Representative of academic differentiation between elite and popular/common jewish views and practices of magic: "It should be stated from the very beginning that the following typology deliberately excludes the more popular magic among the Jews, which apparently continued to be practiced in the same manner as for hundreds of years beforehand." Quoted in Jewish Magic from the Renaissance Period to Early Hasidism, Moshe Idel
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While Menachem Kellner reads Maimonides as anti-"Proto-Kabbalah" (Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism, Littman Library), David R. Blumenthal (Philosophic Mysticism and anthologies) reads Maimonides as a rationalist mystic: "The thesis of the book is that medieval philosophers had a type of religious mysticism that was rooted in, yet grew out of, their rationalist thinking. The religious experience of "philosophic mysticism" was the result of this intellectualist and post-intellectualist effort." ([1][2])
There is academic debate whether Prophetic Judaism is phenomenologically a mysticism. While the prophets differed from many (not Hasidic) Jewish mystics in their social role, there are mystical passages in the prophetic books; eg. Ezekiel 1 became the basis of Merkabah mysticism. The Talmud says that there were hundreds of thousands of prophets among Israel: twice as many as the 600,000 Israelites who left Egypt; but most conveyed messages solely for their own generation, so were not reported in scripture (Judaism 101-Prophets and Prophecy). Scripture identifies only 55 prophets of Israel. In Meditation and the Bible, Aryeh Kaplan reconstructs meditative-mystical methods of the Jewish prophetic schools.
[3] Describes Renaissance era jewish communities in Italy: indigenous Italian jews, immigrant Sephardi and Ashkenazi groups, and their respective views of general Italian intellectual culture; indigenous communities and Rabbinic leadership being receptively in favour, a tradition that continued through modernity.
Cultural Relationships between Jews and Non-Jews in Fifteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Yohanan Alemanno For Alemanno, "Florence, the new Constantinople, was the place where the study of philosophy and the natural and divine law allowed...a holy wisdom...a universal system of thought, in which politics and sciences could coexist with religion and mysticism, would become the basis for the revival of a 'jewish nation'. Moses -regarded by humanists as one of the Oriental prisci philosophi (ancient philosophers) who had received intellectual secrets directly from God- was to Alemanno also the model of the perfect Platonic ruler..."
Astral Dreams in R.Yohanan Alemanno's Writings, Moshe Idel, introduction: "A long Jewish medieval tradition, represented by tens of authors in the 14th and 15th centuries who composed their writings in Spain and Provence, which gradually interpreted all the main aspects of Judaism in astro-magical terms culminated, from many points of view, in Alemanno's writings. His thought represents one of the moments of the move of this Hermetic interpretation of Judaism from West to East; By East I mean the land of Israel, where the astro-magical interpretations become evident in the writings of the 16th century Kabbalists R.Joseph Albotini, R.Shlomo Al-Qabetz, R.Moshe Cordovero and his disciples. Under their impact, 18th century Hasidism in Eastern Europe absorbed important Hermetic elements, which had been attenuated and transformed."
