| Stephen Schwartz's Jewcy Summer Book: The Zohar in Muslim and Christian Spain | |
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by Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, July 12, 2007
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I may be caricaturing myself by recommending a summer book that is a) hard to find, and b) obscure in subject matter. Nevertheless: I recommend a search for a book called The Zohar in Muslim and Christian Spain, by Ariel Bension. It can be encountered in the odd Judaica store or online at www.abebooks.com.
This volume is unique: the only extended commentary by a 20th century Kabbalist on the relationship between Kabbalah and Sufism, i.e. Islamic spirituality, with especially interesting remarks on the greatest of all the Sufis, Muhyid’din Ibn ul-Arabi. R. Bension goes further than either Gershom Scholem (who cited him), Moshe Idel, or any other modern Jewish scholar in this direction. His book also illuminates the links between both Kabbalah and Sufism and Spanish Catholic mysticism. The author was a Sephardi born in Jerusalem, and the first Sephardi from the Holy Land to study in modern European universities. He was a rabbi in Manastir, one of the Sephardic and Sufi centers in the Balkans, where Jews frequented the Sufi assemblies of their Albanian and Turkish Muslim neighbors. The book is extremely readable, and a good introduction to the Zohar.
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Stephen Schwartz is the Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, DC and author of the bestselling The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role In Terrorism (Doubleday). He was born in 1948, and More... |
Shaun
You might find this interesting
"Between Muslim and Jew":
http://www.amazon.com/Between-Muslim-Jew-Steven-Wasserstrom/dp/069103455...
Gregory C.
Zohar before Scholem
This looks very interesting, particularly because Scholem's work is often the earliest cited (unless one is dealing with Provence). The links between later Spanish mysticism and Kabbalah sounds promising as well...
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