J H Chajes
Biographic Data
| ID | 1651070 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J H Chajes |
| GIVEN NAMES | J H |
| FAMILY NAME | Chajes |
| SIGNATURE | CHAJES J H |
| AFFILIATIONS | 1Yale University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Jacob Ṣemaḥ, Humanist
Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578–1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha in northwest Portugal. He fled the country in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica. Ṣemaḥ 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 v…
Re-envisioning the Evil Eye: Magic, Optical Theory, and Modern Supernaturalism in Jewish Thought
This essay is a case study in the modern emergence of the “supernatural.” I argue that pre-modern understandings of the evil eye were predominantly naturalistic, based on extramissionist, haptic concepts of vision. The need to believe in the evil eye first arises when sight becomes universally understood as the result of light entering rather than emerging from the eyes. In the Jewish context, rabbis then begin to develop alternative explanations…
Spheres, Sefirot , and the Imaginal Astronomical Discourse of Classical Kabbalah
The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging of the divine as ten hypostatic sefirot that structure the Godhead and generate the cosmos. Since Gershom Scholem, the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, declared the term sefirah (sg.) as deriving from “sapphire”—pointedly rejecting its connection to the Greek σφαῖρα—scholars have paid scant attention to the profound indebtedness of the…
Practical Kabbalah: Guest Editors’ Introduction
Kabbalah Practices / Practical Kabbalah: The Magic of Kabbalistic Trees
Kabbalistic trees— ilanot , in Hebrew—are not merely arboreal diagrams illustrating the sefirot and other symbols associated with them. By the fifteenth century, the term ilan (singular) referred to a genre of kabbalistic creativity that fused this schema with a specific medium: an ilan was a diagram of the sefirot inscribed on a parchment sheet or rotulus. Ilanot had a variety of functions, from meditative to mnemonic. The present essay isolates…
Ansky's Dybbuk as Heretical Midrash
This paper suggests that The Dybbuk, by S. Ansky (1863-1920) may be read as a modern retelling of the ancient myth of fallen angels, in which heavenly beings descend to earth only to be seduced by it. It also shows that most of the mythic elements in the play can be attributed to Ansky, rather than his translator, H. N. Bialik. Ansky thus steers a modernist course that differs meaningfully from those charted by some of his contemporaries. His pla…
Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution
Studies in a Rabbinic Family: The de Botons
Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women
Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile
To Come to the Land: Immigration and Settlement in Sixteenth-Century Eretz-Israel
Judgments Sweetened: Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern Jewish Culture
The century 1550-1650 has been called "the Age of the Demoniac" by European historians who have analyzed the prominent role played by the possessed in numerous witch-trials during this period, as well as the propagandistic uses of demonic possession in the era of the Counter-Reformation. Noting that accounts of demonic possession among Jews reappear in Jewish sources after an absence of more than a millennium precisely in this period (c. 1540), J…
Judgments Sweetened: Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern Jewish Culture
The century 1550-1650 has been called "the Age of the Demoniac" by European historians who have analyzed the prominent role played by the possessed in numerous witch-trials during this period, as well as the propagandistic uses of demonic possession in the era of the Counter-Reformation. Noting that accounts of demonic possession among Jews reappear in Jewish sources after an absence of more than a millennium precisely in this period (c. 1540), J…
Judgments Sweetened: Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern Jewish Culture
The century 1550-1650 has been called "the Age of the Demoniac" by European historians who have analyzed the prominent role played by the possessed in numerous witch-trials during this period, as well as the propagandistic uses of demonic possession in the era of the Counter-Reformation. Noting that accounts of demonic possession among Jews reappear in Jewish sources after an absence of more than a millennium precisely in this period (c. 1540), J…
To Come to the Land: Immigration and Settlement in Sixteenth-Century Eretz-Israel
Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile
Studies in a Rabbinic Family: The de Botons
Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women
Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution
Ansky's Dybbuk as Heretical Midrash
This paper suggests that The Dybbuk, by S. Ansky (1863-1920) may be read as a modern retelling of the ancient myth of fallen angels, in which heavenly beings descend to earth only to be seduced by it. It also shows that most of the mythic elements in the play can be attributed to Ansky, rather than his translator, H. N. Bialik. Ansky thus steers a modernist course that differs meaningfully from those charted by some of his contemporaries. His pla…
Practical Kabbalah: Guest Editors’ Introduction
Kabbalah Practices / Practical Kabbalah: The Magic of Kabbalistic Trees
Kabbalistic trees— ilanot , in Hebrew—are not merely arboreal diagrams illustrating the sefirot and other symbols associated with them. By the fifteenth century, the term ilan (singular) referred to a genre of kabbalistic creativity that fused this schema with a specific medium: an ilan was a diagram of the sefirot inscribed on a parchment sheet or rotulus. Ilanot had a variety of functions, from meditative to mnemonic. The present essay isolates…
Re-envisioning the Evil Eye: Magic, Optical Theory, and Modern Supernaturalism in Jewish Thought
This essay is a case study in the modern emergence of the “supernatural.” I argue that pre-modern understandings of the evil eye were predominantly naturalistic, based on extramissionist, haptic concepts of vision. The need to believe in the evil eye first arises when sight becomes universally understood as the result of light entering rather than emerging from the eyes. In the Jewish context, rabbis then begin to develop alternative explanations…
Spheres, Sefirot , and the Imaginal Astronomical Discourse of Classical Kabbalah
The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging of the divine as ten hypostatic sefirot that structure the Godhead and generate the cosmos. Since Gershom Scholem, the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, declared the term sefirah (sg.) as deriving from “sapphire”—pointedly rejecting its connection to the Greek σφαῖρα—scholars have paid scant attention to the profound indebtedness of the…
Jacob Ṣemaḥ, Humanist
Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578–1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha in northwest Portugal. He fled the country in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica. Ṣemaḥ 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 v…
Philosophy (10 works) · History (9 works) · Judaism (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Medieval and Classical Philosophy (7 works) · Theology (6 works) · Archaeology (5 works) · History (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Archaeology and Historical Studies (4 works)