ON THE PERFORMING BODY IN THEOSOPHICAL-THEURGICAL KABBALAH: SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS Moshe Idel The Performing Body: Between Book and Body Two different, and to a great extent, diverging understandings of Judaism have been competing in the last generation: Jews are described, in a more traditional manner, as the people of the book, be it the Bible or the Talmud on the one hand, and, more recently, the people of the body on the other hand. 1 Both evaluations are as illuminating as they are distorting. If the former approach refers more to the centrality of text in the elite culture of the Jews through generations, the latter is connected—as I shall try to clarify below—to the performance of the commandments. The more recent overemphasis on the centrality of the body, salutary as it may be as part of a temporary corrective move toward reaching a more balanced attitude toward Judaism is, in my opinion, not quite a balanced description of the comprehensive and complex historical phenomena known as traditional Judaism. In any case, there are few Jewish literary parallels to the esthetics of the body found in Greek culture. In terms of what I see as two very different extremes of the wider and more diversified phenomena belonging to this religion, I would 1 See, for example, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, ed., People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), Charles Mopsik, “The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. M. Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989), I, 49–74 and Daniel Abrams, The Female Body of God in Kabbalistic Literature (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004) (Hebrew). In a different manner, the emphasis on the body is evident also in the phallocentric theory of Elliot R. Wolfson, to which he dedicated several voluminous studies, which envisions a part of the body as the centre of gravity in Jewish tradition, and more explicitly in Jewish mysticism. See, for example, his Circle in the Square, Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995) and Language, Eros, Being, Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).