Note 39 — III.

Knorr Baron von Rosenroth, therefore put himself under the tuition of R. Meier Stern, a learned Jew, and with his assistance was enabled to publish the celebrated work entitled the Unveiled Kabbalah (Kabbala Denudata), in two large volumes, the first of which was printed at Sulzbach, 1677–78, and the second at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, 1684, giving a Latin translation of the Introduction to and the following portion of the Sohar—the Book of Mysteries (‏ספר דצניעותא‎); the Great Assembly (‏אדרא רבא‎); the Small Assembly (‏אדרא זוטא‎); Joseph Gikatilla’s Gate of Light (‏שער אורה‎); the Doctrine of Metempsychosis (‏הגלגולים‎), and the Tree of Life (‏עץ חיים‎), of Chajim Vital; the Garden of Pomegranates (‏פרדס רימונים‎), of Moses Cordovero; the House of the Lord (‏בית אלהים‎), and the Gate of Heaven (‏שער השמים‎), of Abraham Herera; the Valley of the King (‏עמק המלך‎), of Naphtah b. Jacob; the Vision of the Priest (‏מראה כהן‎), of Issachar Beer b. Naphtali Cohen, &c., &c., with elaborate annotations, glossaries and indices. The only drawback to this gigantic work is that it is without any system, and that it mixes up in one all the earlier developments of the Kabbalah with the later productions. Still the criticism passed upon it by Buddeus, that it is a “confused and obscure work, in which the necessary and the unnecessary, the useful and the useless are mixed up and thrown together as it were into one chaos,”39 is rather too severe; and it must be remembered that if the Kabbala Denudata does not exhibit a regular system of this esoteric doctrine, it furnishes much material for it. Baron von Rosenroth has also collected all the passages of the New Testament which contain similar doctrines to those propounded by the Kabbalah.