On Practical Uses of Ten Sefirot: Material Readings in an Early Modern Kabbalistic Collectaneum (MS Michael 473)

Abstract

By the end of the sixteenth century, textual manifestations of kabbalah—a variety of Jewish mysticism that first emerged in medieval Provence and Catalonia—achieved the status of elite but authoritative lore in Eastern and Central Europe, even if at times they stirred religious opposition. At the same time, and especially in the seventeenth century, the so-called practical kabbalah, associated with magic and a talismanic approach to religious ritual, gained substantial popularity among Ashkenazi (i.e., Eastern and Central European) Jews. This study centers on a multiple-text and composite codex, Oxford-Bodleian MS Michael 473, and throws into relief the dynamics of circulation of various kabbalistic traditions in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. By zooming in on a single codex, this article foregrounds the hermeneutic potential of contextual reading of texts in complex manuscripts and of interpreting material choices taken by their cocreators. It does so with a methodological agenda that goes beyond tracing of authorial genealogies, and beyond the sociology of texts and their producers, toward exploring the interpretive relations of literary and material form in early modern handwritten kabbalistic texts. The article showcases a single textual unit, Qabbalat ‘Eser Sefirot, that MS Michael 473 contains, in order to focus on the position of practical kabbalistic texts and practices within the spectrum of kabbalistic traditions of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, ushered in by the contemporary modes of reading and transcription of texts.