Department of Jewish Thought
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.
Graduate of the Honors Program for Outstanding MA Students, 2016–2018