of all European scholars, whom he invited to the Eternal City, promising to defray their travelling expenses, was the following: "No science yields greater proof of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Kabbalah." Mirandola so convinced Pope Sixtus of the paramount importance of the Kabbalah as an auxiliary to Christianity that his holiness exerted himself to have Kabbalistic writings translated into Latin for the use of divinity students. With equal zeal did Reuchlin act as the apostle of the Kabbalah. His treatises exercised an almost magic influence upon the greatest thinkers of the time. Pope Leo X. and the early Reformers were alike captivated by the charms of the Kabbalah as propounded by Reuchlin, and not only divines, but statesmen and warriors, began to study the Oriental languages in order to be able to fathom the mysteries of Jewish theosophy. The _Zohar_, that farrago of absurdity and spiritual devotion, was the weapon with which these Christians defended Jewish literature against hostile ecclesiastic bodies (Abrahams, _Jew. Lit._ p. 106). Thus the Kabbalah linked the old scholasticism with the new and independent inquiries in learning and philosophy after the Renaissance, and although it had evolved a remarkably bizarre conception of the universe, it partly anticipated, in its own way, the scientific study of natural philosophy.[11] Jewish theosophy, then, with its good and evil tendencies, and with its varied results, may thus claim to have played no unimportant part in the history of European scholarship and thought. The main sources to be noticed are:-- Main Sources. 1. The _Sepher Yesirah_, or "book of creation," not the old Hilkoth Y. ("rules of creation"), which belongs to the Talmudic period (on which see Kohler, _Jew. Ency._ xii. 602 seq.), but a later treatise, a combination of medieval natural philosophy and mysticism. It has been variously ascribed to the patriarch Abraham and to the illustrious rabbi 'Aqiba; its essential elements, however, maybe of the 3rd or 4th century A.D., and it is apparently earlier than the 9th (see L. Ginzberg, _op. cit._ 603 sqq.). It has "had a greater influence on the development of the Jewish mind than almost any other book after the completion of the Talmud" (ibid.). 2. The _Bahir_ ("brilliant," Job. xxxvii. 21), though ascribed to Nehunyah b. Haqqanah (1st century A.D.), is first quoted by Nahmanides, and is now attributed to his teacher Ezra or Azriel (1160-1238). It shows the influence of the _Sepher Yesirah_, is marked by the teaching of a celestial Trinity, is a rough outline of what the _Zohar_ was destined to be, and gave the first opening to a thorough study of metaphysics among the Jews. (See further 1. Broyde, _Jew. Ency._ ii. 442 seq.).