The Kabbalah: The Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews in the Kabbalist Books; the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar

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Overview

The Kabbalah's history and esoteric qualities are demystified and explained by Adolph Franck, a philosopher and scholar of ancient Jewish texts.With origins dating back thousands of years, the Kabbalistic texts are a cornerstone of Judaist tradition. They explain the relationship between God, humanity, the Earth, and the very Creation itself. For many centuries, Kabbalist scholars employed the lore as a means of explaining difficult passages in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient texts. However the Kabbalah itself evolved with time; an important component of it is the Zohar, a book whose origins are considered by scholars to be potentially as late as the 13th century AD.Beginning in the Renaissance, elements of the Zohar's doctrine were even adopted by Christian thinkers. As Franck explains, its influences can be felt in religions and philosophical belief systems elsewhere. Frequent reinterpretations and complex philosophical discussions give the Kabbalah aspects of continuous history, reflective of the changes in society such as the Renaissance. The author devotes entire chapters to the Kabbalist views on the human soul, the physically manifest world, and the divine nature of God, his analysis informed by a wide breadth of sources plus many years of personal researches and scholarship on Judaism.