Kabbalah

Merkavah and Heikhalot

The ascent literature of late antiquity: descenders to the Chariot pass through seven palaces guarded by angelic gatekeepers, armed with seals and hymns. The corpus was redacted over centuries and its social setting is still argued; it is the deep background of Kabbalah, not yet Kabbalah itself.

The visionary tradition looks back to Ezekiel's chariot and to tannaitic restrictions on expounding it.

Sefer Yetzirah

A brief, gnomic treatise describes creation through thirty-two paths of wisdom — ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters. Its date is contested across the whole span from the third century to the seventh, and its sefirot are numbers and limits, not yet the divine potencies of the later Kabbalah.

Every later family — Jewish, Christian, and Hermetic — reads itself back into this book; the book itself resists all of them.

The Bahir surfaces in Provence

The Sefer ha-Bahir appears in Provence around 1176, the first text to speak of the sefirot as living divine potencies arranged in a structure. It presents itself as ancient midrash; its actual prehistory is obscure, and the question of older oral or written sources remains open.

The Zohar in Castile

The Zohar begins to circulate in Castile in the 1280s, in the circle of Moses de Leon, written in an artificial Aramaic as the ancient midrash of Shimon bar Yochai. The pseudepigraphy was suspected almost at once and is now established; the book's power was never diminished by it.

Between Bahir and Zohar stand Gerona and Nahmanides' guarded allusions — and, in the same decade as the Zohar, Abulafia's quite different ecstatic school.

Christian Cabala

Pico della Mirandola's 900 Theses of 1486 announce that no science gives greater certainty of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah; Reuchlin's De arte cabalistica of 1517 builds the system. A second family is founded — Christian in aim, Latin in language, and from the outset distinct from the Judaism it borrowed from.

Expulsion from Spain

The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 scatters the Castilian kabbalistic inheritance across the Mediterranean — to Italy, North Africa, and the Ottoman lands. Within two generations the tradition's centre of gravity has moved to the Galilean town of Safed.

Luria at Safed

Isaac Luria teaches at Safed for barely two years before his death in 1572, leaving almost nothing in writing. Through Hayyim Vital's redactions his system — tzimtzum, the breaking of the vessels, tikkun — becomes the dominant kabbalistic theology of early modern Judaism.

Sabbatai Zevi

Nathan of Gaza proclaims Sabbatai Zevi messiah in 1665, reading his mission through Lurianic categories of sparks and repair; the movement sweeps the diaspora until Sabbatai's conversion to Islam under Ottoman pressure in 1666. The apostasy discredits public messianic Kabbalah and drives its radical wing underground.

Hasidism

From around 1740 the Baal Shem Tov, who dies in 1760, and his circle turn Lurianic and earlier kabbalistic materials toward a popular devotional revival in Podolia and Volhynia — devekut for the ordinary Jew, the rebbe as channel, Kabbalah internalised as psychology of worship.

The Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is founded in London in 1888, and with it Hermetic Qabalah takes settled form: the Tree of Life as a scheme of correspondences binding tarot, astrology, and ceremonial magic. It is a nineteenth-century synthesis built from Latin intermediaries, and should be named as such.

Scholem and the academy

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism of 1941 founds the modern academic study of Kabbalah; Idel, Liebes, and their successors have since revised his map without abandoning the enterprise. The three families are now studied, and distinguished, as history.