Long neglected by scholars of Kabbalah, diagrams have figured as eye-candy illustrations alongside unrelated discussions and as raw material for book-jacket designers. The importance of the diagrammatic image to kabbalists stands in sharp contrast to their relative invisibility in scholarship. To be a student of the Kabbalah is to visualize its knowledge as a graphic no less than a mental image. Instead, as a kind of final project, the student is instructed to draft a large and complex drawing to represent the knowledge acquired in the preceding chapters on the basis of the very precise and technical verbal instructions to which the final chapter is entirely devoted.
(2) The complete introductory course is extant in one manuscript and hasn't a single diagram. And all of them must be drawn ] before him so that he comprehend and understand these matters." (1) So begins the final chapter of "Introductions and Keys Appropriate for All Who Would Enter the Science of the Kabbalah to Know" ], an introduction to the Kabbalah, apparently of early sixteenth-century Italian provenance. "One who begins the study of this science ] must know that he must first learn all of the drawings ], and how all the worlds descend ] one after another. Kabbalistic Diagrams, Scientific Diagrams Kabbalah, 'ilanot, Tree of Life, diagrams, visualization of knowledge, astronomy This study will place particular emphasis on the adoption-adaptation and ontologization of the dominant schemata of these most prestigious fields of medieval science by classical kabbalists, what it reveals about their self-understanding, and how it contributed to the perception of Kabbalah as a "divine science" well into the early modern period. The present paper seeks to redress this neglect through an examination of the appropriation of the diagrammatic-iconographical and rhetorical languages of astronomy and natural philosophy in medieval and early modern kabbalistic discourse.
Since Gershom Scholem, the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, declared the term sefirah (sg.) as deriving from "sapphire"-pointedly rejecting its connection to the Greek -scholars have paid scant attention to the profound indebtedness of the visual and verbal lexicon of the kabbalists to the Greco-Arabic scientific tradition. The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging of the divine as ten hypostatic sefirot that structure the Godhead and generate the cosmos.
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