Kabbalah

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Kabbalah is the principal tradition of Jewish mysticism: a body of teaching, developed mainly in medieval Spain and Provence, concerned with the hidden inner life of God and the means by which the human soul might know it. The Hebrew word means “that which is received” — a received tradition, handed on rather than reasoned out, and held by its bearers to descend in unbroken transmission from Sinai.

At its center stands a map of the divine. Beyond all naming is Ein Sof, the Infinite — God as utterly hidden, without limit or attribute. From this concealment proceed the ten sefirot: stages or vessels through which the infinite becomes active, knowable, and capable of relation to the world, often drawn as a single figure, the Tree of Life. The earliest layer of the tradition is older than this scheme; the Sefer Yetzirah, the “Book of Formation,” already speaks of ten sefirot and the creative power of the Hebrew letters, though scholars place its composition somewhere in late antiquity and dispute the date sharply. The mature system crystallized later, and its great document is the Zohar, the “Book of Splendour” — a sprawling mystical commentary on the Torah that appeared in Castile in the late thirteenth century. The work presents itself as the teaching of a second-century sage, Shimon bar Yochai; modern scholarship, following Gershom Scholem, attributes it largely to the Castilian kabbalist Moses de León, and the question of how far it draws on older material remains live.

Practitioners did not read this as speculation. They held that the sefirot are genuinely how God acts, that the commandments performed below have effect above, and that contemplation, prayer, and right intention can mend a fracture within the divine order itself — a task later Lurianic Kabbalah named tikkun, the repair of a world broken at its making. The tradition guarded itself: it was taught discreetly, often only to the mature, and warned against the dangers of ascent undertaken unprepared.

Its reach extended far beyond Judaism. Renaissance Christian scholars, Pico della Mirandola among them, took up the sefirot and the techniques of letter mysticism and built a Christian Kabbalah, reading the system as confirmation of their own theology. From there it passed into the wider current of Western esotericism, where the Tree of Life became a master diagram of correspondence, and the spelling shifted — Qabalah, Cabala — to mark the distance from the Jewish source. These later versions borrow the architecture and reframe the meaning; the resemblance is real, and it is also a translation. What the rabbis received and what the magicians built are not the same thing, and the tradition itself never lost sight of which God it was trying to know.

→ In the library: The Zohar (Nurho de Manhar, partial — 1914) · Sepher Yetzirah (Westcott — 1911) · Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887)

→ Related: Emanation · Christian Kabbalah · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Occultism