Early Modern Krakow as a Kabbalistic Center

In my lecture, I will depict Krakow at the beginning of the 17th century as a kabbalistic center, one that provided an alternative to contemporary centers in Palestine. Not unlike Safed and Jerusalem in the same period, scholars from Germany gravitated to Krakow in order to attain kabbalistic knowledge in general, and methods for reading the Zohar in particular. Against this background, I will offer a new reading of the homilies of a well-known kabbalist from Krakow, Nathan Neta Shapira (d. 1633), as a theosophical response to the pretension of the kabbalists in Palestine to fully control esoteric knowledge and accomplishments.