Elliot Wolfson

Elliot R. Wolfson — born 1956

Elliot R. Wolfson is an American scholar of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, comparative religion, philosophy, hermeneutics, and religious poetics. He earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986 and later taught at New York University before becoming Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His major works include Through a Speculum That Shines, Circle in the Square, Language, Eros, Being, and many studies of Kabbalah, gender, embodiment, language, and mystical symbolism. UCSB identifies him as Distinguished Professor of Religion and lists his Brandeis Ph.D. in 1986.

In Jeffrey Kripal’s context, Wolfson represents a highly sophisticated postmodern and hermeneutical approach to mysticism. His work on Kabbalah is intensely textual, philosophical, poetic, and concerned with eros, embodiment, gender, and language. Kripal treats him as a scholar whose writing shows how mystical traditions are mediated through symbols, bodies, sexuality, secrecy, and interpretation. Wolfson is especially close to Kripal’s own concerns because both take seriously the erotic and reflexive dimensions of religious texts.