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Hartley Lachter, assistant professor of religion and director of the Judaic Studies program at Muhlenberg College, will present “Spreading the Secrets of the Kabbalah: Jewish Mysticism and the Confrontation with Christianity in the Middle Ages” 8 p.m. Thursday, March 22 in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights, room 104.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the religious studies department, under the auspices of the Lyman Coleman Fund, and the Jewish Studies program.
Lachter will discuss the origins of one of the major religious revolutions in the history of Judaism, which took place in the northern regions of Spain at the end of the 13th century. Hundreds of texts based on the secret wisdom of the Kabbalah began to circulate among Jewish scholars, including the text that would later become known as the Zohar – the most famous Kabbalistic book of all time. Lachter will explore the forces that shaped the movement, with a focus on the role of Kabbalah in combating Christian missionizing among the Jews of Spain.
“Professor Lachter is an expert on Jewish mysticism, known as Kabbalah, a vital and under-appreciated form of Jewish religious expression,” says event organizer Robert Cohn, Berman Professor of Jewish Studies. “Though Kabbalah in a New Age version has received a lot of recent attention because pop culture icons like Madonna and Britney Spears have claimed to be adherents, classical Kabbalah remains a mystery even to most Jews. But, as Professor Lachter will surely show, this secret teaching reveals startling perspectives on the human condition.”
Lachter is currently working on a book examining the mystical experience in the Zohar and other Kabbalistic literature from the second half of the 13th century within the context of the prevailing Jewish-Christian debates.
Before joining the Muhlenberg faculty in 2005, he taught at Vassar College and Rutgers University. He is a member of the Association for Jewish Studies and American Academy of Religion.
Lachter earned his Ph.D. in medieval Jewish mysticism from New York University in 2004, an M.A. in the history of Hebrew Bible interpretation from McGill University in 1997, and a B.A. in Jewish Studies and philosophy from McGill in 1996.