Kabbalah as Transfer Paradigm between Judaism and Christianity

• Applicants: Dr. Níels Eggerz; Privatdozentin Dr. Elke Morlok
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Protestant Theology ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 497340432

The word Kabbalah was on everyone's lips in Europe for several centuries. Luther claimed to know the true Kabbalah, and Casanova used a technique he called Kabbalah for his frauds. Occupation with or interest in the Kabbalah or with that, what Christians imagined it to be, was a vital component of early modern European culture. The so-called Christian Kabbalah is thus one of the most enduring appropriation of and projection onto Jewish cultural heritage.The term "Christian Kabbalah" itself is a catch-all term denoting quite different and sometimes mutually exclusive schools of thought. Enthusiastic Christian scholars, anti-Jewish polemicists, or even respected theologians addressed Kabbalah and perceived it in many ways: as an ancient messianic-universal or even Christian tradition, as a form of number or letter speculation, or as a novel Jewish, fundamentally nonsensically, way of exegesis. The aim of this research project is a comprehensive (re)integration of Christian Kabbalah into European intellectual history. This involves carving out the respective projections onto Kabbalah and Judaism in general as well as their historical developments. Hence, this project pursues a fundamental reorganization of this field of research in its entirety. In so doing, it views Christian preoccupation with Kabbalah as a key phenomenon for understanding the various early modern approaches to Jewish traditions and writings. After having overcome the dependence on Jewish informants thanks to the enormous success of Christian Hebraism, Christian scholars developed their own powerful conceptions of Kabbalah. These – and with them the respective appropriations – differed according to denomination and were, especially after the Reformation, weaponized for inner-Christian or inner-confessional polemics, often accompanied by some form of largely meaningless missionary rhetoric. Moreover, it was intertwined with political considerations of various sovereigns, whom Christian kabbalists addressed directly or indirectly in numerous dedications and prefaces. Thus, with a view to Critical Heritage Studies one can say that the dominating socio-religious community of the present chose an inheritance from an imagined past for current use and decided what should be passed on to an imagined future. Consequently, the complex dynamics of the emergence and development of the Cabala Christiana continue to shape both Christian and Jewish conceptions of Kabbalah – as well as the academic study of it to this very day. Unfolding this multi-layered process of transformation of cultural heritage from Jewish to Christian Kabbalah and back again within European intellectual history and the history of scholarship is the main object of this project. Interdisciplinarily situated between the fields of history, Jewish Studies, and the different theologies of Christianity, it draws upon and triangularly combines the various methodological tools and approaches of these disciplines.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2357: Jewish Cultural Heritage