Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals
Subtitle: Eating And Embodiment In Medieval Kabbalah (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology)
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: April 30, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 282
ISBN-13: 9780814331811
Subjects: Judaism - General; Judaism - History; Judaism - Kabbalah & Mysticism; Religion; Religion - Judaism; Cabala; Dinners and dining; History; Judaism; Mysticism; Religious aspects
Description: "Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals is the first book-length study of eating practices and experiences in the kabbalah. Focusing on the Jewish mystical literature of late-thirteenth-century Spain, author Joel Hecker analyzes the ways in which the Zohar and other contemporaneous literature represent mystical attainment in their homilies about eating. What emerges is not only consideration of eating practices but, more broadly, the effects such practices and experiences have on the bodies of its practitioners." "Using anthropology, sociology, ritual studies, and gender theory, Hecker accounts for the internal topography of the body as imaginatively conceived by kabbalists."--BOOK JACKET.