Early Kabbalah

← Encyclopedia

Early Kabbalah is the name scholarship gives to the first documented phase of Jewish mystical theosophy, which surfaced in southern France and northern Spain across the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, before the Zohar gathered its themes into the form later generations would treat as canonical. The Hebrew word kabbalah means “received tradition,” and the men who used it claimed to be transmitting something old. What can be dated is younger than the claim.

The earliest surviving witness is the Sefer ha-Bahir, the “Book of Brightness,” which appears in Provence around 1180 as a short, deliberately obscure commentary cast as ancient rabbinic teaching. It introduces the structure that would organize everything after it: the ten sefirot, a graded series of divine powers or emanations through which the hidden God acts and becomes knowable. The text reads less as argument than as a chain of dense images, and its sources remain disputed — some scholars trace fragments to older Eastern material, while the resemblance of its imagery to Gnostic schemes of antiquity has been argued over for a century without settled result.

From Provence the current passed to the figure of Isaac the Blind, credited with a contemplative reading of the sefirot, and then to Catalonia, where a circle formed at Gerona in the early thirteenth century. Azriel and Ezra of Gerona gave the emerging doctrine its first systematic statements, drawing the language of emanation toward the philosophical vocabulary then circulating in the form of Neoplatonism. The circle worked in a milieu where the rationalism of Maimonides was hotly contested, and part of what it offered was a counter-account: not philosophy’s God reached by argument, but a God whose inner life could be mapped and, in measure, entered.

These thinkers held that the unknowable Ein Sof — the Infinite, beyond all attribute — unfolds through the sefirot into the world, and that the practitioner’s contemplation, prayer, and conduct touch that inner structure and can affect it. The map of the divine was at once a cosmology and a discipline; to study it correctly was held to be a kind of participation in it. How much of this was genuinely received and how much newly composed is precisely the question modern study has pressed hardest, against the tradition’s own insistence on antiquity.

The phase closed when these strands were absorbed into the great pseudepigraphic work of late-thirteenth-century Castile, the Zohar, which presented the same theosophy as the teaching of a second-century sage and quickly eclipsed its predecessors. What came before survives mostly in commentaries, letters, and fragments — the workshop drafts of a tradition that would later prefer to remember itself as having sprung whole from the distant past.

→ In the library: Westcott — Sepher Yetzirah (1911) · Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887)

→ Related: Kabbalah · Emanation · Neoplatonism · Gnosis