Concealment and Revelation

Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications

Moshe Halbertal, Jackie Feldman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780691125718
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400827961
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes.


Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition?


Halbertal concludes that, through the medium of the concealed, Jewish thinkers integrated into the heart of the Jewish tradition diverse cultural influences such as Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticisims. And the creation of an added concealed layer, unregulated and open-ended, became the source of the most daring and radical interpretations of the tradition.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Editions Used
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 The Paradox of Esotericism
• CHAPTER 2 The Hidden and the Sublime
• CHAPTER 3 The Ethics of Gazing
• CHAPTER 4 Concealment and Power
• CHAPTER 5 Esotericism and Commentary
• CHAPTER 6 Concealment and Heresy
• CHAPTER 7 Double Language and the Divided Public in Guide of the Perplexed
• CHAPTER 8 The Breaching of the Limits of the Esoteric
• CHAPTER 9 From Transmission to Writing
• CHAPTER 10 Open Knowledge and Closed Knowledge
• CHAPTER 11 Tradition, Closed Knowledge, and the Esoteric
• CHAPTER 12 From Tradition to Literature
• CHAPTER 13 The Widening of the Apertures of the Showpiece
• CHAPTER 14 Esotericism, Sermons, and Curricula
• CHAPTER 15 The Ambivalence of Secrecy
• CHAPTER 16 Esotericism, Discontent, and Co-Existence
• CHAPTER 17 Taxonomy and Paradoxes of Esotericism
• Notes