Note 44 — III.

1845. A new era in the study of the Kabbalah was created by the researches of M. H. Landauer, who died February 3rd, 1841, when scarcely thirty-three years of age. This learned Rabbi, whose premature death is an irreparable loss to literature, in spite of constitutional infirmities, which occasioned him permanent sufferings during the short period of his earthly career, devoted himself from his youth to the study of Hebrew, the Mishna, the Talmud, and the rich stores of Jewish learning. He afterwards visited the universities of Munich and Tübingen, and in addition to his other researches in the department of Biblical criticism, determined to fathom the depths of the Kabbalah. It was this scholar who, after a careful study of this esoteric doctrine, for the first time distinguished between the ancient mysticism of the Gaonim period and the real Kabbalah, and shewed that “the former, as contained in the Alphabet of R. Akiba (‏אותיות בר׳ עקיבא‎), the Dimensions of the Deity (‏שיעור קומה‎), the Heavenly Mansions (‏היכלות‎), and even the Book of Jetzira (‏ספר יצירה‎) and similar documents, essentially differ from the later Kabbalah, inasmuch as it knows nothing about the so-called Sephiroth and about the speculations respecting the nature of the Deity, and that, according to the proper notions of the Kabbalah, its contents ought to be described as Hagada and not as Kabbalah.”44 As to the Sohar, Landauer maintains that it was written by Abraham b. Samuel Abulafia towards the end of the second half of the thirteenth century. Landauer’s views on the Kabbalah and on the authorship of the Sohar, as Steinschneider rightly remarks, are all the more weighty and instructive because he originally started with opinions of an exactly opposite character. (Jewish Literature, p. 299.)