212 JSRI  No. 2 /Summer 2002 Petru Moldovan Moshe Idel, Kabbalah - New Perspectives, Nemira Publishing House, Bucuresti, 2000 This book, written by M. Idel stands for, as the title indicates, a new interpretative approach to this little known aspects of Jewish religious experience. The author maintains the hypothesis that Kabbalah appeared at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth century as a reaction against the decline of the ancient mystical traditions. This was determined by the daring re-interpretation of Jewish esoterism provided by Maimonides, as well as by his attempt to replace the mystical traditions with philosophical interpretation. Therefore, historical Kabbalah emerges as a result of the continuos en- deavor to systematize the existing elements of theurgy, myth and mystic into a complex answer to the challenge launched by rationalism. In Kabbalah-New Perspective, M. Idel proposes an analysis of the two major orientations of Kabbalah: the theosophic-theurgic orientation and the ecstatic- prophetic one. The author does not provide an his- torical approach of the two tendencies, but prefers a phenomenological one discussing the significance of the two models and their conditions of emergence, with emphasis on their evolution. The aim of this work is both to offer some per- sonal comments of some texts which remained inac- cessible for G. Scholem and to point out some of the texts the scholar has dealt with hurriedly (pp. 43). M. Idel employs key-words such as: esoterism/ exoterism, innovation/conservatism, theocentrism/ anthropocentrism, theurgy/unio mystica, philosophy/ Kabbalah, mystical salvation of the individual/national eschatology; these key-words are regarded as of equal importance to the spatial and temporal data which de- fine each Kabbalistic text. The author examines early Jewish sources in order to underline both the concepts in Kabbalah and the mystical techniques it makes use of. One may notice that the first major model of Kabbalah, namely the theosophic-theurgic one, is cen- tered on two fundamental topics: theosophy which provides an elaborate theoretical structure of the di- vine world, and the ritual and concrete methods nec- essary to entering into union with Divinity. This union is needed in order to establish a state of harmony. It is in this way that a new form of theocentric religiosity emerges, which tends to con- ceive religious perfection as an instrument through which the practitioner exerts an effective power over the heavenly things without overlooking the needs of the human being. The second major model of Kabbalah, the ecstatic one, is utterly anthropocentric as it conceives the practitioners mystical experience a summum bonum in itself, paying little attention to a possible influence of the mystical state over the inner harmony of the di- vine. The theurgic act, here, is outlined in the form of