Assimilation, Sovereignty, Diaspora: The Politics of Mysticism from a Jewish Perspective

In recent decades, Leigh Eric Schmidt and others have demonstrated the extent to which modern mystical discourse has reflected not only Protestant sensibilities but also the modern project of liberalism. In this paper, I examine the politics of mysticism through a lens of Jewish cultural history in order to shed new light on both the category of mysticism and modern liberal politics, including different formations of modern Jewish politics. While scholars such as Leora Batnitzky, Aamir Mufti, and Sarah Hammerschlag have shown how attention to the “Jewish question” illuminates foundational blind spots, complexities, and dangers of liberalism, this study builds upon that scholarship through demonstrating how representations of Judaism among the architects of modern mysticism reveals a great deal about that very category and its entanglements with liberalism. My study refracts these materials through the prism of three different pathways in modern Jewish politics: assimilation, nationalism, and diaspora.