Moshe Idel

Moshe Idel (; born January 19, 1947) is a Romanian-born Israeli historian and philosopher of Jewish mysticism. He is Emeritus Max Cooper Professor in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and a Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

Life and scholarship

Born in Târgu Neamț, Romania, on 19 January 1947. Idel was a precocious child, with a passion for reading which made him read all the books in the town, cooperative, then High school Library, in addition to buying more books with the money earned by singing at weddings. Although the Holocaust did not directly affect the Jewish population of Târgu Neamț, they were affected by the so-called “population displacements”. In 1963 he immigrated with his family to Israel, settling in Haifa.

Enrolled at the Hebrew University, he studied under Shlomo Pines. After earning his doctorate with a thesis on Abraham Abulafia, he eventually succeeded Scholem to the chair of Jewish Thought. He has served as visiting Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, UCLA, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and the Collège de France.

Idel has undertaken a systematic revision of the history and analysis of Jewish mysticism. His explorations of the mythical, theurgical, mystical, and messianic dimensions of Judaism have been attentive to history, sociology, and anthropology, while rejecting a naïve historicist approach to Judaism. His 1988 work, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale University Press), is said to have revolutionised Kabbalah studies. His historical and phenomenological studies of rabbinic, philosophic, kabbalistic, and Hasidic texts have transformed the understanding of Jewish intellectual history and highlighted the close relationship between magic, mysticism, and liturgy.

Awards In 1999, Idel was awarded the Israel Prize for excellent achievement in the field of Jewish philosophy, and in 2002 the EMET Prize for Jewish Thought. In 2003, he received the Koret Award for Jewish philosophy for his book Absorbing Perfections. Cluj, Iasi and Bucharest. In 1993, he received the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought.

Book awards

1989: National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship for Kabbalah: New Perspectives 2007: National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship for Ben: sonship and Jewish mysticism Kabbalah in Italy 1280-1510 (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011). Saturn’s Jews, On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism (Continuum, London, New York, 2011). Mircea Eliade: From Myth to Magic (Peter Lang, New York, 2014). Representing God, eds. H. Samuelson-Tirosh, A. Hughes (Leiden, Brill, 2014). Kabbalah : a neurocognitive approach to mystical experiences, with Shahar Arzy, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2015). The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah (Boston, De Gruyter, 2018). Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (Brooklyn, NY, KTAV Publishing House, 2019). Vocal Rites and Broken Theologies: Cleaving to Vocables in R. Israel Ba'al Shem Tov's Mysticism (Crossroad, New York, 2020). Middot: On the Emergence of Kabbalistic Theosophies (KTAV Publishing House, New York, 2021)

Students

Prof. Jonathan Garb, Hebrew University

Prof. Boaz Huss, Ben-Gurion University

Prof. Haviva Pedaya, Ben-Gurion University