e boundless One, as in modern philosophy God is the
Absolute. He manifests Himself in the ten _Sephiroth_, or intelligences.
It would be easy on this point to show Dante's indebtedness to the
Kabbalah in his description of the various heavens of his Paradise. These
intelligences control, in groups of three, the three worlds of intellect,
of soul, and of matter. The tenth of the _Sephiroth_ is called Kingdom,
_i.e._, the personal Deity, as seen in the workings of Providence, with
which conception we may compare Dante's description of Fortune, in the
seventh book of the "Inferno." This last of the _Sephiroth_ is manifested
visibly in the Shekinah. This is the barest and baldest outline of the
main features in this famous system.

The rise of Kabbalism is not very clearly known as regards authorship and
date; it is in turn, by different Jewish writers, ascribed to Adam,
Abraham, Moses and Ezra; but doubtless the work is an aggregation of
successive writings, and some critics believe that it was not compiled
before the Middle Ages, _i.e._, in the centuries between the conquest of
Gaul by the Franks and the period following the death of Dante.

There can be no doubt that the Kabbalah contains the ripest fruit of
spiritual and mystical speculation which the Jewish world produced on
subjects which had hitherto been obscured by the gross anthropomorphism of
such men as Maimonides and his school. We can understand the revolt of the
devout Hebrew mind from traditions like those which represented Jehovah as
wearing a phylactery, and as descending to earth for the purpose of taking
a razor and shaving the head and beard of Sennacherib. The theory of the
_Sephiroth_ was at least a noble and truly reverent guess at the mode of
God's immanence in nature. This conception won the favor of Christian
philosophers in the Middle Ages, and, indeed, was adopted or adapted by
the angelic Doctor Aquinas himself, the foremost of ecclesiastical and
scholastic metaphysicians. The psychology of the Kabbalah, even its
treatment of the soul's preexistence before union with the body, found
many advocates among Gentile and even Christian philosophers.

We are therefore led to the conclusion that the Kabbalah is by far the
most exalted, the most profound and the most interesting of all that mass
of traditional literature which comprises, among other writings, such
remains as the Targums and the Talmud.

A study of Hebrew literature would indeed be inc