The tree of God’s mysteries

The Jewish Kabbalah tradition offers a way of

understanding God in the world—one that has
profoundly influenced Christianity.
by Mordechai Beck in the January 2024 issue
Published on November 29, 2023
Tree of Holiness (detail), Eastern Europe, ca. 1700 (from the Klau Scrolls collection,
courtesy of Hebrew Union College Library, Cincinnati, via Penn State University
Press)
The patriarch Abraham not only introduced monotheism but also proposed the
concept of an invisible deity. Abraham’s God was beyond anything that the ancient
world could imagine: this God could not be bribed nor inveigled to do something
against God’s will. This God was both all powerful and totally humble. How, then,
was an individual supposed to relate to God? How could humanity visualize the
invisible?

The Jewish tradition had a further problem. One of the Ten Commandments forbids
making a graven image. Though aimed mainly at the idolatrous practice of creating
objects of worship, the commandment was taken more generally as a ban on any
visual expression of the Divine. All suggestions of what constituted the Divine had to
be verbalized, which is what the tradition of the oral law—or Torah shel b’al Peh, as
opposed to the written law, Torah shel bichtav—does in spades.

Yet even this did not satisfy everyone, and in the 12th and 13th centuries, a new
concept took hold in the Jewish rabbinical tradition: Kabbalah. The word literally
means “receiving,” indicating that Kabbalah was an ongoing tradition received by
the rabbinic elite, which in turn could share it with a select few acolytes. Kabbalah
arose as an attempt to define the indefinable–the Ein Sof, the unending, or infinite,
presence of God. God’s immanence could be intuited through sefirot. This Hebrew
word contains a number of associations, including story, a thing written, a sapphire,
and also sphere. In kabbalistic circles, these sefirot were graphically depicted as fruit
hanging on a tree.

Kabbalah offered the graphic representation of a tree as a way of understanding the

Divine in the world. The kabbalistic tree, ilan sefirot, is the subject of a new study by
J. H. Chajes, a professor of Jewish thought at the University of Haifa. At 440 pages,
The Kabbalistic Tree is not an easy read, but it is a fascinating, in-depth look at this
unique dimension of Jewish thought—including its profound overlap with medieval
and Renaissance Christianity. Chajes’s book is bound to become a classic, not just
because it is the first and most comprehensive survey of the history and
development of kabbalistic trees but also because its attention to detail, both
graphic and written, makes it an invaluable tool for further research and discoveries
in this often neglected area of Jewish thought.

In Kabbalah, the different fruits of the sefirotic tree are the visible aspects of the
Divine, while the tree’s underground roots represent the hidden aspect of God, the
Ein Sof. The aim of the tree was not only to distinguish the visible from that which
was not visible but to share the experience of the Divine. You can’t see God in the
sefirotic tree, but you can experience God’s presence.

It took some time for this ilan, or tree, to take its ultimate shape, consisting of ten
linked circles—the sefirot—arranged vertically from the top of the tree. Through
each sefira God’s attributes are revealed. Beginning from the top of the tree, they
are keter (crown) or chochma (wisdom), bina (understanding or explication), da’at
(applied knowledge), chesed (love or compassion): gevurah (strength or power),
tiferet (beauty), Nezach (Endurance), Hod (Majesty), Yesod (foundation), and
Malchiut (majesty).

The “trees of Kabbalah,” as the drawings came to be known, were often elaborations
on the basic design of the sefirotic tree, with extensive commentary in writing
explaining the sefirot and the relations between them. The diagrammatic trees often
contained circles into which a particular emanation appeared (loving kindness, strict
justice, beauty), making the sefirot distinct from one another even though they were
ultimately connected. Some had a dark patch over the whole or a part of the circle,
indicating that this was the territory of Ein Sof, the essence of God, into which it was
impossible for mortal man to enter.

“These ten sefirot were considered the key to unlock the most profound secrets in
nature and scriptures,” writes Chajes. The kabbalists thought of themselves as men
of science “engaged in the pursuit of hokhmat ha-nistar, the occult science,” a
pursuit “long validated by Europe’s leading scientists, as the sustained attention of
European savants from Marsilio Ficino to Isaac Newton to this ‘divine science’ amply
demonstrates.” Borrowing language from science—as even the early kabbalists
did—he writes, “The sefirot tree is the double helix of Kabbalah.”

Chajes emphasizes the overlapping of Jewish and Christian interests in the sciences
and in the influence of the ilan sefirot on Christian thought throughout history. He
notes that Oration on the Dignity of Man—Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “manifesto
of the Renaissance” from 1486—“is suffused with Kabbalah.” Pico della Mirandola
was one of the Christian intellectuals of the era who took great interest in the
subject, studying it privately with rabbis and engaging the services of Jewish
converts to Christianity to gather, translate, and teach kabbalistic sources.
Moreover, according to Chajes, “Renaissance ilanot (trees) . . . are the products of
Jews (and Christians) who shared a common conviction that the Kabbalah was the
most ancient and sublime expression of philosophical and magical esotericism.”

Chajes notes that in Renaissance Italy, non-Jewish elites—not just wealthy

Jews—were eager to acquire kabbalistic trees. He cites a letter from a Florentine Jew
named Benedetto Blanis to his patron Don Giovanni de’ Medici, which likely refers to
a kabbalistic tree known as the Magnificent Parchment:

I am delighted to have so important a “Tree of Kabbalah” here in Florence

brought from Lippilano at my request. I am having it copied on vellum with
great diligence, so it will not be inferior to the original in any way but even
better. I hope that this Tree will please Your Most Illustrious Excellency and
that we will be able to enjoy it together.

“Blanis understood the value of the Magnificent Parchment,” writes Chajes, “even to
a Christian of Don Giovanni’s stature.”

But not every connection between Jews and Christians was so friendly. The story of
Jacob Zemach (1578–1667) is a case in point. Brought up in Portugal, Zemach was
both a physician and a rabbi who had absorbed much in the way of humanist
education. It is possible that he was a converso—forcibly converted during the
Portuguese Inquisition—and was one of the many conversos students and faculty
when he studied at a Portuguese university. At one point he fled Portugal for the
land of Israel, where he wrote, among other tracts, Tiferet Adam (The Beauty of
Adam). Chajes writes that this was “the only work to mention gentile authors and
works, even if his references are disparaging.” He goes on:

Zemach spoke as one whose familiarity with gentile corpora had bred
ambivalence if not contempt. . . . He used the great books of the non-
Jewish humanists to demonstrate that the origins of esoteric knowledge
are prophetic and therefore known exclusively to the Jews. Whatever true
secrets [these books] hold are merely the vestigial remains of our own, he
writes, invariably intermingled with spurious accretions. Zemach had
become a missionary to his fellow conversos. His mission, however, was to
lead them away from the literature that he and they knew well, and could
not but admire, to the fuller truth of the Torah. By highlighting the gentile
appropriations of Jewish secrets, Zemach simultaneously validated their
kernel of truth and their dependence on the authentic uncorrupted
 tradition of the Jews.

Despite all his hesitations, Zemach related positively to Italian philosopher Giordano
Bruno’s On the Shadows of Ideas. He felt that Bruno had rediscovered the truth that
had been lost to the Jewish people. Bruno’s martyrdom in Rome in 1600 may well
have consolidated Zemach’s conviction that On the Shadows of Ideas was, at the
very least, a shadow of the Torah.

In the Jewish world, the development of Kabbalah went through a major change with
Isaac Luria, the Ari (Lion) of Safed (1534–1572), a rabbi who taught a far more
complex system of sefirot. His teachings became the new standard of the
dissemination of Kabbalah, which brought a new wave of kabbalistic trees. At this
point, the work of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689), a Lutheran, also
became significant for Jews. “He pursued his studies without the Christological
readings and conversionist agendas of earlier generations of Christian kabbalists,”
writes Chajes. “His book Kabbalah Denudata (The Kabbalah Unveiled) provided
Christians with the tools and the texts Knorr thought necessary to embark on the
study of Jewish Kabbalah.”

Included in the book are some of the kabbalistic trees based on Luria’s new
Kabbalah, one of which was designed by Knorr himself. “It would have no place in
this present book,” Chajes explains, “had it not subsequently been appropriated by
Jewish kabbalists for use as an opening component in the modular ilanot (trees)
explored below.” In other words, Jewish kabbalists found the Christian Knorr model
relevant for their own purposes.

Knorr was not the only 17th-century Christian to be drawn into the Jewish sphere.
Chajes relates that “two Jewish doctors and teachers of Hebrew presented Frederick
William—the ‘great elector’ known for his tolerance of Catholics and Jews despite his
strict Calvinist beliefs—with their ilan.” The gift was meant to signal that the
“newcomers had arrived as representatives of a people and culture with something
to offer the local community of scholars.”

The first volume of Knorr’s Kabbalah Denudata ends with the triumph of the
Messiah, quoting Romans 16:27, which would have assured Knorr’s critics that he
was a pious Christian. Nevertheless, Chajes speculates that hidden in the ellipse in
which he quotes Isaiah 25:8 (“The sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all
faces and will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth”) is the implicit
subtext of Knorr’s entire project: the end of the reproach of the Jews. The choice of a
verse that highlights the end of this universal reproach as constitutive of the
messianic era could not have been accidental. It was the thoughtful, if slightly
veiled, statement of a scholar at once occultist and antiquarian, enlightened and
messianic.

Hebrew scholar Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860) saw a copy of Kabbalah Denudata
for sale at a local fair in Berdychiv in Eastern Europe. It was printed in both Aramaic
and Latin, complete with the five Kabbalah trees, including the one designed by
Knorr himself, according to his understanding of Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalah. In this way,
the Jews of early 18th-century Eastern Europe discovered Knorr’s work. Moreover,
Knorr aimed to provide learned Christians with the keys to this ancient wisdom, keys
that dangle from the wrist of Lady Wisdom on the frontispiece engraving.

Chajes has much more to say on the development of kabbalistic trees in his
exhaustive study, including the proliferation of the trees in Jewish culture. He points
to miniature trees used as amulets and to an Israeli political party that used the
image of a sefirotic tree on its election flyers. He also references modern artists’ own
colorful interpretation of these trees. The image has become familiar in the culture,
but it is, nonetheless, not well understood. As the late Jerusalem rabbi Chaim Lifshitz
observed: “When elevated ideas are brought down to the street level, they lose their
meaning.” Many rabbinic authorities once thought of these trees as dangerous—and
certainly not for the general public. Instead, they believed the trees should be
reserved for an elite group of kabbalists to study and contemplate. But the Hasidic
movement of the 17th century onward utilized these trees as a way of bringing
esoteric concepts closer to their mass following, utilizing these images to enhance
their own joyous forms of worship.