Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory uncovers the unstated assumptions and expectations of scribes and scholars who fashioned editions from manuscripts of Jewish mystical literature. This study offers a theory of Kabbalistic textuality in which the material book – the printed page no less than handwritten manuscripts – serves as the site for textual dialogue between Jewish mystics of different periods and locations. The refashioning of the text through the process of reading and commenting that takes place on the page – in the margins and between the lines – blurs the boundaries between the traditionally defined roles of author, reader, commentator and editor. This study shows that Kabbalists and academic editors reinvented the text in their own image, as part of a fluid textual process that was nothing short of transformative.
Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory was first published in 2010 and is reissued in this revised edition with a new chapter:
Textual Fixity and Textual Fluidity
Kabbalistic Textuality and the Hypertexualism of Kabbalah Scholarship
1. Hypertextualism and the Study of Jewish Mysticism
2. Recent Debates on Textual Methodology in Kabbalah Research
3. Kabbalists as Literary Critics: An Undocumented History
4. Re-Editing as a Religious Imperative: A Psychological Appreciation of the Theurgic Justification of Editorial Practice
5. The Cultural Agendas and Assumptions of the Methodologies Kabbalah Scholarship
6. Epilogue: Kabbalah as Textual Process
"This book is certainly monumental, offering in its seven hundred pages a wealth of documentation and distilled argument that manages to be both comprehensive in its materials and transparent in its critical insights. It is rare indeed that a work of such formidable scholarship can actually be a pleasure to read and convincing in its elucidation of what are often extremely complex documentary circumstances and editorial traditions."