Kabbalah

The Kabbalah ('the received tradition') is the Jewish mystical teaching that unfolds the inner life of God as a structure of ten emanations, the sefirot, through which the hidden Infinite pours forth into creation — and that finds in the letters, names, and hidden senses of scripture a key to the divine.

Its scheme of emanation from an unknowable source ran strikingly parallel to Neoplatonic procession from the One. Renaissance Christians — above all Pico della Mirandola, and after him Reuchlin and Agrippa — seized on this, forging a 'Christian Cabala' and weaving Jewish mysticism together with Hermeticism and Platonism into the great synthesis of Western esotericism.