emigrated to Israel in 1963, where he teaches at Hebrew University since 1974 as Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought. He taught as a visiting professor at many foreign universities, such as Yale, Harvard and Princeton and the Collège de France. Idel is a member of the Israel Academy of Humanities and Sciences and won the Israel Prize for Jewish Thought in 1999. He is an expert in the phenomenology of Jewish mysticism, the history of the early Kabala, the relation between Kabala and the Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century Polish Chassidism. In English he published, among other things: Golem; Jewish magical and mystical traditions on the artificial anthropoid (1990), Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (1994), Absorbing Perfections, Kabbalah and Interpretation (2002) and Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (2007). He is currently preparing a book on the founder of Chasidic Judaism, Rabbi Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht).