The Founder of a Magical Order Who Translated a Kabbalistic Text

Gershom Scholem's history of the Kabbalah's origins treats Sefer Yetzirah as older than Kabbalah proper and strange to classify because of it. Scholem dates the core text to somewhere between the third and sixth centuries, composed long before the medieval Kabbalistic movement his own study is mainly about, which begins in earnest in twelfth century Provence with texts like the Bahir. Sefer Yetzirah's cosmology of creation through number and letter, already noted on this passage as the source of the ten sefirot and twenty two letters later Kabbalists organized into the Tree of Life, was inherited and reinterpreted by that later movement rather than produced by it, an old text absorbed into a younger system that grew up around it.

The translator recorded on this passage is himself part of the text's stranger afterlife. William Wynn Westcott was a founding member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the influential English magical order, and his English Sefer Yetzirah, loose rather than critical as already noted here, carried the text into modern Western esotericism largely independent of the rabbinic scholarly tradition Scholem represents. Two readers of the same short text, a magical order's founder and a critical historian of Jewish mysticism, arrived at it from entirely different directions and for entirely different purposes.