Kabbalah and Jewish Magic: Points of Contact and Divergence

Kabbalah and Jewish Magic: Points of Contact and Divergence
03/29

2023. március 29. 18:00 - 19:30

ELTE BTK Kerényi terem (1088 Budapest, Múzeum krt. 4/F)

03/29

2023. március 29. 18:00 - 19:30

ELTE BTK Kerényi terem (1088 Budapest, Múzeum krt. 4/F)


The Institute of Ancient and Classical Studies ELTE cordially invites to the lecture by Andrea Gondos, as next part of the thematic series “Kabbalah Lecture Series Budapest”.

Focusing on a cache of magical recipe books produced in early modern East-Central Europe, my talk will probe points of contact and divergence between Jewish magic and Kabbalah. By parsing select examples drawn from a collection of more than one hundred Jewishbooks of secrets, extant today in manuscript notebooks that were written between 1600–1800, the talk will critically examine the magical deployment of the Sefirot, the use of classical elements of the Jewish liturgy, as well as the magical manipulation of divine names. I will also examine the visual elements of our sources to trace the relationship between text and image in the construction and transmission of Jewish esoteric knowledge. A close examination of these elements will allow us to foreground the extent to which these two epistemic fields—Kabbalah and magic—interacted and shaped each other in the early modern period.  

Dr Andrea Gondos is a scholar of Kabbalah in the early modern period. Her recently published book, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (New York: SUNY, 2020), examines the organization of kabbalistic knowledge and the use of new literary genres and pedagogic techniques in its popularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was recently a Trinity Fellow at Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (April–June 2022) and has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Katz Centre of Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, and in Israel at Tel Aviv University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. At present, she is an Emmy Noether Post-Doctoral Fellow in the research group, “Patterns of Knowledge Circulation” at Freie Universität and her current research focuses on the intersection of magic, medicine, and gender in early modern Ashkenazi manuscripts of books of secrets, and recipe compilations. 

The Kabbalah lecture series in Budapest organised and co-hosted by  Eötvös Loránd University & Jewish Theological Seminary—University of Jewish Studies. It offers scholars, students, and the public the opportunity to gain insight into some of the latest results of modern Kabbalah scholarship. The five guest speakers will present novel, hitherto little understood aspects of the long and variegated history of Kabbalah and Kabbalah research from the early modern period up until the present time. The speakers will deliver talks on topics from their field of expertise, exploring questions on Kabbalah and book culture, Jewish Magic, Freemasonry, Mysticism, and Protestantism. 

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