Knowledge of God and the development of early Kabbalah

the long version

"....A major factor that led to the development of Kabbalah was the adoption by the first Kabbalists of a philosophic ethos that, under the influence of the newly emergent Hebrew philosophic materials, had taken root in Jewish communities in Languedoc and Catalonia. This was an ethos in which a sort of meta-reflection on classical Jewish texts and, in particular, the investigation of God as the height of that reflection, was accorded great religious significance....Kabbalah...did not emerge as a true literary tradition until the first half of the thirteenth century, when the Languedocian and the Catalonian students and followers of R. Isaac the Blind, the son of the...leading Rabbinic figure, R. Abraham ben David, wrote the first Kabbalistic works...I will refer to them as the circle of R. Isaac. It is the emergence of Kabbalah at the hands of this circle...that is my particular interest here."--Introduction, p. 3-4.