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Zimzum

God and the Origin of the World

Christoph Schulte author Corey Twitchell translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press

Published:12th Sep '23

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Zimzum cover

Zimzum is the kabbalistic idea that God created the world by limiting his omnipresence. Zimzum originated in the teachings of the sixteenth-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria and here, Christoph Schulte follows its traces across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America over four centuries.

The Hebrew word zimzum originally means “contraction,” “withdrawal,” “retreat,” “limitation,” and “concentration.” In Kabbalah, zimzum is a term for God’s self-limitation, done before creating the world to create the world. Jewish mystic Isaac Luria coined this term in Galilee in the sixteenth century, positing that the God who was “Ein-Sof,” unlimited and omnipresent before creation, must concentrate himself in the zimzum and withdraw in order to make room for the creation of the world in God’s own center. At the same time, God also limits his infinite omnipotence to allow the finite world to arise. Without the zimzum there is no creation, making zimzum one of the basic concepts of Judaism.
The Lurianic doctrine of the zimzum has been considered an intellectual showpiece of the Kabbalah and of Jewish philosophy. The teaching of the zimzum has appeared in the Kabbalistic literature across Central and Eastern Europe, perhaps most famously in Hasidic literature up to the present day and in philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem’s epoch-making research on Jewish mysticism. The Zimzum has fascinated Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers, and writers like no other Kabbalistic teaching. This can be seen across the philosophy and cultural history of the twentieth century as it gained prominence among such diverse authors and artists as Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harold Bloom, Barnett Newman, and Anselm Kiefer.
This book follows the traces of the zimzum across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America over more than four centuries, where Judaism and Christianity, theosophy and philosophy, divine and human, mysticism and literature, Kabbalah and the arts encounter, mix, and cross-fertilize the interpretations and appropriations of this doctrine of God’s self-entanglement and limitation.

"Schulte’s colorful patchwork history shows that zimzum has been a constant preoccupation far beyond the network of rabbinic scholars who considered themselves direct heirs to the kabbalistic tradition." * Jewish Review of Books *
"The shining translation by Corey Twitchell, working closely with the author, allows a vital work to have a new and expanded audience. Bravo! A book for every library—in Jewish studies and well beyond." * Sander L. Gilman, author of Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity *
"Christoph Schulte’s Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World surveys the major interpretations of the notion of divine contraction in Jewish mysticism, in the developments triggered by its reverberations in German philosophy, and in modern scholarship." * Moshe Idel, Hebrew University, Jerusalem *
"This brilliant book, tracing the origins and later transformations of the notion of zimzum—from Luria to contemporary arts—is a necessary read for all interested in the intellectual history of Western modernity." * Agata Bielik-Robson, University of Nottingham *

ISBN: 9781512824353

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

424 pages