Zimzum : God and the origin of the world / Christoph Schulte.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schulte, Christoph, 1958- author.

Series:

Jewish Culture and Contexts Series

Standardized Title:

Zimzum. English

Language:

English

German

Subjects (All):

Cabala--History.

Cabala.

Genre:

History

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (425 pages)

Edition:

1st edition.

Place of Publication:

Jefferson, North Carolina : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2023]

Summary:

"The Hebrew word Zimzum originally means "contraction", "withdrawal", "retreat", "limitation" and "concentration". In Kabbalah, Zimzum is a term for God's self-limitation, done before creating the world to create the world. Jewish mystic Isaac Luria coined this term in Galilee in the 16th century, positing that the God who was "En Sof", unlimited and omnipresent before creation, must concentrate himself in the Zimzum and withdraw in order to make room for the creation of the world in God's own center. At the same time, God also limits his infinite omnipotence to allow the finite world to arise. Without the Zimzum there is no creation, making Zimzum one of the basic concepts of Judaism. The Lurianic doctrine of the Zimzum has been considered an intellectual showpiece of the Kabbalah and of Jewish philosophy. The teaching of the Zimzum has appeared in the Kabbalistic literature across Central and Eastern Europe, perhaps most famously in Hasidic literature up to the present day and in Gershom Scholem's epoch-making research on Jewish mysticism. The Zimzum has fascinated Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers and writers like no other Kabbalistic teaching. This can be seen across the philosophy and cultural history of the 20th century as it gained prominence among such diverse authors and artists as Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harold Bloom, Barnett Newman or Anselm Kiefer. This book follows the traces of the Zimzum across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America in more than four centuries, where Judaism and Christianity, theosophy and philosophy, divine and human, mysticism and literature, Kabbalah and arts encounter, mix and cross-fertilize in the interpretations and appropriations of that fascinating doctrine of God's self-entanglement and limitation"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Preface to the English Edition

Introduction

Chapter 1. Origins in the Holy Land

Chapter 2. From Esoteric to Exoteric: European Kabbalists Transmitting Texts and Ideas in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

Chapter 3. Christians Unveil the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Chapter 4. Shabbateans and Anti-Shabbateans

Chapter 5. The Origins of Chassidism

Chapter 6. God's Contraction in German Idealism and Romanticism

Chapter 7. The Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums

Chapter 8. Zimzum in the Twentieth Century

Conclusion. The Anthropology of Zimzum

Appendix A. Sources on Zimzum: Texts, Art, and Music

Appendix B. Four Hundred Fifty Years of Zimzum Diffusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments.

Notes:

"Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania"--Series title page.

Originally published as: Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin : Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781512824360

1512824364

OCLC:

1376195750