Christian Kabbalah

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Christian Kabbalah is the body of interpretation, beginning in the late fifteenth century, in which Christian scholars took up the symbols and methods of Jewish Kabbalah and read them as secret confirmation of Christian doctrine. Its premise was that the same revelation lay hidden inside both faiths, and that the Jewish mystical tradition, rightly construed, pointed toward Christ.

The current is usually traced to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who in 1486 included Kabbalistic theses among the nine hundred propositions he proposed to defend at Rome, and argued that no science proves the divinity of Christ better than magic and Kabbalah. A generation later the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin gave the project its first sustained books — De Verbo Mirifico and De Arte Cabalistica — in which the divine name itself, expanded by a single letter, was made to yield the name of Jesus. The line ran on through Cornelius Agrippa, the Franciscan Francesco Giorgi, and others, and reached a kind of summit in Kabbala Denudata, the vast Latin anthology compiled by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth in the 1670s and 1680s — the work through which most later European readers, including the nineteenth-century occultists, met Kabbalistic texts at all. (The library’s Kabbalah Unveiled is one such later translation, drawn from that compilation.)

What these authors did with the material is what most separates them from their sources. Jewish Kabbalah is the inner mystical and theosophical tradition of Judaism, worked out within its own law and community; the Christian readers lifted its vocabulary — the sefirot, the divine names, the techniques of letter and number — and bent it toward a conclusion their teachers did not hold. They believed they were not distorting the tradition but completing it, recovering an original wisdom that Jews had received and only half understood. Jewish writers, for the most part, did not recognize the result as their own.

Modern scholarship treats the claim of hidden continuity as the current’s defining idea rather than an established fact: Christian Kabbalah is studied as a Renaissance reading of Jewish sources, shaped as much by Neoplatonism and the hunt for an ancient theology as by the Kabbalah it cited. Its long influence is not in doubt. The fusion of Kabbalistic structure with Christian and Hermetic themes fed directly into later Western esotericism — Rosicrucian and Masonic symbolism, the magical Kabbalah of the occult revival — where the diagram of the sefirot became a fixture far from the synagogue that first drew it.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887; from Knorr von Rosenroth)

→ Related: Kabbalah · Neoplatonism · Rosicrucianism · Occultism · Emanation