On the Art of the Kabbalah (De Arte Cabalistica) By Johann Reuchlin

On the Art of the Kabbalah (De Arte Cabalistica) By Johann Reuchlin

Introduction to the Bison Book Edition by Moshe Idel 

I. The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah?

Johannes Reuchlin is one of the major exponents of the Christian Kabbalah; he may even be conceived , as we shall attempt to show it below, as one of the earliest founders of this type of Christian theology. However, to describe an author writing at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries as an early founder of Christian Kabbalah that needs both e laboration and clarification. The historical beginning of the Christian Kabbalah is a matter of debate, as it is in regard to the beginnings of the Jewish Kabbalah. Precisely when a certain phenomenon is conceived as existent depends on the minimum that is required to define this phenomenon; thus the modem scholarly tendency today to describe the Jewish Kabbalah as emerging, on the historical plane, in the last decades of the twelfth century in Languedoc pushes the identification of the Christian parallels or similar phenomena to the thirteenth century. If we accept the ten divine powers, the ten sefirot, as a vital component of Kabbalah, it will be difficult to find Christian discussions of this topic before the end of the thirteenth century. However, if we accept other ways of defining Kabbalah , found already in the eleventh century, as an esoteric tradition concerning the divine names, the situation may be much more complex. Indeed , some passages dealing with divine names recur in Christian texts early in the thirteenth century, as the discussions of Joachim de Fiore demonstrate. 1 At the end of this century, Arnauld of Vilanova had completed a whole treatise dealing with the divine name. 3

However, it is possible to approach the question from another angle: it is not so much the passage of some traditions from one type of religion to another that is the defining moment of the emergence of a certain new phenomenon , but the absorption, especially the creative one, of the techniques that are characteristic of one type of lore , by a religious thinker belonging to another religion. In our case, the question would be not when a Christian has adopted some forms of Jewish esoteric traditions, but when a Christian thinker has adopted a Kabbalistic type of thinking. Thus, the occurrence of a certain combinatory technique of interpretation of the first word of the Bible by separating its letters , as practiced by Alexander of Neckham, or of the peculiar combination of letters by means of concentric circles, apparently under the influence of Jewish sources, as evident in the work of Ramon Null, may fit this second approach. What lacks in all these examples is the explicit awareness that, 5 when dealing with divine names or with combinatory techniques, the Christian author operates in a speculative realm that, at least from the point of view of the primary sources, is a characteristically esoteric type of Jewish lore. However, already in the last third of the thirteenth century, such an awareness was apparently existent. Alfonso Sabio's nephew, Juan Manuel, testified as to the concerns of his famous uncle:

''Ostrosi fizo traslador toda le ley de los judios et aun el su Talmud et otra scientia que han los judious muy escon dida, a que llaman Cabala." 

"Furthermore he ordered translated the whole law of the Jews , and even their Talmud, and other knowledge which is called qabbalah and which the Jews keep closely secret. And he did this so it might be manifest through their own Law that it is a [mere] presentation of that Law which we Christians have; and that they, like the Moors, are in grave error and in peril of losing their souls."

If this passage is reliable , and I see no reason to doubt it, then a significant segment of Kabbalistic literature had been translated as soon as the seventies of the thirteenth century. However, even this testimony, as well as some other dated from the fourteenth century up to the middle-fifteenth century, interesting as it may be , did not relate to texts that become part of a larger cultural phenomenon. At the court of Alfonso Sabio no Christian sort of Kabbalah was cultivated, while the uses of Kabbalah in the writings of converts like Alfonso de Validolid or Paulus de Heredia did not incite the imagination of their con temporaries, and they did not produce significant repercussions. Whatever the evidence regarding the penetration of Jewish esoterism before the end of the fifteenth century is, or may turn out to be, it seems that before the writings of Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) those Jewish elements did not become a considerable part of any de fined Christian circle, neither were they cultivated by a movement that consciously continued the steps of some founding figures. In other words, while we can easily accumulate interesting pieces of evidence dealing with the acquaintance of various Christian authors with Jewish esoteric topics, they are scanty, disparate, and incontinuous.