Leone di Modena, a 17th-century Venetian critic of Kabbalah, wrote that if we were to accept the Kabbalah, then the Christian trinity would be compatible with Judaism, as the Trinity seems to resemble the kabbalistic doctrine of the "sephirot". This was in response to the belief that some European Jews of the period addressed individual "sephirot" in their prayers, although the practice was apparently uncommon. Apologists explained that Jews may have been praying "for" and not necessarily "to" the aspects of Godliness represented by the "sephirot". In contrast to Christianity, Kabbalists declare that one prays only "to Him (God's Essence, male solely by metaphor in Hebrew's gendered grammer), not to his attributes (sephirot or any other Divine manifestations or forms of incarnation)". Kabbalists directed their prayers to God's essence through the channels of particular sephirot using kavanot Divine names intentions. To pray to a manifestation of God introduces false division among the sephirot, disrupting their absolute unity, dependence and dissolving into the transcendent Ein Sof; the sephirot descend throughout Creation, only appearing from man's perception of God, where God manifests by any variety of numbers.