Swedenborg's Formative Influences: Jewish Mysticism, Christian Cabala and Pietism (original) (raw)

The Construction of the Great Synagogue in Stockholm, 1860-1870: A Space for Jewish and Swedish-Christian Dialogues

Arts: Special Issue on Synagogue Architecture and Art, 2020

The construction of the Great Synagogue in Stockholm during the 1860s initiated Jewish communal debates on the position and public presence of Jews in the Swedish pre-emancipatory society. An investigation into the construction process not only reveals various Jewish opinions on the sacred building, but also the pivotal role of Swedish-Christian actors in shaping the synagogue’s location, architecture, and the way it was presented in the public narrative. The Jewish community’s conceptualization and the Swedish society’s reception of the new synagogue turned it into a space on the ‘frontier.’ Conceptually situated in-between the Jewish community and the Swedish-Christian society, it encouraged cross-border interactions and became a physical product of the Jewish and Swedish-Christian entangled relationship. Non-Jewish architect Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander, historical figures prominent in the Swedish national narrative, and local and national newspapers were incorporated by the Jewish lay leadership into the creative process, and they influenced and circulated the community’s self-understanding as both Swedish citizens and Jews of a modern religion. The construction process and final product strategically communicated Jewish belonging to the Swedish nation during the last decade of social and legal inequality, thus adding to the contemporary political debate on Jewish emancipation.

The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden

Religious Minorities in the North, 2022

Open Access The significance of religion for the development of modern racist antisemitism is a much debated topic in the study of Jewish-Christian relations. This book, the first study on antisemitism in nineteenth-century Sweden, provides new insights into the debate from the specific case of a country in which religious homogeneity was the considered ideal long into the modern era. Between 1800 and 1900, approximately 150 books and pamphlets were printed in Sweden on the subject of Judaism and Jews. About one third comprised of translations mostly from German, but to a lesser extent also from French and English. Two thirds were Swedish originals, covering all genres and topics, but with a majority on religious topics: conversion, supersessionism, and accusations of deicide and bloodlust. The latter stem from the vastly popular medieval legends of Ahasverus, Pilate, and Judas which were printed in only slightly adapted forms and accompanied by medieval texts connecting these apocryphal figures to contemporary Jews, ascribing them a physical, essential, and biological coherence and continuity – a specific Jewish temporality shaped in medieval passion piety, which remained functional and intelligible in the modern period. Relying on medieval models and their combination of religious and racist imagery, nineteenth-century debates were informed by a comprehensive and mostly negative "knowledge" about Jews.

A Century of Swedish Theology

Lutheran Queaterly 21:2, 2007, 125-162

“A Century of Swedish Theology” is much more than Söderblom, Billing, Aulén, Nygren, and Wingren, although any overview must situate such luminaries carefully in Sweden’s constellation. Arne Rasmusson covers the whole century, from original context through the stars to more recent leaders like Anders Jeffner and the complex current scene.

An Apocalypse of Mind: Cracking the Jerusalem Code in Emanuel Swedenborg's Theosophy

Tracing the Jerusalem Code: Christian Cultures in Scandinavia, 2020

The Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) came to believe that the ideas contained in his mystical writings constituted the coming of the New Jerusalem, the dawning of a new age as foretold in the book of the Apocalypse. Both allegorical and yet tied to a specific historical claim – that a spiritual apocalypse, a “last judgement,” began unfolding in the year 1757 – Swedenborg catalysed a later generation of Romantic thinkers and writers (such as William Blake) who gravitated towards his millennial combination of Enlightenment empiricism with visionary accounts of things “seen and heard” in heaven and hell. This essay surveys Swedenborg’s conceptualisation of Jerusalem within his eschatological contexts, before considering how his delineations of alternative spiritualities, flourishing outside Christendom, galvanised later Swedenborgian and New Age imaginaries. Attention will also be given to how Swedenborg’s New Jerusalem led to distinctive artistic and ecclesiastical iconographies within the Swedenborgian church tradition.

THE AFTERLIFE AND HEAVEN: THE HOLY BIBLE IN THE LITERARY CLASSICS OF EMANUEL SWEDENBORG (1688-1772

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is one of Sweden’s greatest sons who had contributed to the prosperity and scientific advancement of seventeenth-century Sweden. He is remembered in the scientific halls of ivy in Sweden and elsewhere for his brilliant inventions and contributions to science. His lasting influence through the last two-hundred and fifty years, however, had been chiefly exercised through his spiritual writings about heaven and the afterlife. His writings and publications on the Bible and the afterlife are extensive. In the wake of scientific and empirical studies of near-death-experiences, which have their origins in the 1960s, the seventeenth-century seer’s writings contribute to the ongoing research on several subjects of interest related to the afterlife. These include life-before-life, near-death and shared-death-experiences, and death-bed visions. The purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to succinctly present Swedenborg’s understanding of the afterlife based on his theology and spiritual visions. Second, to demonstrate the influence of his theology throughout the last two-hundred and fifty years.