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Kabbalah: Spanish Jews
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[One] early book of Kabbalah is the Bahir ("illumination")... known as The Midrash of Rabbi Nehuniah ben haKana. It is some 12,000 words long. First published in Provence in 1176, many Orthodox Jews believe that the author was Rabbi Nehuniah ben haKana, a Talmudic sage of the first century. Historians, however, believe that the book was likely written not long before it was published.
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[One] aspect of Jewish religion which influenced Kabbalah was the Biblical phenomenon of prophecy. The prophet was an individual chosen by God as a mouthpiece, and there was the implication that God, far from being a transcendental abstraction, was a being whom one could approach (albeit with enormous difficulty, risk, fear and trembling). Some Kabbalists believed that they were the inheritors of practical techniques handed down from the time of the Biblical prophets, and it is not impossible or improbable that this was in fact the case.
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Israeli journalist, Hannah Newman, wrote "Masters of the Blinding Light" to warn fellow Jews of the infiltration of New Age mysticism, via Kabbalah, into Judaism. The door-to-door sale of the Zohar throughout Israel may result in the replacement of the Torah with Kabbalah.
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In the end of the 15th century, in the early days of renascence, Christian scholars began to take interest in the teachings of the Kabbalah and some of the writings were translated to Latin. The scholars saw a resemblance between a few elements in the Kabbalah and basic Christian beliefs and sought out to found those beliefs on the Kabbalah. This movement attempted in missionary activity, trying to convince Jews to convert to Christianity by proving its authenticity based on the Kabbalah and the Zohar.
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