The fact is that the main ideas of the Zohar find confirmation in the Talmud. As the _Jewish Encyclopædia_ observes, "the Cabala is not really in opposition to the Talmud," and "many Talmudic Jews have supported and contributed to it."[31] Adolphe Franck does not hesitate to describe it as "the heart and life of Judaism."[32] "The greater number of the most eminent Rabbis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed firmly in the sacredness of the Zohar and the infallibility of its teaching."[33] The question of the antiquity of the Cabala is therefore in reality largely a matter of names. That a mystical tradition existed amongst the Jews from remote antiquity will hardly be denied by anyone[34]; it is therefore, as M. Vulliaud observes, "only a matter of knowing at what moment Jewish mysticism took the name of Cabala."[35] Edersheim asserts that-- It is undeniable that, already at the time of Jesus Christ, there existed an assemblage of doctrines and speculations that were carefully concealed from the multitude. They were not even revealed to ordinary scholars, for fear of leading them towards heretical ideas. This kind bore the name of Kabbalah, and as the term (of Kabbalah, to receive, transmit) indicates, it represented the spiritual traditions transmitted from the earliest ages, although mingled in the course of time with impure or foreign elements.[36] Is the Cabala, then, as Gougenot des Mousseaux asserts, older than the Jewish race, a legacy handed down from the first patriarchs of the world?[37] We must admit this hypothesis to be incapable of proof, yet it is one that has found so much favour with students of occult traditions that it cannot be ignored. The Jewish Cabala itself supports it by tracing its descent from the patriarchs--Adam, Noah, Enoch, and Abraham--who lived before the Jews as a separate race came into existence. Eliphas Lévi accepts this genealogy, and relates that "the Holy Cabala" was the tradition of the children of Seth carried out of Chaldea by Abraham, who was "the inheritor of the secrets of Enoch and the father of initiation in Israel."[38]