Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies by Sheila E. Jelen (review)

Abstract

Scholem research, includes an assessment of the mutually constitutive relationship between Kabbalah scholarship and contemporary spirituality. For example, chapter 3, titled ”The New Age of Kabbalah Research,“ discusses the image of ”Kabbalah Research as a Spiritual Path,“ and the ”New Age Affinities“ of research in the wake of Scholem. Chapter 4, titled ” ‘Authorized Guardians’: The Rejection of Occult and Contemporary Kabbalah,“ documents a politics of authenticity waged by academics posturing as Kabbalah’s ”authorized guardians“ against contemporary appropriators of the traditional lore. Such posturing flies in the face of two considerations: (a) the domain of contemporary Jewish spirituality requires research in its own right (this is now a growing area of research initiated in large part by Huss himself); and (b) the scholarly discourse has, by virtue of its broad dissemination of the phrase “Jewish mysticism,” facilitated the very appropriations it bemoans. All of this exemplifies what is most deserving of praise in this volume, namely, its candor in divulging the inflamed politics of Kabbalah and Hasidism research. In sum, Mystifying Kabbalah is a courageous book that celebrates the potential of ideology criticism to invigorate and refine a venerable tradition of scholarship. It is a book that challenges scholars to relinquish their attachments to inherited paradigms and provides a cogent, if not humbling, account of the road taken.