General

Title

Jerusalem (Israel), The National Library of Israel: Ms. Heb. 4=9822

Manuscript name

Tree of Circular and Linear Emanations

Summary

This uniquely structured Great Tree was created by Joseph Siprut de Gabay in Amsterdam around 1734. Gabay made three such ilanot: a second is also held by the NLI (Ms. Heb. 4=1045) and a third is in the Lehmann Collection (K85, this witness being the only one bearing the author's signed colophon). Gabay took a novel approach to fashioning a Great Tree that included Vital's concentric circles (V). Instead of opening a long rotulus with V, which would then be followed by the other components, Gabay inserted a modified Great Tree within roughly 40 large circles—all on a single membrane. In doing so, he created the most ramified “Iggulim ve-yosher” (circles and straight [line]) diagram in the corpus. The use of phrases including “light that contains no thought” in the inscriptions suggests that Gabay was familiar with concepts associated with Nathan of Gaza.

Support material

parchment

Hand description

Sephardic

Identifier

Ms. Heb. 4=9822

NLI identifier

997012314164905171

Repository

The National Library of Israel

Country

Israel

Settlement

Jerusalem

Research literature

J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree: Ha-Ilan ha-Kabali (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022), 249–251, 355, 378. J. H. Chajes, "And Now I Will Draw You a Circle: Kabbalistic Diagram as Epistemic Image," Pe‘amim: Studies in Oriental Jewry 150–2018 (152): 235–288, esp. 271–273. [In Hebrew]

Creation time

Date

c. 1734