Moshe Idel's studies of ecstatic Kabbalah
- Date of account
- 1980s
- Location
- Israel and medieval Spanish and Italian Jewish textual traditions
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
Moshe Idel's 1980s research on ecstatic Kabbalah examined techniques associated with Abraham Abulafia, including letter permutation, divine names, breathing, and concentrated prayer. The scholarship is a strong comparison lead for visionary and scrying research because it reconstructs practices intended to produce altered consciousness or prophetic experience from medieval texts. It does not verify the supernatural interpretation of those experiences. Idel's work also challenged some of Scholem's emphases, making it useful for tracing scholarly disagreement over whether Kabbalah should be understood primarily as theosophical symbolism or experiential technique.
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