Kabbalah and Literature

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The aim of the course is to examine the medieval Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah – primarily through its major text, the thirteenth-century Zohar – and subsequently to examine the acknowledged influence of Kabbalah upon a variety of modern writers, Jewish and non-Jewish. The first half of the course will investigate extracts from the Zohar, including important secondary criticism by the most famous of Kabbalah scholars, Gershon Scholem. The second half of the course will go on to look at various famous writers – Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Benjamin, Borges – and try to understand precisely where this influence lies, and how it developed. In all of the textual approaches adopted, a range of contexts and interpretations will be considered – not just literary or theological, but even questions of gender, class, race which run across the boundaries of the many scholarly disciplines this course encompasses: it is a course primarily of literature, but also sociology, religious studies, media studies, history and theology. Questions of theory – Derrida, Zizek, Foucault – will also be implicit in our classroom discussions. Some films which deal directly with the themes and questions of Kabbalah (Aronofsky, the Cohen brothers) will also be shown.