A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Elliot Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth- century kabbalistic literature."Massive, magisterial.... Wolfson has amassed an impressive array of texts to establish the foundational importance of seeing God for Jewish mysticism ... and his book formulates many questions that will undoubtedly occupy subsequent investigators as they grapple with the significance of its findings.... This book comprises a manifold contribution to our appreciation of Jewish mysticism and Jewish intellectual history in the Middle Ages."--Jeremy Cohen, American Historical Review"Energy and excitement ... burst forth from page after page of this remarkably wide-ranging yet tightly argued work.... Wolfson's work is scholarship in the grand tradition--sweeping in scope and references, precise in analysis and argumentation."--Everett Gendler, Theological Studies