אודות

About this Project

Maps of God is a platform for the research and presentation of kabbalistic trees Ilanot. Ilanot were unstudied in the first century of Jewish mysticism research. Despite having been created by kabbalists around the Jewish world for over 600 years and being regarded as a distinct genre of mystical expression, ilanot did not merit even a mention in the Encyclopaedia Judaica.

The University of Haifa Ilanot Project, founded and led by Prof. J. H. Chajes, is the first academic project dedicated to the study of visual Kabbalah. Numerous publications in leading journals, invited lectures around the world, the development of a database of over 700 artifacts, and the assembly of a vast collection of images are among the accomplishments of the project to date.

Basic research requires an assessment of scores of ilan scrolls, which present complex integrations of diagrammatic images and texts. Many ilanot are over ten meters long and present textual anthologies of 15-30,000 words. Furthermore, as “iconotexts,” the images and texts of ilanot are inseparable. Prof. Chajes soon came to two realizations:

The metadata generated by the analysis of these artifacts — in particular, the ideas they visualized, the images they used, and the texts they incorporated — would only be useful were they embedded in images of the ilanot.

The scrolling of ilanot, fundamental to the mimesis of their enactment, would be lost were scientific editions of the ilanot published in conventional book form.

From these insights, the vision of Maps of God was born.

The Digital Editions

The digital editions of the Ilanot involve a range of tools that allow us to encode each Ilan using XML and an image annotator tool (VIA). The relationships between portions and concepts of each Ilan are defined using a digital ontology, which comprises of a defined set of classes, object and data properties and individuals. The ontology allows the dynamic visualisation of the Ilanot and truly embodies the potential of digital editions.