ny Jews and Christians still write as
though they believe that the book is as old as it was asserted to be.
The defects of the Zohar are in keeping with this imposture. Absurd
allegories are read into the Bible; the words of Scripture are counters
in a game of distortion and combination; God himself is obscured amid a
maze of mystic beings, childishly conceived and childishly named.
Philosophically, the Zohar has no originality. Its doctrines of the
Transmigration of the Soul, of the Creation as God's self-revelation in
the world, of the Emanation from the divine essence of semi-human,
semi-divine powers, were only commonplaces of medieval theology. Its
great original idea was that the revealed Word of God, the Torah, was
designed for no other purpose than to effect a union between the soul of
man and the soul of God.

Reinforced by this curious jumble of excellence and nonsense, the
Kabbala became one of the strongest literary bonds between Jews and
Christians. It is hardly to be wondered at, for the Zohar contains some
ideas which are more Christian than Jewish. Christians, like Pico di
Mirandola (1463-1494), under the influence of the Jewish Kabbalist
Jochanan Aleman, and Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), sharer of Pico's
spirit and precursor of the improved study of the Scriptures in Europe,
made the Zohar the basis of their defence of Jewish literature against
the attempts of various ecclesiastical bodies to crush and destroy it.

The Kabbala did not, however, retain a high place in the realm of
literature. It greatly influenced Jewish religious ceremonies, it
produced saintly souls, and from such centres as Safed and Salonica sent
forth men like Solomon Molcho and Sabbatai Zevi, who maintained that
they were Messiahs, and could perform miracles on the strength of
Kabbalistic powers. But from the literary stand-point the Kabbala was a
barren inspiration. The later works of Kabbalists are a rehash of the
older works. The Zohar was the bible of the Kabbalists, and the later
works of the school were commentaries on this bible. The Zohar had
absorbed all the earlier Kabbalistic literature, such as the "Book of
Creation" (_Sefer Yetsirah_), the Book Raziel, the Alphabet of Rabbi
Akiba, and it was the final literary expression of the Kabbala.

It is, therefore, unnecessary to do more than name one or two of the
more noted Kabbalists of post-Zoharistic ages. Isaac Lurya (1534-1572)
was a saint, so devoid of self-conceit that