Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory Daniel Abrams Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory uncovers the unstated assumptions and expectations of scribes and scholars who fashioned editions from manuscripts of Jewish mystical literature. This study offers a theory of kabbalistic textuality in which the material book - the printed page no less than handwritten manuscripts - serves as the site for textual dialogue between Jewish mystics of different periods and locations. The refashioning of the text through the process of reading and commenting that takes place on the page - in the margins and between the lines - blurs the boundaries between the traditionally defined roles of author, reader, commentator and editor. This study shows that kabbalists and academic editors reinvented the text in their own image, as part of a fluid textual process that was nothing short of transformative. This book is certainly monumental, offering in its seven hundred pages a wealth of documentation and distilled argument that manages to be both comprehensive in its materials and transparent in its critical insights. It is rare indeed that a work of such formidable scholarship can actually be a pleasure to read and convincing in its elucidation of what are often extremely complex documentary circumstances and editorial traditions. Daniel Abrams lectures on Jewish Mysticism in the Department of Philosophy at Bar Ilan University and is editor of Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts. In 2010, he was awarded the Gershom Scholem Prize for excellence in scholarship of Jewish mysticism. He is the author of numerous books and editions of Jewish mystical literature, including: The Female Body of God in Kabbalistic Literature: Embodied Forms of the Love and Sexuality of the Divine Feminine.