Megalleh ʻamuqot

Agata Paluch

"Nathan Neta ben Shlomo Shapira (1585-1633), the most famous kabbalist stemming from the Jewish intellectual environment of Poland, has remained one of the least studied figures in modern scholarship. Shapira is generally acknowledged as the most important early-modern Ashkenazi kabbalist, whose influence on later Eastern-European mystical circles is well attested. His major treatise, Megalleh ʻAmuqot, one the most complex kabbalistic texts ever written, combines variegated strata of older mystical traditions, to which the author applies diverse, often obscure modes of interpretation. In considering medieval Ashkenazi mysticism as Shapira's formative background, the book focuses on Enoch-Metatron cluster of traditions, which was as central to Shapira's thought as it was to his Ashkenazi predecessors. The Enoch-Metatron constellation of motifs serves as a vehicle for exploring...