Most students of kabbalistic literature find themselves "visualizing" its cosmogonic and cosmological teachings. The iconic "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. Chajes will introduce this little-known genre and explain the origins and functions of these amazing kabbalistic artifacts.
J. H. (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is Sir Isaac Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. A former recipient of Fulbright, Rothchild, Wexner, and Hartman Fellowships, Chajes has also been a visiting professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a three-time fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and a fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University Frankfurt. He sits on the Executive Board of the World Union of Jewish Studies, representing the fields of rabbinics and Jewish thought.
Chajes’s research focuses on the intersection of Kabbalah, magic, and science in Jewish cultural history. He has written on spirit possession and exorcism, egodocuments, women’s religiosity, Jewish attitudes towards magic, and, most recently, on the visualization of knowledge. He co-edited The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2020). Chajes’s first book, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (2003) was listed by the Wall Street Journal as among the top five books ever written on spirit possession, alongside Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun. Chajes’s foundational book, The Kabbalistic Tree, was published in November 2022 by Penn State University Press and has been lauded as a “monumental achievement that will be valuable to scholars and general readers interested in Judaism, religion, and art history.” In November 2023, The Kabbalistic Tree was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize of the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought. It is also a 2024 National Jewish Book Award finalist.
For the past decade, Chajes has directed the Ilanot Project, an ambitious and unprecedented attempt to research the history of kabbalistic diagrams and the ilanot genre in particular. Chajes’s pioneering work has been awarded five consecutive Israel Science Foundation personal research grants, three ISF research seminar grants, an ISF book subvention award, and the 2014 Friedenberg Prize for the outstanding ISF-funded project in the humanities. Chajes has been awarded two consecutive grants by the German Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony/Volkswagen Foundation to partner with the digital humanities lab at the University of Göttingen to build a platform for the research and presentation of critical editions of ilanot online: Maps of God.
A considerable number of publications relating to the Ilanot Project have recently been published and many more are forthcoming. Please follow the project via its homepage or on Facebook. Many of Chajes’s publications may be found at https://haifa.academia.edu/JHChajes
