What is it about?
Jacob Ẓemaḥ (ca. 1578–1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha—today Viana do Castelo, a town in northwest Portugal that had a Jewish community and quarter until 1496. He fled Portugal in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica (Thessaloniki). _x000D_ Ẓemaḥ was responsible for the consolidation of the Lurianic literary corpus in the second third of the seventeenth century. His contribution, I argue, should be situated in the broader context of a scholarly “curriculum vitae” that began decades before his flight from Portugal, as Ẓemaḥ embraced Jewish life as a humanist. Coupled with his natural gifts and genius, Ẓemaḥ’s humanist education served him remarkably well in his new life. The interesting question is therefore not “how might he have learned Torah in Portugal” but “how did his Portuguese educational background affect—indeed, effect may be the more apt term—his Jewish scholarship?” The latter question also has the distinct advantage of being answerable: the imprint of Ẓemaḥ’s humanist education is visible on nearly every page of his oeuvre. Ẓemaḥ’s singular impact on the history of Kabbalah is, more than anything, the result of his scholarly habitus. The ethos he internalized as one who had been educated in the bastions of late Portuguese humanism guided his approach to the Lurianic corpus, as his remarkable textual restorations, reconstructions, and redactions all testify.
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Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Semah/Ẓemaḥ was one of the most important kabbalists of the seventeenth century and a key consolidator of the Lurianic canon (based on the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria (d.1572, Safed). Since the 1950s, scholars have attempted to understand how a man who lived in Portugal as a Catholic until his 30s was able to become one of the leading rabbis of his age not long after his return to the Jewish world. This article explains how the humanist training he received in Portugal is actually the best explanation of his subsequent successful career.
Perspectives
I wrote this article in the process of trying to understand Ẓemaḥ's central role in the renewal of the classical kabbalistic genre of "ilanot" (kabbalistic trees) in the mid-17th century. From appreciating the highly visual nature of his kabbalistic thought/thinking, I went on to explore the roots of his editorial practices and noticed also the prominence of visual materials in the (non-Jewish) literature he discusses in one of his major works. Much of this material serves to introduce my treatment of his visual Kabbalah in my forthcoming book, The Kabbalistic Tree (Penn State University Press, 2022).
Josef Chajes
University of Haifa
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Jacob Ṣemaḥ, Humanist, European Journal of Jewish Studies, November 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/1872471x-bja10032.
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