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keshetchai · 7 years ago

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What I am currently reading:

CHAJES, J.H. "'Too Holy to Print': Taboo Anxiety and the Publishing of Practical Hebrew Esoterica." Jewish History 26, no. 1/2 (2012): 247-62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23352435.

This is actually REALLY fascinating, because it shows just how protected actual kabbalah and Jewish mysticism is, and has been. In the beginning of the article, Chajes describes how in 1995, he discovered a magical compendium, Shorshei ha-Shemot, had been published in Jerusalem. And in order to obtain a copy for his dissertation, he first had to meet with two Rabbis who interviewed him, which was a requirement before selling any copies of the book. One of Israel’s most eminent Kabbalists, Yitzhak Kadoori wrote:

And now the aforementioned rabbis have accepted upon themselves neither to give nor to sell the book to those other than the God-fearing who will not make use of it for Practical Kabbalah5 [Kabbalah Ma'asit], God-forbid, [but rather6] to protect and to save them from all misfortune, God-forbid, and to find grace and favor in the eyes of God and man. And they must conduct an investigation and an interrogation [hakirah u-derishah] before selling this holy book to see if he [the potential buyer] is worthy.

In four years, the book was republished for wider distribution, but no longer as a historical copy of a 17th century text - this time it had been expanded upon, and portions of it had been “deleted.” Most importantly, the original copy of the book had come out shortly before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated:

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Israelis tried to understand how the "unthinkable" had happened. What were the precursors of the assassination? One of the most commonly noted was the placement of a magical curse upon the Prime Minister not long before the assassin struck. The media popularized the rather arcane fact that the curse had been none other than pulsa de-nura, the "fire-stroke," turning this esoteric Aramaic idiom into a household word for the first time in history.9 The event was to become a canonical element of any recounting of the tragedy; even the brief official Israeli government biography of Rabin does not fail to mention the curse by name as part of its treatment of the assassination.10 Even more surprising, perhaps, was the frequent obfuscation in public discourse of the distinction between curse as incitement to violence and curse as criminal ritual.11 Under such circumstances, the publishers feared that they might be vulnerable to prosecution as "curse-dealers." In a flourish of political and financial acumen, the publishers released the new edition. Free of potentially incriminating curse formulae, it was also sans Kadoori and thus available on the open market.

#jewish mysiticism #judaism #kabbalah

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