The Afterlife of a Kabbalistic Manuscript: Reconstructing a Lost Anthology

This lecture examines a set of reused Hebrew manuscript fragments discovered in the State archive of Pesaro and Urbino, Italy.  These fragments have been identified as the remains of a kabbalistic book which would have contained a collection of pieces of writing by various authors. These manuscripts were written by a single scribe of Italian origin, whose non-square script can be dated to the fifteenth century. After outlining the historical conditions that most likely shaped both the circulation and the subsequent dismemberment and reuse of this manuscript in the early modern period, the lecture focuses on examining the book’s original structure, including its scribal and visual features, including the diagrams that once accompanied the texts. Through close analysis of these elements, it recovers key features of the lost anthology and examines its position compared with similar contemporary works produced in Italy.

Emma Abate is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna. She is a specialist in Hebrew manuscripts, and her research focuses on the study of Jewish magical and kabbalistic manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Image: A classic Sefirot tree from the Kabbalistic manuscript Sha’arei Ora shel R. Yosef Gikatilla