Mevo She‘arim (Introduction to the Gates), with Sha‘ar Pirkei ha-Tzelem (The Gate of the Chapters of the Image), Hayyim Vital [Italy: late 17th-early 18th centuries]

Vol. 1: 268 leaves; Vol. 2: 96 leaves (8 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.; 215 x 170 mm).

Yosef Avivi, Lurianic Kabbalah, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2008), pp. 621-628 (in Hebrew).

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Mevo She‘arim, a treatise on divine emanation edited by Jacob Zemah in 1646 is based on autograph manuscripts of Hayyim Vital, discovered in a genizah in Hebron. Zemah added his own notes in the margins and subsequently Nathan Shapira of Jerusalem filled out the missing sections.  The present manuscript, copied in a beautiful Italian hand with wide margins by an anonymous student of Rabbi Moses Zacuto (ca. 1620-1697), is divided into two volumes. Volume 1 includes all of Zemah’s Mevo She‘arim (fols. 1a-229b), followed by the sections filled out by Shapira (fols. 230a-267b), while volume 2 comprises another one of the sections added by Shapira (fols. 1a-26b), as well as Sha‘ar Pirkei ha-Tzelem, part of Zemah’s Sefer Kehillat Ya‘akov (fols. 37a-86b).