Maimonides Lecture on Scepticism (Moshe Idel)

14 June 2022

Photo: UHH/SUB HH

We would like to invite you to an Online Maimonides Lecture on Scepticism on Tuesday, 14 June 2022, at 18:00. Moshe Idel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) will talk about "Abraham Abulafia’s Prophetic Books."

Abraham Abulafia’s Prophetic Books

The prophetic Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240–c.1292) used a variety of literary genres in his writings: commentaries on Sefer Yeṣirah, Maimonides’s secrets, and the Pentateuch; poems; detailed handbooks with instructions
on how to achieve prophetic experiences, especially Hayyei ha-ʿOlam ha-Baʾ and Or ha-Sekhel; books on grammar, which are now probably lost; and a series of prophetic books, written from 1279 onwards in the Byzantine Empire, Rome, and Messina, which have survived in fragments. These books contain details of revelations he claimed to have received from the Agent Intellect and commentaries on those revealed statements. The latter genre includes by far the most complex, obscure, and difficult treatises, which are extant in fewer manuscripts and have not yet attracted the due attention of most scholars in the field. Moshe Idel’s point is that despite the difficulties of decoding those texts in their original Hebrew, they were preserved in manuscripts found in libraries that were connected in one way or another to Christian Kabbalists in the Renaissance period.

Moshe Idel is Emeritus Max Cooper Professor in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Date
Tuesday, 14 June 2022, 18:00

Venue
MCAS and Online (Zoom)
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.

Poster
[PDF]

Contact and registration
maimonides-centre"AT"uni-hamburg.de