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Kabbalah (Hebr.  kabbala, literally “reception,” understood as the adoption or transmission of an esoteric tradition) is the most important form of Jewish mysticism. From its origins in the Middle Ages, it has undergone manifold transformations and interpretations within Judaism – and since the early modern era increasingly from the outside. Although it was exemplary as a Jewish-philosophical paradigm within humanism, the representatives of the Haskalah and even more of the Wissenschaft des Judent…

The German language plays an important and ambivalent role in Jewish history. On the one hand, it became a medium of secularization, integration, and emancipation. In this capacity, it advanced in the 19th century to become the lingua franca of the Ashkenazi Jews and of large parts of Eastern Europe, where it was seen as a expression of progress, education, and science. On the other hand, it became a locus of social and cultural inequality between Jews and Germans. Cultural antisemitism deprived…

The Hebrew alphabet ( Alef-Bet) has been used in Jewish theosophical and kabbalistic representations of ideas from Antiquity to the Modern Era, not just as a system of graphic representation of the Hebrew language but also to convey symbolic and metaphorical meaning. The status of scribes of sacred texts in Antiquity and the Middle Ages corresponded to the sacredness (Kadosh) of the Hebrew letters, and so did the development of printing. In the context of modernization, the Hebrew alphabet was the f…