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Cordovero, Nahum

Index: El inmortal, El Aleph, OC,Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974. 544.

author of The Coat of Many Colours

Fishburn and Hughes: "A fictional character with biblical and historical associations. Nahum, which in Hebrew means 'comfort' or 'source of comfort', is one of the twelve minor prophets of the Old Testament. Cordovero (Moses ben Jacob), who lived in Safed, a centre of Cabbalism in the seventeenth century, was held to be the greatest theoretician of Jewish mysticism (see G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, NY 1961, 252). His teachings, which exerted a marked influence on his contemporary Isaac Luria, dealt with questions of immortality and the transmigration of souls. A Coat of Many Colours, the title of Nahum Cordovero's fictional text, refers to the longsleeved coat given by Jacob to Joseph, his favourite son (Gen. 37:3). Its some hundred pages suggest that it is itself a cento (cien), a work made up of quotations and fragments of other works." (51-52)