Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis (Yale Studies in Hermeneutics) [Hardcover]

Karen Silvia de Leon-Jones (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300068077 | ISBN-13: 978-0300068078 | Publication Date: September 23, 1997 | Edition: 1st Ed.

In this interpretation of the thought of the heretical philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Karen de L.-Jones depicts the influential thinker as mystic and cabbalist. She rejects the popular view of Bruno as hermetic magus - a position initiated by Frances Yates and widely accepted by succeeding scholars. Bruno's interest in mysticism and the Kabbalah was not merely intellectual or satiric, de L.-Jones contends: a close look at his study of the Kabbalah reveals him as a practising believer. For Bruno, the Kabbalah reconciled science with theology and provided a biblical support for theories such as metempsychosis that he wished to prove scientifically through atomic theory and physiognomy. Balancing his mystical Cabala dialogue with the hermetic vein of his dialogue "Spacio della bestia trionfante" and the Napoleonic emblems of "Degli eroici furofi", Bruno creates a solid syncretic trilogy, as well as a modern apology for scientific and philosophical debates still of interest today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Sheds light on Bruno''s own self-understanding as a mystical prophet to a new age."—Choice

(CHOICE )

"This book is fascinating in its grasp and interpretation of a difficult and multi-faceted philosophy that includes elements of the Platonic and Kabbalistic thought that Bruno encompassed in his eclectic and highly individualistic writings."—The Philosopher

(The Philosopher )

“In an age of religious sectarianism, when the gap between Lakewood and Yeshiva is farther than the gaps between Judaism and Christianity used to be in some places, it might pay to look at this great harmonizer.”—The Commentator

(The Commentator )

"A fascinating Renaissance figure brought to life by de León-Jones. . . . [in] a refreshing and informative exploration of Bruno''s mystical speculations."—Religious Studies Review

(Religious Studies Review )

"De León-Jones has enriched our understanding of the ways Jews and Christians interacted and the effects these interactions had in shaping the philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas of both communities."—Shofar

(Shofar ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

"Sheds light on Bruno's own self-understanding as a mystical prophet to a new age."—Choice. "This book is fascinating in its grasp and interpretation of a difficult and multi-faceted philosophy that includes elements of the Platonic and Kabbalistic thought that Bruno encompassed in his eclectic and highly individualistic writings."—The Philosopher. "A fascinating Renaissance figure brought to life by de León-Jones . . . [in] a refreshing and informative exploration of Bruno's mystical speculations."—Religious Studies Review. "De León-Jones has enriched our understanding of the ways Jews and Christians interacted and the effects these interactions had in shaping the philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas of both communities."—Shofar<

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), a defrocked Dominican monk, was convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Inquisition and burned at the stake in Rome. He had spent fifteen years wandering throughout Europe on the run from Counter-Reformation intelligence and eight years in prison under interrogation.

The author of more than sixty works on mathematics, science, ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, the art of memory and esoteric mysticism, Bruno had a profound impact on Western thought. Until now his involvement with Jewish mysticism has never been fully explored. Karen Silvia de León-Jones presents an engaging and illuminating discussion of his mystical understanding and use of Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, theology, and philosophy, including the famous Hermetica, and especially his exploration and use of magic to reveal the mysteries of the universe and the divine.

Karen de León-Jones is a research fellow in religious studies at the Centre d'Etudes des Religions du Livre, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-Ecole Pratique des Etudes Scientifiques (Paris) and at the Institut Karma Ling (Arvillard). --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st Ed. edition (September 23, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300068077
• ISBN-13: 978-0300068078
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,522,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding academic study!, April 19, 1998

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Kalev Pehme (Redondo Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis (Yale Studies in Hermeneutics) (Hardcover)

Lovers of Giordano Bruno (you know who you are!) will enjoy this book, because it clarifies a vast area of Bruno's thought as it relates to the Kabbalah. It illuminates a good part of Bruno's iconography as well. It is well written, and solidly reasoned and researched (unlike another recent book on Bruno). For the few who feel cabala-teologia-filosofia collapse into each other every once in a while, this book is a must. Buy it before it goes out of print.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Bringing Wisdom to Life (A Review from the YU Commentator 9/21/05), September 21, 2005

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Joshua A. Harrison (Morganville, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis (Paperback)

The figure of the Renaissance magus looms large at Yeshiva College. Indeed, the very slogan of the school channels the spirit of Egyptian pneumatic magic. Beckoning us to "bring wisdom to life," the new motto conjures an image of a magician, his figure ensconced in dark robes, Picatrix in hand, standing over the moribund YU student and imparting him with the ancient Gnostic wisdom of the Hermetica. Just as the ancient Egyptians brought the celestial powers into their idols, we take the lifeless Modern Orthodox youth and fill them with celestial knowledge!

Scorn is heaped on the pedant by Giordano Bruno. The pedant represents the opposite of the magus. With his emphasis on philology or his willingness to analyze primary texts (like Copernicus), the pedants of the world challenged Bruno, whom Yates calls "the lunatic the lover and the poet." Indeed, the Oxford doctors who so opposed Bruno find piercing arrows of invective hurled at them. While they ponder the true epicycles, Bruno hears the song of the Universe.

Of course, the Isaac Casaubon controversy, in which Casaubon used early philological methods to disprove the authenticity of the Hermetica as received Egyptian wisdom, brought this situation to a head. At least Bruno had the authoritative Hermetica on his side. When Casaubon proved that the Hermetica was a Gnostic text, and not a text that antedated Moses (who cribbed, in the old account, liberally from Hermes Trismegistus!), the later Magi, like Robert Fludd, had to persist in their art in the face of vastly superior critical scholarship.

In the post-Modern Orthodox world, when expositors like Rabbi Shagar can quote Heidegger and Rav Nachman in the same sentence, when Madonna reigns as the queen of a Kabalistic empire, and when philological approaches to Talmud have been exposed as the most soulless readings of all, perhaps we need to return to the inspired lunatic frenzy of a Giordano Bruno. In an age of religious sectarianism, when the gap between Lakewood and Yeshiva is farther than the gaps between Judaism and Christianity used to be in some places, it might pay to look at this great harmonizer.
While our sages tell us that "scribal jealousies increase wisdom," Bruno vehemently dissents from this position. Scribal jealousies for him, as we have seen, constitute an Oxford pedantry that could only hinder the coming celestial reform. Yet, based on the amazing work of Dame Frances Yates, Karen Silvia de Leon Jones chose to write a book based entirely on the scribal jealousies and the Oxford pedantry that the Renaissance magus so decried.

Yates contends numerous times in her book that, though Bruno dabbles in Kabbalah, following in the illustrious footsteps of Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, his is a strictly Hermetic program. Leon Jones disagrees vehemently. She claims that Bruno is a Kabbalist, and that his Kabbalistic dialogues reflect this.

This argument could now go one of two ways. In the first scenario, Leon Jones could show us not only how Bruno was a Kabbalist, but also how his general program of religious harmonizing worked. Thus, she could tell us how Bruno's "hermetic reform" would've united Catholic countries with Protestant ones. She could explain the place of the Jews, and Jewish wisdom, in this great harmonization. She could explain Bruno's complex messianic politics, and his hopes that various Kings or Queens might usher in an age of religious syncretism in Christianity based on the pre-Mosaic wisdom of Hermes. Leon Jones could even make all of this relevant by pointing to Bruno's Baroque context, with its inquisitions and its Reformation, and by talking about the religious fragmentation of the time and contrasting it with our own, increasingly splintered religious context.

Leon Jones could have done all of these things. Instead, she chose to point to very limited examples that lend no resonance and no context to the amazing figure of Bruno. The first proof Leon Jones gives of the fact that Bruno is a Kabbalist is the recurring motif of the ass in Bruno's celestial reform. This motif, she brilliantly shows, is a Jewish one. Balaam rode an ass and the ass is an important Jewish symbol. Thusly, she concludes that Kabbalah was the consistent hermeneutic thread in all of Bruno's works, and that he did not just steal his Kabalah from Pico and Agrippa.
I am not dismissing Leon Jones as bad scholarship. Indeed, I agree with her conclusions on the nature of Bruno's Kabbalah. The deficiencies in Yate's knowledge of Kabbalah only buttress the idea that there is much more Kabbalah in Bruno, for those who know how to look. Moreover, Yates relied heavily on the outdated ideas of Scholem, who thought of all of Kabbalah as Gnostic, something contemporary researchers like Idel have discredited. As much as I agree with Leon Jones on a purely scholarly level, any book or article can be made relevant, and this book fails the test of relevance. Indeed, beyond the scholarly banter, the book contains about one page of background on Bruno (where we are told that he has an Internet fan club and that there are people in France who want to put a statue of him up in Paris, in imitation of the monument to Bruno in Rome's Campo del Fiore) and very little about the general context of Christian hebraicism and religious harmonization that Bruno wishes to implement. This is noting, if not a betrayal of Bruno to the vile pedantry of the 21st Century academy. Instead of just lining up sefirot with astrological signs as she does, Leon Jones would've done well to work on parallel tracks with Yates, and to write a whole history of the Hermetic/Kabbalistic synthesis, as Yates writes her history of the Hermetic tradition. With such a picture, we might have at least an inkling of the path to our own celestial reform and our own new synthesis.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars If you are interested in Bruno, their are better books, January 21, 2009

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Dav id Nazar "David Nazar" (Chattanooga TN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis (Paperback)

I didn't think much of this book. If you are a student of the Kabbalah you might find it interesting and be able to follow the many relatively unexplained references. I suggest you read "The Pope and the Heritic" if you want to learn more about Bruno and his life. It would be even better to read "The Expulison of the Triumphant Beast" which has a great introduction giving a good overview of Bruno's life, or read something else actually written by Giordano Bruno. I felt like I wasted a lot of time with "Giordano Btruno and the Kabbalah".