The Maverick and the Mystics: C. D. Ginsburg’s Foray into Kabbalah

This article explores one aspect of the scholarship of Christian David Ginsburg (1825-1914), a Jewish-Christian scholar who became the preeminent Hebraist of Victorian England. Ginsburg’s 1865 monograph on Kabbalah, or medieval Jewish mysticism, was noteworthy for several reasons. Aside from being the first rigorous exposition of Kabbalah in English, Ginsburg’s work broke with mainstream Christian scholarship both in portraying Kabbalah as a branch of medieval religious philosophy, and in its highlighting the superiority of Jewish scholarship in this field. Moreover, Ginsburg’s work advances important arguments for allying religious scholarship – within the missionising Christian contexts in which he participated – with textual and historical rigour. In sum, Ginsburg’s work serves as a microcosm of, and an important stage within, the process of Jewish-Christian engagement through the emerging discipline of academic religious scholarship.