The Essential Works of Kabbalah. Bernhard Pick

The Essential Works of Kabbalah - Bernhard Pick


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Customs and Manner of Life of the Jews" (Padua, 1640), and translated into Latin, French, Dutch, English.5 But besides this and other works, he also wrote a polemical treatise against the Cabalists, whom he despised and derided, entitled Ari noham, i. e., "Roaring Lion," published by Julius Furst, Leipsic, 1840. In this treatise he shows that the cabalistic works, "which are palmed upon ancient authorities, are pseudonymous; that the doctrines themselves are mischievous; and that the followers of this system are inflated with proud notions, pretending to know the nature of God better than any one else, and to possess the nearest and best way of approaching the Deity." He even went so far as to question whether God will ever forgive those who printed the cabalistic works (comp. Furst, p. 7), and this no doubt, because so many Cabalists joined the Church.

      The Cabalists of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Moses Chayim Luzzatto (born 1707, died 1747), are of little importance. Modern influences gradually put a stop to the authority of the Cabala, and modern Judaism sees in the Cabala in general only an historical curiosity or an object of literary historical disquisitions.

      CHAPTER V.

      THE MOST IMPORTANT DOCTRINES OF THE CABALA.

       Table of Contents

      God arid Creation.—After having become acquainted in previous chapters with the principal actors in the cabalistic drama we are now prepared to examine the tenets of the Cabala.

      Different from the system as exhibited in the Book of Creation or Jezirah is that of the Zohar, because the more difficult, since it embraces not merely the origin of the world, but likewise speculates on the essence of God and the properties of man; in other words it treats of theology, cosmology and anthropology.


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