J. H. (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is the Sir Isaac Wolfson Full Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Chajes has been visiting Erasmus Professor at Queen Mary University London, visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a senior research fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University in Frankfurt, and a three-time fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Chajes directs the “Ilanot Project”—a research project devoted to the previously unstudied genre of visual Kabbalah known as "Ilanot" (kabbalistic trees). Chajes’s pioneering work has been awarded eight Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grants, the Friedenberg Prize for the outstanding ISF-funded project in the humanities, and two Volkswagen Foundation grants to develop the digital humanities project “Maps of God” (www.ilanot.org). His book, The Kabbalistic Tree, was published in late 2022 by PSUP.
Chapter 4 of J. H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadel... more Chapter 4 of J. H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
J. H. Chajes, and Eliezer Baumgarten, “Visual Kabbalah in the Italian Renaissance: The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms,” The Vatican Library Review 1 (2022): 91–145., 2022
The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms-a name we have given to this anonymous and untitled treatise-is ... more The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms-a name we have given to this anonymous and untitled treatise-is a unique work in the kabbalistic library. The Italian kabbalist responsible for its first iteration assigned great value to the images he found in the kabbalistic works circulating in his environment. The most striking aspect of the Booklet is the diverse range of schematic images that have been gathered together, all representations of the divine world culled from the repertoire of ca. 1500 Italian Jewish Kabbalah. Rather than seeking to establish a "correct" visual representation of the sefirotic Divine, the "forms" collected in the Booklet were treated as images that bore meanings pertinent to all manner of kabbalistic mysteries. The present article introduces this singular work, followed by a critical edition and an English translation.
Sexorcism: Sexual Dimensions of Dybbuk Possession and Exorcism, 2022
The opening Miscellaneous section, entirely in English, begins with an article provocatively enti... more The opening Miscellaneous section, entirely in English, begins with an article provocatively entitled “Sexorcism" by J. H. Chajes. In the article, Chajes exposes and explores the highly sexualized exorcism rituals enacted to treat cases of spirit possession in the early modern Jewish world. The author’s analysis integrates close readings of the emic language of Jewish magical and kabbalistic sources with insights gleaned from comparative historiography and anthropological literature. In so doing, Chajes proposes the fundamental intelligibility of traditional approaches to exorcism that may strike modern readers as crudely pornographic.
J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree as Material Text
Ilanot (Hebrew, “trees”) refers to a distinct... more J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree as Material Text Ilanot (Hebrew, “trees”) refers to a distinct kabbalistic iconotextual genre constituted by the marriage of schema and medium: the arboreal diagram and the parchment sheet. The present article seeks to highlight the latter and explore the ways in which the media of ilanot effected their meaning and function. The constitutive role of the material text of the ilan is communicated by the synecdoche yeri‘ah ([parchment] sheet) commonly used to refer to such artifacts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two definitive characteristics of ilanot—their map-like nature and the mimetic significance of the act of scrolling—are also shown to be intimately related to their materiality.
Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578-1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of ... more Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578-1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha in northwest Portugal. He fled the country in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica. Ṣemaḥ was responsible for the consolidation of the Lurianic literary corpus in the second third of the seventeenth century. His contribution, I argue, should be situated in the broader context of a scholarly "curriculum vitae" that began decades before his flight from Portugal, as Ṣemaḥ embraced Jewish life as a humanist. Coupled with his natural gifts and genius, Ṣemaḥ's humanist education served him remarkably well in his new life. The interesting question is therefore not "how might he have learned Torah in Portugal" but "how did his Portuguese educational background affect—indeed, effect may be the more apt term—his Jewish scholarship?"
Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre const... more Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre constituted by the wedding of kabbalistic diagrams—the trees of the metonymic name—and large parchment sheets. Differences of kabbalistic opinion naturally found expression in these “maps of God.” The Sabbatean messianic movement of the 1660s and its prolonged and impactful afterlife produced, among other things, a number of distinctive kabbalistic opinions. For the most part, these innovations were tightly integrated with the speculations associated with “Lurianic” Kabbalah based on the teachings of R. Isaac Luria (1534–1572). The great Lurianic ilanot were designed and circulated in the second third of the seventeenth century, not long before the emergence of Sabbateanism, but their golden age was “the long eighteenth century”—a British coinage for roughly 1660–1830—and thus coincided with the profound and pervasive absorption of Sabbatean elements in precisely those sectors that produced and consumed these artifacts, including nascent Hasidism. The deceptively simple question at the heart of this article is this: What would it mean to diagram Sabbateanism? Or to put it another way, what would constitute a Sabbatean ilan? How might distinctive Sabbatean ideas have found diagrammatic expression in this genre? Once identified as such, what do Sabbatean ilanot tell us about the meanings of Sabbateanism in the contexts within which they were produced?
Windows on Jewish Worlds: Essays in Honor of William Gross, Collector of Judaica, on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, 2019
A brief survey introducing the genre of "ilanot"--kabbalistic cosmographical drawings, generally ... more A brief survey introducing the genre of "ilanot"--kabbalistic cosmographical drawings, generally on parchment rotuli--with a special focus on their anthropomorphic representations of the divine face. The essay highlights the importance of the Gross Family Collection, collected over the past four decades by the indefatigable and generous William Gross.
במאמר החדש, שנכתב על ידי יוסי אורי ואליעזר יחדיו, מוצג אילן קבלי גדול ממדים מכורדיסטן, שנכתב על ... more במאמר החדש, שנכתב על ידי יוסי אורי ואליעזר יחדיו, מוצג אילן קבלי גדול ממדים מכורדיסטן, שנכתב על ידי ר' יהושע - תלמידו של ר' שמואל ברזאני, במאה ה17. האילן מלמד אותנו על תפיסותיהם הקבליות של חכמי הקבלה בכורדיסטן במאה ה17, ועל הקשר בינם ובין מקובלים בארץ ישראל ובאירופה.
Chapter 4 of J. H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadel... more Chapter 4 of J. H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
J. H. Chajes, and Eliezer Baumgarten, “Visual Kabbalah in the Italian Renaissance: The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms,” The Vatican Library Review 1 (2022): 91–145., 2022
The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms-a name we have given to this anonymous and untitled treatise-is ... more The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms-a name we have given to this anonymous and untitled treatise-is a unique work in the kabbalistic library. The Italian kabbalist responsible for its first iteration assigned great value to the images he found in the kabbalistic works circulating in his environment. The most striking aspect of the Booklet is the diverse range of schematic images that have been gathered together, all representations of the divine world culled from the repertoire of ca. 1500 Italian Jewish Kabbalah. Rather than seeking to establish a "correct" visual representation of the sefirotic Divine, the "forms" collected in the Booklet were treated as images that bore meanings pertinent to all manner of kabbalistic mysteries. The present article introduces this singular work, followed by a critical edition and an English translation.
Sexorcism: Sexual Dimensions of Dybbuk Possession and Exorcism, 2022
The opening Miscellaneous section, entirely in English, begins with an article provocatively enti... more The opening Miscellaneous section, entirely in English, begins with an article provocatively entitled “Sexorcism" by J. H. Chajes. In the article, Chajes exposes and explores the highly sexualized exorcism rituals enacted to treat cases of spirit possession in the early modern Jewish world. The author’s analysis integrates close readings of the emic language of Jewish magical and kabbalistic sources with insights gleaned from comparative historiography and anthropological literature. In so doing, Chajes proposes the fundamental intelligibility of traditional approaches to exorcism that may strike modern readers as crudely pornographic.
J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree as Material Text
Ilanot (Hebrew, “trees”) refers to a distinct... more J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree as Material Text Ilanot (Hebrew, “trees”) refers to a distinct kabbalistic iconotextual genre constituted by the marriage of schema and medium: the arboreal diagram and the parchment sheet. The present article seeks to highlight the latter and explore the ways in which the media of ilanot effected their meaning and function. The constitutive role of the material text of the ilan is communicated by the synecdoche yeri‘ah ([parchment] sheet) commonly used to refer to such artifacts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two definitive characteristics of ilanot—their map-like nature and the mimetic significance of the act of scrolling—are also shown to be intimately related to their materiality.
Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578-1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of ... more Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578-1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha in northwest Portugal. He fled the country in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica. Ṣemaḥ was responsible for the consolidation of the Lurianic literary corpus in the second third of the seventeenth century. His contribution, I argue, should be situated in the broader context of a scholarly "curriculum vitae" that began decades before his flight from Portugal, as Ṣemaḥ embraced Jewish life as a humanist. Coupled with his natural gifts and genius, Ṣemaḥ's humanist education served him remarkably well in his new life. The interesting question is therefore not "how might he have learned Torah in Portugal" but "how did his Portuguese educational background affect—indeed, effect may be the more apt term—his Jewish scholarship?"
Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre const... more Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre constituted by the wedding of kabbalistic diagrams—the trees of the metonymic name—and large parchment sheets. Differences of kabbalistic opinion naturally found expression in these “maps of God.” The Sabbatean messianic movement of the 1660s and its prolonged and impactful afterlife produced, among other things, a number of distinctive kabbalistic opinions. For the most part, these innovations were tightly integrated with the speculations associated with “Lurianic” Kabbalah based on the teachings of R. Isaac Luria (1534–1572). The great Lurianic ilanot were designed and circulated in the second third of the seventeenth century, not long before the emergence of Sabbateanism, but their golden age was “the long eighteenth century”—a British coinage for roughly 1660–1830—and thus coincided with the profound and pervasive absorption of Sabbatean elements in precisely those sectors that produced and consumed these artifacts, including nascent Hasidism. The deceptively simple question at the heart of this article is this: What would it mean to diagram Sabbateanism? Or to put it another way, what would constitute a Sabbatean ilan? How might distinctive Sabbatean ideas have found diagrammatic expression in this genre? Once identified as such, what do Sabbatean ilanot tell us about the meanings of Sabbateanism in the contexts within which they were produced?
Windows on Jewish Worlds: Essays in Honor of William Gross, Collector of Judaica, on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, 2019
A brief survey introducing the genre of "ilanot"--kabbalistic cosmographical drawings, generally ... more A brief survey introducing the genre of "ilanot"--kabbalistic cosmographical drawings, generally on parchment rotuli--with a special focus on their anthropomorphic representations of the divine face. The essay highlights the importance of the Gross Family Collection, collected over the past four decades by the indefatigable and generous William Gross.
במאמר החדש, שנכתב על ידי יוסי אורי ואליעזר יחדיו, מוצג אילן קבלי גדול ממדים מכורדיסטן, שנכתב על ... more במאמר החדש, שנכתב על ידי יוסי אורי ואליעזר יחדיו, מוצג אילן קבלי גדול ממדים מכורדיסטן, שנכתב על ידי ר' יהושע - תלמידו של ר' שמואל ברזאני, במאה ה17. האילן מלמד אותנו על תפיסותיהם הקבליות של חכמי הקבלה בכורדיסטן במאה ה17, ועל הקשר בינם ובין מקובלים בארץ ישראל ובאירופה.
Ilanot—parchment sheets presenting the kabbalistic “tree of life”—have been at the center of Jewi... more Ilanot—parchment sheets presenting the kabbalistic “tree of life”—have been at the center of Jewish mystical practice for the past seven hundred years. Written by leading ilanot expert J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree is a comprehensive and gorgeously illustrated history of these arboreal “maps of God.”
This book documents when, where, and why Jews began to visualize and to draw the mystical shape of the Divine as a Porphyrian tree. At once maps, mandalas, and memory palaces, ilanot provided kabbalists with diagrammatic representations of their structured image of God. Scrolling an ilan parchment in contemplative study, the kabbalist participated mimetically in tikkun, the development and perfection of Divinity. Chajes reveals the complex lore behind these objects. His survey begins with the classical ilanot of pre-expulsion Spain, Byzantine Crete, Kurdistan, Yemen, and Renaissance Italy. A close examination of the ilanot inspired by the Kabbalah taught by R. Isaac Luria in sixteenth-century Safed follows, and Chajes concludes with explorations of modern ilan amulets and printed ilanot. With attention to the contexts of their creation and how they were used, The Kabbalistic Tree investigates ilanot from collections around the world, including forty from the incomparable Gross Family Collection.
With 250 never-before-seen images reproduced in stunning quality, this chronological and typological survey is a singular combination of exquisite art and foundational scholarship. Specialists in early modern history, religion, art history, and esotericism, as well as those fascinated by Kabbalah and its iconography, will enthusiastically embrace Chajes’s iconic work.
Page 1. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism Michaela Valente Renaissance... more Page 1. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism Michaela Valente Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 235-236 (Review) ... MICHAELAVALENTE Università del Molise RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 236
Kabbalistic trees—ilanot, in Hebrew—are not merely arboreal diagrams illustrating the sefirot and... more Kabbalistic trees—ilanot, in Hebrew—are not merely arboreal diagrams illustrating the sefirot and other symbols associated with them. By the fifteenth century, the term ilan (singular) referred to a genre of kabbalistic creativity that fused this schema with a specific medium: an ilan was a diagram of the sefirot inscribed on a parchment sheet or rotulus. Ilanot had a variety of functions, from meditative to mnemonic. The present essay isolates a common element in the various uses of ilanot: they are performative, ritually-used artefacts. The ilan is thus a tool of kabbalistic practice, but is it to be considered part of so-called “Practical Kabbalah”? By the nineteenth century, ilanot were being produced specifically to serve as amulets; these apotropaic rotuli are certainly classifiable as artefacts of Practical Kabbalah. Ilanot not produced as amulets are best regarded as magical—but in the sense that they facilitate opportunities for ritual identification with the divine image that they map, and therefore participation in and manipulation of the divine.
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, Oct 1, 2005
... may hear voices long since silenced. JH (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is Lectu... more ... may hear voices long since silenced. JH (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is Lecturer in Medieval Jewish History in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. A former Fulbright, Wexner, and Hartman ...
The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms—a name we have given to this anonymous and untitled treatise—is ... more The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms—a name we have given to this anonymous and untitled treatise—is a unique work in the kabbalistic library. The Italian kabbalist responsible for its first iteration assigned great value to the images he found in the kabbalistic works circulating in his environment. The most striking aspect of the Booklet is the diverse range of schematic images that have been gathered together, all representations of the divine world culled from the repertoire of ca. 1500 Italian Jewish Kabbalah. Rather than seeking to establish a “correct” visual representation of the sefirotic Divine, the “forms” collected in the Booklet were treated as images that bore meanings pertinent to all manner of kabbalistic mysteries. The present article introduces this singular work, followed by a critical edition and an English translation.
Edited by Peter Forshaw (University of Amsterdam) NOW AVAILABLE - Online submission: Articles for... more Edited by Peter Forshaw (University of Amsterdam) NOW AVAILABLE - Online submission: Articles for publication in Aries can be submitted online through Editorial Manager, please click here. Published under the auspices of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). For Aries Book Series - Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism please click here. Aries is the first professional academic journal specifically devoted to a long-neglected but now rapidly developing new domain of research in the humanities, usually referred to as "Western Esotericism". This field covers a variety of "alternative" currents in western religious history, including the so-called "hermetic philosophy" and related currents in the early modern period; alchemy, paracelsianism and rosicrucianism; christian kabbalah and its later developments; theosophical and illuminist currents; and various occultist and related developments during the 19th and 20th centuries, up to and including popular contemporary currents such as the New Age movement. Aries is a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles and book reviews in English, French, German and Italian.
The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging o... more The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging of the divine as ten hypostatic sefirot that structure the Godhead and generate the cosmos. Since Gershom Scholem, the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, declared the term sefirah (sg.) as deriving from “sapphire”—pointedly rejecting its connection to the Greek σφαῖρα—scholars have paid scant attention to the profound indebtedness of the visual and verbal lexicon of the kabbalists to the Greco-Arabic scientific tradition. The present paper seeks to redress this neglect through an examination of the appropriation of the diagrammatic-iconographical and rhetorical languages of astronomy and natural philosophy in medieval and early modern kabbalistic discourse. This study will place particular emphasis on the adoption-adaptation and ontologization of the dominant schemata of these most prestigious fields of medieval science by classical kabbalists, what it reveals about their s...
Ars Judaica: The Bar Ilan Journal of Jewish Art, 2020
Scholars have only recently begun to take interest in ilanot (kabbalistic trees), a genre of kabb... more Scholars have only recently begun to take interest in ilanot (kabbalistic trees), a genre of kabbalistic creativity ignored by Gershom Scholem, the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism. Given that Scholem was intimately familiar with manuscripts the world over, his lack of attention to this genre in his innumerable writings must be considered an anomaly in need of explanation. Yet Scholem created ilanot of his own: a series of colorful, poster-size kabbalistic diagrams now held in the Scholem Archives at the National Library of Israel. These were produced to Scholem’s precise specifications for his teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My discussion of their production and analysis of their semiotics will range from the personal - including Scholem’s relationship to the graduate students who made these posters for their advisor - to the professional questions of how these images visualize particular kabbalistic ideas. I conclude with an examination of how “Scholem’s ilan...
Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre const... more Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre constituted by the wedding of kabbalistic diagrams—the trees of the metonymic name—and large parchment sheets. Differences of kabbalistic opinion naturally found expression in these “maps of God.” The Sabbatean messianic movement of the 1660s and its prolonged and impactful afterlife produced, among other things, a number of distinctive kabbalistic opinions. For the most part, these innovations were tightly integrated with the speculations associated with “Lurianic” Kabbalah based on the teachings of R. Isaac Luria (1534–1572). The great Lurianic ilanot were designed and circulated in the second third of the seventeenth century, not long before the emergence of Sabbateanism, but their golden age was “the long eighteenth century”—a British coinage for roughly 1660–1830—and thus coincided with the profound and pervasive absorption of Sabbatean elements in precisely those sectors that produced a...
The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging o... more The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging of the divine as ten hypostatic sefirot that structure the Godhead and generate the cosmos. Since Gershom Scholem, the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, declared the term sefirah (sg.) as deriving from “sapphire”—pointedly rejecting its connection to the Greek σφαῖρα—scholars have paid scant attention to the profound indebtedness of the visual and verbal lexicon of the kabbalists to the Greco-Arabic scientific tradition. The present paper seeks to redress this neglect through an examination of the appropriation of the diagrammatic-iconographical and rhetorical languages of astronomy and natural philosophy in medieval and early modern kabbalistic discourse. This study will place particular emphasis on the adoption-adaptation and ontologization of the dominant schemata of these most prestigious fields of medieval science by classical kabbalists, what it reveals about their s...
Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578–1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of ... more Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578–1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha in northwest Portugal. He fled the country in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica. Ṣemaḥ was responsible for the consolidation of the Lurianic literary corpus in the second third of the seventeenth century. His contribution, I argue, should be situated in the broader context of a scholarly curriculum vitae that began decades before his flight from Portugal, as Ṣemaḥ embraced Jewish life as a humanist. Coupled with his natural gifts and genius, Ṣemaḥ’s humanist education served him remarkably well in his new life. The interesting question is therefore not “how might he have learned Torah in Portugal” but “how did his Portuguese educational background affect—indeed, effect may be the more apt term—his Jewish scholarship?”
We have dedicated this issue of Aries to the subject of Jewish magic. With its focus on Practical... more We have dedicated this issue of Aries to the subject of Jewish magic. With its focus on Practical Kabbalah, this issue constitutes not only the first collection of essays ever dedicated to this topic, but the first comprehensive reassessment of the Practical Kabbalah since Gershom Scholem’s brief Encyclopedia Judaica article of nearly fifty years ago. Prima facie, the compound term Practical Kabbalah needs no special explanation. Jewish writers have used it since the late Middle Ages to refer to the active, applied, and/or performative expressions of Jewish esotericism—by this period, known simply as the Kabbalah. This traditional perception of Kabbalah, in which Practical Kabbalah was subsumed as well, was famously adopted by key Christian intellectuals of the Renaissance. Ficino, Pico, Johannes Reuchlin, and no few others identified Kabbalah as the Prisca Theologia; its recovery and study was central to their entire project. The back story of Practical Kabbalah—its rise and development, its connections to ancient Jewish magic, its relation to medieval and early modern forms of Kabbalah, and even its ongoing presence in modern Jewish life—is likely less familiar to our readers. The four essays that have been written especially for this issue seek, individually and collectively, to close that familiarity gap.
Presentazione del libro di J.H. Chajes (University of Haifa) The Kabbalistic Tree, 2023
The Kabbalistic Tree
Presentazione del libro di J.H. Chajes (University of Haifa)
Data: 16 marzo ... more The Kabbalistic Tree Presentazione del libro di J.H. Chajes (University of Haifa) Data: 16 marzo 2023 dalle 15:00 alle 18:00 Luogo: Sala conferenze, terzo piano, via degli Ariani 1, Ravenna e online su piattaforma Teams
In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of R. Hayyim Vital (1542-1620), the Goldst... more In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of R. Hayyim Vital (1542-1620), the Goldstein-Goren International Center for Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, and the World Union of Jewish Studies will hold a three-day conference via ZOOM dedicated to Vital and his world. Vital is known first and foremost as the chief disciple of R. Isaac Luria. Luria himself wrote little; Vital is thus responsible to a large extent for what is now known as “Lurianic Kabbalah.” As a paragon of the sixteenth-century Safed renaissance, many aspects of Jewish life in Palestine and Syria are imbricated in his life and thought in this critical chapter of early modern Jewish history. Alongside his immense and singular contribution to the development of the Kabbalah, the breadth and diversity of Vital’s interests are evident in his rich corpus of writings. These are devoted to a plethora of topics and express the variegated aspects of his activity over many decades in Safed, Jerusalem, and Damascus. The study of Vital’s life and work may thus shed light on many facets of contemporary Ottoman Jewish society. The fifteen sessions of the conference will cover many aspects of the activity of Vital and his contemporaries, as well as the history of the reception of his intellectual legacy in the modern and early modern periods. Sessions include: Safedian Modes of Fashioning Prominent Figures | Crossroads in the Formations of Kabbalistic Knowledge | Vital, Between Cordovero and Luria: A Reappraisal | Vital’s Book of Visions and Its Early and Later Contexts | Safedian Praxis and Its Contexts | Safed Beyond the Text: Reality and Imagination | Metempsychosis and the Fate of the Soul | Vital the Doubtful Messiah | Safed’s Culture of the Book | The Formation of Lurianic Kabbalah Across Regions | From Vilna to Jerusalem: Reading Vital in Modern Times | Vital in a Philosophical Tone Papers will be delivered in both Hebrew and English For details (including list of English papers), see: https://sites.google.com/view/vital400/en | For further inquiries: 400vital@gmail.com. Academic Committee: Prof. Boaz Huss, Prof. Bracha Sack, Prof. J. H. Chajes, Dr. Hanan Harif, Prof. Ronit Meroz, Prof. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. Committee secretary: Dr. Assaf Tamari
במלאת 400 שנים לפטירתו של ר' חיים ויטאל (1620-1542), המרכז הבינלאומי למחשבת ישראל ע"ש גולדשטיין-ג... more במלאת 400 שנים לפטירתו של ר' חיים ויטאל (1620-1542), המרכז הבינלאומי למחשבת ישראל ע"ש גולדשטיין-גורן באוניברסיטת בן־גוריון בנגב ומכון בן־צבי לחקר קהילות ישראל במזרח בירושלים, מתכבדים להזמינכן/ם להגיש הצעות לכנס שיוקדש לדמותו ולהקשריה.
עקב מגיפת הקורונה והמצב המיוחד בו כולנו מצויים, הוחלט על הארכת המועד האחרון להגשת הצעות לכנס עד ל-15/6
אפשרות לקיום הרצאות מקוונות תישקל בהתאם להתפתחויות הוועדה האקדמית: פרופ' בעז הוס, פרופ' ברכה זק, פרופ' יוסי חיות, ד"ר חנן חריף, פרופ' רונית מרוז ופרופ' אמנון (נונו) רז-קרקוצקין. מזכיר הוועדה: ד"ר אסף תמרי.
The Wolfson Chair is pleased to announce a call for applications for the Wolfson Chair Doctoral F... more The Wolfson Chair is pleased to announce a call for applications for the Wolfson Chair Doctoral Fellowship in Jewish Thought for the 2024-25 academic year. The Wolfson Fellowship is designated for outstanding students registering in the departmental doctoral program and is granted for a period of four years. The annual fellowship award is in the amount of 78,000 ILS. (Tuition is covered in keeping with the terms of the Graduate Authority.) Preference will be given to students whose proposed research in the history of Jewish Thought is well-suited to the areas of expertise of the department faculty. Note that our department hosts world-renowned Digital Humanities projects that present ideal opportunities for Ph.D. research projects. Applicants must have received a Masters Degree in a field relevant to their proposed doctoral research and have been awarded a grade of no less than 90 on their MA thesis.
Call for applications for the 2022–2023 round of the University of Haifa SPINOZA POSTDOC FELLOWSH... more Call for applications for the 2022–2023 round of the University of Haifa SPINOZA POSTDOC FELLOWSHIP - in the Department of Jewish History and Bible
The Jewish tradition — technically speaking, the rabbinic tradition that establishes what is call... more The Jewish tradition — technically speaking, the rabbinic tradition that establishes what is called “Judaism” and which is known in emic terms as “the Oral Tradition” — might be described as a courageous and even audacious attempt of the ancient rabbis to read and implement the Bible in a manner consistent with their own ethical ideals. This, even when doing so required them to assert readings that clearly contradicted the plain sense of Scripture. In this lecture, I explore the ways in which rabbinic morality and commitment to the sanctity of human life led to the neutralization of biblically-mandated violence.
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Articles by J. H. Chajes
Ilanot (Hebrew, “trees”) refers to a distinct kabbalistic iconotextual genre constituted by the marriage of schema and medium: the arboreal diagram and the parchment sheet. The present article seeks to highlight the latter and explore the ways in which the media of ilanot effected their meaning and function. The constitutive role of the material text of the ilan is communicated by the synecdoche yeri‘ah ([parchment] sheet) commonly used to refer to such artifacts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two definitive characteristics of ilanot—their map-like nature and the mimetic significance of the act of scrolling—are also shown to be intimately related to their materiality.
האילן מלמד אותנו על תפיסותיהם הקבליות של חכמי הקבלה בכורדיסטן במאה ה17, ועל הקשר בינם ובין מקובלים בארץ ישראל ובאירופה.
Ilanot (Hebrew, “trees”) refers to a distinct kabbalistic iconotextual genre constituted by the marriage of schema and medium: the arboreal diagram and the parchment sheet. The present article seeks to highlight the latter and explore the ways in which the media of ilanot effected their meaning and function. The constitutive role of the material text of the ilan is communicated by the synecdoche yeri‘ah ([parchment] sheet) commonly used to refer to such artifacts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two definitive characteristics of ilanot—their map-like nature and the mimetic significance of the act of scrolling—are also shown to be intimately related to their materiality.
האילן מלמד אותנו על תפיסותיהם הקבליות של חכמי הקבלה בכורדיסטן במאה ה17, ועל הקשר בינם ובין מקובלים בארץ ישראל ובאירופה.
This book documents when, where, and why Jews began to visualize and to draw the mystical shape of the Divine as a Porphyrian tree. At once maps, mandalas, and memory palaces, ilanot provided kabbalists with diagrammatic representations of their structured image of God. Scrolling an ilan parchment in contemplative study, the kabbalist participated mimetically in tikkun, the development and perfection of Divinity. Chajes reveals the complex lore behind these objects. His survey begins with the classical ilanot of pre-expulsion Spain, Byzantine Crete, Kurdistan, Yemen, and Renaissance Italy. A close examination of the ilanot inspired by the Kabbalah taught by R. Isaac Luria in sixteenth-century Safed follows, and Chajes concludes with explorations of modern ilan amulets and printed ilanot. With attention to the contexts of their creation and how they were used, The Kabbalistic Tree investigates ilanot from collections around the world, including forty from the incomparable Gross Family Collection.
With 250 never-before-seen images reproduced in stunning quality, this chronological and typological survey is a singular combination of exquisite art and foundational scholarship. Specialists in early modern history, religion, art history, and esotericism, as well as those fascinated by Kabbalah and its iconography, will enthusiastically embrace Chajes’s iconic work.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0271093455/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_FS5BA5SY3H42391S3239
esotericism—by this period, known simply as the Kabbalah. This traditional perception of Kabbalah, in which Practical Kabbalah was subsumed as well, was famously adopted by key Christian intellectuals of the Renaissance. Ficino, Pico, Johannes Reuchlin, and no few others identified Kabbalah as the Prisca Theologia; its recovery and study was central to their entire project. The back story of Practical Kabbalah—its rise and development, its connections to ancient Jewish magic, its relation to medieval and early modern forms of Kabbalah, and even its ongoing presence in modern Jewish life—is likely less familiar to our readers. The four essays that have been written especially for this issue seek, individually and collectively, to close that familiarity gap.
Presentazione del libro di J.H. Chajes (University of Haifa)
Data: 16 marzo 2023 dalle 15:00 alle 18:00
Luogo: Sala conferenze, terzo piano, via degli Ariani 1, Ravenna e online su piattaforma Teams
Presentazione del libro di J.H. Chajes (University of Haifa)
The Kabbalistic Tree
Giovedì 16 marzo 2023 dalle h. 15.00
presso la Sala Conferenze del Dipartimento di Beni Culturali di Ravenna
A cura di Emma Abate
https://beniculturali.unibo.it/it/eventi/presentazione-del-libro-di-j-h-chajes-university-of-haifa-the-kabbalistic-tree
Vital is known first and foremost as the chief disciple of R. Isaac Luria. Luria himself wrote little; Vital is thus responsible to a large extent for what is now known as “Lurianic Kabbalah.” As a paragon of the sixteenth-century Safed renaissance, many aspects of Jewish life in Palestine and Syria are imbricated in his life and thought in this critical chapter of early modern Jewish history. Alongside his immense and singular contribution to the development of the Kabbalah, the breadth and diversity of Vital’s interests are evident in his rich corpus of writings. These are devoted to a plethora of topics and express the variegated aspects of his activity over many decades in Safed, Jerusalem, and Damascus. The study of Vital’s life and work may thus shed light on many facets of contemporary Ottoman Jewish society.
The fifteen sessions of the conference will cover many aspects of the activity of Vital and his contemporaries, as well as the history of the reception of his intellectual legacy in the modern and early modern periods.
Sessions include:
Safedian Modes of Fashioning Prominent Figures | Crossroads in the Formations of Kabbalistic Knowledge | Vital, Between Cordovero and Luria: A Reappraisal | Vital’s Book of Visions and Its Early and Later Contexts | Safedian Praxis and Its Contexts | Safed Beyond the Text: Reality and Imagination | Metempsychosis and the Fate of the Soul | Vital the Doubtful Messiah | Safed’s Culture of the Book | The Formation of Lurianic Kabbalah Across Regions | From Vilna to Jerusalem: Reading Vital in Modern Times | Vital in a Philosophical Tone
Papers will be delivered in both Hebrew and English
For details (including list of English papers), see: https://sites.google.com/view/vital400/en | For further inquiries: 400vital@gmail.com.
Academic Committee: Prof. Boaz Huss, Prof. Bracha Sack, Prof. J. H. Chajes, Dr. Hanan Harif, Prof. Ronit Meroz, Prof. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. Committee secretary: Dr. Assaf Tamari
עקב מגיפת הקורונה והמצב המיוחד בו כולנו מצויים, הוחלט על הארכת המועד האחרון להגשת הצעות לכנס עד ל-15/6
אפשרות לקיום הרצאות מקוונות תישקל בהתאם להתפתחויות
הוועדה האקדמית: פרופ' בעז הוס, פרופ' ברכה זק, פרופ' יוסי חיות, ד"ר חנן חריף,
פרופ' רונית מרוז ופרופ' אמנון (נונו) רז-קרקוצקין.
מזכיר הוועדה: ד"ר אסף תמרי.