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This talk investigates one of Kabbalah's most impenetrable mysteries: the enigmatic texts known as Iggeret sippurim (Epistle of Stories) that appeared on a long-lost medieval kabbalistic iconotext called "The Great Parchment," which scholars from the fifteenth century to today have described as incomprehensible, labyrinthine, and "rebelling against the laws of meaning." Through close examination of the fourteenth-century commentary by Reuven Sarfatti—the only person who seems to have understood these texts—the lecture proposes a provocative solution: Sarfatti may have authored the very texts he claimed to explicate, creating an auto-commentary that helped establish the ilanot (textually-rich arboreal diagrams on parchment sheets) as a major genre of Jewish mystical expression.

Free lunch will be served to those who register. 

Speaker

J. H. (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is Sir Isaac Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Chajes’s research focuses on the intersection of Kabbalah, magic, and science in Jewish cultural history. He has written on spirit possession and exorcism, egodocuments, women’s religiosity, Jewish attitudes towards magic, and, most recently, on the visualization of knowledge. Chajes’s recent book, "The Kabbalistic Tree," has been lauded as a “monumental achievement that will be valuable to scholars and general readers interested in Judaism, religion, and art history.” For over a decade, Chajes has directed the Ilanot Project, an ambitious and unprecedented attempt to research the history of kabbalistic diagrams; in partnership with the University of Göttingen, he is also creating a platform for the research and presentation of critical editions of kabbalistic trees online: Maps of God.