Kabbalah and the Founding of America

The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World

Kabbalah and the Founding of America
Brian Ogren
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NZ$ 121.99
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Hardback
h229 x 152mm - 320pg
20 Jul 2021 US
9781479807987
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Explores the influence of Kabbalah in shaping America' s religious identity In 1688, a leading Quaker thinker and activist in what is now New Jersey penned a letter to one of his closest disciples concerning Kabbalah, or what he called the mystical theology of the Jews. Around that same time, one of the leading Puritan ministers developed a messianic theology based in part on the mystical conversion of the Jews. This led to the actual conversion of a Jew in Boston a few decades later, an event that directly produced the first kabbalistic book conceived of and published in America. That book was read by an eventual president of Yale College, who went on to engage in a deep study of Kabbalah that would prod him to involve the likes of Benjamin Franklin, and to give a public oration at Yale in 1781 calling for an infusion of Kabbalah and Jewish thought into the Protestant colleges of America. Kabbalah and the Founding of America traces the influence of Kabbalah on early Christian Americans. It offers a new picture of Jewish-Christian intellectual exchange in pre-Revolutionary America, and illuminates how Kabbalah helped to shape early American religious sensibilities. The volume demonstrates that key figures, including the well-known Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and Increase Mather and Yale University President Ezra Stiles, developed theological ideas that were deeply influenced by Kabbalah. Some of them set out to create a more universal Kabbalah, developing their ideas during a crucial time of national myth building, laying down precedents for developing notions of American exceptionalism. This book illustrates how, through fascinating and often surprising events, this unlikely inter-religious influence helped shape the United States and American identity.
This learned and ambitious study reevaluates the role of Kabbalah in shaping early American religious sensibilities and sheds important new light upon the Kabbalistic interests of such key figures as the Mathers, George Keith, Judah Monis, and Ezra Stiles. A path-breaking contribution. -- Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University Anyone interested in the history of the colonial period and the development of spirituality in America, as well as in the impact of Kabbalah on Christian intellectuals, will welcome Brian Ogren' s remarkable book. This is a fascinating, thorough, and compelling study of a very important topic and I highly recommend it. -- Yaakov Ariel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Radically changes our understanding of the intellectual links between colonial American Puritanism, identity formation, and the esoteric literature of rabbinic scholarship, the mysticism of the Kabbalah, Zohar, and Sefer Yetzirah. Ogren is the foremost scholar to trace the influence of kabbalistic literature and Jewish thought . . . drawing on archival resources few have bothered to examine. This is an intellectual feast of the first order and a credit to American religious historiography. -- Reiner Smolinski, Georgia State University Offers a groundbreaking, often breathtaking story, based on first-rate scholarship, about the relation between forms of Kabbalist thought and major figures and ideas in early America. It is a gripping, thoughtful, and often surprising account that will provoke a reconsideration of the intellectual sources of American ideals and of early modern thought more generally. -- Christia Mercer, Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
Brian Ogren is Anna Smith Fine Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at Rice University. He is the author of The Beginning of the World in Renaissance Jewish Thought (2016) and Renaissance and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Early Modern Italian Kabbalah 2009).
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781479807987
Published: 20 Jul 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: New York University Press
Publisher: New York University Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 320

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