17 min read
What This Book Is
Kabbalah: New Perspectives was published by Yale University Press in 1988. It runs to over four hundred pages with substantial notes.
It is a scholarly monograph and it is also an intervention. The title announces both: new perspectives implies that the existing perspective needed replacing, and the existing perspective was Gershom Scholem's.
The book is organised thematically rather than chronologically, taking topics such as unitive experience, mystical technique, and the theurgical understanding of ritual, and examining each across the whole span of the literature.
The organisation is itself an argument. Scholem's great work was historical and developmental; Idel's is phenomenological and comparative, and the shape of the book is a claim about how the material should be approached.
You need the background. This book was written for people who had read Scholem and knew the field. Coming to it first produces the sensation of hearing one side of an argument, because that is what it is.
Who Moshe Idel Is
Idel was born in Romania in 1947 and emigrated to Israel as a young man. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has taught there for most of his career.
His doctoral work was on Abraham Abulafia, the thirteenth-century ecstatic kabbalist, and that subject shapes everything that followed. He spent years reading manuscripts in libraries across Europe and Israel, much of the material never printed.
He belongs to the generation that came after Scholem and studied under Scholem's students, which places him in a specific position: trained in the school he was going to revise.
He has published extensively since, on Hasidism, on golem traditions, on messianism, and on the relation between Jewish and Christian mysticism, and he is generally regarded as the most important scholar in the field of the last forty years.
What Scholem Established
The position being argued with, stated fairly, because Idel's book makes no sense without it.
Gershom Scholem effectively created the academic study of Jewish mysticism in the twentieth century. Before him the subject was ignored or dismissed by Jewish scholarship as an embarrassment.
His major survey, published in 1941, established the framework: a historical narrative running from the merkabah literature of late antiquity through the Zohar to Lurianic Kabbalah and its aftermath.
The framework has several load-bearing features. That Kabbalah is essentially theosophical, concerned with knowledge of the divine structure. That it is mythical, reintroducing myth into a rationalising tradition. That major developments respond to historical crisis, notably the expulsion from Spain.
And, critically, that Jewish mysticism lacks the unitive experience characteristic of other traditions. Scholem held that the gap between creature and creator in Judaism is too absolute to permit union, and that the kabbalist approaches without merging.
Why One Account Dominated
A point about the sociology of the field that Idel makes carefully and that explains the situation he was addressing.
Scholem did not merely propose an interpretation. He built the discipline: catalogued the manuscripts, trained the scholars, established the institutions, and defined what the questions were.
When one person does all of that, their interpretive choices become the field's assumptions, and the assumptions become invisible. Later scholars inherit a map without seeing that it was drawn.
Idel's contribution is partly to make the map visible: to show that specific decisions were made about what to publish, what to emphasise and what to file as marginal, and that those decisions had consequences for what everyone subsequently saw.
This is a general lesson about founded fields and it is why the book is interesting to readers with no stake in Kabbalah.
Idel's Method
The methodological difference is the root of everything else.
Scholem's approach was historical: identify periods, trace development, explain change by context. The question asked of a text is what stage it represents.
Idel's approach is phenomenological: read the texts for what they describe as practice and experience, compare descriptions across periods, and let the material group itself by what it is doing rather than by when it was written.
The consequence is that continuities become visible that a developmental account obscures. A technique described in the thirteenth century and one described in the eighteenth may belong together phenomenologically while sitting in different chapters of a historical survey.
Idel argues this is not merely a different emphasis but a better fit to material that was substantially concerned with what to do rather than with what to believe.
The Manuscript Evidence
The concrete basis of the argument, and the reason it could not have been made earlier.
A very large proportion of kabbalistic literature has never been printed. It survives in manuscripts scattered across European and Israeli collections, much of it uncatalogued in any detail.
What gets printed reflects the interests of whoever prints it, and the material that reached publication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was disproportionately theosophical, because that is what interested the people doing the publishing.
Idel spent years in the manuscript collections and found a different balance: practical material, technical instruction, first-person accounts of experience, in quantities that the printed record does not represent.
This is his strongest card. The argument is not that Scholem misread the sources but that a substantial body of sources was not being read at all, and that reading it changes the picture.
The manuscript point deserves emphasis because it applies far beyond this field. What a tradition looks like from outside is shaped by what got printed, and what got printed was chosen by people with their own interests at a particular moment. A body of writing can be entirely available, sitting in libraries, and effectively invisible because nobody made it convenient. The gap between what exists and what circulates is where a great deal of scholarly reassessment lives.
Two Models of Kabbalah
The distinction that organises the book.
Theosophical-theurgical. Concerned with the structure of the divine, the sefirot and their relations, and with the effect of human action on that structure. This is the strand Scholem centred, and it includes the Zohar and the Lurianic system.
Ecstatic. Concerned with the individual's attainment of an altered state and with union with the divine, using deliberate technique to induce it. Abulafia is the central figure.
Idel's claim is that both were present throughout, that the ecstatic strand is not a marginal curiosity, and that treating the first as the main line and the second as a deviation was a choice rather than a finding.
He also argues the two strands interact continuously and that many figures work in both registers, so the distinction is analytic rather than a division of the literature into two camps.
Abraham Abulafia
The figure whose restoration is the book's most visible achievement.
Abulafia was born in Spain in 1240, travelled widely, and developed a system of mystical practice based on the permutation of Hebrew letters, combined with breathing and bodily technique.
He was controversial in his own time, wrote a great deal, and at one point set out for Rome intending to convert the Pope, which did not go well and from which he was fortunate to escape.
Scholem knew Abulafia well and gave him a chapter, and treated him as a distinctive figure somewhat off the main line of development.
Idel's doctoral work and much of his subsequent career has been devoted to showing that Abulafia represents a substantial tradition rather than an individual eccentricity: that he had teachers, students, and successors, and that the ecstatic technique has a documented history.
The case is largely accepted now, which is a significant shift in how the field is organised.
The Techniques
The practical material, which is what most non-specialist readers will find most striking.
The methods described include the permutation of Hebrew letters according to systematic schemes, the recitation of divine names with prescribed vocalisation, coordination with breathing, and specified head movements accompanying the vowels.
The practitioner works through combinations in sequence, often for extended periods, in isolation and at night, with the aim of exhausting ordinary discursive thought.
Idel notes the structural similarity to techniques in other traditions, particularly Sufi practice and Indian mantra recitation, and is cautious about claiming influence where the evidence is thin.
What the first-person accounts describe is not calm. The reports involve intense physical sensation, heat, trembling, visions of light, and occasionally terror, and Abulafia himself warns about the dangers of proceeding without guidance.
Why Hebrew Letters
The feature of this material most likely to puzzle a reader from outside, and Idel explains it well.
The techniques work on letters rather than on images or on concepts, and the reason is doctrinal. In the tradition Abulafia inherited, the Hebrew alphabet is not a notation for a language that exists independently of it. The letters are the elements from which the world was made.
The early text known as the Sefer Yetzirah, dating from somewhere in late antiquity, describes creation as an act of combination: letters engraved, weighed, permuted, and formed into everything that exists.
If that is what letters are, then permuting them is not a mental exercise resembling meditation. It is an operation on the material of reality, performed with the same elements the creator used.
This makes sense of features that otherwise look arbitrary. The insistence on Hebrew specifically. The precision about vocalisation. The treatment of divine names as the most potent combinations rather than as labels.
It also explains why the practice was regarded as dangerous. Handling the constituents of the world is not the same kind of activity as calming the mind, and the warnings in the literature are proportionate to what the practitioners thought they were doing.
The Question of Union
The most substantive point of disagreement, and it matters for comparative work.
Scholem held that unitive experience, the dissolution of the boundary between the mystic and God, is essentially absent from Judaism, and that this distinguishes Jewish mysticism from Christian and Islamic forms.
Idel assembles texts that appear to describe exactly that: statements of the soul's absorption, of becoming identical with the divine intellect, of the disappearance of separation.
The counterargument, made by defenders of Scholem's position, is that these passages use philosophical language derived from Aristotelian psychology, where the intellect becomes what it knows, and that this is a technical claim rather than a report of dissolved boundaries.
Idel replies that the language is used in contexts describing experience rather than in philosophical argument, and that the distinction is being drawn to protect a conclusion.
The dispute is not settled. Most scholars now accept that unitive language is present and that its interpretation remains open, which is a partial win for Idel.
Theurgy
The other major claim, and the one with the widest implications for how the tradition is understood.
Theurgy means action that affects the divine. Idel argues that kabbalists understood the commandments in exactly this way: that performing a ritual correctly influences the relations among the sefirot, repairs a disturbance, or restores a flow.
This is a strong claim about the religious logic. The commandments are not obedience, and they are not symbolic education. They are operations, and their performance has effects on the divine life itself.
Scholem recognised the theurgical dimension and treated it as one element among several. Idel makes it central, arguing it explains why kabbalah remained tied to observance rather than developing into a philosophy detachable from practice.
The argument is persuasive and it clarifies something otherwise puzzling: why a mystical tradition with such abstract metaphysics stayed so closely bound to detailed ritual.
Continuity Against Rupture
A quieter disagreement with large consequences for the historical picture.
Scholem's narrative is punctuated by crises. The expulsion from Spain in 1492 produces the Lurianic system as a response to catastrophe; the messianic movement of the seventeenth century produces a crisis of its own; each stage responds to historical trauma.
Idel is sceptical of these explanations. He argues that the ideas attributed to post-expulsion innovation can be found earlier, and that the correlation between historical disaster and mystical development is weaker than the narrative requires.
His alternative is continuity: traditions transmitted through teachers and manuscripts, developing on their own internal logic, with historical events affecting the pace and the visibility rather than the content.
This is a real methodological dispute about whether ideas are best explained by context or by transmission, and it recurs across intellectual history.
What This Means for Hermetic Qabalah
A note for readers who arrived at this subject through the Western magical tradition, since the relationship is frequently misunderstood.
The system taught in the Golden Dawn tradition and its descendants, with the Tree of Life mapped to tarot, astrology and the elements, descends from Christian Kabbalah: a Renaissance development in which Jewish material was adopted by Christian scholars for their own purposes.
That adaptation was substantial. The theurgical logic tying the sefirot to the commandments does not survive it, because the commandments are not being performed. What remains is the structure without the operation it was built to describe.
Idel's book is not about this and it bears on it indirectly. If his reading is right, then what the Renaissance adapters took was the diagram of a practice whose practice they did not take, which explains why the Hermetic system functions so differently despite the shared vocabulary.
None of this makes the later system illegitimate on its own terms. It does mean that reading Jewish sources expecting to find the Golden Dawn correspondences produces confusion, and that the two bodies of material answer different questions.
The Objections to Idel
Three, and they are made by serious scholars.
Overcorrection. Having found the ecstatic strand undervalued, he may have overvalued it. The theosophical material is quantitatively dominant in the surviving literature, whatever the manuscript picture adds.
The phenomenological method loses history. Comparing texts across five centuries by what they describe risks flattening real differences of context and meaning between them.
The unitive texts are contested. The debate about whether the language of absorption reports experience or restates a philosophical doctrine has not been resolved in his favour, and the strongest passages are few.
Where the Field Landed
The current position, roughly forty years on, is a synthesis rather than a victory.
Idel's ecstatic strand is accepted as real and substantial, and Abulafia is now a standard subject rather than a curiosity.
The theurgical reading of the commandments is accepted widely and has become the ordinary way of explaining the relation between kabbalah and practice.
Scholem's historical framework survives in modified form, with the crisis explanations weakened and the developmental narrative retained.
The manuscript work continues and has produced further surprises, and the field is considerably more plural than it was, which is the outcome Idel was arguing for.
How to Read It
Practical guidance, since this book defeats people who approach it unprepared.
Read Scholem first, or at minimum a good general introduction to what Kabbalah is. The argument is unintelligible without the position it opposes.
Do not read it front to back if the technical material is heavy going. The chapters are thematic and can be taken separately.
Pay attention to the notes. A substantial part of the argument is in the apparatus, where the manuscript citations are, and skipping them loses the evidential basis.
Expect to disagree with some of it. The book is a position in an argument, and reading it as settled fact would repeat exactly the error it was written to correct.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have a foundation in Jewish mysticism and want the reassessment that shaped current scholarship.
Read it if you are interested in mystical technique across traditions, since the Abulafian material is among the most detailed practical description in any Western source.
Read it if the question of how a founding scholar shapes a field interests you, because this is an unusually clear case.
Do not read it as an introduction. A general overview first, then Scholem, then this.
The thing worth carrying out of this book has little to do with Kabbalah. It is that the shape of what you know about any subject was determined by someone who decided what to publish, what to translate, and what to call marginal, and that those decisions are almost never visible from inside the resulting picture. Idel found a different tradition by going to the manuscripts nobody had bothered with. The equivalent exists in every field, and it is usually sitting in plain view, unread because the map says there is nothing there.
The book that reopened a field one scholar had closed.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the objections to Idel's position and of the book's difficulty is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Kabbalah: New Perspectives about?
Moshe Idel's 1988 reassessment of Jewish mysticism, arguing that Kabbalah was centrally a set of practices aimed at direct experience of the divine rather than primarily a body of theosophical speculation.
Who is Moshe Idel?
An Israeli scholar, born in Romania in 1947, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the leading figure in the generation of Kabbalah scholarship that followed and revised Gershom Scholem.
How does he differ from Scholem?
Scholem emphasised theosophy, myth and historical rupture, and treated unitive mysticism as largely absent from Judaism. Idel emphasises continuous practice, ecstatic experience, and older strands Scholem downplayed.
What is ecstatic Kabbalah?
The strand associated with Abraham Abulafia in the thirteenth century, using letter permutation, breathing and recitation to induce altered states, aiming at union with the divine intellect rather than at knowledge of the sefirot.
Who was Abraham Abulafia?
A thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist who taught techniques of letter combination and recitation, wrote extensively about his own experiences, and was largely marginalised in Scholem's account before Idel restored him.
What is theurgy in this context?
The idea that human action affects the divine. Idel argues that kabbalists understood the commandments as operations influencing the inner life of God, and that this is a central rather than a marginal claim.
Is the book difficult?
Yes. It is scholarly, argues against a position it assumes you know, quotes Hebrew and Aramaic sources, and is best approached after reading Scholem or a general introduction.
Does he say Scholem was wrong?
He says the account was partial and shaped by particular commitments. His criticism is respectful in tone and substantial in content, and the field now generally accepts that both figures describe real strands.
What is the phenomenological method?
Reading the texts for what they describe as experience and practice, comparing across periods, rather than arranging them primarily as a historical development from earlier to later forms.
Does it discuss Christian Kabbalah?
Very little. The subject is Jewish Kabbalah in its own context, and readers coming from the Hermetic and occult traditions should know that those developments are a separate later story.
Are there practical techniques in it?
It describes techniques in detail as historical material, including letter permutation and breathing practices, without presenting them as instruction. It is a study rather than a manual.
Who should read it?
Readers with a foundation in Jewish mysticism who want the current scholarly picture, and anyone interested in how a single authoritative account of a tradition can shape what everyone sees in it.
Check who drew your map
Every subject you know something about, you know through somebody. A translator chose the words, an editor chose the selections, a scholar decided what belonged at the centre and what could be a footnote. None of this is hidden and almost nobody looks. Idel's whole career came out of noticing that the standard picture of a tradition was one man's picture, and then going to the sources to see what else was there. That move is available in any field where you have read enough to have a picture at all, and the discomfort of making it is the price of finding out what you have been assuming.
Sources & References
- Idel, Moshe (1988). Kabbalah: New Perspectives. Yale University Press.
- Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, the account under revision.
- Abulafia, Abraham. Thirteenth-century writings on ecstatic technique, largely in manuscript.
- Idel, M. The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia and related studies.
- The Zohar and the Lurianic corpus, the theosophical mainstream.
- Subsequent scholarship on the unitive-language dispute.