ABSTRACT
Judaism is a religion that is rooted in practice rather than belief, and efforts, such as those of Maimonides, to produce a credo or articles of faith have been met with ambivalence and controversy. For many centuries some of those searching for a spiritual and theoretical foundation for their Jewish commitment and practice have turned to the esoteric tradition within Judaism, the Kabbalah. Outside of Orthodox Judaism the main interest in the Kabbalah came in Christian circles who saw it as a spiritual foundation for alchemy, a justification for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, or part of a universal theosophy. Traditional Jewish scholars trace the Kabbalah to the oral revelation to Moses at Mt Sinai. Modern scholarship understands the Kabbalah to have originated during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries in southern France and Spain as an outgrowth and development of earlier forms of Jewish mysticism.
