What Is Kabbalah?

The word means “received tradition.” It is a set of mystical readings of the Hebrew Bible, not a separate scripture, and it is the home of much of the Hebrew letter-number lore behind gematria.

A mystical reading of the Torah

Kabbalah (Hebrew qabbalah, “receiving”) is the main mystical tradition of Judaism. Its followers claim that beneath the plain meaning of the Torah lies a hidden layer describing the inner life of God and how the world is bound to it. It is a way of reading the Hebrew Bible, not an addition to it, and it grew up inside rabbinic Judaism. Its roots are older than its name, including the Jewish visionary tradition of the divine chariot-throne (merkavah) drawn from Ezekiel's vision.

The main books

The Sefer Yetzirah (“Book of Formation”), a short and cryptic text from late antiquity whose date is debated, describes creation through the twenty-two Hebrew letters and ten numbers. The Bahir appeared in Provence in the twelfth century. The most famous work, the Zohar (“Radiance”), surfaced in Spain in the late thirteenth century. Tradition attributes it to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai, but the scholar Gershom Scholem argued in the twentieth century that it was written mainly by Moses de León, and most scholars accept that its main body is medieval. In the sixteenth century, Isaac Luria and his circle at Safed in Galilee gave Kabbalah its most influential form.

Central ideas

Kabbalists speak of Ein Sof (“without end”), the infinite God beyond description, who is known through ten emanations or attributes, the sefirot, such as wisdom, understanding, mercy and judgment. Later Lurianic teaching adds the idea of a broken world to be repaired, tikkun olam. Kabbalah also gives the Hebrew alphabet a role in creation itself, which links it directly to gematria, the practice of reading numeric values in Hebrew words.

Secret and revealed

The tradition has always stressed that some knowledge is to be handled with care. The Bible already distinguishes what God has revealed from what he has kept to himself:

Traditionally, Jewish teachers restricted the study of Kabbalah to mature students who had first mastered the Bible and Talmud, and many Jewish authorities still hold that view, which is one reason modern commercial versions draw criticism.

Christian Kabbalah and the Western esoteric tradition

In the late fifteenth century, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and later Johannes Reuchlin began studying Kabbalah, sometimes hoping to find the Trinity or Christ in it. In the seventeenth century, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth published the Latin Kabbala Denudata, which brought parts of the Zohar to European readers. In 1887 the occultist S. L. MacGregor Mathers translated parts of it into English as The Kabbalah Unveiled, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built its own system on Kabbalistic diagrams, which is why popular “Kabbalah” today often owes more to Christian and occult writers than to Jewish tradition. Mathers also translated the Key of Solomon, carried on this site's Ceremonial Magic shelf, though that is a distinct tradition of ritual magic, not Kabbalah.

On this site

Kabbalistic writings are not scripture. The library carries three treatises of the Zohar on its Kabbalah shelf, the Book of Concealed Mystery and the Greater and Lesser Holy Assemblies, in Mathers's 1887 English: only a small part of the Zohar, and a translation made through Rosenroth's Latin. The site's Hebrew text and its gematria tools show the letter-number system that Kabbalah builds on.