Our workshop sought to interrogate the forms of textual manifestations and kabbalistic expressions that appeared in reaction to prior texts and artefacts, from the vantage point of text technologies, media, and materiality of kabbalistic knowledge in post-1500 Eastern and Central Europe. The so-called Ashkenazi kabbalah has been characterised in early scholarship as “unoriginal”, “repetitive,” or simply receptive of the innovations that originated outside of the Ashkenazi world. We question the interpretations of kabbalistic textual and cultural dynamics beyond the binaries of the ostensible “authentic/original” and “copy/reproduction”. Instead, we invited contributions that critically re-evaluate the practices of copying, imitation, reproduction, transmission, recurrence or translation in the history of the kabbalistic textuality in Eastern and Central Europe, with an eye to the transformative qualities and broader conditions of these processes.

Chronoi Einstein Centrum, Villa Chronoi - 11 & 12 July 2023