Gershom Scholem, in Origins of the Kabbalah, recognizes the influence the Mandaeans had upon the early Kabbalists. This was a critical time, the first Millennium of the Common Era. The ancient world was gradually forgotten as the long night of the Dark Ages overtook everything in the West, thanks to the Catholics and the Barbarians. In the Middle East, and in Asia, such was not the case. With the Moslems came the need to develop the sciences. There was more tolerance for these things in Moslem countries, therefore the Church had to stigmatize the Moslems as infidels. Of course, we would be amiss if we said that the Moslems were the model of tolerance. Indeed, they were far from it. The Jewish Schools lasted in Babylonia until the tenth to eleventh centuries of the Common Era. From that time progress took place in Italy, Germany, France and Spain. The Kabbalah itself, we can see, really got started in the Languedoc region of France. Before this, however, it came from Babylonia, to Italy, and thence to Germany. By the time it reached Narbonne and Lunel, by 1130 c.e., it had enjoyed a long and circuitous route.
Starting in Babylonia, then, it would have, in the 8th Century c.e., have come in contact with Isma'ili influences, most particularly Batini and Carmathian influences. Before that, it would have absorbed elements of the Gnosis that survived the persecutions in Egypt and the Mediterranean world in general during the centuries after the Gnosis became a heresy more dangerous than Communism in the United States was in the 1940s and 1950s of the Common Era. One of these elements would have been Mandaean religion, which, it can be seen, originated as a Jewish Heresy in the same region that the original Kabbalah was first developed, namely, the Transjordan region.
When we get to describing this material in the Timeline of the Authentic Tradition, it all becomes more clear, even if the paths get muddied due to all the intersections and links that connect every group together, constantly. Perhaps an excerpt from the Graphic Timeline shall suffice here.
[Create Graphic chart for the Church Driven Into the Desert period here... i.e., it is still to come.]
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