General

Title

Oxford (England), The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford: Ms. Opp. 128

Manuscript name

Great Tree

Summary

This mid-seventeenth-century Great Tree is preserved as a paper foldout in the front matter of an Ashkenazi kabbalistic miscellany. The ilan precedes Jacob Ẓemaḥ’s commentary on the Idra Rabba. It belongs to a subset of approximately twenty percent of Great Trees that feature Ẓemaḥ’s visualization of the enrobings (the Z14 module) without the accompaniment of Moses Zacuto’s Arikh diagram (Z13). The practice of including such ambitious diagrams as foldouts at the beginning or end of a codex likely took inspiration from the precedent set by Ḥayyim Vital, who incorporated complex opening diagrams into his own works.

Support material

paper

Main language

Rabbinic Hebrew

Hand description

Ashkenazic and various hands.

Identifier

Ms. Opp. 128

NLI identifier

990000662790205171

Repository

The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Country

England

Settlement

Oxford

Page number

159

Research literature

Adolf Neubauer, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886). J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022), 93–95, 383, 400.

Creation time

Date

mid-17th century