Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
Kabbalah in America; Ancient Lore in the New World
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2020) 31-47
Keywords:
Stiles, Ezra,
;
Zohar Criticism, interpretation, etc.
;
Cabala and Christianity
;
Protestants
Abstract:
In the mid eighteenth century, the famed Congregational minister Ezra Stiles became intrigued by kabbalistic text study and sought to procure a copy of the Zohar for his own perusal. Stiles’s quest for zoharic knowledge led from Benjamin Franklin to Harvard Hebrew instructor and convert from Judaism Judah Monis; it led to the first recorded copy of the Zohar on the American continent; and it involved textual expositions concerning Jewish theosophy and Christian Trinitarianism. This article traces the history of Stiles’s encounter with and usage of the Zohar, and it makes the case that Stiles sought to forge a new type of American Protestant theology as based in part upon kabbalistic, and specifically zoharic exegesis.
DOI:
10.1163/9789004428140_004
URL:
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