Jewish Culture

in Early Modern Europe

Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman

Edited by
Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann,
Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner

Hebrew Union College Press

University of Pittsburgh Press

This publication is made possible with support from the Herbert D. Katz Publication Fund
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260,
and Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati, OH, 45220
Copyright 2014, Hebrew Union College Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman / edited
by Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8229-4433-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. JewsEuropeHistory18th century. 2. JewsEuropeHistory17th century. 3.
JewsEuropeHistory16th century. 4. JewsCivilization. 5. JudaismRelations. 6.
Civilization, ModernJewish influences. 7. EuropeEthnic relations.
I. Ruderman, David B., honoree. II. Cohen, Richard I., editor. III. Dohrmann, Natalie B.,
editor. IV. Shear, Adam, editor. V. Reiner, Elchanan, editor.
DS135.E82J49 2014
305.8924040903dc23
2014008210

Contents

Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
From Venice to PhiladelphiaRevisiting the Early Modern
Adam Shear, Richard I. Cohen, Elchanan Reiner, and Natalie B. Dohrmann

xi
I. Realms of Authority: Conflict and Adaptation
Continuity or Change
The Case of Two Prominent Jewish Portuguese Clans in the Ottoman Empire
Joseph R. Hacker

3
Dont Mess with Messer Leon
Halakhah and Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Elliott Horowitz

18
Jews and Habsburgs in Prague and Regensburg
On the Political and Cultural Significance of Solomon Molkhos Relics
Matt Goldish

28
Jewish Women in the Wake of the Chmielnicki Uprising
Gzeires Tah-Tat as a Gendered Experience
Adam Teller

39
For God and Country
Jewish Identity and the State in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam
Benjamin Fisher

50
A Civil Death
Sovereignty and the Jewish Republic in an Early Modern Treatment of Genesis 49:10
Anne Oravetz Albert

63

viContents

II. Knowledge Networks

The Hebrew Bible and the Senses in Late Medieval Spain
Talya Fishman

75
Printing Kabbalah in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Moshe Idel

85
Persecution and the Art of Printing
Hebrew Books in Italy in the 1550s
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin

97
Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution
J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

109
Yosef Shlomo Delmedigos Engagement with Atomism
Some Further Explorations into a Knotty Problem
Y. Tzvi Langermann

124
III. Jews and Judaism in the Early
Modern European Imagination
The Theater of Creation and Re-creation
Giuseppe Mazzotta

137
Weeping over Erasmus in Hebrew and Latin
Joanna Weinberg

145
Fair Measures from Our Region
The Study of Jewish Antiquities in Renaissance Italy
Andrew Berns

156
Christian Hebraism and the Rediscovery of Hellenistic Judaism
Anthony Grafton

169

Contentsvii

Jews, Nobility, and Usury in Luthers Europe

Jonathan Karp

181
Adopt This Person So Totally Born Again
Elias Schadeus and the Conversion of the Jews
Debra Kaplan

193
The Conservative Hybridity of Miguel de Barrios
Adam Sutcliffe

205
Le Don Quichotte dAntnio Jos Da Silva, les Marionnettes
du Bairro Alto et les Prisons de LInquisition
Roger Chartier

216
IV. The Long Eighteenth Century
in an Early Modern Key
The Collapse of Jacobs Ladders?
A Suggested Perspective on the Problem of Secularization
on the Eve of the Enlightenment
Michael Heyd

229
A Jew from the East Meets Books from the West
Yaacob Dweck

239
Printing, Fundraising, and Jewish Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Livorno
Francesca Bregoli

250
An Interpretive Tradition
Connecting Europe and the East in the Eighteenth Century
Andrea Schatz

260
Gibbons Jews
Dead but Alive in Eighteenth-Century England
David S. Katz

271

viiiContents

The Happy Time of Moses Mendelssohn and the Transformative Year 1782
Shmuel Feiner

282
A Tale of Three Generations
Shifting Attitudes toward Haskalah, Mendelssohn, and Acculturation
Sharon Flatto

294
An Underclass in Jewish History?
Jewish Maidservants in East European Jewish Society, 17001900
Rebecca Kobrin

307
V. From the Early Modern to the
Late Modern (and Back Again)
Did North American Jewry Have an Early Modern Period?
Beth S. Wenger

319
Language and Periodization
Mendele Moykher Sforim and the Revival of Pre-Haskalah Style
Israel Bartal

331
The End or the Beginning
Jewish Modernity and the Reception of Rahel Varnhagen
Vivian Liska

344
Between Yitzhak Baer and Claudio Snchez Albornoz
The Rift That Never Healed
Yosef Kaplan

356

List of David B. Rudermans Publications

Compiled by Yechiel Y. Schur

369

Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase

of the Scientific Revolution

J. H. (Yossi) Chajes
University of Haifa

Ich schau in diesen reinen Zgen

Die wirkende Natur vor meiner Seele liegen.
Goethe, Faust

In what follows, I would like to consider the interplay of Lurianic Kabbalah and
early modern science from a fresh perspective. Lurianism, long portrayed in the
historiography as the ne plus ultra of arcane obscurantism, has come to be regarded
by todays scholars as a distinctively early modern lore in which individuality, embodiment, and even a quasi-scientific orientation are palpably present.1 Moreover,
scholars now accept that the pioneers of the scientific revolutionnatural philosophers rather than scientists in the modern sense2were no less deeply engaged by
matters of religion and the occult, Lurianism included.
I begin with a pair of premises not sufficiently clear to scholars working on
the Lurianic Kabbalah-science question. Firstly, whenever one works on Lurianic
Kabbalah, it is vital that one distinguish between different internal (Jewish) stages
in its history. There is Lurias thought (which itself has been stratified in the historiography);3 its (re)presentations by Vital and other students;4 and its reception and
the reformulations and representations of subsequent generations. Secondly, when
one works on topics in the history of science, it is vital that one be clear about
what science meant in the particular place and time under scrutiny. Sophisticated
practitioners of the history of science have long since abandoned an ahistoric, essentialized notion of science in favor of an approach that takes as its objective to dis109

110J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

close the ways in which science has been variously constructed through discursive
practices in their socio-political contexts.5 In short, the term science is a historical
variable rather than a constant, and must be treated as such. To further complicate
matters, the period of the emergence and reception history of Lurianism in its first
long century, roughly from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, coincides with perhaps the most dramatic, dazzling, and often baffling period in the
history of western science. Neither Lurianism nor science meant in 1570 what they
would in 1700; when we explore their interplay from an historical perspective (rather
than from a strictly phenomenological one), precision with regard to each variable
is vital to the avoidance of specious and anachronistic arguments as well as to the
facilitation of fresh insights.
With that methodological preface out of the way, we turn to the big question of
this essay: Why did so many scientific revolutionaries take an interest in Lurianic
Kabbalah? After all, Lurianism, like astrophysics, is utterly incomprehensible to
all but the rarest of initiates. In 1975, Allison Coudert, having recently finished
her Ph.D. under Francis Yates, published her first article, A Cambridge Platonists
Kabbalist Nightmare.6 In this article she proposed a thesis that has been at the heart
of her work ever since: Francis Mercury van Helmont (161498) and Baron Christian
Knorr von Rosenroth (163889)as well as to varying extents seventeenth-century
natural philosophers who knew them or their work, from Henry More (161487)
and Joseph Glanvill (163680), to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (16461716) and Isaac
Newton (16421727)took a keen interest in Lurianic Kabbalah because of its optimistic character.7 In Couderts reckoning, Lurias doctrine taught universal salvation,
as it was based on the premise of Gods supreme attributes being love and goodness.
Moreover, salvation would be achieved not by divine grace but by collective human
efforttikkun (repair). Lurianism thus supplied the perfect ethos for the scientific
revolution, empowering humanity in the quest for progress.
Couderts optimism thesis seems to have emerged from her reading of these
seventeenth-century figures in light of (her reading of) Scholem.8 I would like to
explore an alternative (perhaps additional) explanation: natural philosophers of the
seventeenth century were drawn to Lurianism out of a perception of its complementary kinship to their own pansophical project. Moreover, this perception was not
merely a function of wishful thinking or projection; discursive practices characteristic of Lurianism, verbal as well as pictorial, were closely related to those deployed
by natural philosophers. These were anything but static fields; yet their striking
proximity is further evinced in the parallel developments in natural philosophical
and Lurianic discursive practices between the mid-sixteenth and late seventeenth
centuries.
Before increasing the historical resolution too much, however, I would like to
make a few germane generalizations.

Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution111

Divinity Objectivized
Despite the great variety of literary styles and genres in kabbalistic literature,
matters of divinity were generally presented with scarcely a reference to the subjective experience of the mysticin stark contrast to the norm in Christian mysticism.9
As Yehuda Liebes argued some twenty years ago, this general characteristic was
amplified in the mythic (rather than symbolic) Lurianic Kabbalah, by which Liebes
meant that its discourse of the divine was 1:1, precise, and objective.10 More than
any form of Kabbalah that had preceded it, Lurianic objectivism allowed for the
possibility of knowing and describing all of reality, spiritual and material, with
the unabashed precision that was precisely the aspiration of contemporary natural
philosophers.
Another Generalization: Not Too Jewish
Much kabbalistic literature is devoted to biblical exegesis, speculation regarding
the reasons for the commandments, and performative-ritual activity. It is inextricably bound up with Judaism, and yes, with Jews. Lurianic literature is no exception.
But neither all of Kabbalah nor all of Lurianism was of equal interest, let alone
accessibility, to Christian readers. I would suggest that the most important works of
Kabbalah for natural philosophers were precisely those that were most judentumrein.
The authoritative voices of these objectifying texts do not seek legitimation in the
precedents of biblical or rabbinic literature; invocations of such are rare features
of Sefer yetsirah, the zoharic Idrot, or the Lurianic Ets hayim and its parallels. They
present a Book of God as universal as three-dimensional space.11
These texts could, therefore, be divorced with relative ease from Jewish particularism and read in a universal key. According to Paolo Rossi,
In the pansophic ideal which dominated seventeenth-century culture there was an
insistence both on the necessity of possessing total knowledge, and on the existence
of a single law, key or language which would enable one to read the alphabet impressed by the Creator in material things. For the pansophists the real world and the
world of knowledge formed a unified and harmonious whole and shared an identical
structure.12

Ets hayim exemplified such a view of reality as unified in a consistent structural

principle.
Compatible Lacunae
But it is possible to be more precise. As we consider characteristics of particular
expressions of Lurianism in light of characteristics of natural philosophy in the first
phase of the scientific revolution, we can do more than point to similarities. We can
point to differences. Indeed, in this instance, I would suggest that a key difference
between the totalizing universal discourse of Ets hayim and that of seventeenth-

112J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

century natural philosophers may have made its assimilation easier than would have
been the case had they been more alike. Roni Weinsteins recent work has laudably
made the case for reading Lurianism in the early modern European Christian context.13 Amidst his enthusiasm for a good cause, however, Weinstein has not always
been careful to distinguish the cultural context of mid-sixteenth century Palestine
from late seventeenth-century Italy, or between Lurias Lurianism and its reception
history; he has also focused on similarity (at times in rather forced readings) to the
exclusion of difference and what can be learned from it.
Pansophism is a case in point. Truly, both Lurianism and early modern natural
philosophers aspire to a comprehensive, seamless knowledge of reality, top to bottom as it were. Putting aside for the moment the question of whether Luria was a
precocious pansophist, how was Lurianic pansophism distinct? Weinstein presents
Lurias pansophism, which he treats under the rubric of encyclopedism, as allinclusivefrom the infinity of En Sof through the divine worlds, to the material
world, and down to the lowest realms of the demonic. This may be true enough,
but it is no less true that along this vast spectrum there are vast disparities when it
comes to real attention and interest. Luria, and it is fair to say most of his kabbalistic
predecessors and subsequent expositors, had little interest in pursuing knowledge
of the material world for its own sake, nor in advancing this knowledge by any
of the various means being pursued by his naturalist contemporaries. We look in
vain for the kabbalistic polymath who was equally attentive to all aspects of reality,
material and spiritual.14 hayim Vitals astronomical treatise, Sefer ha-tekhunah, seems
typical of its genreno interest in advancing science, but merely in teaching the
astronomy an educated Jew would need to calculate his calendar.15 This is not to say
that Sefer ha-tekhunah did not take its place on the spectrum of Vitals works devoted
to describing how everything worked. Indeed, this celestial primer sat adjacent to
his treatments of how the divine workedquite literally, as a number of extant
fragmentary manuscripts of the work are bound alongside his Lurianic treatise Shaar
ha-hakdamot.16 Vitals alchemical-magical manuscript, recently published for the first
time, can, in turn, be seen as occupying the next spot on the spectrum, in its earthly,
this-worldly practical orientation.17
The eclectic and ambitious intellectual agendas of leading early modern natural philosophers, on the other hand, could and did include extensive forays into
esoterica and matters of divinity; the Book of God was studied with avid interest
alongside the Book of Nature.18 I cannot therefore quite say that the Lurianic lacuna with regard to the Book of Nature was matched by a seventeenth-century natural
philosophy lacuna with regard to the Book of God. What I would suggest, however,
is that the Book of God as represented in Lurianism was, at the very least discursively and, as we shall soon see, visually as well as verbally, well-matched to sit alongside
the Book of Nature as it was being conceived in the early, or to use James Franklins
term, diagrammatic phase of the scientific revolution. Indeed, in the expressions
of Lurianism that reached seventeenth-century Christians via Rosenroths Kabbala

Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution113

denudata, the divine world was represented with geometrical precision, to exacting
specifications, in excruciating detail. They had to love it.
But perhaps no less significant was the lack of real interest in the Book of Nature
in Lurianic pansophism. This gap in the spectrum, this difference, made for easier
assimilation. There was no rival kabbalistic Book of Nature that came as a package
deal with their Book of God that had to be countered or suppressed.
Pythagorean Cabala
Having made passing reference to the early diagrammatic phase of the scientific
revolution, let us unpack that designation as an entre to a consideration of what my
recent work on kabbalistic diagrams might contribute to a history of the interplay
between Kabbalah and science in the early modern period. First, we should define
the term: a diagram is a picture, in which one is intended to perform inference about the
thing pictured, by mentally following around the parts of the diagram.19 Second,
we should note its significance, as emphasized by Franklin: if the later phase of
the Scientific Revolution was algebraic, the earlier one was diagrammatic. This may
be seen though innumerable examples, from Descartes (15961650) conviction that
science could be forwarded by ignoring all properties of matter except the purely geometrical; to Leibnizs (16461716) comment that geometrical diagrams were
the most useful of characters for recognizing, discovering, or proving . . . truth;20
to Spinozas (163277) attempt to develop ethics more geometrico (in the [deductive]
manner of geometry), an attempt indicative of a conviction that geometry was the
key to much more than mathematics. In short, in Franklins whiggish formulation,
reasoning with diagrams in the Middle Ages and Renaissance trained Europeans to
think adequately to do science.21
Meanwhile, the conflation of Kabbalah and Pythagoreanism (and of course
Platonism) had long been axiomatic amongst Christians. It figures centrally in
the writings of Johannes Reuchlin (14551522) and persisted in the minds of sixteenth-century figures including Giordano Bruno (15481600) and John Dee (1527
1608/9).22 In 1698, Leibniz expressed his admiration for van Helmont by composing
an epitaph describing him as one who joined together the wealth of various arts
and sciences. Through him Pythagoras and the sacred Cabala were reborn.23 Even
when figures such as Henry More or Isaac Newton were critical of the Kabbalah,
their critiques bear witness to such a perception; so too must be understood the
contemporary charge that Spinoza was in fact a kabbalist.24
Such an identification could only be consolidated, and to some extent vindicated,
when Kabbalah shifted from the eros of the Zohar to the anatomical architecture of
Ets hayim.25 Or should we say the astronomy of Ets hayim? As Vital himself writes in
the book, the structure of the sefirot, in their endless concentric circles, may be pictured in the manner of the pictures of the spheres as found in astronomical treatises.
(Al derekh temunat ha-galgalim ka-nizkar be-sifre tokhniim.)26
It is striking that what have been called the two sciences of the mid-sixteenth

114J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

century, anatomy and astronomy, are so palpably central to the discourse of Ets
hayim. Significantly for our current discussion,27however, the two rely on very different modes of visualization and representation. Anatomys rhetoric of reality uses
recognizable visual signals of uncompromising naturalism; in astronomy, representing the heavens as they appear to the unaided eye would be pointless. Astronomy
requires the representation of things that cannot literally be seen: the orbs that
enclose the paths of the planets, the points that mark the centers around which
they turn, or the circles that map out the invisible spheres. Astronomys rhetoric
of irrefutable precision, [was] conveyed by tables of figures and flat geometrical
diagrams.28
Although much of the verbal rhetoric of Ets hayim is anatomical, anatomical conventions of visual representation were not deployed by kabbalists. Lurianic divinity
shared the invisibility no less than the perfect, dynamically sentient circularity of
the astronomical sky. It should hardly surprise us, then, to find astronomical-style
diagrams in the earliest Lurianic works, just as they had been deployed in the works
of earlier kabbalists.29
It should be noted that diagrams of concentric spheres were supplemented by,
and later integrated within, more complex graphical presentations that deployed two
other conventional modes of medieval scientific diagramming: arbores and tabulae.
The former were typically deployed to classify and analytically divide wholes into
their constitute parts; the latter to summarize large bodies of information. Arbores
and tabulae survived and indeed thrived in early modern science, as may be observed
in the revival of the Lullian image of the tree of sciences in the works of Francis
Bacon and Ren Descartes.30 Tables were indispensable ordering and presentation
devices. They could also be versatile tools deployed to express something as ineffable as infinity; here too the figures of mathematicians and astronomers converge
with those of kabbalists.31 Finally, the innumerable acrostics in the Lurianic Book
of God could only have heightened the sense that it was written in some kind of
Euclidean language.
Until approximately the mid-seventeenth century, Lurianic diagrams were very
much like those in medieval works of natural philosophy; they served to illustrate
specific arguments set forth by some segmentperhaps of only a few linesof text.
(p. 288) Thus there are a handful of verbal cues in the Vitalian corpus to illustrative
diagrams that form an integral part of the presentation. Thus, to use the most widespread example, early in the exposition of the emanatory scheme of creation, Vital
concludes a section of his discussion with some version of and we will draw its
form here like this or just like this. The detail diagrams that followin which a
series of concentric circles are penetrated from above by a channelare a ubiquitous
feature of manuscripts and subsequent printed editions of the various receptions
of Vitalian-Lurianic cosmogony32 (fig. 1). More ambitious synoptic diagrams of
Lurianic cosmology may have been attempted by Vital, as may be inferred by the
references in subsequent generations to his daf ha-tsiyur, which at this point is not

Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution115

Figure 1. "Detail" diagram. From hayim Vital, Sefer ha-drushim, X893 K11, Hebrew
Manuscripts Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the
City of New York, 15v. This manuscript was copied c 1600 and contains comments by
R. Menachem de Lonzano.

extant. It is likely, however, that such a synoptic diagram resembled the drawing in
R. Menachem deLonzanos (15501626) manuscript rather than any of the ramified
exemplars of a later provenance (fig. 2).33

116J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

Figure 2. Synoptic diagram. From hayim Vital, Sefer ha-drushim, X893 K11, Hebrew
Manuscripts Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the
City of New York, 33r.

Indeed, preliminary results of my research on Vitals particularly mechanistic

presentation of Lurianic cosmology, Otsrot hayim, seem to point to an increasing
supplementation with diagrams in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to

Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution117

manuscripts that were originally quite sparsely illustrated. The more ambitious attempts to represent Lurianic cosmology diagrammatically in large scrolls (as well
as in codices with fold-out illustrations) begin only in the mid-seventeenth century.
These are the great Ilanot, arbores that can run many meters in length and stretch
nearly a meter wide, associated with R. Meir Poppers (162462) and R. Nathan Nata
Hammerschlag (active 1680s1690s). From the sporadic and modest medieval-style
concentric circles that seem to have been Vitals preferred visual idiom to the proliferation of detail and synoptic diagramming from the mid-seventeenth century
onward, the diagramming of Lurianism would thus appear to have marched in step
with trends in natural philosophy.
The pansophical differential complementarity I described above is plain to see
in these attempts to diagram the whole. The impressively large synoptic diagrams
like Oxford Hebrew MS 1949 (which, as an exemplar of a family of ilanot scrolls
of fifteenth-century Italian provenance, is pre-Lurianic), or Hammerschlags Ilan deAdam Kadmon34 treat the divine world(s) in great detail (diagrammatically the Lurianic
manuscript much more so). Such diagrams often include a schematic representation
of the spheres that revolve around the earth; many conclude with a mapping of demonic, sub-terrestrial realms. There is never, however, significant investment made
in the treatment of the sublunar or even the celestial spheres. These maps are of the
divine, albeit fashioned in a manner bespeaking the presumption that the divine was
susceptible to cartographical conquest.
In the End, Aesthetics
One last salient feature to consider in this context is aesthetics. When kabbalistic
lore is diagrammed, it looks very little like the images we come across in the first places someone like me runs to lookthe memory palaces or emblems so magnificently
analyzed by Frances Yates, Lina Bolzoni, and Mary Carruthers.35 It does, however,
look very much like the diagrams in early modern editions of Euclid or Sacrobosco,
and in the new works of Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus. That Lurianism was a
form of esotericism that did not cultivate the emblematic visual representation of
other contemporary forms of esotericism may have ultimately lent it a modern aesthetic uniquely appealing to a vanguard like Kepler. Kepler was determined to liberate science from the imaginative polyvalence of the emblematic image.36 Tellingly,
Kepler also perceived the Kabbalah in geometrical rather than emblematic terms, as
evinced in his noting that he had planned a little work, Geometric Kabbalah, which
is about the ideas of natural things in geometry.37
It may be that kabbalistic diagrams, in particular the more ambitious arbores,
were perceived as more important by Christian than Jewish kabbalists. At the very
least they may have felt fewer compunctions about going public with visual representations of the divine. Guillaume Postel (151081) refers in his work to ilanot as a
distinct genre of Hebraica.38 It is hard to think of a Jewish writer (including modern
scholars) who has adopted such a generic classification. We also know that elabo-

118J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

rate ilanot of Renaissance Italian provenance were commissioned or copied at great

expense by patrons among whom were members of the illustrious Medici family.39 A
beautifully colorful parchment scroll now in Oxford was copied by Yaakov Hevron,
aka Scottish Hebraist James Hepburn.40
The most ambitious and influential example is to be found in Rosenroths Kabbala
denudata, the work Coudert has argued was so significant for understanding the
emergence of modern thought.41 Rosenroth published comprehensive ilanot nearly
two centuries before Jews would begin to publish increasingly anemic versions of
similar material. The significance of the diagrams in Rosenroths presentation seems
to have been appreciated by his readers. Thus, for example, Henry Mores Opera
Omnia includes his own version of Figure XV of Kabbala denudata.
And another interesting example: recently I discovered a note from Johann
Benedict Carpzov II (163999), a former student of Johannes Buxtorf IIs in Basel,
and professor of Oriental languages at Leipzig from 1668.42 In this note, addressed
to the pious Lutheran hymn composer Johann Jakob Schtz (164090), Carpzov
explains that the recondite speculations of the Kabbalah have been all but impenetrable in the past, not only to Christians but to Jewish rabbis. Why? Because most
of them do not know anything about its Cabbalistic tree, which is the foundation
of the whole doctrine. Carpzov continues by noting that Theodoricus Hackspan
(160759) wrote in his Miscellanea sacra that he had given up on his plan to provide
an explicated kabbalistic tree because of the great difficulty of the subject matter
(p.453). Recently, however, Carpzov reassures Schtz that a highly illustrious man
[i.e., Rosenroth] has undertaken it in a really heroic way, that Christians could not
even have dared hope for. A reader of Kabbala denudata today would be unlikely
to regard the explicated ilanot diagrams as Rosenroths most heroic accomplishment,
but that is precisely the opinion of his learned contemporary Carpzov. What made
the diagrammatic explication so impressive to Carpzov? And what led Rosenroth
to pursue such an unprecedented and elaborate presentation of diagrammatic ilanot? I would suggest that Rosenroths diagrammatic presentation of the Kabbalah
was an expression of his perception that this Book of God could be seamlessly
incorporated into the pansophic project of contemporary natural philosophy, or, in
the retrospective terms suggested by Franklin, into the diagrammatic phase of the
Scientific Revolution.
What early modern natural philosophers knew of Lurianism they knew from
Knorr. Rosenroths diagrammatic representation of Lurianism constitutes a juncture where the parallel evolving discourses of Lurianism and early modern natural
philosophy converged, en route to a meeting with the makers of modernity if not
modernity itself.
Postscript: An Aesthetic Aside
Understanding that the conventions of astronomical representation were consciously adopted by exponents of Lurianism may explain an aesthetic enigma: why

Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution119

Figure 3. Detail from figure 12 of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata,
vol. 2 (1678) (unpaginated fold-out diagram).

would someone with access to Johann Christoph Sartorius, an artist-engraver of real

distinction who embellished the frontispiece of Kabbala denudata with an emblematic image of subtle complexity,43 present diagrammatic representations of Lurianism

120J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

with hardly an attempt to improve upon them? There is the one teasethe lovely
engraving of the head of Adam Kadmon II (fig.3)but no more.
This head, presented in profile, likely owes its origins to precedents ranging from
wind diagrams illustrating manuscripts of Isador of Sevilles De rerum natura to more
complex later expressions including Andrea Baccis Ordo universi et humanarum scientiarum prima monumenta. Steffen Siegel has recently emphasized the central place of
the head in early modern visual representations of world pictures;44 Rosenroth may
have found this an opportune moment in his diagrammatic presentation to incorporate this venerable albeit rapidly transforming tradition of cosmological representation.45 Yet the more the ilanot are appreciated as implementations of the economical
aesthetic of the unseeable typical of astronomy, the more Rosenroths foray into
veridical representation seems the exception that proves the rule.
Heads indeed recur in ilanot diagrams, including elsewhere in the materials
quite faithfully copied for inclusion by Rosenroth. With the exception of the
Hammerschlag ilan and the much later Shantuch ilanot, the heads of Jewish ilanot
are, however, crudely if suggestively geometrical rather than figurative. In some
sense the geometrical suggestion may even be viewed as an apt representation of
the underlying presumption of identity between cosmic and anatomical structures.46

Notes
1. The Catholic resonances of Lurianism have also been suggested by early modernists beginning with David Ruderman. See David B. Ruderman, Hope against Hope: Jewish and Christian
Messianic Expectations in the Late Middle Ages, in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance
and Baroque Italy, ed. D. B. Ruderman (New York, 1992), 299323. The most comprehensive attempt
to read Lurianism in light of European early modern cultural history is Roni Weinstein, Kabbalah
and Jewish Modernity (Tel Aviv, 2011). For earlier, ahistorical, but nevertheless relevant readings of
this corpus, see Joseph Dan, Kabbalat ha-Ari: Between Myth and Science, in Mehkere Yerushalayim
be-mahshevet Yisrael 10, ed. R. Elior, and Y. Liebes (Jerusalem, 1992): 936; and in the same volume,
Karl E. Grzinger, Principles and Aims in Lurianic Cosmology (Hebrew), 3746.
2. Unlike the sciences that later replaced it, natural philosophy was unified by its search for a
better understanding of Godof divine creation (in natural historical disciplines) and divine laws
(in the mathematized disciplines). See Ann Blair, Natural Philosophy, in The Cambridge History of
Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. K. Park, and L. Daston (Cambridge, 2006), 403.
3. See Ronit Meroz, Geula be-Torat ha-Ari (Jerusalem, 1988); Joseph Avivi, Binyan Ariel
(Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1987). For a comprehensive attempt to recover Lurias own thought amidst a
bibliographical thicket, see Avivis Kabalat ha-Ari, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 2008).
4. Ronit Meroz, Faithful Transmission versus Innovation: Luria and His Disciples, in Gershom
Scholems Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 50 Years After: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference
on the History of Jewish Mysticism, ed. P. Schfer and J. Dan (Tbingen, 1993), 25774.
5. For a consideration of the constructivist approach to the history of science, see Jan Golinski,
Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge, 1998).
6. Allison P. Coudert, A Cambridge Platonists Kabbalist Nightmare, Journal of the History of
Ideas 35 (1975): 63352.
7. See especially Allison P. Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Dordrect, 1995); Coudert, The

Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution121

Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury Van Helmot, 1614
1698 (Leiden, 1999).
8. It should be noted that Couderts reading of Scholem-on-Luria is somewhat idiosyncratic.
Couderts later work includes references to the revisionist work of Moshe Idel. Idels revisionism
does not seem to have had a significant impact on Couderts perception of Lurianism, however.
9. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1961), 1516.
10. Yehuda Liebes, Myth vs. Symbol in the Zohar and in Lurianic Kabbalah, in Essential Papers
on Kabbalah, ed. L. Fine (New York, 1995), 21242.
11. Of course even the kabbalistic works that seem minimally integrated with classical Judaism
were written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and, in that sense, are indelibly Jewish. So we find in a 1688
letter from Leibniz to Gerhardt Molanus (16331722), the Cabala of the Jews is a certain kind
of more lofty metaphysic, which, diverted of its covering of words, reveals certain very splendid
matters. Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, 48. In another letter, Leibniz refers to Kabbala denudata
as a book on the kabbalistic science of the Jews, ibid., 55. Although Coudert argues that Leibniz
rationalizes the mythology of the Kabbalah, my observations here, building upon Leibnizs
very different understanding of mythology vis-a-vis Lurianism, would suggest that Leibnizs task
would not have been as difficult as Coudert imagined. For her assertion, see ibid., 59. Cf. p. 88
regarding Leibnizs rationalization of metaphors used by van Helmont. On John Dees nearly
asemitic writings on Kabbalah, see Karen De Len-Jones, John Dee and the Kabbalah, in John
Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought, ed. S. Clucas (Dordrecht, 2006), 14358.
12. Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, trans. S. Clucas,
(Chicago, 2000). 38.
13. Weinstein, Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity.
14. See, for example, David B. Ruderman, Judaism to 1700, in The History of Science and
Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, ed. G. B. Ferngren, et al. (New York, 2000), 240.
15. Unfortunately no complete manuscript is extant of this work. The published version and
most manuscripts preserve only the first section.
16. See, e.g., MS Benayahu 132 (F72312); New YorkM. Lehmann 8 (F23183); MoscowRussian
State Library, MS Guenzburg 251 (F27955). Dr. Eliezer Baumgarten brought to my attention another interesting juxtaposition of astronomical and kabbalistic discussions and diagrams in Abraham
Azulais h
esed le-Avraham (Amsterdam, 1685), 9b-11b, 28b-29b.
17. h
ayim Vital, Sefer ha-peulot (Modiin Illit, 2009).
18. See, e.g., Richard H. Popkin, The Religious Background of Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy, Journal of the History of Philosophy 25.1 (1987): 3550. On the Book of Nature, see Allen
G. Debus and Michael T. Walton, eds., Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific
Revolution (Kirksville, Mo., 1998).
19. My emphasis in the quote. James Franklin, Diagrammatic Reasoning and Modelling in the
Imagination: The Secret Weapons of the Scientific Revolution, in 1543 and All That: Image and Word,
Change and Continuity in the Proto-Scientific Revolution, ed. G. Freeland and A. Corones (Dordrecht,
2000). 55. The proliferation of diagrams in medieval scientific literature probably owes something
to Roger Bacons (c.121494) claim that through figures in geometry we learn per experientiam
[through experience]. John Emery Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New
York, 1984), 113.
20. Richard W. Serjeantson, Proof and Persuasion, in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3
(Cambridge, 2006). 168.
21. Franklin, Diagrammatic Reasoning and Modelling, 75. Cf. Amos Funkenstein, Theology
and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 6.
22. On John Dees equation of Pythagoreanism and Kabbalah, see De Len-Jones, John Dee
and the Kabbalah.

122J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

23. Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, 12.
24. See, e.g., James E. Force, and Richard Henry Popkin, Newton and Religion: Context, Nature,
and Influence (Dordrecht, 1999); Popkin, Spinoza, Neoplatonist Kabbalist? in Neoplatonism and
Jewish Thought, ed. L. E. Goodman (Albany, N.Y., 1992), 387409. The passage is cited in Weinstein,
Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity, 6364.
25. On the eros of the Zohar, see Yehuda Liebes, Zohar and Eros (Hebrew), Alpayim 9 (1994):
67119. For the comparison, see Liebes, Myth vs. Symbol.
26. In his pioneering work on visual Kabbalah, Giulio Busi evinces keen awareness of the
significance of astronomical (and astrological) illustration for an understanding of the history of
kabbalistic diagrams. Although Busis work deals chiefly with pre-Lurianic materials, in treating
Lurianism he incisively notes Il sistema teosofico elaborato da Vital ha il respiro di unambiziosa
astronomia mistica e, in effetti, le sue sequenze di figure luminose e di sefirot possono essere viste
come costellazioni del cosmo intelligibile. See Giulio Busi, Qabbalah visiva (Torino, 2005). 397.
On earlier connections between astronomy and kabbalistic thought and diagrams, see also 7274,
95, 102103, 13336, 19596 (Moon=Malkhut!). The passage here cited is adduced in Weinstein,
Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity, 6364.
27. See Martin Kemp, Vision and Visualisation in the Illustration of Anatomy and Astronomy
From Leonardo to Galileo, in 1543 and All That, 1751.
28. Ibid., 1920.
29. For a brief survey of astronomical iconography, see Sabine Krifka, Zur Ikonographie der
Astronomie, in Erkenntnis, Erfindung, Konstruktion: Studien zur Bildgeschichte von Naturwissenschaften
und Technik vom 16. zum 19. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Hollnder (Berlin, 2000), 40948.
30. Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, 37. For a study of Lulls arbor elementalis in terms of sacred
geometry, see Charles Lohr, Mathematics and the Divine: Ramon Lull, in Mathematics and the
Divine: A Historical Study, ed. L. Bergmans and T. Koetsier (Amsterdam, 2005), 21328.
31. See the examples in John Emery Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 159.
Cf. Jewish Theological Seminary MS S431 for an example of a kabbalistic diagram of infinity that,
at least in external appearances, is strikingly similar. The inferential mathematical annotation of
the Latin diagram from Richard Swinesheads Liber calculationum has no parallel in the Hebrew
manuscript.
32. The difference of opinion with regard to the channels degree of penetration is reflected
in different graphical representations in various manuscripts. In this context I might note that the
fascinating question of the hermeneutical status of these visual materials is the subject of another
essay currently in preparation.
33. The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem MS Heb. 287991, 10a.
34. For online access to this Ilan, go to: http://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/search?oclcno=
643070081 (accessed August 8, 2013).
35. See, e.g., Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966); Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery
of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, trans. J. Parzen (Toronto,
2001); Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 4001200
(Cambridge, 2000).
36. The geometrical regularities of Keplerian diagrams were central to Keplers attempt to develop exact scientific representations of the motions of the universe. See Raz Chen-Morris, From
Emblems to Diagrams: Keplers New Pictorial Language of Scientific Representation, Renaissance
Quarterly 62.1 (2009): 13470.
37. See Judith Veronica Field, Keplers Geometrical Cosmology (Chicago, 1988).
38. Judith Weiss was kind enough to bring this to my attention.
39. Edward L. Goldberg, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis
(Toronto, 2011).

Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution123

40. See Anthony Grafton, and Joanna Weinberg, I have always loved the Holy Tongue: Isaac
Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship, (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), 8386.
41. Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century, xv. Coudert continues by arguing
that within Kabbala denudata one can find the basis for the faith in science, belief in progress,
and commitment to religious toleration characteristic of the best aspects of western culture, xv.
Although in this essay I am specifically engaging with Couderts thesis, a significant body of scholarship on Kabbala denudata has emerged in recent years. See, e.g., Andreas B. Kilcher, Die Kabbala
Denudata in Text und Kontext, in Die Kabbala Denudata: Text und Kontext: Akten der 15. Tagung der
Christian Knorr von Rosenroth-Gesellschaft, Morgen-Glantz (Bern, 2006), 914. In the same volume
see also Andreas B. Kilcher, Verhllung und Enthllung des Geheimnisses: Die Kabbala Denudata
im Okkultismus der Moderne, 34383; Yossef Schwartz, Kabbala als Atheismus: Die Kabbala
Denudata und die religisen Krise des 17. Jahrhunderts, Morgen-Glantz: Zeitschrift der Christian
Knorr von Rosenroth-Gesellschaft 16 (2006): 25984.
42. I am grateful to Yossef Schwartz for encouraging me to make the trip to Wolfenbttel, and
to Sven Limbeck of the Herzog August Bibliothek for his invaluable assistance. The note, MS 157.1
Extrav. 42 R & V, may be viewed at http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?dir=mss/1571-extrav (accessed
August 8, 2013).
43. Rosemarie Zeller, Der Paratext der Kabbala Denudata. Die Vermittlung von jdischer und
christlicher Weisheit, Morgen-Glantz 7 (1997): 14169.
44. Steffen Siegel, Kosmos und Kopf: die Sichtbarkeit des Weltbildes, in Die Welt als Bild:
Interdisziplinre Beitrge zur Visualitt von Weltbildern, ed. C. Markschies und J. Zachhuber (Berlin,
2008), 11342.
45. The sixteen fold-out diagram plates published by Rosenroth present some five distinct
ilanot, each with its own provenance. As this article goes to press, I am exploring the hypothesis
that figures 812, including the representational head, were conceived by Rosenroth himself
and subsequently copied by Jews. I hope to publish a more thorough treatment of the Rosenroth
diagram collection in the near future.
46. Van Helmonts Alphabet of Nature is also worth considering in this context, asserting as it
does an identity between the shapes of the Hebrew letters, the anatomy of the human head, and
the building blocks of the universe. See Allison Coudert and Taylor Corse, eds., The Alphabet of
Nature (Leiden, 2007).