Guillaume Postel

← Encyclopedia

Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) was a French orientalist, linguist, and Christian Kabbalist whose vast learning served a single conviction: that the whole human race could be drawn into one faith and one law, and that the turning of that age had already begun. Self-taught in Hebrew and Arabic, he became the royal reader in mathematics and Oriental languages at Paris and was, by any measure, one of the most accomplished scholars of his century. He was also, by the verdict of his own age, mad.

The two judgments are not easily separated. Postel’s scholarship was real: he produced one of the first European grammars of comparable Semitic languages, argued for the common descent of the world’s tongues from Hebrew, and worked closely with the Kabbalah, translating and commenting on the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah. From that material he built a program he called restitution — a restoring of all things to unity, in which the recovery of an original language and an original revelation would undo the dispersion of Babel and gather the nations under a single, reformed concord. He looked to the French crown to accomplish it; for a time he looked to the Jesuits, whose early Roman house briefly took him in before expelling him.

What fixed his later reputation was Venice. There, in the 1540s, Postel served as chaplain to a hospital and met an unlettered older woman he came to call Mother Joanna (Madre Zuana). He concluded that she was the feminine messiah — that the redemption Christ had begun in the masculine half of humanity she would complete in the feminine, and that her spirit, after her death, had entered him and made him her “first-born son” of the restored world. The claim was, in the terms of his church, simple heresy. When the Roman Inquisition examined him in 1555 it declined to burn him: it ruled him non malus sed amens — not wicked but insane — and confined him. He spent his last years under a comfortable house arrest at the priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs in Paris, still writing.

Postel sits at the strange edge where Renaissance humanism, Christian Kabbalah, and apocalyptic expectation overlap. Like Pico and Reuchlin before him, he treated Jewish mysticism as a key to Christian truth rather than a rival to it; unlike them, he carried the method into prophecy and named a living redeemer. Later esoteric and universalist currents have periodically reclaimed him — as a precursor of religious toleration, of comparative philology, even of a coming feminine age. Each reading takes one face of a man whose contemporaries could not decide whether he was a genius or a casualty, and who appears, on the evidence, to have been both at once.

→ In the library: The Zohar (Nurho de Manhar, 1914) · Sepher Yetzirah (Westcott, 1911)

→ Related: Anne Conway · Leonardo Da Pistoia · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus