There emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish
elite, notes Moshe Idel, no longer made up of prophets, priests, kings,
or rabbis but of intellectuals and academicians working in secular
universities or writing for an audience not defined by any one set of
religious beliefs. In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Idel turns his gaze on
figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka
and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel
and George Steiner to reflect on their relationships to Judaism in a
cosmopolitan, mostly European, context.
Idel--himself one of the world's most eminent scholars of Jewish
mysticism--focuses in particular on the mystical aspects of his
subjects' writings. Avoiding all attempts to discern anything like a
single essence of Judaism in their works, he nevertheless maintains a
sustained effort to illumine especially the Kabbalistic and Hasidic
strains of thought these figures would have derived from earlier Jewish
sources. Looming large throughout is Gershom Scholem, the thinker who
played such a crucial role in establishing the study of Kabbalah as a
modern academic discipline and whose influence pervades Idel's own work;
indeed, the author observes, much of the book may be seen as a mirror
held up to reflect on the broader reception of Scholem's thought.