THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
filled with a mass of cabalistic and other mystical speculations, and with allegorism run mad, especially concerning the names of God, the accents, and the vowel-points. In like manner, the kingdom of evil, with its demons and evil spirits which continually oppose the realm of righteousness, is described in terms of wildest fantasy. Its statements are placed in the mouth of Simeon ben Yohai, a Tanna of the second century a.d., who, according to the Talmud, lived in association with the angel Metatron, who communicated to him the divine mysteries. Yet it is by no means a uniform work, among its older components being the " Book of Mystery," which is devoted to the
creation and the events which pre- 17. The ceded it; the " Great Holy Assem- Zohar. bly," which forms a compend of
cabalistic speculation and finds the type of all sefiroth in man, through whose mental processes the upper world of light is united with the lower world of sense, while the anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament are declared to be mere metaphors; and the " True Shepherd," which explains the nature of the primal emanations. The later elements of the Zohar are as follows: the " Small Holy Assembly," which gives a clearer exposition of the subjects treated in the " Great Holy Assembly"; the "Book of the Mystery of Mysteries," devoted to physiognomy and cheiromancy; the '' Book of the Halls," which describes the abodes of the souls in the Garden of Eden and in hell; the " Hidden Midrash," which recounts the return of the souls to their new and perfect human forms after the resurrection, and portrays the meal prepared for the righteous; the " Ancient," which describes the transmigration of souls and the punishments of hell; the " Young," an exposition of various cabalistic teachings; and " Mishnas and Tosefta," which is devoted chiefly to the mystical meanings of the divine names. Despite "the opposition of Talmudists and philosophers the Zohar gained an enormous following and was Tegarded as a revelation from heaven. Through it Spain became the real home of the Cabala, and even to the present day it is considered authoritative in some Judaistic quarters.
With the exile of the Jews from Spain the Cabala was carried into all lands, and Safed in Palestine became its new center. There, in the sixteenth century, Moses ben Jacob Cordovero and Isaac Luria systematized the Cabala and filled many a gap wh;qh had existed in the Zohar, the former emphasizing the metaphysical and speculative,
and the latter the ascetic and ethical
18. Closing side. Through them the Zohar was
Period of well-nigh deified, and in a like spirit
the Cabala, many cabalists of the seventeenth
century, such as Shabbathai Zebi and Jacob Frank, proclaimed themselves prophets or asserted that the Sliekinah or the soul of the Messiah had become incarnate in them. From this time on, however, the Cabala has steadily declined, and the names of its representatives are too unimportant to require mention here.
Though the Cabala was devoted to a spiritualization of religion, the pagan elements which it
adopted brought to Judaism a view of the universe which was entirely foreign to it, and worked it grave injury. The Biblical concept of a monotheistic God was superseded by a vague Gentile theory of emanation with a pantheistic tendency, and the doctrine of the unity of God was thrust into the background by the ten sefiroth, who were regarded as divine in essence. Since prayer was no longer addressed immediately to God but to the sefiroth, a genuine sefirolh-cult was evolved. The Talmud and philosophy were disdained by the cabalists, and even the study of the Bible was neglected, since it was no longer read for its own sake, but solely with the aid of cabalistic methods of hermeneutics. Nor did the ritual escape change and mutilation, and the phylacteries
19. Influ- and the prayer-mantles were now put ence of the on to the accompaniment of various Cabala on cabalistic formulas, especially prom- Judaism, inent being the prayers to the sefiroth.
Worst of all was the growth of superstition. That the soul might attain to the realm of light after death, the severest mortification of the flesh was practised, while the mysterious names of God were believed to heal the sick and quench the flames, and God altered his divine will at the prayer of the cabalist. The very kingdom of darkness was subject to the proper formulas of prayer, and the damned were freed from their torments by use of the magic names of God.
During the period of the Reformation the Cabala attracted wide attention because of the alleged kinship and agreement of its doctrines with the dogmas of the Christian Church. The opinion accordingly prevailed that it formed the means by which Judaism and Christianity might easily be united, especially as it was believed to contain the doctrines of the Trinity, the Messiah as the Son of God, and his work of atonement. In his missionary zeal for the Saracens in the
20. Rela- thirteenth century Raymond Lully tion of the (q.v.) considered the Cabala a divine Cabala to revelation, and after the converted Jew
Christianity. Paulus de Heredia (about 14S0) had shown in his " Letter of Secrets " that all the chief truths of Christianity were contained in the Cabala, Christian scholars became rivals in their eagerness to study esoteric Judaism. In 1486 Pico de Mirandola published at Rome his Septuaginta-dum conclusiones cabballisticm, and invited all scholars to Rome to attend a disputation to convince themselves of the kinship between the Cabala and Christianity. The first German to investigate this subject was Reuchlin, who devoted to it his De verbo mirifico (Basel, 1494) and his De arte cabbalistiea (Hagenau, 1517). Latin translations of various portions of cabalistic works were made by Baruch of Benevento at the request of Cardinal yEgidius of Viterbo and by the convert Paul Riccio, physician in ordinary to the emperor Maximilian I., but the most important work which sought the truths of Christianity in the Cabala and gave translations from it was the Kabbala denuduta of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (4 vols., Sulzbach and Frankfort, 1G77-84), the source for all subsequent scholars.