Johann Reuchlin

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Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) was a German humanist, jurist, and Hellenist who became the first Christian north of the Alps to study Hebrew at length and the earliest to set out, at book length, what would later be called Christian Kabbalah. He was by training a man of the law and the languages — Greek above all, which few of his contemporaries could read — and he turned to Hebrew in middle age, convinced that the deepest matters of his own faith were locked in a tongue the Church had largely ignored.

The conviction took learned form in two dialogues. De verbo mirifico (1494), “On the Wonder-Working Word,” argued that the hidden name of God carried a power the philosophers had only groped toward. De arte cabalistica (1517), “On the Art of Kabbalah,” went further, presenting the Jewish mystical tradition as a revealed wisdom older than Greek philosophy and secretly in accord with Christianity. Reuchlin had read the Florentine Pico della Mirandola, who a generation earlier had claimed that “no science assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah”; Reuchlin built that claim into a system, treating the Hebrew letters, the divine names, and the doctrine of emanation as a key the Church had mislaid. He held that the addition of a single letter to the four-letter name of God yielded the name of Jesus — the kind of reading in which his Kabbalah did its work.

What scholarship establishes is harder-edged than the system. Reuchlin’s Hebrew grammar and lexicon, De rudimentis hebraicis (1506), gave Christian Europe its first usable textbook of the language and is his most lasting achievement; the speculative dialogues drew on a real but partial acquaintance with Jewish sources, and Jewish Kabbalists would not have recognized everything he made of them. He is, on the record, less a magus than a scholar who believed the texts he was learning to read held more than grammar.

The episode that made him famous in his own day was a fight over books. When a convert named Johannes Pfefferkorn pressed for the confiscation and burning of Hebrew writings, Reuchlin, asked for an expert opinion, argued that most such books were lawful and useful and ought to be preserved. The defense drew the fury of the Dominican theologians of Cologne and pitched him into years of proceedings that reached Rome. Humanists across Europe took his side, and the quarrel produced the Epistolae obscurorum virorum — the “Letters of Obscure Men,” an anonymous satire that held his opponents up to ridicule and is remembered as a small landmark in the running war between the new learning and the old schools.

Reuchlin died in 1522, as the Reformation he had not sought was breaking over Germany; Melanchthon, who carried Greek and Hebrew into the Lutheran universities, was his great-nephew. His Kabbalah passed into the long Christian fascination with Hebrew letters and divine names that runs through the Renaissance occult revival. He had wanted, in the end, to read what others could not, and to argue that what he found there was not foreign.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887)

→ Related: Erasmus · Paracelsus · Ramon Llull · Neoplatonism · Emanation