Ilan Ha-Gadol (Kabbalistic Scroll), Isaac Kopio [North Africa: 18th-19th century]

Scroll (9 in. x 11 ft 7 in.; 230 mm x 3 meters 530 mm). Ink on Parchment written on 6 membranes. Housed in a capped metal tube.

This Ilan is a fine, early exemplar of one of the most widely reproduced kabbalistic divinity maps. Originally drafted by R. Isaac Kopio, a North African kabbalist whose period of activity spanned the last decades of the seventeenth and first of the eighteenth century, this artifact is one of the most important witnesses to the spiritual-intellectual repertoire of Moroccan rabbinic sages in that period. The unambiguous attribution of this highly complex artefact to Kopio stands in contradistinction to the general anonymity of these visual materials, and makes it possible for us to explore the connections between its content and the fascinating life of its creator. Although we know relatively little about Kopio, his own writings testify to an itinerant lifestyle that included extensive travels in North Africa, as well as, it seems, to Italy and the Ottoman Empire. Kopio’s wanderlust was driven by his passion for discovering kabbalistic works unavailable in his native land, and wherever he went, he made copies of local manuscripts to bring home to Morocco. His work was of singular importance in the transmission of European Kabbalah to North Africa, and his Ilan is the most outstanding expression of, and contribution to, that transfer of knowledge.

 

Kopio’s Ilan, the only one known to have been fashioned in North Africa, combines geometrical-diagrammatic visual elements with extensive embedded texts and commentary. The texts found in Kopio’s scroll are largely anthological, but also include a number of passages composed by Kopio himself specifically for the Ilan. In some of these, directions are provided for drafting the diagrams that follow.  The central concept visualized in the scroll is that of the Lurianic “Faces” (Parzufim) of the divine. These form a sort of chain of being that bridges the unknowable “Infinite” (Ein Sof) God and finite creation, progressively attenuating the light through a series of “Engarmentations” (Hitlabshuot). This process was also at the center of the kabbalistic scrolls in Europe with which Kopio had become acquainted in his travels. Unlike the European scrolls, however, Kopio relied exclusively on the Lurianic teachings of R. Hayyim Vital (1543-1620), Luria’s most prominent student, without the complementary materials of ostensible Italian provenance developed by R. Israel Sarug featured at the opening of most European exemplars. Kopio’s work is also deeply indebted to the traditions of his teacher R. Moshe Even-Tzur, the great kabbalist of Fez, Morocco, whose school was directly connected to that of the Italian school of R. Moshe Zacuto, also known for its exclusive devotion to Vital’s formulations of Lurianic thought.

 

The Kopio Ilan in the Moussaieff Collection represents the most highly developed expression of this family of manuscript scrolls, with the full array of diagrams and textual materials. It should be noted that most of the exemplars of this scroll are late copies that were made as amulets, and stripped accordingly of the extensive commentaries found along the right margin of this scroll. Understandably, the elements presumed to have apotropaic magic power were graphical rather than textual. This Moussaieff scroll, however, was copied by a kabbalist to be used, rather than worn. (These various uses will be noted in the description of the Poppers Ilan.)

 

Scrolling through the Kopio Ilan, one notes a number of interesting graphical features of which a few deserve special mention. The primordial state at the onset of creation is represented at the top of the scroll in a striking figure that is one of the oldest in the visual repertoire of this lore. Found in the earliest kabbalistic manuscripts from the fourteenth century, the image evokes the concentric spheres of ancient astronomy by nesting the first letters of each of the ten Sefirot one within another. The khaf of Keter-Crown is the outermost sphere, and the mem of Malkhut-Kingdom is at the center. This concentric spherical representation of the very first differentiation in the infinite ground of being may be seen streaming a linear channel of these same Sefirot, now aligned as a chain. At the end of this sequence we find a cross-section of all the created worlds, again figured as nested spheres. At the heart of this image is “This World” (Zeh ha-‘Olam).

 

The scroll then continues with diagrammatic representations of the Divine Faces (Parzufim) that show the clear influence of the European scrolls associated with R. Meir Poppers and R. Jacob Zemach. The former feature a highly schematic face of “Primordial Adam” (Adam Kadmon) fashioned of eight circles in an asymmetric array within a larger circle; these inner circles are labelled to indicate their divine-anatomical references to eyes, nostrils, and so forth but figurative anthropomorphism is kept to a bare minimum. (For a very different approach to anthropomorphism in this genre, see the Moussaieff collection Shantuch scroll.) The familiar arboreal diagram of the Sefirot makes its first appearance only the lower portion of the scroll, where the progressive articulation of creation is figured by means of a fractal-like multiplication of these iconic trees.