 Maimon’s relation to the Kabbalah was a bit more ambivalent. While he had no sympathy for the anthropomorphic teachings of some of the major Kabbalistic works, Maimon attempted to disclose the rationalistic core of the Kabbalah, which he identified with Spinoza’s pantheistic teachings. In his early Hebrew writings Maimon develops the view that God is also the material cause of the world (i.e., that all things are merely predicates of God, who is their substratum). Since Maimon conceives God to be a pure intellect, the result is a genuine form of radical — and pantheistic — idealism. This form of idealism plays a significant role in Maimon’s thought in the 1790s, and possibly also in the development of German Idealism in general.