Early modern kabbalistic how-to books and cross-cultural transfer of knowledge

• In Event: Kabbalah and Knowledge Circulation in Early Modern East-Central Europe

Abstract

Historians of science and knowledge have long been facing a quandary with regards to epistemic exchanges between cultures. As much as such exchanges have been studied in the long-term diachronic perspective, a degree of incommensurability with regards to ideas and culturally determined concepts has often hindered the possibility of synchronic historical analyses. In my presentation, I will focus on Jewish kabbalistic manuals as a case study of textual format through which knowledge circulated between various cultural (mostly, Jewish or Christian) and linguistic contexts (Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, Polish, Ruthenian), expressing various disciplines of knowing (religious, technical, or scientific) in early modern East-Central Europe. The emergence of the European books of recipes, which sprang from the growing engagement with practical knowledge and increasing interest in accounting for it in writing, marks a move towards reconciling hitherto distant disciplines of knowing and discernment with practice and making. The epistemic genre of recipes reflects a growing predilection to validating theoretical knowledge through demonstrations of facts in practice. In sixteenth century, a particular type of recipe books begins to circulate in Jewish-language manuscripts more widely than before, one that includes methods of practical application of speculative kabbalistic theories to exert effects in the natural world. The presentation will center on those features of how-to books which enabled crossing boundaries between linguistically and culturally distinct groups and point to distinct commonalities in the ways the genre facilitated creation, compilation, and transfer of practical knowledge in the context of early modern kabbalistic theosophy as expressed in East-Central European sources.

Author

• Agata Paluch, Free University of Berlin