Cultic and Further Orders: Semiotics of a Kabbalistic Culture

This book starts from the assumption that semiotics of culture and social-anthropological studies can offer useful tools to understand large segments and lasting aspects of the kabbalistic tradition. It attempts to study from this perspective the Sephardi Kabbalah, by examining 16th-century emblematic commentaries that collect, rearrange and carry on the earlier kabbalistic interpretation of the rabbinic ritual system. In this unusual light, much kabbalistic culture appears as an ongoing semiotic intensification of deep structures governing the discourse and practice of the Jews - so that, for instance, institutional cultic orders are integrated by other forms of order in imagination, thought, writing and experience.