GIKATILLA, JOSEPH. Portae Lucis (“Gates of Light.”). Paulus Ricius' Latin translation of substantial portions of Sha'arei Orah

(KABBALAH)

Johannes Miller

Augsburg

1516

FIRST EDITION IN ANY LANGUAGE. Latin interspersed with vocalized Hebrew. Exquisite title woodcut by Hans Burgkmayr. Title in red and black. Latin kabbalistic chart on f.44v. Tailpiece of man in armor

Scholem, Bibliographia Kabbalistica (1933), p. 128, no. 942; EJ, Vol. X, col. 635 (facsimile of title); G. Scholem, Kabbalah (1974), frontispiece (facsimile of title); not in Adams

THE BOOK THAT OPENED THE PORTAL OF KABBALAH TO CHRISTIAN HEBRAISTS. A FINE COPY OF THIS IMPORTANT FIRST EDITION. Sha'arei Orah, a work roughly contemporaneous with the publication of the Zohar, was written by the Spanish kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla toward the end of the thirteenth century. It has served countless generations of aspiring students as a systematic primer of Kabbalah, working its way through the Sefiroth in ascending order, with Malchuth (Kingdom) as the primary, and Kether (Crown) as the final Sefirah. By translating the work into Latin, Paulus Ricius, a converted Jew, made available to Christians for the first time what amounts to an introductory course in the concepts and keywords of the Kabbalah. The book is said to have inspired the Judeophile Johannes Reuchlin, whose work De Arte Cabalistica (“On the Science of the Kabbalah”) appeared the following year in 1517. Ironically, the Hebrew original of this classic work would not be published for another forty-five years in Mantua, 1561 (Vinograd, Mantua 84). See EJ, Vol. X, col. 646.