Customer Reviews

Jewish Mysticism: Late Antiquity (Jewish Mysticism in Late Antiquity) (Volume 1)

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This book is a nice compact overview of a number of schools of early Jewish mysticism. Dan is pretty even-handed, IMO, and his writing is clear and not highly technical. He is a good scholar, citing sources and thereby providing a lot of paths for further exploration; I've found it invaluable for this alone, locating lots of writing on Hekhalot and translations of some of its texts I would not have otherwise known of. It is composed of a collection of articles, but they do indeed fit well together, which is nicely surprising. I have read many other article collections that did not.

One of the things that made me cheer this book out loud, though, was his absolute lambasting of people like Eliade and Campbell, whom he rightly accused of being ahistorical and of being unable to credit people or cultures with creativity and originality. He pointed out how Eliade and other reactionary scholars look at the world and see nothing but their own face. It indicated to me that this was someone who was able to place a phenomenon in its historical context, so the reader could have some understanding of where concepts might have arisen, if they were borrowed, how they had been modified if they had been borrowed, how those concepts served that moment in time, and so forth.

All in all, this is a very gratifying book. I expect to buy the rest of the volumes.