Foreword: A Maimonidean Kabbalist Warren Zev Harvey, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Moshe Idel, the Max Cooper Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew Uni- versity of Jerusalem, was born in Târgu Neamț, Romania, in 1947. He immigrated to Israel in 1963, majored in Hebrew and English literatures at Haifa University (BA, 1970), and studied Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jer- usalem under Shlomo Pines and Ephraim Gottlieb (PhD, 1976). He has published scores of books and hundreds of essays, including the ground-breaking Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988), which has been translated into nine languages. He is an Is- rael Prize laureate (1999), an EMET Prize laureate (2002), and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2006). Idel’s research ranges far and wide, from the Bible and Talmud through the me- dieval Kabbalists and philosophers to Renaissance humanism, Safed mysticism, Sab- batianism, Hasidism, and post-modernism. However, at the centre of his work is the “prophetic” or “ecstatic” Kabbalah of Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (1240–1291). His doc- toral dissertation, written in Hebrew under the supervision of Shlomo Pines, was en- titled “Rabbi Abraham Abulafia’s Works and Doctrine” (1976). Among his English books on Abulafia are The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia (1988), Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (1988), and Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia (1989). Idel was not the first person to appreciate Abulafia’s importance. In 1919, Ger- shom Scholem, who later founded the discipline of Kabbalah studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began a doctoral dissertation at the University of Munich on the theory of language in the works of Abulafia and other Kabbalists. However, he abandoned this project because he had difficulty deciphering Abulafia’s arcane texts, and instead wrote about Sefer ha-Bahir (1922).¹ In 1925, Scholem composed a report for the famed Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik in which he assessed the state of research in Jewish mysticism. When he came to mention the Kabbalistic works that urgently needed to be published, he lauded “the books of Rabbi Abraham Abulafia,” describing him as “the most important personality among all the early [Kabbalists] known to us today.”² In his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published in 1941, Scholem devoted a significant chapter to Abulafia, writing about his “very great” influence and praising his “remarkable combination of logical power, pellucid style, deep insight, and highly colored abstruseness.”³ However, after Major Trends,  Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1980), 115.  Gershom Scholem, Devarim be-Go (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1975), 62.  Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941), 124.