Anti-Providential Nominalist Nominalism in Jewish Mystical Thought

This paper investigates Gershom Scholem's positing of an “anti-ideological turn in Jewish mysticism”. I illuminate Scholem’s thoughts on the matter by way of an appraisal of the relationship between nominalism and antinomianism in his work. Scholem assessed the mystical function of nomoi (laws) having sought to peel off and separate an ideological, discursive, temporal, and providential (nominalist) structure from the bare bones of law. By seating law below language, despite Scholem’s best attempts to argue that there is “no such thing as mysticism in the abstract”, he essentially permitted a messianic and apocalyptic isolation of the mystical law from any temporal and providential context.