D E wrote:
>
> I also went to a talk yesterday about Kabballah being taken up by
> Victorian occult orders, and in the question time there was some
> discussion of the way that modern kabbalists are taking on a version of
> kabbalah that orthodox Hebrew scholars might decry- for (for example) to
> be a "true" (for which read "approved") kabbalist one has to take the
> Torah as truth, which most modern kabbalists don't, since they are not
> followers of Judaism
That kind of Kabbalah goes back to the
Renaissance, so it could be connected up
to the rise of Protestantism, but I have
often thought it had to do with
Christianity's general co-optation of
Judaism, starting with Christian
renaming of the Hebrew Bible "Old
Testament." That would make the energy
it sprang from a lot older and of a
different source than circumventing
priesthood--unless you want to argue
that Christianity itself was a way of
doing that, which I think you could. But
then how historical is circumventing
priesthood? Seems trans-historical then.
Harry Roth
|