What is the Jewish Kabbalah? To some persons the sound of the word
will be familiar, though the ideas which it conveys will probably be vague in the extreme, while to many, indeed, the very name will be unknown. What is the Jewish Kabbalah? If we tum to those general storehouses of all kinds of knowledge, the encyclopaedias, we find but bald and unsatisfactory information. Thus Burrowes' Modern Encyclopaedia says: "The Hebrew Cabbala signifies tradition; and the Rabbins who are called Cabbalists, study principally the combination of particular words, letters, and numbers, and by this means pretend to discover what is to come, and to see clearly into the sense of many difficult passages of Scripture. There are no sure principles of this knowledge, but it depends upon some particular traditions of the ancients, for which reason it is termed Cabbala. The secrets of the Cabbala are said to have been discovered to Moses on Mount Sinai; and to have been delivered from him down from father to son, without interruption, and without any use of letters; for to write them down is what they are by no means permitted to do ... There is another Cabbala, called artificial, which consists in searching for abstruse and mysterious signification of a word in Scripture, from whence they borrow certain explanations, by combining the letters which compose it; this Cabbala is divided into three kinds, the gematrie [gematria], the notaricon, and the temura or themura. The first whereof consists in taking the letters of a Hebrew word for cyphers or arithmetical numbers, and explaining every word by the arithmetical value of the letters whereof it is composed. The second sort of Cabbala, called notaricon, consists in taking every particular letter of a word for an entire diction; and the third, called themura, i.e., change, consists in making different transpositions or changes of letters, placing one for the other, or one before the other
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