Durchlässige Grenzen: Die Visualisierung Gottes zwischen jüdischer und christlicher Kabbala bei Knorr von Rosenroth und van Helmont

The article explores the “permeable boundaries” between Jewish and Christians forms of Kabbalah in the seventeenth century, with special attention to graphical materials. The diagrammatic expressions of Kabbalah were of particular interest to many Christian kabbalists, who identified the “Tree” as the key to this esoteric lore. The Tree was not the only expression of the centrality of the graphical for these thinkers, as will be exemplified in a reassessment of van Helmont’s Alphabeti vere naturalis Hebraica brevissima delineatio. Special attention will also be devoted to the final appendix of the first volume of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbalah denudata, which presents 16 foldout figures of kabbalistic diagrams. Most of these represent complex Lurianic cosmographs that Knorr was able to obtain in manuscript form. Of particular interest will be four of these figures (fig. 8-11) that became the most ubiquitously reproduced Lurianic diagrams in Jewish circles. It will be demonstrated that these diagrams, which look like no others in the visual repertoire of earlier Jewish Kabbalah, were drafted originally by Knorr himself on the basis of his reading of the 1648 work Emeq ha-Melekh. Their unusual aesthetics and schemata did not prevent Jews from adopting them (without attribution and perhapsawareness) and reproducing them extensively in manuscript and printed abbalistic scrolls into the twentieth century.