ABSTRACT
Qabbalah (Hebrew: “received [knowledge]”) A form of Jewish mysticism that originated in southern France (Provence) in the twelfth century and northern Spain in the thirteenth; an important movement in the medieval period, with continued significance within Hasidic Judaism today. The Qabbalah developed from systematic speculations about God’s relationship to humanity and developed through new forms of commentary on Scripture that found hidden levels of meaning in the sacred text. Unique to Qabbalah is its theory of the existence of ten divine emanations-called Sefirotwhich the Qabbalists see as spanning the void between the infinite God and the finite world.
