Peri Etz Hadarפרי עץ הדר
Tzfat · 1600
סי
Anonymous (Sefer Yetzirah)
Anonymous (Sefer Yetzirah)
200 BCE–500 CE · Tannaim · Tiberias
Anonymous author of Sefer Yetzirah ('Book of Formation'), the oldest extant work of Jewish mystical speculation. Reconstructs Creation as the combinatorial work of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and ten primordial 'sefirot.' Variously dated from the 2nd to 6th century.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the orchard map →
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Stop 1 of 1200–600Composed
TiberiasLand of Israel
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Tiberias
Galilee center; home of Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk and his Hasidic disciples after aliyah.
In Tiberias at the same time
Anonymous Merkavah mystics, Shimon ben Eleazar, Yose ben Yehuda, Chiyya HaGadol, Levi bar Sisi, R. Yochanan
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Anonymous (Sefer Yetzirah)’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Anonymous (Sefer Yetzirah)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Graeco-Roman world
Christian world
Egyptian world
Works(2)
Sefer Yetzirahספר יצירה
Jerusalem · 500
The proto-text of Jewish mysticism. A short, dense work attributed traditionally to Abraham and dated by scholars to somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the early Geonic period. It describes the creation of the world through ten primordial numbers (sefirot) and twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet — the architecture every later kabbalistic system would build on.