Abraham Cohen de Herrera: Gate of Heaven: Translated from the Spanish with Introduction and Notes

With the publication of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Gate of Heaven, a widely influential work of Jewish mysticism is available for the first time in an unabridged, annotated English edition. In this work, originally written in Spanish for the marrano community of Amsterdam, Herrera (d. 1635) follows the syncretic model of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in reconciling the teachings of the Sefer Yezirah, the Zohar, Moses Cordovero, Isaac Lurian and the Lurianic school (in particular Israel Sarug), with Aristotelian, Platonic, and Neoplatonic metaphysics, medieval Islamic and Jewish theology, and Scholasticism. This thorough synthesis explains the work’s appeal to philosophers like Spinoza, Leibniz, Henry More, Hegel, and Jacob Bruckner.