General

Title

Munich (Germany), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: Cod.hebr. 449

Manuscript name

Zacuto-Ẓemaḥ Arik and the Enrobings Ilan

Summary

This seventeenth-century Ashkenazi rotulus is a seminal witness of the Zacuto-Ẓemaḥ (Z) type. It is of particular historical significance as it bears the closest resemblance to the foldout engravings in Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, sharing distinctive graphical anomalies and textual variants reflected in Knorr’s Latin translations. The manuscript is executed in a unique style, featuring diagrammatic elements drawn in green ink that stands in contrast to the rest of the inscriptions, which were penned in a seventeenth-century Ashkenazi square script. The ilan consists of an elegant splicing of Moses Zacuto’s Arikh Anpin diagram (Z13) and Jacob Ẓemaḥ’s visualization of the Enrobings (Z14). A continuous vertical channel runs the entire length of the parchment, flowing from the intake funnel for the light of Ein Sof at the top of the ilan to the outtake funnel emerging from Yesod at the bottom.

Support material

parchment

Hand description

Ashkenazic

Identifier

Cod.hebr. 449

NLI identifier

990001284990205171

Repository

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

Country

Germany

Settlement

Munich

Research literature

J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022), 40–41.

Creation time

Date

17th century