Renaissance magic
Johannes Reuchlin
The first Christian in Europe to read Hebrew well enough to argue with it, and the man who turned Pico's handful of theses into a subject with books of its own.
- Dates
- 1455 – 1522
- Dating
- documented dates
- Born
- Pforzheim
- Died
- Stuttgart
The life
A jurist and Greek scholar who learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers, and then spent years defending Jewish books against an campaign to have them confiscated and burned.
Place in the tradition
De Verbo Mirifico (1494) and De Arte Cabalistica (1517) are where Christian Cabala becomes a literature. Almost every later Latin treatment runs through them.
a note on the record
History and later legend
His defence of Jewish books was not a defence of Judaism: he argued they were valuable to Christians, and he too read Kabbalah as evidence for Christian doctrine.
the written record
Principal works
-
Basel, 1494
De Verbo Mirifico
On the Wonder-Working Word: a dialogue arguing that the name of Jesus is the pronounceable form of the Tetragrammaton. Christian Cabala's founding argument, and its founding appropriation.
-
Hagenau, 1517
De Arte Cabalistica
On the Art of Kabbalah: three books of dialogue, and the first full European account of the subject as a subject. It is where a Latin reader could find out what the sefirot were without knowing Hebrew.