Do I need to learn Hebrew to study Kabbalah?

A Jewish Kabbalist would maintain that it is impossible to study Kabbalah without knowing Hebrew. Most Hermetic Kabbalists learn some Hebrew, but there are many practical exercises and ritual techniques which can be employed with only a minimal knowledge of Hebrew.

There is no question that a knowledge of Hebrew can make a very large difference. Non-Jewish texts on Kabbalah abound in simple mistakes which are due largely to uninformed copying. Thousands of important Kabbalistic texts have not been translated out of Hebrew or Aramaic, and the number of important source texts in translation is small. The difficulties in trying to read the archaic and technically complex literature of Kabbalah should not be discounted, but it is well worthwhile to acquire even a superficial knowledge of Hebrew. Four useful books are:

Levy, Harold, "Hebrew for All", Valentine, Mitchell 1976

Harrison R.K. "Teach yourself Biblical Hebrew", NTC Publishing Group 1993

Kelley, P.H., "Biblical Hebrew, an introductory grammar", Eerdmans 1992

Brown, F, "The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon", Hendrickson 1979

Many Kabbalists view the Torah as the word of God and Hebrew as the language of creation. In this view the alphabet and language are divine and have immense magical power. Many of the source texts of Kabbalah are commentaries on the Bible, and derive their insights using a variety of devices, such as puns, anagrams, gematria (letter manipulations) and cross references to the same word in different contexts. The reader is presumed to be adept at playing this game, which becomes completely inaccessible in translation.