GEMS Lectures for 2012-2013

“Kabbalah, Science, and Moral Cosmopolitanism in Enlightenment Jewish Thought”

Professor David B. Ruderman, Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

David B. Ruderman, the Joseph Meyerhof Professor of Modern Jewish History and the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of many books, most recently Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton). He is presently the German Transatlantic Program Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, working on the text and context of The Book of the Covenant.

The Book of Covenant (Sefer ha-Brit) was one of the most popular Hebrew books read by Jews in the Modern Era, reflected in its 36 editions, including three Yiddish and two Ladino translations. It was first published by a relatively unknown Eastern European Jew named Phinehas Elijah Hurwitz, in Brünn, Moravia in 1797 and then in a much expanded edition in Zolkiev, Galicia, in 1807. The work purports to be an extended commentary on a popular Jewish mystical work called Gates of Holiness (Sha’arei Kedushah) written by Hayyim Vital (1542-1620), the well-known mystic and prominent figure of sixteenth century Lurianic kabbalah. In this accessible work, Vital presented his readership a strategy on how to become a prophet even if one lives outside the land of Israel and in present times. The book was widely read and reprinted for centuries and was especially popular in Eastern Europe among traditional Jews including in chasidic circles.

Special thanks to the Graduate College, History Department, English Department, the School of Theater, Film and Television, Classics Department, the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the School of Anthropology