Few educated persons, and certainly none belonging to the class of students for which this work is more especially designed, will require to be told that the Kabalah is a form of esoteric philosophy, that it makes for itself a high claim, or that this claim has, from time to time, been admitted by persons who are entitled to our consideration. Nor will it be needful to state that the literature called Kabalistic rose up among the Jews during the Christian centuries which succeeded their dispersal and the destruction of their Holy City. It offers a strong contrast to the sacred scriptures of Israel, which are direct, beautiful and simple, while Kabalism is involved, obscure and in many ways repellent as regards its outward form. The Bible is in focus with humanity; the Kabalah is distorted out of all correspondence with the simple senses, and we must grind our intellectual lenses with exceeding care if we would bring it into perspective.
From whatever point of view it may be approached, the Kabalah is, however, of importance: it connects with literatures which are greater than itself and with pregnant issues of history. It is part of the history of philosophy, and as such it once entered into the thought of Europe. It is responsible, broadly speaking, for all that strange tissue of symbolism and ceremonial which made up the magic of the Middle Ages; at a later period it sought to transform alchemy; it tinctured many of those conventional practices and beliefs which we term superstition generically, and the guise in which we know them is therefore chiefly a Kabalistic guise. If we might dare to suppose for a moment that behind magic, behind alchemy, behind astrology there is any mystery of secret and real knowledge, then it is entitled to peculiar respect, because, by the hypothesis of some of its defenders, it is through this seemingly impassable literature that the road to the secret lies.
