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The Zohar: Reception

and Impact
B oa z H us s

Translated from the Hebrew by Yudith Nave

From its first appearance, the Zohar has been one of
the most sacred, authoritative, and influential books
in Jewish culture. Many scholarly works have been
dedicated to its mystical content, its literary style, and
the question of its authorship. This book focuses on
different issues: it examines the various ways in which
the Zohar has been received by its readers and the
impact it has had on Jewish culture, including the
fluctuations in its status and value and the various
cultural practices linked to these changes. This
dynamic and multi-layered history throws important
new light on many aspects of Jewish cultural history
over the last seven centuries.

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Boaz Huss has broken new ground with this study,

which examines of the reception and canonization of
the Zohar as well as its criticism and rejection from its
inception to the present day. His underlying
assumption is that the different values attributed to
the Zohar are not inherent qualities of the zoharic
texts, but rather represent the way it has been
perceived by its readers in different cultural contexts.
He therefore considers not only the attribution of
different qualities to the Zohar through time but also
the people who were engaged in attributing such
qualities and the social and cultural functions
associated with their creation, re-creation, and
rejection.
For each historical period from the beginning of Zohar
scholarship to the present, Huss considers the social
conditions that stimulated the veneration of the Zohar
as well as the factors that contributed to its rejection,
alongside the cultural functions and consequences of
each approach. Because the multiple modes of the
reception of the Zohar have had a decisive influence
on the history of Jewish culture, this highly innovative
and wide-ranging approach to Zohar scholarship will
have important repercussions for many areas of
Jewish studies.

Boaz Huss is Professor of Kabbalah in the GoldsteinGoren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev. His research interests include
the Zohar and its reception, modern kabbalah,
Western esotericism, and New Age culture. Professor
Huss received his Ph.D. in the history of Jewish
thought from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
after which he was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at
Yale University. He has also been a Starr fellow at the
Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University and a
fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the
Hebrew University. He is the author of two books on
Jewish mysticism and kabbalah in Hebrew and editor
of the English-language Kabbalah and Contemporary
Spiritual Revival. This is his first monograph in
English.
392 pages
9781904113966 26.25 instead of 35.00

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

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