ריבוי נוסחים בכתבי יד בקבלה בעיני המקובלים

The article turns scholarly attention away from a history of ideas of kabbalistic manuscriptsas the good or corrupt witnesses of the literary works that were written by certain authorsin a particular time and place and instead focuses on later scribes and kabbalists as theproducers and readers of manuscripts. This study amounts to a neglected chapter in thehistory of Kabbalah concerning the self-awareness of Kabbalists to the textual version foundin any one manuscript and the many versions they found in many manuscripts. No doubt,the invention of the printing press influenced the thinking of kabbalists in this regard, and inthis period they began to speak of the true or correct version. But alongside the constructionof a history of how the kabbalists related to a written formulation as the text that is found inany one written document, this study shines a light on the status of textual versions amongstthose who transferred esoteric knowledge from one generation to the next and did notidentify Kabbalah with its literary works. Moreover, they did not identify a literary work ofKabbalah with the textual version found in any one manuscript.