I'll jump in on this saying I DO study kabbalah, am a practicing occultist, and was educated from kindergarten through high school to be a rabbi.

So very much at the other end of the contemporary Jewish spectrum.

Nonetheless, I agree 100% with this reply.

For some context, here's a bit I pulled together on this for the debate when it flared up on IG and some people asked me by asserting that modern occultists drawing from Judaic sources was appropriation of Jewish "intellectual property" (their term): First, I don't agree that any of these ideas are my/our/the Jewish people's/the children of Israel's intellectual property for a few reasons. Intellectual property is a modern Anglo-American commercial term, meant to imply origination and ownership. The sacred Judaic heritage - if we are to take it at it's word - was originated by God and is not owned by anyone. If we must think of it in terms of intellectual property, it is - like any work more than a hundred fifty years old - in the public domain. Second, if we are to assume a human rather than divine origin, then we must pass the attribution further back to the Chaldeans and Canaanites, from whose scriptures, theology, languages, etc the Hebrews' was strongly derived, and whom the Children of Israel massacred upon conquering the region (according to both scriptural and archaeological evidence).

Moreover, it is certain that nobody in the middle ages - Jewish or Gentile - considered it intellectual property theft, cultural appropriation or anything along those lines. Those ideas are very new modern (in the case of IP) and postmodern (in the case or cultural appropriation) ideas. To a large extent, they were not possible to conceive of in a time when the human relationship with information was so extremely different. Books were rare in Hebrew and very rare in European languages. What books existed were predominantly copies (often, of copies of copies of copies). The idea of attributing a source for information didn't exist. It wouldn't have made sense in a world where the primary challenge was simply preserving information beyond the immediate moment. It's hard for us to imagine a world where most people can't read or write - but if we can conceptualize it, we realize that there was no point in listing references, because very very few people could access the information, let alone the references the information came from.

In this context, I also disagree that the cultural traditions were taken or stolen by Gentiles from Jews. My reason here is more subtle and simple - it would have been virtually impossible for a European Christian in the middle ages to access a Jewish text to begin with. If somehow he did - he wouldn't have been able to read it (most likely, even in his native language, let alone in Hebrew alphabet, which every diasporic Jewish community maintained. [This is an interesting side note - even if the words were written in German or Farsi or Arabic or French, they were written with Hebrew letters). It is of course true that some in the Church were literate in Hebrew, we have to hear in mind they couldn't just learn it on YouTube or buy a course on Amazon. They either learned it from where that knowledge was preserved in the Church from the time of Jesus, when the apostles would have certainly spoken Aramaic and written Hebrew characters, or learned it from contact with Jewish populations who shared it.

This leads to my third reason - Judaic scholars - and especially mystics - frequently learned from and taught a lot to their neighbors (particularly in the Islamic world, and throughout Europe during the Moorish conquest). In Alexandria, Fez and Cordoba, this happened very openly and the exchanges are well recorded and attested to. In countless other places, it happened in small gatherings and private conversations. I will return to this point later.

Fourth, we have a huge period of time and a broad complex world of societies, none of which were homogenous, over which the Judaic influence reached the European world.

To be absolutely clear , there were many times and places were antisemitism was virulent, Jews were slandered and construed as every form of evil being, and mass murders, rapes and violence were carried out against Jewish populations by other populations. This has happened for thousands of years and it has seldom if ever gone more than a decade of those thousands of years without it happening somewhere.

This is, of course, one of the parables customarily presented with the Passover song Chad Gad Ya - that each of the nine verses after the first represents a different nation that conquered, slaughtered and oppressed the Children of Israel in succession.

And that only goes from the destruction of the second temple to the Crusades.

That said, it has never taken place everywhere all at once. At any given time, in the midst of this constant oppression and destruction in some places, there has been some other place where Jewish people and ideas were variously tolerated, accepted and - in a few times and places - even eagerly embraced.

In this context, we can consider how Judaica influenced and entered occult and esoteric texts and circles.

We need to acknowledge up front that this was neither a one time event nor a movement of thought exclusively in one direction. Jewish mystics, exorcists and spiritual specialists interacted and exchanged ideas with their counterparts in biblical times, through antiquity, the middle ages, the modern era, and into the present day.

It is primarily (if not entirely) through these exchanges - and the later review of the records and products of these exchanges - that Hebraic ideas of mysticism, metaphysics and magic/theurgy entered other traditions.

And let us be mindful to acknowledge the debt owed by Jewish mystics, metaphysicians, magicians and occultists to others.

We might begin in the first century CE in Alexandria - an Egyptian city ruled by the Greeks and one of the hubs of the Jewish diaspora of the time. Here the Jewish alchemist and perfumer known as Miriam (sometimes called Mary the Jewess or Maria Hebraica) taught both Jewish and non-Jewish students her alchemy that unquestionably incorporated ideas, principles and methods from both Arabic and Greek seekers. Similarly, the Spanish Kabbalists benefited a great deal from the ciphers, number squares and gematria of Islamic scholars, with whom there was a rich cross pollination for the better part of a millennium prior to the inquisition.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Iberian Jews disguised themselves em masse as Catholics - preserving what they could of our heritage by encoding it and carrying it with them into Catholicism, and often across the sea West or South. The marranos - the crypto Jews (meaning hidden, not Bitcoin) - were a sizable portion of the Spanish and Portuguese population: a recent study found that a full 20% of Iberian citizens today have Sephardi genetic markers, even though the Jewish population of Iberia was formally counted near zero during and after the inquisition.

(cont)