Tedacus Levi. The Many Lives of a Bibliographic Ghost

The article traces the story of a “bibliographic ghost”, the elusive reference to a Tedacus Levi who should have authored a commentary on the ten sefirot (in itself a very common genre within Kabbalistic literature) through the history of Hebrew bibliography. Far more than a success story of progress and enlightenment through elimination of medieval darkness, this chapter of Hebrew bibliography reveals itelf as a convenient vantage point for analysing the complex relationship between library and catalogue claiming rather boldly that it is, by necessity, a phantasmatic one since the library could not exist without the catalogue but the latter tends to supersede the former. The issue of organisation of knowledge is thus addressed for an individual case of book-hunt but not without implicit effects towards the definition of what a Kabbalistic library is or should be.