Patterns of Knowledge Circulation: The Transmission and Reception of Jewish Esotericism in Manuscripts and Print in Early Modern East-Central Europe

• Applicant: Dr. Agata Paluch
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies ; Early Modern History
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 401023278

"Patterns of Knowledge Circulation" aims to provide the first comprehensive study of the transmission and reception of Jewish mystical and magical textual traditions in early modern East-Central Europe. The project seeks to analyse the forms of textual manifestations and kabbalistic (i.e., Jewish esoteric) expressions that appeared in reaction to prior texts and artifacts, from the perspective of text technologies, media history, and materiality of esoteric knowledge in post-medieval Eastern and Central Europe. Scholarship has previously characterized the so-called Ashkenazi, or Eastern-Central European, kabbalah as "unoriginal", "repetitive", or simply receptive to innovations originating outside of the Ashkenazi world. This project questions such interpretations of kabbalistic textual and cultural dynamics beyond the binaries of "authentic/original" and "copy/reproduction". Instead, it critically re-evaluates the practices of copying, imitation, reproduction, transmission, recurrence, or translation in the history of Jewish textuality in Eastern and Central Europe, with attention to the transformative qualities and broader conditions of these processes. In ist final stage, this project aims to address the multifaceted and multilingual nature of Jewish esoteric knowledge in early modern East-Central Europe by subjecting the corpus of Ashkenazi magical and kabbalistic handwritten texts to further analysis. First, our research group will explore manuscripts that are transcribed into a single material unit but in more than one Jewish language, whether formal or vernacular. Secondly, we will produce a detailed description and analysis of graphic representations of Jewish esoteric knowledge within the same corpus of material texts, highlighting connections between the semantic and material-visual language layers within the textual traditions under consideration. These two interrelated strands of research aim to produce the first in-depth study of the multi-formal and multilingual forms of Jewish esoteric knowledge formation in the early modern Eastern and Central European context, and open this area of research to further comparative, cross-cultural, and transnational perspectives.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups