General

Title

Library of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Ms. 293

Manuscript name

Zacuto Ilan

Summary

This seventeenth-century witness, formerly preserved in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, served as the master copy of Ḥayyim Vital’s Oẓrot Ḥayyim. It is a document of exceptional historical significance, as it contains the autograph marginalia and diagrams of R. Moses Zacuto (the RaMaZ). In an important note, Zacuto argues that several schematic arrays of the sefirotic configuration rejected by Moses Cordovero in his Pardes Rimonim were, in fact, authentic visualizations of specific parẓufim—most notably Arikh Anpin—of which Cordovero was unaware. To substantiate this transvaluation of classical forms, Zacuto appended his own ilan of Arikh Anpin to the manuscript. This witness became the basis for Zacuto’s effort to distribute Oẓrot Ḥayyim, a project that eventually produced over eighty copies. Although the physical manuscript was stolen from the Institute several decades ago, its contents remain accessible via microfilm.

Support material

paper

Main language

Rabbinic Hebrew

Hand description

Oriental

Identifier

Ms. 293

NLI identifier

990001177810205171

Repository

Library of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute

Country

Poland

Settlement

Warsaw

Page number

179

Edition

b0

Colophon

On the Title Page: "שנת ה'ש'ק'ט', מכתיבת ידי הצעיר רפאל מורנו יצ"ו"

Research literature

Yosef Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari (Jerusalem: 2008), volume 2, 727–728. J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 381–382. Arthur Zacharias Schwarz, Die hebraeischen Handschriften in Oesterreich (Leipzig: 1931), number 271.

Creation time

Date

1649