As mentioned recently, the new local network of the ESSWE in Israel recently held their inaugural conference. I already posted Wouter Hanegraaff’s inaugural lecture on Jung and the Eranos circle; however, the conference organizers have taken care to record and make available seven other lectures as well. Most deal with Kabbalah, both Jewish and Christian, as one would perhaps expect given the location and special local competence. The lectures by Isaac Lubelsky and Boaz Huss both discuss Zionism, and esoteric aspects and contexts of Zionist thought and ideology. There is also a sort of introductory lecture on Traditionalism by the specialist of that politicized esoteric current, Mark Sedgwick. If all that is not juicy enough, Julie Chajes’ lecture promises nothing less than a peak into Christian Zionist Sexual Mysticism (the latter, I should add, in a Victorian context). You’ll find them all below.
Yossef Schwartz: “The Interreligious Dimension of the Kabbalistic Project: Jews, Christians and Christian-Jews”
Judith Weiss: “Guillaume Postel’s Proficiency in Aramaic and Hebrew”
Mark Sedgwick: “Traditionalism and Esotericism”
Yossi Chajes: “Kabbalistic Divinity Maps in the Age of Kabala Denudata”
Isaac Lubelsky: “Oliphant, Balfour, and Wingate: Three Facets of Esoteric (British) Zionism”
Boaz Huss: “Forward to the East: Zionism, Esotericism and Orientalism in Naftali Herz Imber’s Perception of Kabbalah”
Julie Chajes: “The Christian Zionist Sexual Mysticism of Laurence & Alice Oliphant’s Symneumata: Some Preliminary Considerations”
As an afterthought, one really has to thank the organizers for making all this material available. I hope to see a lot more conferences doing this in the future.
This blog post by Egil Asprem was first published on Heterodoxology. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Heterodoxology 
[…] via Heterodoxology, a whole bunch of video lectures from the INASWE Conference. Come for the lecture on Kabbalistic divinity maps, stay for the juicy lowdown on sexual mysticism. […]
[…] in previous years, it is wonderful that all of this is made available online. So go and watch Karl Baier talk about […]