Pinchas Giller. Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xviii, 246 pp.
Pinchas Giller is one of the finest contemporary scholars of the zoharic corpus. His current study, Reading the Zohar, constitutes an excellent sequel to his earlier book, The Enlightened Will Shine. The Zohar certainly warrants the kind of thoughtful and serious reflection that Giller devotes to it...
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Pennsylvania Press
2005
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| In: |
AJS review
Year: 2005, Volume: 29, Issue: 1, Pages: 171-173 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Pinchas Giller is one of the finest contemporary scholars of the zoharic corpus. His current study, Reading the Zohar, constitutes an excellent sequel to his earlier book, The Enlightened Will Shine. The Zohar certainly warrants the kind of thoughtful and serious reflection that Giller devotes to it, insofar as the Zohar is a massive, complex corpus consisting of some two dozen distinct strata. In Enlightened, Giller examined major themes in Tikkunei Zohar and Raעayaء Mehemnaء. Although these are rich and interesting compositions, chronologically they are among the latest and were undoubtedly written by someone other than whoever was responsible for the foundational writings of the Zohar. In Reading the Zohar, Giller is primarily concerned with three seminal aspects of the zoharic corpus: Sabaءde-mishpatim, cosmogonic descriptions that are preserved in various strata, and the four interconnected עIdrot texts. On its own, an analysis of such disparate and challenging sources would be an admirable undertaking. What makes Giller's study even more ambitious is that he also examines how these particular works were studied and interpreted. In particular, Giller is interested in how the kabbalists of Safed, most notably R. Moses Cordovero and R. Isaac Luria, incorporated these zoharic texts into their distinctive theosophical systems. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0364009405270095 |