Prof. Daniel Abrams

My research has focused on Jewish mysticism in Europe in the middle ages, in Ashkenaz, Provence, Gerona and Castile. I have published a number of editions of texts from the Early Kabbalah and a series of articles on divine hypostases and angelic figures, tracing traditions from rabbinic times through the Spanish Expulsion. I have published a number of studies on the meanings of the masculine and feminine in kabbalistic literature and a book that discusses for the first time the positive description of the subjective and embodied experience of the divine female body in kabbalistic literature. I have published a number of studies on the Zohar showing that it was not composed as a book but rather was edited as such at a much later date. More recently, I published a book of textual scholarship and methodologies of kabbalistic research in light of the wide-spread phenomenon of textual fluidity in Kabbalah and the existence of multiple versions with which that the editor and academic interpreter of these texts works. Since 1996 I have served as editor of ‘Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts’.