HMANE (formerly the Semitic Museum) room 201, 6 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138
“Seeing the Kabbalah Through Its Trees: New Perspectives of The Kabbalistic Tree“
J. H. Chajes, Wolfson Professor of Jewish Religious Thought, University of Haifa
Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Early Modern Workshop, and the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminars in the History of the Book and Diagrams Across Disciplines
Professor Chajes will introduce the genre of “ilanot” (trees), the striking parchment rolls devoted to visualizations of kabbalistic lore that have been created and used by kabbalists since the fourteenth century for study and contemplation. Though nearly unknown today, these divinity maps were made wherever there were kabbalists throughout the Jewish world. Each has a unique story; individually and collectively they offer new perspectives on the ways in which Jews visualized knowledge, assimilated diverse traditions, and interacted with contemporary cultures. Chajes’s The Kabbalistic Tree(PSUP, 2022) is the first ever study of this practical expression of Kabbalah, about which he is the pre-eminent authority
J. H. (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is the Sir Isaac Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Chajes has been visiting Erasmus Professor at Queen Mary University London, a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University Frankfurt, and a three-time fellow at the KatzCenter for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Chajes directs the “Ilanot Project”—an ambitious and unprecedented attempt to research kabbalistic cosmological diagrams. Chajes’s pioneering work has been awarded four Israel Science Foundation (ISF) research grants, the Friedenberg Prize for the outstanding ISF-funded project in the humanities, and two Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony/Volkswagen Foundation grants to develop the digital humanities project “Maps of God-Building a Portal to Visual Kabbalah.” Chajes’s recent book is The Kabbalistic Tree (PSUP 2022).