mandaeism encounters gnosticism foundation

books:

Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism (Religion in America)

1 review

Oxford University Press, USA, 1999

Fascinating and Little Known
The topic seemed so off-the-beaten-track to be interesting for that reason alone. The book certainly lived up to the promise by providing numerous perspectives of the interaction between Jews and people of African descent in the Americas. Especially fascinating was when the two cultures meshed in the same people: Black Jews. Conceived as a religious take on Black Jewishness, the book wisely ...

The Gnostic Imagination: Gnosticism, Mandaeism and Merkabah Mysticism (Brill's Series in Jewish Studies, Vol. ...

2 reviews
Nathaniel Deutsch

Brill Academic Pub, 1995

THE AUTHORITY ON MERKABAH MYSTICISM
This book is a necessity for any serious religious scholar. It is the definitive text on the relationship between Merkabah Mysticism and Gnosticism. An important addition to religious knowledge

The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies)

2 reviews
Nathaniel Deutsch

University of California Press, 2003

Wistful and scholarly search for an elusive image
This is a beautifully written and comprehensive investigation into the intriguing personality of the Ludomirer Moid. Deutsch not only thoroughly investigates the literary and documentary evidence of her story, but sets both in thoughtful cultural contexts, both historic and contemporary. This involves mastery of an impressive range of disciplines, ranging from Hasidic / kabbalistic theology to ...

Guardians of the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity (Brill's Series in Jewish Studies)

1 review
Nathaniel Deutsch

Brill Academic Publishers, 1999

Rabbinic Judaism and Esoteric Religions in Antiquity
I used this book for an independent study I did about year ago on Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism. (A rough outline: Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism is a religious movement that took place within the world of Rabbinic Judaism beginning somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd century. Its main focus is the ascent of a rabbi to the highest heaven so that he can worship God with the angels and perhaps even ...

Inventing America's "Worst" Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael
Nathaniel Deutsch

University of California Press, 2009

This book tells the stranger-than-fiction story of how a poor white family from Indiana was scapegoated into prominence as America's "worst" family by the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, then "reinvented" in the 1970s as part of a vanguard of social rebellion. In what becomes a profoundly unsettling counter-history of the United States, Nathaniel Deutsch traces how the Ishmaels, whose patriarch fought in the Revolutionary War, ...