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 the doctrine of Christianity. Its premise was that the same revelation lay hidden in both faiths: rightly construed, the secret tradition of Israel pointed toward Christ. To the movement’s founders this was not analogy but discovery — the divine Names concealed the Trinity; the Tetragrammaton, completed by a single letter, sounded the name of Jesus; the primordial man of the Kabbalists was the heavenly Christ. They were not distorting the tradition but completing it — recovering an original wisdom the Jews had received and only half understood.

The ambition had rehearsals in the Middle Ages — Ramon Llull had prized the Kabbalah as an instrument of conversion without being a Kabbalist, and the Spanish convert Pablo de Heredia’s Epistle of Secrets, quoting partly from works that do not exist, is its first recognizable piece — but as a movement the current is usually traced to Rome in the winter of 1486.

The founding: a program and a library

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola printed his nine hundred Conclusiones at Rome on 7 December 1486, for a public disputation that never took place. One hundred nineteen of them are explicitly Kabbalistic — forty-seven reporting “the secret doctrine of the wise Hebrew Cabalists,” seventy-two more drawn, in Pico’s own voice, from those sages’ foundations. The movement’s charter sentence is the ninth of the twenty-six magical conclusions in the own-opinion series: nulla est scientia que nos magis certificet de divinitate Christi quam magia et cabala — no science gives more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and Kabbalah. It was among the propositions Rome condemned.

The program rested on a commissioned library. Flavius Mithridates — Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada, a Sicilian convert from Judaism — produced for Pico in roughly ten months, 1485–86, Latin versions of nearly forty Hebrew and Aramaic works — thousands of folio pages: Menahem Recanati’s Pentateuch commentary, treatises of Abraham Abulafia, the Bahir, portions of the Zohar, Gikatilla’s Ginnat Egoz. With the teaching of Yohanan Alemanno beside it, this corpus fixed the founders’ Kabbalah: the medieval tradition of early Kabbalah — Castilian-Geronese theosophy, Abulafian ecstatic technique — not the Lurianic system, which did not yet exist.

It was also, in part, a doctored library. Chaim Wirszubski’s Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Harvard University Press, 1989; https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674667112) reconstructed the corpus and showed that Mithridates routinely worked Christianizing glosses into the translations and fabricated passages outright: some of the confirmations Pico found had been put there by his translator. The mediation problem that haunts all later Christian Kabbalah is present at its source.

The frame waiting for the material was prisca theologia, the ancient theology Marsilio Ficino’s Florence traced from Hermes Trismegistus through Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato. Presented as the secret oral law of Moses, Kabbalah entered that genealogy as its Mosaic-Hebrew limb, letting Renaissance Hermetism and Neoplatonism stand beside Scripture as branches of one revelation.

Reuchlin: the Name made utterable

The German humanist Johann Reuchlin met Pico in Florence in 1490, took up Hebrew in 1492 with Jakob ben Jehiel Loans, the emperor’s Jewish physician, and gave the project its first sustained books. De verbo mirifico (Basel, 1494; digitized at https://www.e-rara.ch/bau_1/content/titleinfo/4571286) is a three-day dialogue among a Jew, a philosopher, and a Christian on the movement’s central argument: the supreme wonder-working word is the Pentagrammaton. The unpronounceable Tetragrammaton YHVH, when the letter shin — the letter of fire and spirit — is set into it, becomes YHShVH: Yeshua, Jesus. In Reuchlin’s demonstration the divine Name made utterable is the Name made flesh, and history follows the Names: God revealed as Shaddai in the age of nature, as the Tetragrammaton in the age of the Torah, as the Pentagrammaton in the age of redemption.

Between Reuchlin’s two books came the first complete Kabbalist treatise printed in Latin: Portae lucis (Augsburg, 1516; full scan at http://www.literature.at/item?objid=13463), the convert Paolo Riccio’s translation of Gikatilla’s Sha’arei Orah, whose frontispiece woodcut of a sage holding the labeled Tree of the sefirot served for two centuries as the movement’s emblem. Reuchlin’s own summa followed: De arte cabalistica (Hagenau, March 1517; digitized at https://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?bandnummer=bsb00017488&c=viewer&l=en), dedicated to Pope Leo X — the first systematic Latin treatise on Kabbalah by a Christian author. Its three books — a Frankfurt dialogue among a Pythagorean, a Muslim, and the Kabbalist Simon — expound the ten sefirot, the divine Names, the seventy-two-letter Shem ha-Mephorash, and the operations of gematria, notarikon, and temurah, arguing that Pythagorean number-mysticism and Kabbalistic letter-mysticism are one wisdom in two dresses.

The books were written under fire. In 1509 Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Cologne convert backed by the Dominicans, obtained an imperial mandate to confiscate and destroy Jewish books. Alone among the consulted experts, Reuchlin opposed destruction: his opinion of 6 October 1510 defended the Talmud and the Kabbalistic books as lawful scholarship and proposed Hebrew chairs at the German universities. Pfefferkorn answered with the libel Handspiegel; Reuchlin replied with his own pamphlet, the Augenspiegel, and the case ran for a decade — to a Roman trial quashed in Reuchlin’s favor in 1516 — while the anonymous satire Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515–17) made the Cologne scholastics the laughingstock of humanist Europe. On 23 June 1520 Leo X, the same pope who had accepted the dedication of De arte cabalistica three years before, condemned Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel as scandalous and offensive. The affair made the legitimacy of Hebrew books an international question and rehearsed the Reformation’s alignments a few years early.

The sixteenth-century constellation

In Rome, Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo kept the grammarian Elia Levita thirteen years in his household as Hebrew teacher and composed the Scechina (1530), a five-book treatise presented to Charles V, reading the Shekhinah as at once Mary, the Church, and the immanent face of the Logos; it stayed in manuscript until 1959. In Venice, the Observant Franciscan Francesco Giorgi, called Zorzi (1466–1540), published De harmonia mundi (1525), the movement’s first full cosmology: three canticles in which Pythagorean ratio, Neoplatonic emanation, and the sefirot describe a single harmonic universe. John Dee owned a copy; the Roman Index of 1583 permitted the book only expurgated.

Cornelius Agrippa absorbed the Pico–Reuchlin–Riccio material on the divine Names into Book III of De occulta philosophia (1533), and through that book Christian Kabbalah passed, in popularized and operative form, into Renaissance magic and to every occult writer after. The boldest of the century’s translators was Guillaume Postel, professor at the future Collège de France: his Latin Sefer Yetzirah was printed at Paris in 1552 — a decade before the Hebrew editio princeps (Mantua, 1562) — while his Latin Zohar-on-Genesis and Bahir stayed in manuscript, recovered only in the twentieth century. He was also the movement’s strangest prophet: in Venice the visions of Mother Zuana, an elderly hospital serving-woman, persuaded him that she was the Venetian Virgin and he her spiritual son, called to gather every religion into one. The Venetian Inquisition in 1555 judged him not a heretic but insane and held him at Ripetta until 1559. Long derided as a heretic or madman, Postel — in the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s verdict — has emerged as one of the impressive and influential personalities of the Renaissance.

The Counter-Reformation closed the Italian chapter: the Talmud burned in Rome from 1553, Paul IV’s Index of 1559 prohibited it along with many Kabbalistic books, and by 1600 the Italian project — Pico’s, Egidio’s, Zorzi’s, and that of Pietro Galatino, whose compendium of 1518 defended Reuchlin while announcing on its title page a campaign against Jewish “perfidy” — had been silenced inside Catholic territories. The center of gravity shifted north across a bridge anthology: Johannes Pistorius’s Artis cabalisticae … tomus I (Basel, 1587), a folio gathering Reuchlin, Riccio, Galatino extracts, and a Latin Sefer Yetzirah — the conduit by which the founding generation reached the seventeenth century. The promised second volume never appeared.

Kabbala Denudata: the conduit

The summit came at the irenic Sulzbach court. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, the count palatine’s privy chancellor, compiled Kabbala denudata — “the Kabbalah unveiled” — in two volumes (Sulzbach, 1677–78; Frankfurt, 1684; digitized at https://www.e-rara.ch/cgj/alch/content/structure/1172145), the most extensive Latin translation of Zoharic and Lurianic material ever produced. Volume one carried a Hebrew–Latin lexicon of Kabbalist terms, a synopsis of the Zohar’s doctrine, the Lurianic Liber Druschim, selections from Moses Cordovero and Naphtali Bacharach, and Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Porta coelorum; the second, the Liber Sohar restitutus, gave the Zohar’s principal theosophical strata — the Sifra di-Tzeniuta and the greater and lesser Idrot — read through the grid of Hayyim Vital’s school, with a treatise on the transmigration of souls. Through these pages Lurianic Kabbalah — tzimtzum, the partzufim, gilgul — became available to Christian Europe for the first time; the founders had known only medieval material.

What the anthology withheld shaped its readers as much as what it gave. It never translated the whole Zohar: Knorr intended a complete version, and the published volumes remained preliminary studies. It silently omitted the Sabbatean material in its Lurianic sources. And its Latin equivalents primed the Christian reading at the level of vocabulary itself — partzuf rendered as persona, tikkun as restauratio, tzimtzum as contractio, Adam Kadmon as Adam coelestis. Knorr held that the three highest sefirot are the Trinity and that Adam Kadmon is Jesus; the anonymous Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae appended to the second volume — the work of Francis Mercury van Helmont — turned that conviction into a system: Adam Kadmon is Christ, the second Adam of 1 Corinthians 15; the upper triad is the Trinity; Zeir Anpin the incarnate Son; the Shekhinah the Spirit and the Church; tzimtzum the kenosis of Philippians 2; tikkun redemption itself.

Around the book stood a circle. Henry More supplied Latin apparatus to both volumes while increasingly recoiling: tzimtzum and the cascade of partzufim seemed to him to compromise creation from nothing. Anne Conway read the same pages with fewer reservations and built gilgul into the moral cosmology of her posthumous Principia (1690); Leibniz read Conway. Meanwhile the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher folded Kabbalah into the Egyptian syncretism of his Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54), and his redrawn Tree of Life became the template the later occultists still use. The standard scholarly judgment of Knorr’s anthology is blunt: it virtually alone represented authentic Jewish Kabbalah to Christian Europe until the mid-nineteenth century.

The Jewish response

The keepers of the sources, for the most part, did not recognize the result as their own. 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. The mediation had been compromised from the first translations, and the conversionist edge was pressed in print while the Talmud burned in Italian squares. The weightiest reply came from inside Venice: the rabbi Leon Modena’s Ari Nohem (“The Roaring Lion”), composed in 1639, argued that the Zohar was a modern composition and the so-called wisdom of Kabbalah neither wisdom nor an ancient tradition — an argument mounted partly in alarm at the Christian Kabbalists’ use of the texts, as Yaacob Dweck shows in The Scandal of Kabbalah (Princeton University Press, 2011; https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691145082/the-scandal-of-kabbalah). The treatise circulated in manuscript and was first printed only in 1840.

Decline, occult transformation, recovery

Its influence outlasted its theology. By the middle of the eighteenth century Christian Kabbalah had faded from mainstream doctrine; it persisted where Agrippa had sent it, in occultism. Éliphas Lévi fused Kabbalah with Tarot and ceremonial magic; the Golden Dawn raised its Hermetic Qabalah on Kircher’s Tree and Knorr’s Latin; Rosicrucian and Masonic symbolism carried the structures onward, until the diagram of the sefirot stood as a fixture of the Hermetic Kabbalist’s equipment, far from the synagogue that first drew it. Mathers’s The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) documents that passage: three Zoharic tracts translated not from the Aramaic but from Knorr’s Latin. A separate German line ran through the physician Balthasar Walther, whose Safed travels fed Jakob Böhme and, through him, Christian theosophy.

Modern scholarship treats the movement’s claim of hidden continuity as its defining conviction rather than as 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. The field’s founding essay is Gershom Scholem’s “Zur Geschichte der Anfänge der christlichen Kabbala,” published in the Leo Baeck eightieth-birthday volume (London, 1954, pp. 158–193; https://blogs.bard.edu/arendtcollection/scholem-gershom-gerhard-zur-geschichte-der-anfange-der-christlichen-kabbala/), first in English in Joseph Dan, ed., The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and Their Christian Interpreters (Harvard College Library, 1997, pp. 17–51; https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Kabbalah-Mystical-Interpreters-Harvard/dp/0914630199). François Secret’s 1964 survey restored the movement to serious history; Wirszubski’s 1989 reconstruction exposed the founding library’s seams; Dweck’s 2011 study recovered the Jewish counter-voice; and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann’s four-volume Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala (Frommann-Holzboog, 2012–2015; https://www.frommann-holzboog.de/reihen/514/51410/514100110?lang=de) gave the movement its fullest history and first complete bibliography. The movement was founded on a partly falsified library; the scholarship that recovered it began by rebuilding that library exactly.

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

→ Related: Kabbalah · Hermetic Qabalah · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Johann Reuchlin · Knorr Von Rosenroth · Lurianic Kabbalah · Prisca Theologia · Renaissance Hermetism · Neoplatonism · Rosicrucianism · Occultism · Emanation