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 Latin Christendom had largely ignored for a thousand years.

He was born in Pforzheim, in the margravate of Baden, on 29 January 1455, the son of a steward of the Dominican monastery there. The education that followed ran across half the universities of the late-medieval north: Latin schooling at home, then Freiburg, then Paris in 1473, where he first met the Greek that would define him; a baccalaureate at Basel in 1475 and a master’s in 1477; legal study at Orléans and a doctorate in law at Poitiers in 1481. He entered the service of Count Eberhard of Württemberg as counselor and was raised, in time, to the imperial nobility. The career was the visible life. The hidden one, the one that made him a figure rather than a functionary, began on his journeys into Italy.

The turn to Hebrew

Three times Reuchlin crossed the Alps — in 1482, 1490, and 1498 — and on the second journey, in Florence, he met Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the young count whose nine hundred theses of 1486 had already proposed reading Jewish mysticism as a secret Mosaic confirmation of Christian doctrine. Pico opened the door; the Italian academy of Marsilio Ficino, with its genealogy of an ancient wisdom — a prisca theologia descending through Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, and Plato — supplied the frame into which Hebrew learning could be fitted as the Mosaic limb of a single revelation. But the system was nothing without the language, and the language Reuchlin took from Jewish teachers. Jacob Loans, court physician and house Jew of the Emperor Frederick III, gave him his first grounding in Hebrew at Linz around 1492; later, in Rome, he studied with the physician and exegete Obadiah Sforno. Reuchlin always named these men. The deference is part of the record: he held that the wisdom he was after could not be reached around the people who kept it. To learn Hebrew at all, in a Latin west that had let the language lapse, meant placing oneself under Jewish instruction, buying Jewish books, and trusting Jewish scholarship at the very moment the Church was moving to suppress all three. The intellectual debt and the political exposure were the same act.

The two dialogues

The conviction took learned form in two speculative dialogues, two decades apart. De verbo mirifico (1494) — on the wonder-working Word — is a three-day conversation among a Jew (Baruchias), an Epicurean philosopher (Sidonius), and a Christian named Capnion — Reuchlin’s own name turned into Greek, kapnos being the smoke that translates Rauch. Its argument is that the supreme miraculous Name carries a power the philosophers had only groped toward, and that the unpronounceable four-letter name of God is made utterable, and made flesh, when a single Hebrew letter is added to it: the Tetragrammaton YHWH becomes the five-letter Pentagrammaton read as the name of Jesus. The kind of reading in which his Kabbalah did its work is visible already here — the divine Name not abolished by the Gospel but completed by it.

De arte cabalistica (1517) — on the art of Kabbalah — went much further. A three-book dialogue set in Frankfurt am Main among a Pythagorean, a Muslim, and a Jewish kabbalist, dedicated to the Medici pope Leo X, it is the most systematic exposition of Kabbalah produced in Latin in the sixteenth century. Reuchlin laid out the doctrine of the ten sefirot, the divine names, the seventy-two-letter Name, the exegetical operations of gematria, notarikon, and temurah, the doctrine of emanation by which the hidden Godhead unfolds into a knowable order, and a sustained argument that Pythagorean number-mysticism and Jewish letter-mysticism are siblings — a move that let Greek-trained humanists receive Kabbalah as familiar territory in unfamiliar dress. He had read Pico, 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 structure, treating the Hebrew letters, the divine names, and the emanative order as a key the Church had mislaid.

The architecture of the central argument is worth stating plainly, because it governs everything else. The Tetragrammaton, the four-letter Name no Jew would pronounce, stood at the summit of the kabbalistic theology of language as the unsayable source from which the order of being descends. Reuchlin took the insertion of the consonant shin — the letter associated with fire and spirit — to transform the silent four-letter Name into a five-letter Name that can be spoken, and that, read aloud, sounds the name of the Savior. The unutterable was not displaced by the Gospel; it was vocalized by it. To this he joined a reading of the highest of the sefirot — Crown, Wisdom, Understanding — as the three Persons of the Christian Godhead, so that the kabbalistic map of emanation became a diagram of the Trinity drawn, as he saw it, by Jewish hands centuries before the Church possessed the doctrine to read it. The whole apparatus of gematria, notarikon, and temurah was directed to drawing such hidden equivalences to the surface. It was exegesis turned into proof.

The Jewish Kabbalah he drew on was real but partial — the medieval, pre-Lurianic theosophy of the Castilian and Geronese line together with the prophetic-ecstatic strain of Abraham Abulafia, reaching him in selective and sometimes Christianized translation — and the kabbalists of the early tradition would not have recognized everything he made of them. He was, on the record, less a magus than a scholar who believed the texts he was learning to read held more than grammar.

De rudimentis hebraicis

Between the two dialogues stands the work that outlasted them both. De rudimentis hebraicis (1506), a grammar and lexicon bound in one folio volume, gave Christian Europe its first usable textbook of the Hebrew language. A grammar by Konrad Pellikan had appeared two years earlier, but Reuchlin’s was the fuller and the more accurate, and it was his that taught a generation. Modeled on the grammatical and lexical work of the medieval Jewish scholar David Kimhi, it embodied the program of Hebraica veritas — the principle that the Latin Vulgate must be measured against, and where wrong corrected by, the original Hebrew. Reuchlin closed it with a line lifted from Horace: he had built a monument more lasting than bronze. It was not bravado. The dialogues remain the curiosities of a particular sixteenth-century enthusiasm; the grammar made an entire Christian discipline possible. Every Hebraist who came after — including the men who would turn Hebrew against him — learned the alphabet in his book.

The fight over the books

The episode that made him famous in his own day was a fight over books. A convert named Johannes Pfefferkorn, backed by the Dominican inquisitor Jacob van Hoogstraten, obtained from the Emperor Maximilian I a mandate in 1509 to seize and burn Jewish writings on the grounds of their blasphemy. Reuchlin, consulted as one of several experts, submitted in October 1510 a recommendation arguing that the great majority of such books — the Talmud and the kabbalistic literature among them — were lawful, useful, and in places indispensable to Christian theology, and must not be destroyed. The defense drew the fury of the Dominican theologians of Cologne. Pfefferkorn attacked him in print; Reuchlin answered, bitterly, in the Augenspiegel — the eye-glasses — of 1511. The quarrel passed from pamphlets into courts. Brought by papal order before the bishop of Speyer, the case was decided in Reuchlin’s favor in 1514; the Cologne party appealed, and the proceedings dragged through Rome for years. On 23 June 1520 — eight days after issuing the first thundering condemnation of Martin Luther — Leo X reversed Speyer and condemned the Augenspiegel, a victory so late and so political that it was already hollow.

Around the conflict humanist Europe organized itself. Scholars across the continent took Reuchlin’s side, and the partisanship produced the Epistolae obscurorum virorum, the “Letters of Obscure Men” (1515–1517), an anonymous satire in barbarous mock-Latin that held the Cologne theologians up as ignorant buffoons and is remembered as a small landmark in the running war between the new learning and the old schools. Erasmus, who privately thought the affair a distraction from the studies that mattered, nonetheless found himself drawn toward the humanist camp it defined. The defense of Hebrew books had, almost incidentally, become the first muster of a transnational party — and that party’s lines would soon be redrawn by a far larger quarrel.

The two faces of the work

Reuchlin’s project was two things at once, and to describe only one is to misdescribe it. It was a serious humanist undertaking: the recovery, translation, and grammatical analysis of a body of Hebrew and Aramaic literature that Latin Christendom had ignored for a millennium, pursued with the conviction that the original tongue held truths the translations had lost. It was at the same time a conversion-polemic instrument, built to demonstrate to Jewish readers that their own most guarded esoteric tradition prefigured the doctrines of the Church — a demonstration that took place inside a wider apparatus of forced disputation and conversionary pressure bearing on the Jewish communities of Italy and the Empire. The two faces do not finally come apart. The same man who argued that Hebrew books must be preserved against the burners argued that the supreme Name of God was the name of Christ. He read with a reverence rare in his century and read toward a conclusion the kabbalists he revered would have refused. Both are in the record, and the figure is intelligible only with both held in view.

Scholarship and sources

Reuchlin’s Latin works are fully in the public domain and survive in good digital facsimiles. De verbo mirifico (Basel: Johann Amerbach, 1494) is held in scanned form at the University Library of Basel through the e-rara repository. De rudimentis hebraicis (Pforzheim: Thomas Anshelm, 1506) is digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France at Gallica. De arte cabalistica (Hagenau: Thomas Anshelm, 1517), dedicated to Leo X, is available from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek’s Munich Digitization Center at the MDZ viewer and from the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection at Pitts Theology Library, Emory. No complete public-domain English translation exists of either dialogue; the standard rendering of De arte cabalistica is the Goodman translation of 1983, in copyright. The foundational nineteenth-century life remains Ludwig Geiger’s Johann Reuchlin: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1871). On the literary strategy of the grammar’s preface, see the analysis in the Revue de l’histoire des religions. The single most consequential modern study for the integrity of the whole project is Chaim Wirszubski’s Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Harvard, 1989), which showed that the convert translator who supplied Pico — and through him the textual horizon Reuchlin inherited — routinely slipped Christianizing glosses into the body of his versions, so that the mediation problem that haunts all Christian Kabbalah was present at its source.

Aftermath

Reuchlin died in Stuttgart on 30 June 1522, having held late chairs of Greek and Hebrew at Ingolstadt and then Tübingen, as the Reformation he had not sought was breaking over Germany. He had no wish to follow Luther; his quarrel was with inquisitors, not with Rome. But the languages he had recovered passed into the new universities through his own kin: Philipp Melanchthon, who carried Greek and Hebrew into the Lutheran schools and became the teacher of Germany’s Protestants, was his great-nephew, and bore for a time a Greek surname Reuchlin himself had bestowed. The speculative side of his work ran a different course. It passed into the long Christian fascination with Hebrew letters and divine names that runs through the Renaissance occult revival: into the operative magic of Cornelius Agrippa, who lifted from him freely; into the universalist millenarianism of Guillaume Postel. The decisive conduit was a single printed volume: the 1587 Basel anthology of Johannes Pistorius the Younger, which gathered De arte cabalistica together with the other founding Latin texts and carried them, intact, into the next century. Through that transmission Reuchlin reached the very different Christian Kabbalah of the 1670s — the Lurianic Kabbalah that Christian Knorr von Rosenroth unveiled in his vast Latin compendium, and the metaphysics of Anne Conway — which worked from doctrines of contraction and the breaking of the vessels, formed in Safed a half-century after his death, that he had never seen. The Hebrew letters and the divine names he had recovered would be read and re-read by men who agreed with almost nothing else he held. 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: Christian Kabbalah · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Philipp Melanchthon · Erasmus · Kabbalah · Early Kabbalah · Hebrew Gematria Kabbalah · Marsilio Ficino · Guillaume Postel · Cornelius Agrippa · Prisca Theologia · Neoplatonism · Emanation · Renaissance Hermetism