Kabbalah Visualized, Ritualized, and Experienced: Lurianic Scrolls, Arboreal Diagrams, and Apotropaic Amulets

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

The visual and diagrammatic dimensions have long constituted largely understudied topics in modern kabbalah research. Elliot R. Wolfson’s monumental work, Through the Speculum that Shines (Princeton UP, 1994) already foregrounded iconic visualisation of the divine as a paradigmatic aspect of medieval kabbalah. The single scholarly volume entirely devoted to the subject, Qabbalah Visiva (I milleni, 2005), was written in Italian by Giulio Busi. While this work reproduced manuscript images of sefirot and other kabbalistic diagrams with great aesthetic attention to detail and presented an impressionistic survey of kabbalistic diagrams, it did not approach the topic systematically, especially with regard to the genre of ilanot. J. H. Chajes’s groundbreaking new book, The Kabbalistic Tree (Penn State UP, 2022), expands upon Busi’s contribution by illuminating the history and epistemological significance of a new genre in the kabbalistic library, the kabbalistic ilan or diagrammatic parchments that depict the sefirot. His pioneering book introduces not only new methodological questions and tools in the study of this vast and expanding field, but also turns the attention toward material evidence, the kabbalistic rotuli that had for centuries laid undocumented and unexplored primarily in private collections and in select libraries. As material artefacts, these scrolls are grounded in broader debates drawn from Jewish intellectual and cultural history, including Jewish and Christian exchange of ideas as well as discourse on the nascent developments in the sciences.

This roundtable will foreground visual kabbalah as a site of entanglements exploring the following questions:
• How do the textual and the ritual or experiential aspects of knowledge inform each other in visual kabbalah?
• In what ways does the new genre of ilanot or diagrammatic parchments expand our understanding of representing and visualising the Divine?
• What does our analysis of visual kabbalah reveal concerning the dynamic interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish representations of God and the cosmos?
• What can we learn from diagrammatic variations in the representation of the sefirot, for example, regarding theoretical debates among kabbalistic schools and teachers concerning intradivine processes and structures?
• How do language, image, and ritual inform each other and interact in visual kabbalah?
• How can scholarship on the visual aspects of kabbalah be developed further, where can research go?

J. H. Chajes will lay the groundwork by presenting the state of the art in the study of visual kabbalah and its relationship to kabbalistic ilanot.
Nathaniel Berman will explore the nexus between the visual and the theoretical and experiential aspects of Lurianic kabbalah.
Vadim Putzu will reflect on Busi’s and Chajes’ differing uses of the notion of symbol as a means to express kabbalistic ideas, with a special attention to their implications when applied to visual representations.
Andrea Gondos will look at the apotropaic and ritualised use of Jewish magical diagrams paying close attention to the interplay between image and word in early modern Jewish amulets.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Mysticism

Moderator

• Joel Hecker, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College

Discussants

• J. H. Yossi Chajes, University of Haifa

• Nathaniel Berman, Brown University

• Andrea Gondos, University of Rochester, Department of Religion and Classics

• Vadim Putzu, Missouri State University