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Updated: April 30, 2025
It was really to Raymund Martini that this error goes back. But George Eliot could not know it. On p. 140, Maimon begins, "Accordingly, I sought to explain all this in the following way," to which George Eliot appends the note, "But this is simply what the Cabbala teaches not his own ingenious explanation." It is interesting to find George Eliot occasionally defending Judaism against Maimon.
Notwithstanding which, some will take the liberty of guessing at their meaning by that species of Cabbala called by the Jews, Notarikon, and suppose the letters to stand for as many words expressing the names and attributes of God, his works, ordinances, and decrees; and therefore these mysterious letters, as well as the verses themselves, seem in the "Koran" to be called signs.
His only luggage was two manuscripts: a commentary on the works of Maimuni, whose name he had adopted, and to whom he paid divine reverence; and a treatise in which he attempted to rationalize the recondite doctrines of the Cabbala, and which he always kept by him "as a monument of the struggle of the human mind after perfection in spite of all hindrances which were put in its way."
After he had long revolved this hypothesis in his mind, at last he met with a Rabbi well skilled in the Talmud, the Cabbala, and the allegorical books of the Jews. This Rabbi had once embraced the Christian religion, but was again relapsed to Judaism on account of the idolatry of the Papists, yet not perfectly disbelieving the integrity of the New Testament.
If we may judge by the extracts at present before us, he seems to have been an absurd and extravagant person, who had attempted to combine the theology of the Cabbala with the very little which he was able to understand of the philosophy of Spinoza; and, as far as he is concerned, neither his writings nor the reflections upon them are of interest to any human being.
On this wise did Hasib, from a dunsical know-nothing, unskilled to read writing, become, by the decree of Allah Almighty, an adept in every science and versed in all manner of knowledge, so that the fame of his learning was blazed abroad over the land and he became renowned as an ocean of lore and skill in medicine and astronomy and geometry and astrology and alchemy and natural magic and the Cabbala and Spiritualism and all other arts and sciences.
The ancient Druids, and Priests of Gaul, as well as the ancient inhabitants of Germany, held to it. Traces of it may be found in the remains of the Aztec, Peruvian and Mexican civilizations. The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, the Roman Mysteries, and the Inner Doctrines of the Cabbala of the Hebrews all taught the Truths of Metempsychosis.
Others explain the intent of these letters from their nature or organ, or else from their value in numbers, according to another species of the Jewish Cabbala called Gematria; the uncertainty of these conjectures sufficiently appears from their disagreement.
Townsend about his accounts an hour or two, we reading of a merry book against the Presbyters called Cabbala, extraordinary witty. Thence walked home and to my office, setting papers of all sorts and writing letters and putting myself into a condition to go to Chatham with Mr. Coventry to-morrow. So, at almost 12 o'clock, and my eyes tired with seeing to write, I went home and to bed.
In the same manner the "Wisdom of God" and the "Word of God" became distinct personages. This was the germ of the process which has engendered the Sephiroth of the Cabbala, the Æons of Gnosticism, the hypostasis of Christianity, and all that dry mythology, consisting of personified abstractions, to which Monotheism is obliged to resort when it wishes to pluralize the Deity.
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