The Safed Genizah: Buried Manuscripts and Kabbalistic Philology in Seventeenth-Century Palestine

Abstract

Many Jewish communities around the world have maintained a special site, known as a genizah, for discarding written materials. This article focuses on the genizah of the town of Safed in the Galilee. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Safed Genizah preserved Hebrew manuscripts written by Ḥayyim Vital (d. 1620), foremost student of the influential kabbalist Yitsḥaḳ Luria (d. 1572). These manuscripts were excavated and edited in the mid-seventeenth century and became authoritative texts in the history of Jewish esotericism. My study describes Vital’s burial of his manuscripts and the editorial efforts of the Jewish scholars who followed him, particularly Avraham Azulai (d. 1643) in Hebron and Ya‘akov Tsemaḥ (d. 1666) and his fellowship in Jerusalem. Through analysis of their rhetoric and scribal practices, I explore the ethical, philological, and material aspects of this chapter in the pre-history of Genizah research.