Secret Societies and Subversive Movements | Page 8

time it is said to have been written down by the disciples of
Simon ben Jochai. The Talmud relates that for twelve years the Rabbi
Simon and his son Eliezer concealed themselves in a cavern, where,
sitting in the sand up to their necks, they meditated on the sacred law
and were frequently visited by the prophet Elias.[26] In this way,
Jewish legend adds, the great book of the Zohar was composed and
committed to writing by the Rabbi's son Eliezer and his secretary the
Rabbi Abba.[27]
The first date at which the Zohar is definitely known to have appeared

is the end of the thirteenth century, when it was committed to writing
by a Spanish Jew, Moses de Leon, who, according to Dr. Ginsburg,
said he had discovered and reproduced the original document of Simon
ben Jochai; his wife and daughter, however, declared that he had
composed it all himself.[28] Which is the truth? Jewish opinion is
strongly divided on this question, one body maintaining that the Zohar
is the comparatively modern work of Moses de Leon, the other
declaring it to be of extreme antiquity. M. Vulliaud, who has collated
all these views in the course of some fifty pages, shows that although
the name Zohar might have originated with Moses de Leon, the ideas it
embodied were far older than the thirteenth century. How, he asks
pertinently, would it have been possible for the Rabbis of the Middle
Ages to have been deceived into accepting as an ancient document a
work that was of completely modern origin?[29] Obviously the Zohar
was not the composition of Moses de Leon, but a compilation made by
him from various documents dating from very early times. Moreover,
as M. Vulliaud goes on to explain, those who deny its antiquity are the
anti-Cabalists, headed by Graetz, whose object is to prove the Cabala to
be at variance with orthodox Judaism. Theodore Reinach goes so far as
to declare the Cabala to be "a subtle poison which enters into the veins
of Judaism and wholly infests it"; Salomon Reinach calls it "one of the
worst aberrations of the human mind."[30] This view, many a student
of the Cabala will hardly dispute, but to say that it is foreign to Judaism
is another matter. The fact is that the main ideas of the Zohar find
confirmation in the Talmud. As the Jewish Encyclopædia observes,
"the Cabala is not really in opposition to the Talmud," and "many
Talmudic Jews have supported and contributed to it."[31] Adolphe
Franck does not hesitate to describe it as "the heart and life of
Judaism."[32] "The greater number of the most eminent Rabbis of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed firmly in the sacredness
of the Zohar and the infallibility of its teaching."[33]
The question of the antiquity of the Cabala is therefore in reality largely
a matter of names. That a mystical tradition existed amongst the Jews
from remote antiquity will hardly be denied by anyone[34]; it is
therefore, as M. Vulliaud observes, "only a matter of knowing at what
moment Jewish mysticism took the name of Cabala."[35] Edersheim

asserts that--
It is undeniable that, already at the time of Jesus Christ, there existed an
assemblage of doctrines and speculations that were carefully concealed
from the multitude. They were not even revealed to ordinary scholars,
for fear of leading them towards heretical ideas. This kind bore the
name of Kabbalah, and as the term (of Kabbalah, to receive, transmit)
indicates, it represented the spiritual traditions transmitted from the
earliest ages, although mingled in the course of time with impure or
foreign elements.[36]
Is the Cabala, then, as Gougenot des Mousseaux asserts, older than the
Jewish race, a legacy handed down from the first patriarchs of the
world?[37] We must admit this hypothesis to be incapable of proof, yet
it is one that has found so much favour with students of occult
traditions that it cannot be ignored. The Jewish Cabala itself supports it
by tracing its descent from the patriarchs--Adam, Noah, Enoch, and
Abraham--who lived before the Jews as a separate race came into
existence. Eliphas Lévi accepts this genealogy, and relates that "the
Holy Cabala" was the tradition of the children of Seth carried out of
Chaldea by Abraham, who was "the inheritor of the secrets of Enoch
and the father of initiation in Israel."[38]
According to this theory, which we find again propounded by the
American Freemason, Dr. Mackey,[39] there was, besides the divine
Cabala of the children of Seth, the magical Cabala of the children of
Cain, which descended to the Sabeists, or star-worshippers, of Chaldea,
adepts in astrology and necromancy. Sorcery, as we know, had been
practised by the Canaanites before the occupation of Palestine by the
Israelites; Egypt India, and Greece also had their soothsayers and