General

Title

Kabbala Denudata

Manuscript name

Kabbala Denudata

Summary

This monumental Latin work, the creation of the Lutheran scholar Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689), published in Sulzbach and Frankfurt (1677–1684) under the patronage of Prince Christian August, represents the most comprehensive anthology and translation of kabbalistic texts in the seventeenth century. In the fourth apparatus of the first volume (Apparatus IV), Knorr von Rosenroth collected five distinct Lurianic ilanot, presented across sixteen foldout copperplate engravings by the engraver Johann Christoph Sartorius. Four of these were original seventeenth-century Hebrew ilanot (authored by R. Meir Poppers, R. Jacob Ẓemaḥ, and R. Moses Zacuto, alongside an expanded-name tree and a pansophic tree), while the fifth was an original ilan designed by Knorr himself, as a visualization of the Saruqian Malbush doctrine from ‘Emek ha-Melekh. Knorr's collection of diagrams functioned as a "time capsule" preserving foundational Lurianic ilanot, and his original illustrations (figs. 8–11) were later "imported" back into the Jewish world, becoming the opening component (module K) of most "Great Trees" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (including the first printed edition in Warsaw, 1864).

Identifier

NHB.136

Repository

Gross, William L.

Country

Israel

Settlement

Tel Aviv

Research literature

J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 128–180, 202, 208–209, 224, 227, 233, 285, 318–325.

Creation time

Date

1677