The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and Their Christian Interpreters by Joseph Dan

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Renaissance scholars, searching for esoteric and ancient wisdom to confirm the truth of Christianity, fastened on the Jewish kabbalah. The body of ideas that emerged, the “Christian kabbalah,” made for some remarkable episodes in the history of Jewish-Christian relations, and eventually interested even such unlikely figures as G.W. Leibniz. In this volume are five original papers from a 1996 symposium on this subject convened at the Houghton Library, along with a catalogue of the accompanying exhibition, describing fifty-two manuscript and printed items from Harvard’s collections. Also included is the classic 1954 essay of Gershom Scholem, “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” not previously available in English.