Word: cabala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...book is also a hymn to Alexandria, a city that has "a strong flavor without having any real character," where sects as well as sex proliferate. Between bouts of love, Justine searches for something to believe in. She learns most from Balthazar, an initiate of the cabala, whose crypticisms ("Passionate love even for a man's own wife is also adultery") leave her in such a state that "at night you can hear her brain ticking like a cheap alarm-clock...
...Hasidim, the Bible is written: p'shat or literal meaning, d'rush or simple allegory relating to moral teachings, remez or "the hint" of the mystical relation between man and God, and sod, the secret, dealing with esoteric cosmological matters accessible only to students of the cabala...
...Hasidic term for leader, stemming from the Hebrew rabbi, meaning teacher. *An esoteric system of speculation on metaphysics which went in for much symbolical manipulation of words and names. The cabala originated in Palestine but came under strong Babylonian influence between 500 and 900 A.D. Its best-known work, the Zohar, compiled in the 13th century, had a profound influence on Hasidism...
Then they knew that "Mr. Wilder is writing." During his months in Rome, he had filled dozens of blankbooks with notes for a series of character sketches. By 1926 he had finished his first novel, The Cabala...