• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Kabbala ("Tradition")

In the centuries in which philosophy and theology were coming more and more under the dominion of Arab Aristotelianism, the esoteric doctrines of the Kabbala ("Tradition") were growing and spreading. The origins of this hidden wisdom are very remote. The Jewish Gnosticism which flourished at the beginning of the Christian era, and the theosophy which had its adepts in the same age even in orthodox circles, are reckoned among its spiritual ancestors. It revived, or sprang up anew, in Babylonia in the early centuries of Moslem rule, and one of its products, the "Book of Creation" (Sepher ha-Yesirah), attributed to Abraham, seemed of sufficient moment for Saadia to write a commentary on it. From Babylonia it seems to have reached Europe in the ninth century, and to have been handed down in initiated circles, taking in time somewhat different forms in different countries. The Neoplatonic elements which were present in the Oriental Kabbala were reinforced in Spain by deeper draughts from the fountainhead, and in the measure in which Aristotelian rationalism gained the upper hand in theology, the Neo-Platonic mysticism found refuge in the Kabbala, to which, in return, it gave a more philosophical form.

These various streams flow together in the classical work of the European Kabbala, the Zohar. This book, in form a commentary on the Pentateuch, purporting to embody the esoteric teachings of the great rabbi and saint, Simeon ben Yohai (first half of the second century A. D.), is indeed an encyclopaedia of kabbalistic doctrines and speculations, and ultimately acquired canonical authority in mystical circles comparable to that of Dionysius the Areopagite among Christian mystics. In the catastrophe that befell the Spanish Jews at the end of the fifteenth century, as has happened over and over again in similar circumstances, men in persecution and exile turned for spiritual refuge to mysticism, and the study of the Kabbala, especially of its theosophic and magical sides, was greatly stimulated, while the scattering of its disciples expelled from Spain spread it in the many lands of their new dispersion.

Isaac Luria (d. 1572, at Safed in Palestine) became the founder of the modern school, which flourished in the sixteenth century not only in the East but in Italy. It took root in Poland, where in the seventeenth century it was expected that all rabbis should be learned in the Kabbala as well as in the Talmud, and in the eighteenth century was disseminated in Germany by Polish teachers. Many Christian scholars, also, from the time of Raymond Lull (d. 1315), particularly in the sixteenth century, busied themselves with this esoteric Judaism, in which some of them found proofs of the truth of Christianity, some a profound symbolical theology, others the secrets of natural philosophy, while its indirect influence may be traced in the Christian mystics.

The metaphysics of the speculative Kabbala are ultimately derived from Neoplatonic sources. God is the Infinite, the Absolute, of which nothing can be affirmatively predicated-neither attributes, will, intention, thought, word, nor deed-and in which change is unthinkable. Between this Absolute and the material world the Kabbalists, like their predecessors, interpose a series of emanations, sometimes conceived in metaphysical, sometimes in more mythological, form (the Sefirot, Adam Kadmon), and a series of worlds. The soul of man is tripartite: the animal soul, the moral nature, and the pure spiritual intelligence, in itself incapable of good or evil. The goal of the last is to return to God. As in the sphere of the will man may be governed by fear of God or by love, so knowledge may be reflective or intuitive; the path of the soul's ascent leads from fear to love, from reflective knowledge to intuitive knowledge; its goal is perfect love and pure contemplation.

By the side of the philosophy and ethics of the Kabbala stands a practical Kabbala, with a fantastic mythology - cosmogonic, angelic, eschatological - which has come down in part from the Enoch books and cognate pre-Christian literature, in part seems to be of Gnostic origin, with a heterogeneous increment from subsequent generations and various sources. The practical Kabbala is largely occupied with the means of working the supernatural world, warding off the assaults of demons, constraining angels to do man's will, performing all manner of miracles. Among these means, amulets, and particularly the magical power of mythical names, have a great place. The history of religions affords many other examples of the pernicious affinity between mysticism and magic-theosophy and theurgy. For the attainment of the loftier ambitions of the soul the practical Kabbala had recourse to ascetic exercises such as have everywhere been employed in religions which propose a like goal-self-inflicted privations, especially fasting, and suffering of body and mind.

There is no doubt that the study of the Kabbala contributed to promote or confirm popular superstitions, but, on the other hand, by the supremacy that it gave to the inward knowledge of God, and by the high value it set on prayer, it did much to keep alive the spiritual element in Judaism, and to prevent its degenerating into an arid formalism of Talmudic casuistry and of ritual observances. The remarkable religious movement of the eighteenth century, Hasidism, drew no small part of its inspiration from the Kabbala.

The Kabbalists had done their share to revive the expectations of the approaching advent of the Messiah; Luria, among others, believed himself to be the Ephraimite Messiah, the forerunner of the Davidic Messiah. Apocalyptic calculations based on a passage in the Zohar made out that the deliverance of Israel was to come in the year 1648; another computation, which gained wide currency among Christians, also, fixed on 1666. Shabbethai Zebi, the most famous in the long catalogue of Messianic pretenders, gave himself out for the designated deliverer, and found credence not only with great masses of the unlearned in many lands, but with some prominent rabbis. Neither his imprisonment by the sultan nor even his conversion to Mohammedanism, which he accepted to save his life (1666), sufficed to destroy faith in him. Several of his followers made similar claims for themselves, so that there was a succession of Shabbethaian Messiahs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the last of whom, Jacob Frank, with many of his dupes, publicly embraced Christianity (1759).

The ease with which these would-be Messiahs found believers, and the pathetic fidelity with which their followers clung to them even after they were unmasked, are symptoms of the prevailing unrest and of the dissatisfaction of multitudes of Jews with their spiritual guides, the rabbis, who were more and more absorbed in the futile casuistry of their Talmudic studies, and, in the telling phrase of Baal Shem, "through sheer study of the Law had no time to think about God."