Note 30 — III.

1543–1620. The real exponent of Loria’s Kabbalistic system is his celebrated disciple Chajim Vital, a descendant of a Calabrian family, who died in 1620 at the age of seventy-seven. After the demise of his teacher, Chajim Vital diligently collected all the MS. notes of the lectures which Loria’s disciples had written down, from which, together with his own jottings, he produced the gigantic and famous system of the Kabbalah, entitled the Tree of Life (‏עץ החיים‎). This work, over which Vital laboured thirty years, was at first circulated in MS. copies, and every one of the Kabbalistic disciples had to pledge himself, under pain of excommunication, not to allow a copy to be made for a foreign land; so that for a time all the Codd. remained in Palestine. At last, however, this Thesaurus of the Kabbalah, which properly consists of six works, was published by J. Satanow at Zolkiev, 1772. New editions of it appeared in Korez, 1785; Sklow, 1800; Dobrowne, 1804; Stilikow, 1818; and Knorr von Rosenroth has translated into Latin a portion of that part of the great work which treats on the doctrine of the metempsychosis (‏הגלגולים‎).30