Guillaume Postel

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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, and much of it was first. From that learning he built a program he called restitutio omnium — 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. Everything he did with his philology, his cartography, and his Kabbalah pointed toward that one end. The strangeness of the life lies in how exact the means were and how absolute the goal.

Origins and the making of a polyglot

Postel was born on 25 March 1510 in the hamlet of La Dolerie, in the parish of Barenton in Normandy, to a poor family — he signed his early works “G. P. Barentonius Doleriensis,” after the place. Orphaned young, by some accounts in an outbreak of plague, he supported his own schooling by teaching in a village at thirteen or fourteen, then made his way to Paris and the Collège Sainte-Barbe. There, in the late 1520s, he fell in among the circle that would become the Society of Jesus, encountering Ignatius of Loyola himself. He took in Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese, and then the languages that would define him: Hebrew, which he taught himself from books bought from a Paris Jew, and Arabic, which almost no Christian in France could read.

The decisive opening came in 1536. King François I, courting a Franco-Ottoman alliance, sent the embassy of Jean de La Forêt to Sultan Süleyman, and Postel went along as official interpreter. He returned by way of Venice having gathered Arabic, Syriac, and other manuscripts — astronomical and scientific texts among them — for the royal library, where they remain the core of an oriental collection. He was made a royal lecturer (lecteur royal) at the college of royal readers founded by François I, the institution that would become the Collège de France, holding what was effectively the first chair of Arabic in France and lecturing in mathematics and Oriental languages.

The philology: all tongues from one

What he brought back he turned into print with extraordinary speed. In 1538 he published two pioneering works of comparative philology. The first, Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum introductio, set out twelve alphabets side by side — the first European comparative-alphabet study, and the first European recognition of the ancient Samaritan Hebrew letters surviving on Judean coins. The second, De originibus seu de Hebraicae linguae et gentis antiquitate, argued the thesis that organized his entire science of language: that Hebrew is the mother of all tongues, the speech of Adam, from which every other language has fallen away. To recover the order among the alphabets was, for Postel, to begin to recover that lost unity.

The philology was not an antiquarian hobby running alongside the prophecy; it was its instrument. If all peoples once spoke one language and held one revelation, then the babel of nations is a wound that learning can help to close. His Grammatica Arabica, the first Arabic grammar printed in the West with Arabic type, and his comparative work on the Semitic family belong to the same project as his eschatology. In 1543 he set Islam and the Gospel side by side in the Alcorani… concordiae liber, reading the Qur’an not as a foe to be crushed but as a tongue to be gathered in. The following year De orbis terrae concordia — his first major book, printed at Basel by Johann Oporinus — made explicit room for Islam within a single universalist scheme and called on the French king to lead the world toward concord. The scan of the 1544 Basel edition is held openly at Open Library.

The Kabbalah, handled precisely

Postel inherited the project of Christian Kabbalah from the founding generation — from Johann Reuchlin, whose De arte cabalistica (1517) had made the Hebrew mystical tradition a philological resource for Christian truth, and from the cosmic harmony of Francesco Zorzi, whose work he knew and cited. Like the Christian Kabbalists before him, he treated Jewish mysticism as a key to Christian truth rather than a rival to it. Where he went further was in carrying the method out of apologetics and into prophecy.

His Kabbalistic work was substantial, and it must be described with care, for he is often over-credited. In 1552 he printed in Paris the Abrahami Patriarchae liber Iezirah, sive Formationis mundi — the first printing in any language of the Sefer Yetzirah, the terse ancient book of formation treating the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters, here with his Latin translation and commentary. (The site’s hosted Sepher Yetzirah, in a later English rendering, preserves the text he was the first to set in type.) With the Zohar he went further still and was the first European to render Zoharic material into Latin — but partially, and in manuscript. In 1547 he bought a Zohar manuscript in Venice from the Hebrew-printer Daniel Bomberg, and from it produced two annotated Latin translations, the earlier surviving in his own hand in the British Library (Sloane 1410). They were never printed in his lifetime; they circulated through manuscript and through his influence, and they are philologically flawed, distorted by his imperfect Aramaic and his habit of reading by sound rather than root. He is therefore not the Zohar translator — that channel would open later, through Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (Knorr, 1677–1684). Postel is the man who first cracked the door. The sefirotic grammar he worked in had been mapped a generation of mystics earlier by figures such as Joseph Gikatilla, and the manuscript-Zohar milieu he entered had its papal-Roman precedent in the household of Egidio da Viterbo, who had sponsored partial Latin Zohar translations before him.

Restitution: undoing Babel

The mature system, presented here as his own prophetic construction, gathered several strands into one. At its center stood restitutio omnium: a divinely appointed final restoration of all creation to its primordial unity — religions, languages, and peoples reconciled in a golden age under a single spiritual and temporal order. He drew it together from the recovery of the Adamic language, from a Christianized version of the Kabbalistic repair of the broken world, and from the old hope of a universal salvation in which nothing is finally lost. He read history in four ages and saw the fourth, the restored age, beginning in his own time. The means were a dominus mundi, a single universal monarch — ideally the French king — and an angelic pope, with Postel himself standing between them as herald.

This is the soil in which Renaissance humanism, Christian Kabbalah, and apocalyptic expectation overlap, and Postel grew in all three at once. The same universalist hope had animated the recovery of ancient wisdom that Marsilio Ficino and the Florentine Neoplatonists had pursued a lifetime earlier — the conviction that beneath the fractures of doctrine lay one prisca theologia, an ancient single theology whose threads ran through Hermes Trismegistus, the Kabbalah, and Plato alike. (That Hermetic strand had entered the Latin West through the friar Leonardo da Pistoia, who carried the Greek Corpus Hermeticum to Cosimo de’ Medici around 1460.) Postel pressed the hope to its breaking point: not a recovered text but a recovered world, not an ancient concord glimpsed but a coming concord proclaimed.

Venice and Mother Joanna

What fixed his later reputation was Venice. In 1546–1549 he was there, serving as censor of Hebrew books and as chaplain at the Hospital of Saints John and Paul, the Ospedaletto. There he met an unlettered woman of about fifty who ran the hospital kitchen and was known for charity and for visions — Johanna, whom he came to call Mother Joanna (Madre Zuana). He concluded that she was the feminine messiah.

The doctrine he built around her inverts an old reading of Genesis. Christ, the new Adam, had redeemed the masculine half of humanity; the redemption of the lower, feminine half awaited a second redeemer, and Joanna was she. In Les très merveilleuses victoires des femmes du nouveau monde (1553) Postel turned Eve from seductress into victim and laid the responsibility for the Fall on the male sex, making woman the redeemer of masculine fault. He identified Joanna with the divine feminine presence of the Kabbalah and with the angelic pope of older prophecy. After her death he claimed her spirit had passed into him and remade his body — repairing, in his own terms, the male and female halves of his soul — so that he became the first-born of the restitution, a new man in whom the restored age had already dawned. The claim was, in the terms of his church, simple heresy.

Non malus sed amens

The reckoning came in stages. His writings were declared heretical; he returned to Venice to defend himself, and the Venetian Inquisition’s proceedings closed in 1555 with his books condemned but the man spared. The tribunal declined to burn him. It ruled him non malus sed amens — not wicked but insane — and on that verdict his life turned. He was afterward held in Rome, and when the crowd threw open the prisons on the death of Pope Paul IV in 1559 he went free, then wandered for years before returning to Paris in 1562. Renewed prophetic preaching led to his confinement at the priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, where, by the documentation of Abel Lefranc, he remained from about 1562–1563 until his death. The arrest was comfortable: he kept writing, received princely and scholarly visitors, and was left to his books. He died on 6 September 1581 and was buried in the priory church — though some accounts hold he may in fact have died at his farm at Trappes.

The system, the scholarship, the afterlives

Postel left more than fifty printed books and a trail of manuscripts, and the modern recovery of him has turned on which face of the work one takes as primary. The first major modern study, William Bouwsma’s Concordia Mundi (Harvard, 1957), read him through universalist concord and held that he would not have thought of himself first as a speculative philosopher at all. The French scholar François Secret made Postel’s documentary backbone — editing his texts and tracing him within Les kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (1964) and Le Zôhar chez les kabbalistes chrétiens (1958), the standard map of how the Zohar reached Christian readers. Marion Kuntz’s Guillaume Postel: Prophet of the Restitution of All Things (Nijhoff, 1981) gave the standard English intellectual biography and argued that his thought is internally rational once its premises are granted. Yvonne Petry’s Gender, Kabbalah and the Reformation (Brill, 2004) put the Mother-Joanna doctrine and Postel’s remarkable theology of the feminine at the center, and argued that his religious vision was often subordinated to a definite political program. The philological question — how good, in fact, was his Latin Zohar — was settled by Ronit Meroz and Judith Weiss, who traced his source to the lost Bomberg manuscript and showed the translation to be frequently inaccurate, in “The source of Guillaume Postel’s 1553 Zohar Latin translation” (Renaissance Studies, 2015). The Mother-Joanna eschatology has its fullest English account in Jean-Pierre Brach’s chapter “Son of the Son of God: The Feminine Messiah and Her Progeny, according to Guillaume Postel” (in Alternative Christs, Cambridge, 2009). All of Postel’s sixteenth-century works, their author four and a half centuries dead, are in the public domain; the live copyright questions attach only to this modern apparatus.

Two debates run on without resolution. One is whether his system is best read as a coherent — if heterodox — synthesis or as the product of derangement, the very question the 1555 verdict raised and refused to decide. The other is whether the restitution was at bottom a religious vision of concord or the blueprint of a universal monarchy. The dispute is genuine and is left here unjudged.

His afterlife scattered. His disciple Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie carried Postelian Christian-Kabbalist ideas into the Antwerp Polyglot Bible of the 1560s and 1570s. His Absconditorum clavis, the “key to things hidden from the foundation of the world,” acquired a strange second life when its seventeenth-century editor Abraham von Franckenberg added to the 1646 edition a diagram he called the editor’s key to the author’s key — a wheel reading ROTA, TARO — which the nineteenth-century occultist Éliphas Lévi later claimed pointed to the tarot, and so to a supposed Kabbalistic pedigree for the cards. The claim is Lévi’s, not Postel’s. Theosophical, Rosicrucian, and Traditionalist writers have each reclaimed some face of him — as a herald of religious toleration, of comparative philology, of a coming feminine age — and each reading belongs to its own century rather than to the sixteenth. Whether Postel earns or escapes a place in the older Hermetic-Tradition narrative associated with Frances Yates is itself a test case in how the history of Western esotericism gets framed.

Each of these readings 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 · Christian Kabbalah · Johann Reuchlin · Kabbalah · Jewish Mysticism · Egidio Da Viterbo · Joseph Gikatilla · Knorr Von Rosenroth · Frances Yates · Marsilio Ficino