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This faience amulet from Lachish depicts the Egyptian goddess Isis sitting on a throne and holding her son, the god Horus, on her lap, a common artistic motif in Egyptian amulets. The legs are broken…
Now, aside from the fact that it is altogether impossible to interpret the matter of tzimtzum literally, for that would attribute corporeal events to the…
According to the colophon, Natan Hammerschlag’s Ilan de-adam kadmon (Sefirotic Diagram of the First Man) was copied from the writings of Ḥayim Vital, the most prominent disciple of Isaac Luria…
That year my wife, Hannah, became extremely ill and one Sabbath she was in a coma and close to death. At night, at the conclusion of the Sabbath, we approached her to witness the departure of the…
I am the man they call, at times, mem-bet-aleph, which are the [Hebrew] initials of Michael ben Abraham. At other times I am called aleph-mem-koph: Abraham Michael Cardozo. I am of the Marranos of…
I have divided this garment into three parts, all of which can serve as cloaks for the rabbis. I have arranged them in the following order: the first part is my commentary on the Guide…
And they permitted themselves to place a blemish in the holiness of heaven and the holiness of the study of the holy Torah, to place the filth of the primeval serpent, behaving according to their…
The essence of divinity is found in every single thing—nothing but it exists. Since it causes every thing to be, no thing can live by anything else. It enlivens them; its existence exists in each…
Amulets often took the form of Bes, a minor Egyptian deity, who was understood to guard mothers in childbirth and their babies. Bes is often shown with a feathered headdress and a grotesque face, a…
This page from a kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography…
