{"id":28,"date":"2017-01-26T19:28:54","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T19:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ilanot.haifa.ac.il\/site\/?page_id=28"},"modified":"2022-06-19T09:35:12","modified_gmt":"2022-06-19T09:35:12","slug":"above-image","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ilanot.haifa.ac.il\/site\/","title":{"rendered":"Home"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Very Brief History of the Ilan<\/em> Genre <\/strong>
Prof. J. H. Chajes<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

Kabbalah<\/b> refers to the form of esotericism that has been dominant in Jewish culture since the thirteenth century. Kabbalists, the practitioners of this lore who produce and consume its literature, began to write systematic treatises ca. 1400. These treatises are largely devoted to the sefirot, the ten luminous emanations that distinguish Kabbalah from all previous expressions of Jewish esotericism. The sefirot are the skeleton keys that unlock all of reality. Their modes and relational structure can be seen throughout creation and, with special intensity, in the Torah, the Hebrew Bible. As hypostatic facets of the Divine, the sefirot also serve as addresses for intentional prayer and as the objects of human efforts to restore their lost harmony. Such assistance is known by the term <\/span>tikkun<\/span><\/i>, referring to the repair and enhancement of the sefirotic network. The interface between God and creation is everywhere <\/span>and <\/span><\/i>it is broken; this, in a nutshell, is the compelling pathos of Kabbalah. Understanding the sefirotic code underlying all things and performing such knowledge is the work of the kabbalist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To do this work, fourteenth-century kabbalists began drawing arboreal diagrams on membrane sheets, creating artifacts they called <\/span>ilanot<\/i><\/b> (trees) or <\/span>yeri\u2018ot<\/i><\/b> (parchments), one synecdoche highlighting the schema and the other the medium of the genre. The arboreal schema, used in the Middle Ages in a variety of applications\u2014trees of Porphyry, of Jesse, of Vices and Virtues\u2014became increasingly favored by kabbalists to represent the sefirotic array. Although not without symbolic valence, the tree diagram was indexical rather than iconic. Like today\u2019s Venn diagram, it was used to visualize abstract relations. A tree could thus represent the sefirot without necessarily implying imaginal resemblance.<\/span><\/p>\n

On an <\/span>ilan<\/span><\/i> (sing.), each sefirah is represented by a medallion, its circle densely inscribed with appellations and associations. The channels that network the sefirot also carry texts that explain their function. Additional elaborations and explanations fill the interstitial spaces within the diagram and in the margins that surround it, in close proximity to the graphical representations of their subjects. An ilan thus served to introduce this fundamental lore, to abet its retention, and to orient the student-practitioner. The development of the \u201cclassical\u201d ilan reached its peak in early sixteenth-century Italy with the extraordinary <\/span>Magnificent <\/span><\/i>parchment.<\/span><\/p>\n

The teachings of the kabbalist R. Isaac Luria (1534\u20131572) inaugurated a new kabbalistic era. Luria was born in Jerusalem and lived most of his adult life in Egypt before relocating to the Galilean town of Safed less than two years before his death. In that brief window, Luria shared his ideas spontaneously with a handful of disciples, whom he often addressed individually as a \u201cphysician of the soul.\u201d As they recorded his ideas, Luria\u2019s students interpreted, abstracting and systematizing them. Their efforts created the system known as \u201cLurianic Kabbalah.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The transition from medieval (\u201cclassical\u201d) to early modern (\u201cLurianic\u201d) Kabbalah has been analogized to that from Newton\u2019s to Einstein\u2019s physics. Although Lurianists recognize the validity of the classical picture of the \u201clower worlds,\u201d they operate within a vastly more intricate system, accountable to the detailed operations of the \u201chighest.\u201d Visualization, understanding, and performance remain intertwined, as they were for medieval kabbalists. The extraordinary difficulty of the new cosmology, however, was a daunting obstacle, an impediment to pedagogy and practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u1e24ayyim Vital (ca. 1543-1620), the dominant figure among Luria\u2019s disciples, thus opened his foundational treatise, <\/span>E\u1e93 \u1e24ayyim,<\/span><\/i> with a synoptic, synchronic cosmograph\u2014one of many he included in his works. Vital\u2019s diagrams provide something akin to a fuzzy satellite photo of the terrain: instructive but insufficient to guide a traveler on the ground. R. Jacob \u1e92ema\u1e25 and his student R. Meir Poppers, the primary redactors and transmitters of the Vitalian corpus, understood the need for high resolution, diachronic images to initiate adepts and to facilitate the operation of tikkun.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To this end, \u1e92ema\u1e25, inspired by the classical ilan, treated it to a Lurianic \u201creboot,\u201d thereby inaugurating the second wave of the genre around 1640. \u1e92ema\u1e25 sketched a streamlined chart of progressively interlocking trees, now representing the divine personae or <\/span>par\u1e93ufim <\/span><\/i>central to Lurianic teaching. <\/span>Map had become time-line<\/span><\/i>. In 1650, Poppers jettisoned the structural clarity of \u1e92ema\u1e25\u2019s ilan in pursuit of unprecedented granularity. Poppers\u2019s stated goal was to picture \u201cas many details as possible,\u201d given the material limitations of the medium and, perhaps no less, the daunting task he faced as he sketched the intricacies of a world he knew exclusively from imaginary voyages fueled by Lurianic texts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Poppers began by drawing the head of the Divine, <\/span>Adam Kadmon<\/span><\/i>, with schematic restraint. Each part of the head was encoded with its names and valances, with special attention given to the orifices out of which flowed the first lights of creation. Incrementally stepped down from their original intensity, they became the divine personae of <\/span>A\u1e93ilut<\/span><\/i>, the highest World. The interlocking unfolding and developmental stages of the <\/span>par\u1e93ufim<\/span><\/i> were notated in shorthand phrases that filled the tables to which nearly all the remaining rotulus was devoted. Nearly, because the heads remain exposed\u2014and therefore represented\u2014as the bodies of the higher personae \u201cenrobed\u201d in those below them. For all its detail, however, Poppers\u2019s ilan is unintelligible to one unversed in Lurianic cosmological treatises, first among them Poppers\u2019s own <\/span>Derekh E\u1e93 \u1e24ayyim.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u1e92ema\u1e25 and Poppers were soon joined by other kabbalists, many of them anonymous, who made Lurianic ilanot of their own. Ilanot were designed to treat cosmogonic material found outside the Vitalian corpus, most notably the concept of the divine garment, or <\/span>Malbush<\/span><\/i>, taught by R. Israel Sarug (active ca. 1600) as a prelude to the emergence of <\/span>Adam Kadmon<\/span><\/i>. In the late seventeenth century, scribes adopted a modular approach to the Lurianic ilan, mixing and matching from among the various artifacts in circulation. The more creative among them crafted variations of their own, augmented by novel texts and images inspired by new books on their shelves or their personal proclivities. By the eighteenth century, Lurianic ilanot had been produced wherever there were kabbalists. Regional and ideational variation found expression in their scripts, decorative programs, and representational languages, in the books and ideas they visualized, and in varied interpolations, bespeaking investment in other esoteric traditions, whether local or transregional. Ilanot with Sabbatean content offer the clearest examples of the last sort.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This brief history distills the findings of a decade of research during which the foundations were established for the study of the genre. Although the general contours of its history can now be sketched, research in this field remains in its infancy. Progress, moreover, is impeded by the challenges the genre presents given its particular characteristics. How are scholars to analyze artifacts that combine images and texts that, separately and together, may be drawn from a diverse library of manuscripts and printed books\u2014and often in the form of pr\u00e9cis or paraphrase? The Digital Humanities initiatives of the Ilanot Project are devoted to tackling precisely these issues.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For a full-length, richly illustrated history of the genre, see now J. H. Chajes’s The Kabbalistic Tree<\/em> \u05d4\u05d0\u05d9\u05dc\u05df \u05d4\u05e7\u05d1\u05dc\u05d9, forthcoming with PSUP<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Very Brief History of the Ilan Genre Prof. J. H. Chajes Kabbalah refers to the form of esotericism that has been dominant in Jewish culture since the thirteenth century. Kabbalists, the practitioners of this lore who produce and consume its literature, began to write systematic treatises ca. 1400. These treatises are largely devoted to … <\/p>\n

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