Research LiteratureJ. H. Chajes and Eliezer Baumgarten, “Visual Kabbalah in the Italian Renaissance: The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms,” The Vatican Library Review 1 (2022): 91–145.
Gershom Scholem, ed., Kitve yad ba-qabalah ha-nimtsa'im be-bet ha-sefarim ha-le'umi veha-universitai bi-yerushalayim (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1930), no. 16, 44ff.
K. V. Zetterstéen, Verzeichnis der hebräischen und aramäischen Handschriften der Kgl. Universitätsbibliothek zu Upsala (Lund: J. Möller, 1900), no. 33:3, 20.
NotesThis extraordinary Magnificent Parchment was donated to the Uppsala University Library in 1705 by Nicolas Bergius (1658-1706). The first mention of the item at the Uppsala University Library is a handwritten inventory list from ca 1730: "Tabula Sephirotica membr.[anea] ex donat.[ione] D.[omini] Bergii", 'Sefirotic table in parchment, from a donation by Mr. [Nicolaus] Bergius [1658-1706]' (Bibl. Arkiv, M:24, p. 301). A luxury manuscript in every respect, this witness is among the most richly decorated to have reached us, with illuminations and diagrams in emerald-green, red, gold, blue, yellow, purple, and brown. Unfortunately, much of this coloring is faded and worn, with the gold text on top of colored backgrounds attrited to the point of illegibility. This witness is also unique in its incorporation of two additional classical ilanot, which were appended under the zodiac. Occupying roughly 20% of the overall rotulus, these two ilanot are each important witnesses in their own right to their respectively manuscript families. The ilan in the lower left may be compared to a number on this platform (München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod.hebr. 448; Vatican City, BAV, MS Vat.ebr. Borg.ebr. 21; Ilan Jerusalem, National Library of Israel MS 1257). The ilan in the lower right is a unique witness of the Great Parchment and displays many of the graphical features seen in the schematic codex reduction preserved in Parma, ms. Parm. 2419, 2v-3r. The copy of the Great Parchment restored by James Hepburn, also viewable on this platform, is clearly a less faithful reproduction of its source. More modest deviations from other Magnificent Parchment witnesses—both of commission and omission—are to be found in the upper sections of the rotulus. Surround the entire rotulus in a golden frame is the text from Sha’ar ha-shamayim (The Gate of Heaven), a text closely related to the Commentary on the Great Parchment by the fourteenth-century kabbalist Reuben Ṣarfatti.