The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin (review)

Abstract

almost incomprehensible. Moreover, these features empower HellnerEshed to make the Idra accessible to her contemporaries, who confront “ideologically narrow agendas and fundamentalist tendencies” (8). This confrontation prompted HellnerEshed’s own turn to the Idra’s “manifesto” to “the religious world,” offering “healing and expansion” (8). HellnerEshed engages with the Zoharic imagination as both an academic and a partisan. She has explicitly situated her standpoint as that of a nonhalakhically observant woman, located outside the “boundaries of the ‘traditional participant’ ”—but who, precisely thereby, has access to a different kind of “fruitfulness” and “freedom.” In all of her work, epitomized in the present book, she splendidly vindicates that claim.