Most students of kabbalistic literature find themselves “visualizing” its cosmogonic and cosmological teachings. The iconic Kabbalstic “Tree of Life” is certainly the best known kabbalistic symbol, and is often the first thing conveyed to those being exposed for the first time to this lore. What few realize is that complex graphical scrolls have been a genre of kabbalistic literature in their own right since the Renaissance, and that from the late seventeenth century such scrolls became an indispensable tool to Lurianic kabbalists.  At once maps, mandalas, and memory palaces, these ilanot provided kabbalists with diagrammatic representations of their structured image of God. Scrolling an ilan parchment in contemplative study, the kabbalist participated mimetically in tikkun, the development and perfection of Divinity. Join us as we explore when, where, and why Jews began to visualize and to draw the mystical shape of the Divine as a Porphyrian tree.

J. H. (Yossi) Chajes, author of the forthcoming The Kabbalistic Tree, is Sir Isaac Wolfson Full Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. His research interests include Kabbalah, early modern Jewish egodocuments, women’s religiosity, the history of Jewish attitudes toward magic, and the visualization of knowledge. He directs the Ilanot Project, the pioneering research program devoted to kabbalistic visual materials and to the genre of kabbalistic trees in particular. Chajes’s research is funded by generous grants from the Volkswagon Foundation and the Israel Science Foundation. He has been awarded Fulbright, Rothschild, Wexner, Hartman, and Katz Center fellowships, and, in addition, has conducted research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at Goethe University, and at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Winner of the 2015 Jewish Book Award in Visual Arts for Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts, Marc Michael Epstein is the product of a mixed marriage between the scions of Slonimer and Lubavitcher Hassidim and Romanian socialists, and grew up, rather confused, but happy, in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently Professor of Religion at Vassar College, where he has been teaching since 1992, and was the first Director of Jewish Studies.  At Vassar, he teaches courses on medieval Christianity, religion, arts and politics, and Jewish texts and sources. He is a graduate of Oberlin College, received the PhD at Yale University, and did much of his graduate research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has written numerous articles and three books on various topics in visual and material culture produced by, for, and about Jews.  His book, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (Yale, 2011) was selected by the London Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 2011. He is the Director of Beit Venezia, the home for International Jewish Studies in Venice, Italy.

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