The Kabbalistic Tree by J. H. Chajes (review)

Reviewed by: The Kabbalistic Tree by J. H. Chajes Avraham O. Kelman J. H. Chajes. The Kabbalistic Tree. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. 440 pp. Over the past two decades, scholars have become increasingly interested in thinking about religion as an embodied phenomenon rather than as a purely intellectual one. That scholars of Kabbalah have taken part in this trend is evident by perusing the titles of recent books on Jewish mysticism, many of which allude to bodily practices such as eating, sexuality, and asceticism. Despite the field's struggle to surface an embodied theoretical language, however, it has not entirely moved past its textual lens. Chajes's wonderful new book, dedicated to the history of visual representations of kabbalistic theosophy, represents an important effort to push forward this embodied and material turn. It is one of the fruits of Chajes's longtime collaboration with a group of scholars (Menachem Kallus, Eliezer Baumgarten, Uri Safrai, and Hanna Gentili) who worked together on a project based at Haifa University. This volume demonstrates, from beginning to end, that Kabbalah is more than theosophy; it includes the cultivation of ways of gazing at objects, meditative imagery techniques, and even drawing images. Kabbalistic manuscripts and books, we come to realize, did not only represent or convey knowledge, but were also used as amulets, aids for contemplative practices, and ritual objects. ʾIlan (pl. ʾilanot), or "tree," refers in the kabbalistic context to "a cosmological iconotext inscribed on parchment," that most often was designed as an arboreal schema (1). Kabbalists have been creating diagrams since at least the late thirteenth century, and are still doing so today. Chajes's The Kabbalistic Tree surveys the ʾilanot genre, dealing with the neglect of this important genre in previous scholarship. The book takes seriously its role as a corrective, and much of it is devoted to presenting plenty of beautiful pictures of various ʾilanot, describing their meaning, and analyzing them. However, Chajes efficiently oscillates between these high-resolution discussions and the bigger picture, as it were, categorizing the ʾilanot into helpful subgenres, sorting them into "manuscripts families," and mapping prominent artistic, theosophical, and rhetorical trends apparent in them. Chajes starts off with the early roots of the genre in the late thirteenth century, and demonstrates how visual representations are inseparable from kabbalistic theosophy from the very beginning. He then shows how the genre evolved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and its deep connection to literary works that systematized Kabbalah. He especially elaborates on Italian ʾilanot and on how they expressed humanistic tendencies. Three out of the book's seven chapters deal with Lurianic ʾilanot, that is, diagrams that represent the kabbalistic teachings of the great sixteenth-century Safedian kabbalist Isaac Luria and his students. Lurianic cosmology is extremely complicated and rich, and crafting ʾilanot that will give account to this system deserved much creativity and talent. Two additional chapters are dedicated to ʾilanot that functioned as magical amulets, and to ʾilanot in print. In his conclusion, Chajes also surveys some ʾilanot produced by contemporary kabbalists and artists. What are we to make of the semiotics of these ʾilanot? Do they represent God's body? If so, how should we reconcile this with the biblical prohibition of End Page 225 visually representing the Divine? Chajes does not provide any definitive answer to this question, and for a good reason: different ʾilanot presume—and advance—various theological assumptions. Only in rare cases do we find detailed anthropomorphic images (pp. 149–52, 225–40), but most Jewish ʾilanot (as opposed to those drawn by Christians, see p. 173) were rather schematic and diagrammatic and kept a safe distance from the perils of anthropomorphism. Often, ʾilanot are also accompanied by apologetic declarations that clarify to observers that what they see is not exactly a picture of God. These preliminary inquiries should be supplemented by future studies exploring the semiotic and epistemological dimensions of ʾilanot more thoroughly. What were observers or practitioners meant to do with the ʾilanot? This is another question that Chajes addresses throughout the book, and here again, the answer must take into account the diversity of phenomena. An ʾilan may have been crafted for various reasons, and...