those best suited to shed light on the circumstances under which the
Kabbalah made its appearance—have by no means been sufficiently
studied. This is not surprising, for these documents contain hardly
any historical accounts that could clarify by means of direct testi-
mony either the milieu into which the Kabbalah was born or its ori-
gin. To the extent that such accounts do exist, they are mostly
pseudepigraphical stories and inventions. Nor is the task of the his-
torian of religion rendered easier by an abundance of detailed mysti-
cal texts whose analysis could compensate for this paucity of histor-
ical documents. On the contrary, he faces texts that are preserved
only in a fragmentary state, rendering them extremely difficult to
understand, and that employ concepts and symbols so strange that
often they are simply incomprehensible. These difficulties in deci-
phering the oldest texts are further increased by the style in which
they are written; the syntax alone can often drive the reader to de-
spair.

Moreover, these primary sources are few. We are not dealing
here with either voluminous works or personal documents that in-
clude exchanges of letters or biographical records of the kind that
are of such invaluable assistance to the historian of Christian or
Islamic mysticism. Nearly all documents of this nature have been
lost in the storms of Jewish history. When I was fortunate enough
to discover one such letter written by a central figure of the early
days of the Provençal Kabbalah, this came as a great and pleasant
surprise.

Since the kabbalistic literature appears to turn only its most
forbidding face toward researchers, few of them have taken the
pains to rescue the manuscripts from the dust of the libraries, pub-
lish them, and attempt to uncover their meaning. Adolph Jellinek
was the only nineteenth-century scholar to publish at least some
texts that bear on the investigation of the Kabbalah of the thir-
teenth century, and of these only a few relate to the earliest period
or to that which immediately followed. The authors who wrote about
the Kabbalah were content to study only what the kabbalists them-
selves had chanced to publish. It does not require much imagination
to conceive how unsatisfactory these editions of difficult texts are to
the modern researcher and how liable they are to lead him to false
conclusions through incorrect readings and other deficiencies. On
this difficult terrain, the absence of any painstaking philological

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