rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 345
is feminine in form, but it was an innovation in Sefer haBahir that this
feminine aspect was emphasized by the author.^45
One has a strong impression that the mystics who produced such
works operated either independently of each other or in small groups.
They cited each other’s works only when it suited them. In contrast to
the constraints of Christian theology, or indeed the development of
halakhah or philosophical theories within Judaism, mystical specula-
tion was comparatively free. Mutual accusations were certainly made,
as we shall see (p. 347), but there was no notion for Jews (as there was
for Christians) that a failure to depict correctly the nature of the divine
world would inevitably lead to a charge of heresy. In Sefer haBahir the
origins of evil were said to lie in the divine itself, in the fingers of God’s
left hand, and the female aspect of the divine world was identified as the
source of evil. Similar notions can be found in early Christian Gnostic
texts, as well as Cathar doctrines, but neither influence explains the
adoption by the author of Sefer haBahir of a belief in the transmigration
of the soul after death: the notion may have been held by Pharisees back
in the period of the Second Temple (see Chapter 6), and it was appar-
ently held by some Jews in the tenth century, since Saadiah as well as his
Karaite contemporaries specifically censured the doctrine as ‘foolish’,
but it had not been adopted before within rabbinic circles.^46
Apparently contemporaneous with the author of Sefer haBahir were
the theosophical speculations in Provence of the Rabad and his son
Isaac the Blind. It was in their time that the term ‘kabbalah’ first became
standard for such speculation. The choice of term (translated literally as
‘reception’) is significant, since it implied that the doctrines being dis-
covered by intense concentration on the biblical texts and the nature of
the universe were in fact already known from antiquity and needed only
to be rediscovered: it was precisely their alleged ancient origins that
gave them their authority. Flourishing at the same time either in Provence
or across the Pyrenees in Castile was a set of mystics whose theosophy
was influenced by two other anonymous works, the speculative Sefer
halyyun (‘The Book of Contemplation’), which described ten (or in
some versions thirteen) powers which emanated from the divine, and
the ruminations found in Maayan haHokhma (‘The Spring of Wis-
dom’), which explained the origins of the world in part through
sequences of primal letters. The authors of the quite numerous short
mystical treatises that survive from this period were distinguished as
much by their independence of thought as by the notions they had in
common. The ascription of their books to ancient figures – Maayan