“A contemporary of Moses reborn in our days”: Oskar Goldberg and kabbalistic metaphysics

Abstract

The biography and views of Oscar Goldberg (1885–1952), a Jewish-German philosopher, psychologist and religious thinker, have in recent years attracted increasing attention from specialists in the history of philosophy, religious and cultural studies. The interpre­tation of metaphysical problems, the nature of myth and ritual, and the concepts of the sa­cred and profane that he proposed had a significant influence on a number of thinkers and writers of the first half of the twentieth century. The article discusses one of the most important sources of Goldberg’s views – the Jewish esoteric tradition (Kabbalah), with which he had a difficult relationship, while simultaneously criticizing its concepts and adapting some of them for his own system. It was in dialogue with the ideas of Kabbalah that Goldberg developed an original approach to the interpretation of the biblical text – the idea of the existence of a universal pre-biological force that manifests itself in both world and human history.