Subject: ’Community and Cosmos: Kabbalah, Halakhah and Occultism in R. Hayyim Vital’s Damascene Circle’
Supervisor: Prof. Jonathan Garb
Abstract: In my doctoral thesis I focus on the work of R. Haim Vital and his circle of students in Damascus, to which Vital immigrated from Safed in the end of the sixteenth-century. Vital was a senior student of Rabbi Yitzhak Luria (1572-1534) and the main editor-recorder of his teachings, which became the most important form of esoteric knowledge in early modern Jewish culture. In my work I will discuss the Kabbalistic center that developed in Damascus after the economic and cultural decline of Safed, and I will analyze the writings of Vital and his students against the religious and social background of the Jewish world during this period, as well as its ties to the Muslem environment of Ottoman Damascus. Through Vital's circle, my research will carefully examine the emergence of the Lurianic Kabbalistic tradition as a dominant intellectual and spiritual force in early modern Jewish cultures, while attempting to explain its attraction for many among the elite in this period.
In a broader perspective, I wish to critically examine how esoteric knowledge, usually understood as trying to express timeless truths, takes shape as a result of the changing needs of those who use it and give it practical expression in everyday life.
Bio: I have B.A. from the History Department and the school of History Honors’ Program, and an M.A. from the History Department. I pursue my doctoral studies in the Jewish Thought department.
My area of study is Jewish intellectual history in the early modern period, with specific foci on Kabbalah, early modern science and magic. I dedicated my M.A. was dedicated to the eighteenth-century Sabbatean thinker Nehemiah Hayon, a leading figure in this fascinating messianic movement. Through my study of Hayon’s intellectual world and social milieu, I aimed at examining the social and ideological changes that the Sabbatian faith went through in the eighteenth century, its relation to the interpretation of Kabbalistic literature in this period and its relations with trends of religious criticism in early modern Europe.
Publications:
2024: ''The Key of Faith': Nehmiyya Hayoun's Self-perception and Ideology in the Light of Sabbatean Succession Struggles in the Eighteenth-century', El Prezente: Journal for Sephardic Studies (Forthcoming). [Hebrew]
2017: 'Between Pietism and the Enlightenment: Christian Thomasius and the Secularization of Knowledge in Halle University at the early eighteenth-century', Hayo Haya: Student Journal of History 12 (2017), pp. 51-73. [Hebrew]
President's Scholarship 2022/2023
MA Honors Program 2016/2017
