J. H. (Yossi) Chajes Senior Lecturer for Jewish History at the University of Haifa (Israel) Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: June/July 2016 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »The Earthly Journeys of Cosmic Maps. A Visual History of Early Modern Kabbalah« Project outline: Most students of kabbalistic literature find themselves »visualizing« its cosmogonic and cosmological teachings. The iconic »Tree of Life« is certainly the best known kabbalistic symbol, and is often the first thing conveyed to those being exposed for the first time to this lore. What few realize is that complex graphical scrolls have been a genre of kabbalistic literature in their own right since the Renaissance, and that from the late seventeenth century such scrolls became an indispensable tool to Lurianic kabbalists. I am directing a project that takes responsibility for the entire corpus, but will focus while in residence at the Institute on exploring the complex relationships between the diagrammatic materials of seventeenth-century Jewish & Christian kabbalists. (J. H. (Yossi) Chajes) Research partner: Yossi Chajes follows the invitation of Christian Wiese, professor of Jewish Philosophy of Religion at Goethe University Frankfurt, and the research training group of the German research foundation »Theology as a Science« (DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 1728). Scholarly profile of J. H. (Yossi) ChajesIn 1999, Yossi Chajes received his PhD from Yale University with a dissertation entitled »Spirit Possession and the Construction of Early Modern Jewish Religiosity«. He is Senior Lecturer at the Deparmtent of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Since 2012, he is the director of the University's Center for the Study of Jewish Culture.Main areas of research: Jewish History, Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah Selected publications:
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