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Maoz Kahana. Pagan Gods in Jewish Space: Greek and Roman Mythology in Early Modern Jewish Culture. Stanford University Press: 2026.

Abstract

This groundbreaking study reveals a remarkable and largely unfamiliar dimension of Jewish history: the ways in which classical mythology became part of Jewish life and erudite culture in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. From vibrant civic processions and rabbinic sermons to kabbalistic treatises, folk tales, and messianic heretical performances, figures such as Bacchus, Pan, the Sibyls, Amazons, and Prometheus entered the Jewish cultural landscape in surprising and illuminating ways. Tracing the Jewish encounter with classical myth through two waves, influenced by Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment critique, Maoz Kahana argues that these encounters were not superficial borrowings. Rather, classical myth served as a medium through which Jews reimagined their textual heritage and expanded the intellectual horizons of their tradition.

Kahana's work illuminates a previously unexplained boom of classical mythological elements in Jewish literature beginning in the early modern era, providing new insight into the intersection of Jewish, Christian humanist, and pagan traditions. In this new portrait of Jewish mysticism in early modernity, Kahana argues that kabbalistic thinkers, leaders, and ritualists can and should be explored within a wider cultural and intellectual landscape. Through vivid case studies, the book shows how Greek and Roman mythological materials opened new avenues for rethinking the distant past, ongoing tradition, revelation, hidden knowledge, and the nature of the self. Putting Nachman of Breslov in conversation with Giambattista Vico, this book offers a sweeping account of the creative Jewish engagement with classical mythology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment."--

About the Author

Maoz Kahana is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author, in Hebrew, of A Heartless Chicken: Religion and Science in Early Modern Rabbinic Culture (2021).