title: Origins of the Kabbalah (Princeton Paperbacks)
author:  Gershom Gerhard Scholem 
description: Gershom Scholem's <i>Origins of the Kabbalah</i> provides a painstakingly detailed history of Kabbalah's rise among medieval French and Spanish Jews, describes the first publication of Jewish mystical texts, and investigates the growth of their influence on Jewish religious life. The book also doubles back to describe secret traditions of Jewish Gnosticism, which describe a Creation story so numerological and esoteric it makes the New Testament book of Revelation look as simple and straightforward as a Saturday-morning cartoon. This book is much denser than Scholem's excellent <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805210512/${0}"><i>On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism</i></a>, but for readers with a basic knowledge of Kabbalah, it shouldn't be rough going. <i>--Michael Joseph Gross</i>
zlib_text: Cjershom Scholem 
  Kabbalah a, 
  Counter-History 
  David Biale 
  Gershom Scholem looms like a 
  colossus in modem Jewish histori¬ 
  ography. Bom in Germany in 1897 
  and resident in Jerusalem since 1923, 
  he is one of the most influential of 
  modern thinkers. His exhaustive 
  studies of Jewish mysticism (Kabba¬ 
  lah), long the unwanted stepchild of 
  Jewish historians, have forced a rev¬ 
  olution in the standard interpreta¬ 
  tions of Jewish history, for he has 
  succeeded in transforming his eso¬ 
  teric subject into a key for under¬ 
  standing the whole Jewish experi¬ 
  ence. The growing interest in the 
  Kabbalah can be directly attributed 
  to Scholem's lucid work, and, in¬ 
  deed, it is virtually impossible to read 
  the Kabbalah today save through 
  his eyes. 
  Mr. Biale's book is the first full- 
  length study of Scholem as histo¬ 
  rian, Zionist thinker, and modem 
  Jewish theologian. Against the 
  background of nineteenth- and 
  twentieth-century Jewish historiog¬ 
  raphy as well as the crisis of 
  Germ