Blavatsky & Philo of Alexandria

HPB, in the glossary of the Key to Theosophy, apparently consulting a bio on Philo, considers his writings to be of a kabbalistic nature -

"Philo-Judaeus. A Hellenized Jew of Alexandria, a famous historian and philosopher of the first century, born about the year 30 B. C., and died between the years 45 and 50 A. D. Philo's symbolism of the Bible is very remarkable. The animals, birds, reptiles, trees, and places mentioned in it are all, it is said, "allegories of conditions of the soul, of faculties, dispositions, or passions; the useful plants were allegories of virtues, the noxious of the affections of the unwise and so on through the mineral kingdom; through heaven, earth and stars; through fountains and rivers, fields and dwellings; through metals, substances, arms, clothes, ornaments, furniture, the body and its parts, the sexes, and our outward condition." (Dict. Christ. Biog.) All of which would strongly corroborate the idea that Philo was acquainted with the ancient Kabbala."

Although the explanations given are brief and from indirect sources (Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of Christian Biography) , the idea that Philo was aware of a secret Kabbalistic doctrine is a plausible one from an esoteric or mystic perspective. From an academic perspective, there has been much resistance. Adolphe Franck's The Kabbalah, a work Blavatsky was aware of, dismisses the idea.  The main problem is that Philo is very sparing in referring to Jewish tradition outside of the Greek Pentateuch, so it is by no means obvious from his writings that he even knew Hebrew or Aramaic. Happily, things are changing, the theory was put forth in the 1950s and is currently being revived with some interesting research:

Naomi G. Cohen, Philo’s Cher. 40–52, Zohar III 31a,
and BT Hag. 16a, Journal of jewish studies, vol. lvii, no. 2, autumn 2006

"It has been shown that Philo has culled this esoteric tradition from a commentary identified by him as ‘Jeremiah’, since as pointed out above, while Philo names Jeremiah in II Cher. §49, what he is obviously quoting is an esoteric commentary on the prophetic verse found in the Book of Jeremiah, for in the same section he also identifies the esoteric exegesis of the Pentateuch as belonging to Moses.The passage from the Zohar contains similar ideas, projects similar images, and uses the same biblical text, in the form found in the Septuagint and in Philo, but not in the MT, and BT Hagiga 16a contains desiccated ‘bare bones’ of this construct, divested of any discernable theosophical dimension.

Thus the very same midrashic building blocks which stem from the Septuagint reading of Jer. 3:4 appear in Philo and in the Zohar, and to some extent in BT Hagigah 16a as well. The completely different form that the tradition takes in these very different sources is apparently the result of their having been transplanted into very different cultural soils and climates. This supports the thesis that a pool of esoteric Midrash common to the Hebrew/Aramaic tradition and the Greco-Jewish ‘world’ existed in the days of the Second Temple—in the days of Philo who was more or less contemporary with Hillel and Shammai.

Further, since as we have seen, this specific tradition must have originated in Hellenistic Jewish circles for whom the Holy Scripture was the Septuagint, it also shows that contributions to this midrashic pool came not only from sources that originated in the Hebrew/Aramaic speaking communities, but that this was at least sometimes a two way street.59 And finally, it also lends support for the hypothesis, which, after a half-century of almost total eclipse, in recent years is gaining a more and more serious hearing in  scholarly circles, that some very early esoteric traditions are in fact embedded in the Zohar."