About
About this Project
Maps of God is the digital research platform of the Ilanot Project at the University of Haifa, founded and directed by Prof. J. H. Chajes. The project is devoted to the systematic study of ilanot (“trees”), a genre of large-format kabbalistic diagrams typically inscribed on parchment sheets and scrolls. It investigates how kabbalists across the Jewish world used these artifacts to organize knowledge, visualize the divine realm, and orient study and practice.
Although ilanot were produced and circulated for more than six centuries, they remained largely overlooked in modern scholarship. Their study brings an extensive visual dimension of Jewish intellectual and religious life into view. Drawing on manuscripts and printed works preserved in libraries, museums, and private collections, the project examines how particular ilanot were composed, copied, adapted, and transmitted. Their changing configurations offer evidence of encounters among texts, teachings, and visual traditions, as well as the interests and interpretive choices of their makers.
The distinctive character of these artifacts demands an approach that treats their images and texts together. Some scrolls extend beyond ten meters and incorporate textual anthologies of tens of thousands of words. Their inscriptions acquire meaning through their position within a diagram: a passage may explain the channel along which it is written, elaborate the names gathered within a medallion, or interpret an adjacent image. Research must therefore attend both to individual details and to the larger configurations in which they participate.
Maps of God grew out of the need to conduct this research within the visual and spatial organization of the artifacts themselves. The platform connects scholarly analysis directly to images of the ilanot, allowing users to move between close reading and an overview of the scroll, and between a particular artifact and related examples. Digital editions emerge from this process of investigation and provide the basis for further inquiry.
The platform grew out of a collaboration between the Ilanot Project and the Göttingen State and University Library, with initial support from the Volkswagen Foundation in 2019. The underlying research has been supported by the Israel Science Foundation. Bringing together historical scholarship and digital methods, Maps of God makes the results of this work available to researchers, students, and everyone interested in the visual worlds of Kabbalah.
The Digital Editions
The digital editions on Maps of God make the integrated images and texts of ilanot available for detailed study. Each artifact’s image provides the point of entry: readers can examine its overall structure, follow its diagrammatic pathways, and investigate individual inscriptions and figures in their original locations. This movement between the whole and its particulars is fundamental to reading an ilan.
Preparing an edition involves transcription, translation, the identification of textual sources and visual features, and scholarly commentary. Texts may quote, abbreviate, rearrange, or combine material from several works; images may adapt inherited forms or give new visual expression to familiar teachings. Connecting these findings to the relevant areas of the parchment allows readers to consider the evidence alongside its interpretation. A transcription can be read against the inscription itself, and a source identification assessed within the visual context that gives the passage its particular significance.
The platform also records relationships within and across ilanot. Its digital ontology—a structured model of the concepts, figures, and relationships represented in the diagrams—provides a common vocabulary for describing their contents. It connects particular representations to broader subjects, such as a sefirah, a divine name, or a Temple vessel. This enables users to follow a concept or image through different artifacts while examining the distinctive form and context of each occurrence.
These connections support several complementary approaches to research. Users can search and filter the collection, place ilanot side by side, and browse indexed features across the corpus. Selecting the menorah in the feature index, for example, brings together its annotated appearances in different ilanot, opening the way to comparisons of its form, placement, and accompanying texts. Such comparisons help researchers investigate manuscript families, the transmission of particular teachings, and the choices through which copyists and compilers transformed their sources.
The editions develop as research proceeds, and the extent of transcription, translation, source identification, and annotation varies across the collection. Maps of God provides a shared environment in which these forms of scholarship can accumulate and inform one another. Its aim is to make the complex contents of ilanot accessible to exploration while enabling