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Martin Luther concerned himself with Kabbalah at two points during his long career as a theologian. From 1513 to 1519, he first considered and then rejected Kabbalah as a kind of spiritual ‘ladder’ that allowed believers a fuller experience of the otherwise ‘hidden’ God. Later, in 1543, he wrote against the Jews’ ‘superstitious’ beliefs about the tetragrammaton and kabbalistic ‘magic’ generally. This essay will consider the sources of Luther’s kabbalistic knowledge, his understanding of what Jews believed about Kabbalah, and how Kabbalah fit into Luther’s own views concerning Jews and Judaism more generally. Luther believed that the devil was involved in promoting Kabbalah and Jewish magical practices both to deceive its practitioners and their followers, and as a way of redirecting worship away from the true God.

This paper tries to shed light on the value and limitations of the label ‘Christian Kabbalah’ for our knowledge of the historical phenomenon it describes. It works out how Christian scholars approached Kabbalah for a variety of reasons, be they instrumental, polemicizing or glorifying approaches, or for further motives. In addition, the article examines how the basic lines of the field of research around the Kabbalah in general were established and which impulses emanated from Gershom Scholem in particular. It concludes with an examination of Scholem’s religious philosophy with regard to his own research interest in the Kabbalah, which goes, in Scholem’s words, beyond historiography in some cases. Scholem described academic research on Kabbalah as ‘ironic’ and this irony affects his own ambivalent attitude towards the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance and the early modern epoch.

This article examines the relationship between Arabic didactic verse and Hebrew poetry in the early 10th-century Middle East. Scholars have argued that Arabic didactic verse served as a model for Hebrew poets at the beginning of the 10th century and that, allegedly, this was one of the earliest signs of Arabic poetry’s influence on Hebrew poets. By surveying Arabic didactic verse and two Hebrew poems ostensibly composed following it (the first is commonly attributed to Nissi al-Nahrawānī and the other is by Saadiah Gaon), this article argues that there is no indication of a connection between the Arabic model and Hebrew poetry from this early period.

While the familiar Hanukkah story of the ‘miracle of the oil’ is often dismissed as quaint and fanciful, it may be seen as a final link in an interesting chain of traditions about the sanctity of Judaism’s holiest of places. In the book of Exodus, one type of oil is used to light the lamps and another oil is used to anoint the Tabernacle and make it inviolate. The Tabernacle became part of the First Temple so there was no need to anoint the Holy of Holies there. In the time of the First Temple, some considered the Temple to be inviolate. When the First Temple was destroyed, no aspect of the new Temple was anointed. In the 160s BCE, during the Antiochene persecution, some felt the need to explain how the Temple could have been violated. The author of Daniel 9 reinterpreted Jeremiah’s prophecies of the 70 years of exile to be 70 weeks of years so that everything that had befallen the Judeans was seen as part of God’s overarching plan. The complex issues of continuity/discontinuity between, and the violability/inviolability of the temples, underlie Dan. 9 and related texts.