Jacob Kuppermann

I: Francis Mercury Van Helmont at the Inquisition

In 1659, Francis Mercury van Helmont was one of the most influential men in Sulzbach,

a courtier in the good graces of Christian Augustus, the Count of Palatinate-Sulzbach. In 1661,

he was on trial at the Roman Inquisition, brought up on charges of heresy and judaizing. In the

Inquisition’s indictment, van Helmont is condemned for a litany of faults, from a boyhood spent

“addicted to heterodox opinions” and his tendency to “sing from the Hebrew Scriptures at any

place whatsoever and at whatever labor first thing in the morning” to more serious issues, like

his replacement of Jesuits with Jewish scholars and “Quakers cloaked under the name of

Lutherans” in various high places in Sulzbach.1 Van Helmont would be freed from his

imprisonment after a year and a half, largely due to the entreaties of Christian Augustus,

though other members of the Catholic nobility of Germany, like Count Palatinate-Neuberg

Phillip Wilhelm, would sharply criticize Christian Augustus’ support.

Yet van Helmont’s crimes against the Catholic Church were not some aberration that

made him a pariah in the Northern European societies he lived and worked in— they were

symptoms of the same philosophical tendencies that made him a member of elite intellectual

circles in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. Francis Mercury van Helmont

was in a quite literal sense a member of the intellectual lineages of the renaissance: his father

was Jan-Baptista van Helmont, a philosopher and chemist in the tradition of Paracelsus who

was responsible for the identification of gases as a distinct class of matter. 2 The son followed in
1 “Indictment of the Inquisition, Rome 5 July 1662.” From Coudert, Allison. The Impact of the Kabbalah in the
Seventeenth Century : The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614-1698) /. Leiden ; Brill, 1999.
2 For more on Jan Baptista, see Berthold Heinecke (1995) The Mysticism and Science of Johann Baptista Van
Helmont (1579–1644), Ambix, 42:2, 65-78, DOI: 10.1179/amb.1995.42.2.65 and Hedesan, Georgiana D. 2016. An
alchemical quest for universal knowledge: the 'Christian philosophy' of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644).

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the same multidisciplinary tradition as the father, practicing as a doctor and a courtier even as

he became a more accomplished philosopher.

The specific roots of van Helmont’s intellectual work came from what may seem at first

an unexpected source: Kabbalistic Judaism, and more specifically the movement of Kabbalah

spearheaded by the Tzfat-based Rabbi Isaac Luria in the fifteenth century. The philosophical

material that led no less a figure than Gottfried Leibniz to praise van Helmont as such a

profound thinker that “If he had lived among the Greeks, he would now be numbered among

the stars.”3 Francis Mercury van Helmont’s philosophy was a unique blend of Christian faith and

Jewish symbolism and reasoning, a syncretic philosophy that began as an attempt to convert

Jews to Christianity but became something that in the end was not quite one faith or the other.

In mystical Jewish texts, van Helmont saw a path that could bridge the complex, deeply split

religious landscape of early modern Europe, a philosophy that could unify both different

Christian groups under a true path to salvation but one that could even bring in Jews. Van

Helmont’s grand synthesis of Christianity and Kabbalah did not succeed in calming those

tensions— in fact, he may have inadvertently contributed to divisions within the nascent

Quaker Church later on in his travels— yet the boldness of his attempt, and the way in which it

ties together centuries of both Jewish and Christian mystical thought, makes van Helmont’s

Christian Kabbalah a fascinating philosophical moment for study.

To properly understand the seventeenth century Christian derivation of the Kabbalah

used by van Helmont, though, we must understand the history and intellectual development of

the Kabbalah itself, as a philosophical school of Judaism that stands both apart and deeply

3 Coudert, xiii.

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entwined with the mainstream of the religion. Most of all, we must understand the work of

Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, a sixteenth century figure whose work most directly influenced van

Helmont’s syncretic philosophy.

II: Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah

The Difficulties of Studying Kabbalah

The task of writing a history that involves the Kabbalah is inherently a difficult one. The

history of the Kabbalah is famously obscure, full of dead ends, mythmaking, and poorly

communicated oral histories. No less a scholar than Gershom Scholem, the first professor of

Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote that the question of the origins

of the Kabbalah “is indisputably one of the most difficult in the history of the Jewish religion.” 4

That difficulty flows naturally from the conditions in which Kabbalah was codified as a

discipline. Jewish communities in the diaspora were forced to practice their Judaism on the

fringes of many European and Middle Eastern societies, meaning that much Jewish history in

general is preserved through oral traditions and other unreliable sources.

The Kabbalah itself is another layer of obscurity beyond mainstream Jewish tradition. A

passage from Pirkei Avot, one of the most important pieces of the Jewish oral tradition, states

that there is a set order in which one should study the different aspects of Jewish life. Some,

like the Tanakh itself, are to be begun early: “At five years of age, the study of Scripture.” 5 Yet

the pursuit of the deeper wisdom is to be reserved until the student, who is nearly always male,

is forty years old. While the original text does not explicitly state what kind of “wisdom” is

4 Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. Origins of the Kabbalah. Princeton University Press, 1990, 3.
5 Pirkei Avot 5:21. Accessed at https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.5.21?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en

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supposed to be reserved for age forty, the association between “wisdom” and Kabbalistic

philosophy was common in Jewish culture, to the point of being codified in Rabbi Sabbatai

Cohen’s mid seventeenth century commentary on the Jewish legal text the Shulchan Aruch. In

Cohen’s commentary, he states that it is necessary to reach the “wisdom of age 40” in order to

perceive the “‫קדושה וטהרה וזריזות נקיות‬,” or holiness, purity, agility, and cleanliness of those

Kabbalistic teachings.6 Even teachers that do not prescribe an exact age for the student of

Kabbalah make clear that true understanding of the mystical texts requires prior education and

connection to the physical world, with eighteenth century Lithuanian rabbi Avraham Danzig

saying “A person should not study the wisdom of the kabbalah until he has filled his belly with

Talmud and codes, and only if he has true fear of Heaven and spends all his time studying

Torah. Otherwise it is forbidden. Rabbi Chaim Vital was very stringent about this.” 7

So what within the Kabbalah is so precious and dangerous to be restricted to only a

certain select few? In short, Kabbalah can be defined as the cosmic and mystical inner structure

of Judaism— in the words of contemporary Rabbi Pinchas Giller, as “the official metaphysics of

Judaism.”8 In contrast to the scriptures of many other religions, which place great importance

on matters like the afterlife, the key rabbinic works of Judaism’s Oral Law, and even the written

works of Torah, Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings) that precede them, largely refrain

from directly commenting on such matters. Instead, the mainstream of Jewish theology is

concerned primarily with practical matters of interpreting and following commandments, with

few, if any, descriptions of the afterlife or more esoteric facets of the divine. In fact, some
6 R. Sabbatai Cohen, Commentary on the Shulhan Aruch Yorei Deah, 246:6
7 R. Avram Danzig, Chayei Adam 10:12
8 Giller, Pinchas. 2011. Kabbalah: A Guide for the Perplexed. Guides for the Perplexed. London: Continuum.
https://search-ebscohost-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=403685&site=ehost-
live&scope=site.

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rabbinic texts explicitly proscribe the open discussion of these supernatural matters. The

Hagigah tractate of the Mishnah, the foundational text of the rabbinic oral law, states that if

one speculates on “what is above, what is beneath, what came before, and what came after” it

would “better had he not come into the world.”9

The Zohar

This historical reluctance to openly discuss matters of Kabbalah is reflected in the

mystery surrounding its most important practitioners and works. Consider the case of the

Zohar, considered by many to be the foundational text of the modern Jewish mystical tradition.

While contemporary scholars, especially following Gershom Scholem’s investigation of the

text’s authorship in the early twentieth century, now generally believe that the Zohar is a

product of late thirteenth century Spain, for centuries a debate raged over the text’s origins. 10

In its own framing devices, the Zohar purports to be a collection of second century rabbinical

correspondences centering around Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai.11 In this conceit, Rabbi Moses De

Leon discovered the ancient text of the Zohar, publishing its mystical secrets in the original

Aramaic. That claim has been contested since the early fourteenth century, when Isaac of Acre,

a fellow mystic, claimed that De Leon’s own widow told him that De Leon falsified the ancient

origins of the Zohar, and wrote the text himself through divine inspiration. 12

9 Mishnah Hagigah 2:1

10 For an overview of the debate over the Zohar’s authorship, see the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on the
Zohar, which details the various debates over the text’s provenance: Jacobs, Joseph, and Isaac Broydé. “ZOHAR.” In
The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906. http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/15278-zohar.
. For Scholem’s treatment on the Zohar, see Zohar, the Book of Splendor /. New York : Schocken Books, 1963.
11 Green, Arthur. A Guide to the Zohar. The Zohar: Pritzker Edition. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press,
2003. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1722821&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
12 Jewish Encyclopedia.

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Nevertheless, the Zohar was largely accepted as an authentic work of early rabbinic

wisdom until at least the early nineteenth century. As late as 1858, literalist readings of the

Zohar’s framing device were still common— the prominent Italian rabbi and Kabbalist Elijah

Benamozegh published a two volume work, The Fear of the Opponent, that attempted to refute

the earlier anti-Kabbalah arguments made by fellow Italian Jewish scholar Leon of Modena

published earlier in the century.13 The perceived authenticity of the Zohar as a Jewish text of

the early rabbinic period fed into the perceived value of the Kabbalah as a knowledge source

for Christians. In the words of Jewish Studies scholar Chaim Wirszurbski, all Kabbalah was seen

by Christian Kabbalists as “ancient, pre-Christian, and divinely inspired.” 14 The

misinterpretations made by Renaissance Kabbalists like Pico della Mirandola as to the

provenance of the Zohar lead to the use of a thirteenth century text to inform the true divine

roots of the Gospels.

Regardless of its perceived origin, the Zohar served as an intellectual point of inspiration

for a wave of Kabbalistic thought throughout the Jewish world— chiefly in the Mediterranean,

where Italian and Spanish schools of Kabbalah flourished in the fourteenth and early fifteenth

centuries. The mass expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 moved the center of the Jewish

spiritual world to the Levant, where governments were usually more permissive of Jewish

cultural life than in Europe. In the city of Safed, in Ottoman Syria (modern day Israel/Palestine),

a new school of Kabbalistic thought was to bloom, under the tutelage of two rabbis— Moses

13 Isidore Singer and Isaac Broydé (1901–1906). "Benamozegh, Elijah". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish
Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls ; Dweck, Yaacob. "Early Modern Criticism of the Zohar." In The Scandal
of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice, 59-100. PRINCETON; OXFORD: Princeton
University Press, 2011. Accessed June 1, 2020. doi:10.2307/j.ctt7tbh9.7.
14

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Cordovero and the rabbi who would give his name to the school of Lurianic Kabbalah: Isaac

Luria.

The Myth and Reality of Rabbi Isaac Luria

In the centuries following his death, the status of Isaac Luria within Kabbalist Jewish

communities has ascended from that of a mere rabbi and teacher to an almost mythological

figure, venerated as “Ha'ARI Hakadosh,” Hebrew for “the Holy Lion.” Even within a generation

of his lifetime his story was shrouded in mystery, fueled by his relatively short period of practice

(he arrived in Safed in 1570 and died two years later in 1572) and his reluctance to produce

written work. This mystery resulted in the proliferation of folklore and legend centered around

Luria, most notably in two works written within a century of his death: Shivhei Ha’Ari, which

was first compiled in 1609 in Krakow, and Toledot Ha’Ari, which circulated in unpublished form

in the Italian Jewish community in the early seventeenth century before being published in

1672 in the Ottoman Jewish chronicler Yosef Sambari’s Sefer Divrei Yosef.15

In one of these folktales, originally from Shivhei Ha’Ari but collected in Pinhas Sadeh’s

1989 anthology of Jewish Folktales as “Rabbi Isaac Luria and the Waverers”, Luria is seen

proposing to his disciples on a Friday evening that they travel from Safed to Jerusalem (around

150 miles) before the Sabbath begins. When a few of his followers demur, citing a need to ask

their wives, Luria is dismayed, saying that if his company had “joyously told me that you were

ready to go to Jerusalem, the Messiah would have come for all Israel.” 16 Later stories about

Luria would become even more fantastical— a story in Sadeh’s collection sourced from a

15 Noy, D., D. Ben-Amos, E. Frankel, and A. be-Yi?ra?el. Folktales of the Jews, Volume 1: Tales from the Sephardic
Dispersion. Folktales of the Jews. Jewish Publication Society, 2006. https://books.google.com/books?id=eKceGfr-
al4C., 17.
16 Sadeh, Pinḥas, and Hillel Halkin. Jewish Folktales. New York : Anchor Books, 1989.
http://archive.org/details/jewishfolktales00pinh.

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volume from 1800s Warsaw tells the story of how the Ari infiltrated the dreams of a king that

sought to punish the Jews of his land, saving the king from some spectral terror and thus

convincing him to not persecute the Jews. Luria’s presence in this story reflects his folk hero

status even when disregarding its fantastical elements— the story, or at least its basic structure,

is a common one in Jewish folklore, also connected with the semi-mythical founder of Hasidic

Judaism, Rabbi Adam Shem Tov.17 It is possible that the mythic quality of Luria has made his

teachings all the more alluring, to both Jewish and Gentile audiences.

Yet beyond the mythic aspects that have been attached to Luria in the years after his

death, it is undeniable that Luria the actual figure was an epochal one in the history of

Kabbalah. Born in 1534 in Jerusalem, Luria spent much of his early years in Ottoman Cairo,

where he studied under David ben Solomon ibn abi Zimra, Chief Rabbi of the city. 18 At age 23, in

1557, Luria was already involved with official rabbinic business, with his name appearing on a

signed contract between a fellowship of nine prominent Cairo rabbis. In addition to his rabbinic

practice, Luria had a second career as a merchant and trader, as was common among Egyptian

Jews. However, evidence of Luria’s career as a trader dries up after around 1562. The historical

record points to his involvement with a new path of study: a path of solitude and Kabbalah.

According to the eighteenth century Polish rabbinic scholar Chaim Yosef David Azulai’s

Shem Ha Gedolim, one of the earliest biographies of prominent rabbis, Luria spent nearly all of

a six year period, likely in the mid-1560s, meditating in solitude on the banks of the Nile river. It

was there that Luria began the sequence of thought that would shortly develop into a full

17 Elswit, Sharon Barcan. The Jewish Story Finder: A Guide to 668 Tales Listing Subjects and Sources, 2d Ed.
McFarland, 2012.
18 Most of the biographical detail of Luria’s life is sourced from Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the
Cosmos : Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship /. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2003., 30.

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reimagining of the worlds explored by Kabbalah. In 1570, Luria would move to Safed, joining up

in the last days of the rabbinic circle of the influential Kabbalist Moses Cordovero, who would

die later that year. Despite the limited overlap between their residences in Safed, Luria referred

to Cordovero as his “teacher” on multiple occasions. Cordovero’s Kabbalah was a culmination

of prior systems of Kabbalah, collating and synthesizing a diverse range of regional traditions

into a unified system expounded upon in works like his Pardes Rimmonim.19 While Luria was

certainly influenced by Cordovero’s tradition, the Lurianic Kabbalah was less a development of

prior systems of Kabbalah and more a radical reinvention of the discipline. In the telling of a

tzadik, or wise man, cited by Rabbi Simchah Bunim, Cordovero’s version of Kabbalah was

considered more steeped in the pedigree of prior generations of Kabbalists, but Luria’s was

more beautiful despite its lack of roots. The tzadik said that of the two, Luria’s was preferred, as

“Vas shein is shein” — that is, what is beautiful is beautiful.20 And in the end, Luria’s more

beautiful reinvention was to win out, in both Jewish and Christian contexts.

The Doctrine of the Lurianic Kabbalah

Luria’s understanding of Kabbalah, like the traditional modes that predated his

teachings, focused primarily on the earliest moments of creation as a way of understanding the

secrets of the universe. The key change made underpinning Luria’s revolution in Kabbalistic

thought was an inversion of the presumed divine order. In traditional, Zoharic Kabbalah, the

order of creation involves, before even the seven days of creation found in the book of

19 Giller.
20 Menzi, Donald Wilder & Zwe Padeh, Introduction to The Tree of LIfe: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the
Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. Jerusalem: Jason Arosnon, Inc, 1999.

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Bereshit’s chronicle, a emanation wherein the divine infinite (Ein Sof) releases ten sephirot, or

aspects forming a holy hierarchy through which God’s creation can be felt. That emanation

begins with the divine presence entering a single point— in the wording of the Zohar, “When

the Concealed of all Concealed verged on being revealed, it produced at first a single point.” 21

God is nowhere at first, then expands out from that first point into the entirety of the cosmos.

In the Lurianic Kabbalah, the first emanation is predicated not on an entrance but on a

withdrawal. Luria declares that before the beginning, God was everywhere in an unformed

state— “there was no vacant place, no aspect of empty space or void, but everything was filled

by that simple light of the Infinite.”22 In order to emanate the sephirot, and unfurl the worlds of

creation, Ein Sof must have contracted, drawing away from its midpoint so that God’s light

could enter the void and so begin creation. That contraction, or tzimtzum, is the core

philosophical point of all Lurianic Kabbalah. Within the empty space left behind, God creates a

set of vessels to be filled with the light of the sephirot. The light is at first pure, but becomes

debased as it passes through the subsequent lower vessels. As it passes through to the more

emotional Sephirot, it causes their vessels to shatter, creating fragments of light that must be

repaired. In Luria’s understanding humanity is a force for Tikkun Olam— the repairing of the

world— through our prayer, we can rebuild the original divine whole and rescue the shards of

the divine from our plane of existence.

Luria’s Disciples & Influence

21 Zohar 1:2a, from Matt, Daniel Chanan, and Nathan Wolski, eds. The Zohar =: Sefer Ha-Zohar. Pritzker edition.
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004.
22 Vital, Ḥayyim ben Joseph. The Tree of Life : Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria : The
Palace of Adam Kadmon /. Northvale, N.J. : Jason Aronson, c1999, 11-13.

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Most of our understanding of Luria’s thought comes not from Luria himself but from his

disciples. In his time, Luria did not write down much. He apparently had difficulty with the task,

saying to one of his disciples that to write a book of his thought would be “impossible, because

all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the

sea had burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received and

how can I put it down in a book?”23 As such, we owe our access to Lurianic Kabbalah to the

work of Chayyim Vital, Luria’s closest pupil. Even Vital’s copies of Luria’s teachings, which would

eventually be compiled and referred to as Etz Chayyim, or the Tree of Life, were not supposed

to be distributed broadly. The texts only escaped Safed and Luria’s circles through subterfuge

and covert copies— as late as the mid-seventeenth century, Kabbalists in many parts of Europe

had little access to Luria, and Cordoveran Kabbalah dominated. 24 Nevertheless, Lurianic

Kabbalah did spread, and for those figures— both Christian and Jewish— who found it, its

doctrine was a compelling guide to understanding the mystical secrets of the cosmos.

III: The Christian Kabbalah, or Cabbala, in the Enlightenment

To the inexperienced scholar of mysticism, the idea of a Christian Kabbalah may seem

faintly ridiculous. It brings to mind images of new age-y spiritualists and pop singers flirting

with Jewish tradition, putting on the garb of mystical Judaism or using its words and traditions

for their own ends.25 Yet despite the recent popularity of Rabbi Philip Berg’s Kabbalah Centre in

23 Menzi & Padeh, xviii.

24 For a discussion of the spread of Luria’s writings (in the context of Gersom Scholem’s theories about messianic
Lurianism), see Idel, Moshe. ""One from a Town, Two from a Clan": The Diffusion of Lurianic Kabbala and
Sabbateanism: A Re-Examination." Jewish History 7, no. 2 (1993): 79-104. Accessed June 7, 2020.
www.jstor.org/stable/20101167.
25 For a discussion of these contemporary dalliances with Kabbalah, see Huss, Boaz. "All You Need Is LAV:
Madonna and Postmodern Kabbalah." The Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (2005): 611-24.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25470100.

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Los Angeles among the non-Jewish celebrity class, Christian engagement with the Kabbalah

itself is a far older topic, stretching back centuries and intersecting with a number of distinct

movements within both Christianity and Judaism. The tradition of Christian Kabbalah, also

referred to (and in this work called henceforth) as “Cabbala,” has been used for many purposes—

both as a tool to unravel the secrets of Christianity and a pawn to convert Jews, and for a range

of aims that mix the two. Its practitioners have been Italians, Englishmen, and men and women

between, and they have been accused of both anti-semitism and Judaizing in turn. This work

primarily focuses on one group within that field— Van Helmont and his correspondents, peers,

and intellectual descendants in Enlightenment-era Northern Europe— but to grasp what made

that group unique, it is helpful to first understand their predecessors within Cabbala.

The Cabbalists of the seventeenth century and beyond were distinct from prior Christian

users of Cabbala in their aims. They sought a goal more complex than many of their

predecessors. They neither simply desired to convert Jews or deepen their Christian learning, but

instead formed a distinct discipline that lay somewhere between the two. They were heavily

influenced by the Lurianic Kabbalah, for reasons that will be discussed at length later on in this

paper. But Christian engagement with Kabbalah predates Rabbi Isaac Luria’s work in sixteenth

century Tzfat, and in fact can be traced back to the years following the writing of the Zohar,

which is to this day still considered the foundational work of all modern Kabbalah.

Early Cabbalists

The first Christian thinker to engage at length with the Kabbalah did so purely for the

sake of debating theological concerns with his Jewish peers and neighbors, and did so in one of

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the few locales in Europe where such discourses were common. Ramon Llull was a Majorcan

philosopher known for his contributions to thirteenth century Catalan literature. Core to Llull’s

motivations as a theological writer was the conversion of Spanish Jews through discursive

means.26 His pursuit of this goal was part of a larger trend in thirteenth century Christianity that

focused on the factual and logical “errors” of the Jewish texts, and the belief that Jews, once

convinced of these errors, would willingly convert to Christianity. This view was made most

obvious by the 1242 burning of the Talmud by the inquisition in Paris, but less incendiary forms

of Christian engagement with Jewish texts were also common among the theologians of the

thirteenth century.27

Yet these engagements were typically confined to the mainstream strain of Talmudic

Judaism, and focused mostly on critiquing those texts and indicating where they blasphemed

Christianity. Llull’s innovation was in going beyond making the negative case against Talmud

into a positive case for Christianity that used Jewish philosophies. Specifically, Llull went to the

well of Kabbalah, at the time one of the two core tendencies within philosophical Judaism, for

his debates in favor of Christianity. His theory was that “one should not be willing to renounce

one belief for another, but [to renounce] a belief for the sake of understanding” — that is, to

come to Christianity not because of a disproof of Judaism, but because of a proof of Christianity

itself.28 In particular, he used the Kabbalistic concept of the “sephirot,” or ten aspects of god, to

connect with the trinity, making the case that god’s simultaneous unity and all-encompassing

diversity could only be explained via a tripartite nature. From this tendency, Llull managed to

26 The most complete study of Llull’s work as it interfaced with the Jewish community is Hames, Harvey J. The Art
of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century. BRILL, 2000.
27 Jewish Virtual Library. “Burning of the Talmud.” Accessed May 27, 2019.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/burning-of-the-talmud.
28 Hames, Harvey. “Quia nolunt dimittere credere pro credere, sed credere per intelligere : Ramon Llull and his
Jewish Contemporaries.” Mirabilia, no. 5 (2005): 0112–41.

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engage with a number of prominent Spanish rabbis, although his success in conversion is not

known.

Yet despite his engagements with the Kabbalah, Llull cannot quite be considered a

Cabbalist. It’s unclear if he himself was an adherent of Kabbalistic thought, and while his own

philosophy of Llullism and his writings in works such as the Ars Brevis were well read

throughout Europe, including among Jewish communities, Llull’s work is not typically

remembered as part of the lineage of Christian Kabbalah.29

The first true Cabbalists were those of the Italian Renaissance. Perhaps inspired by the

large number of Kabbalah scholars within the Jewish communities of Italy, Christian

philosophers like Pico della Mirandola began incorporating Kabbalah into their worldviews,

which also incorporated philosophies like Hermeticism. Mirandola was perhaps the first of these

philosophers. In his 900 Theses, later condemned by the Church for a variety of charges,

Mirandola used Kabbalistic reasonings to advance his own theories. Mirandola’s philosophy has

been termed a “Christosyncretism” because, despite its wide range of reasonings, its findings all

lead back to the pursuit of ultimate Christian knowledge.30 In a sense, Mirandola’s use of

Kabbalistic thought is the perfect mirror to Llull’s. Where Llull sought to use Kabbalah solely

for the purposes of external comparison, Mirandola used it purely internally.

Neither the dispute-based interaction that Llull exemplified and the Christosyncretic

school that Mirandola inspired provided a full engagement with Kabbalah in itself. They either

used it as one wrench in a discursive toolkit or a single ingredient in a pansyncretic stew. It was

not until the mid seventeenth century that a loose intellectual grouping of Northern European

29 Beattie, Pamela M. "The Ars and Translation: Ramon Llull’s Strategies for Communicating Truth." CR: The New
Centennial Review 16, no. 1 (2016): 139-60. Accessed June 7, 2020. doi:10.14321/crnewcentrevi.16.1.0139.
30 Sudduth, Michael. “Pico della Mirandola’s Philosophy of Religion” from Pico della Mirandola : New Essays.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Accessed May 28, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central.

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philosophers would revisit the Kabbalah and form a true Cabbala— one that focused almost

entirely on Kabbalistic methods, referred back extensively to Jewish texts and reasonings, and

sought to form something of a universal religion, with Christian and Jewish ideals hand in hand.

Cabbalists of the Enlightenment

The Northern European Christians who became interested in Kabbalah in the 1600s

differed from their predecessors both in attitude and in their source material. Southern

European Christians that engaged with Kabbalah did so in regions with extensive histories and

traditions of Kabbalah— the Spanish and Italian traditions of Kabbalah that figures like Llull and

Mirandola borrowed from were early crucibles of the mystic path. 31 No such tradition exists in

Northern Europe. As such, the Kabbalistic works cited by these figures varied widely, largely

based on the documents they could acquire and translate. Additionally, the advent of Lurianic

Kabbalah in the late 1500s served as a decisive change in European engagement with Kabbalah

— the doctrine of creation found in Chayyim Vital’s written-down versions of Luria’s thought

would serve as a more accessible, easier to syncretize set of beliefs than the Zoharic Kabbalah.

The works of Christian Kabbalah produced in Northern Europe in the mid to late seventeenth

century would serve to revolutionize the Christian understanding of Kabbalah, bringing

Kabbalah into the broader arena of engagement with the occult and mystical.

Yet these works of Christian Kabbalah were only as good as the translations that they

had access to. Unlike Spanish or Italian Christian works that engaged with Kabbalah, there were

few Jewish Kabbalists that Northern European Christians could engage with. As such, many

31 For more information on the Italian Kabbalists, see Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510 : A Survey /. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

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Jacob Kuppermann

early works of Northern European Christian Kabbalah were only tenuously connected to actual

Kabbalah.

For an early example of Northern European enlightenment-era fascination with the

Kabbalah, consider the work of Henry More. More was an English philosopher of the mid 1600s,

associated with the Cambridge Platonist school. He wrote about a diverse range of topics, mostly

centered around rationalist theology and attempting to prove the existence and power of the

immaterial soul.32 One of his early works, 1653’s Conjectura Cabbalistica: or, a conjectural

essay of interpreting the minde of Moses, according to a threefold Cabbala: viz. literal,

philosophical, mystical, or, divinely moral, uses the concept of the Kabbalah as a theoretical

reference point. Yet despite its name and its copious references to the Kabbalah as the

“Traditional Doctrine” of the Jews, More’s Conjectura is very much disconnected from the

actualities of Kabbalistic discourse.33

Instead, More’s work is Cabbalistic by inference and metaphor, with his explanation of

the work’s title providing a window into his conception of the Kabbalah. In the work’s

introduction, More states that his analysis is so profound that it is as if he “had indeed light upon

the true Cabbala of Moses.”34 Yet More admits readily that his work is also “conjecture,” and

that he must proceed “sceptically” in his presentation due to a certain uncertainty that he sees in

his interpretations.35 He also notes that, contrary to the Hebrew etymology of Kabbalah, his

interpretations are not received, “neither from Man nor Angel,” and instead root simply from his

32 Henry, John. “Henry More.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter
2016. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2016.
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/henry-more/.
33 More, Henry. Conjectura Cabbalistica or, a Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Minde of Moses, According to a
Threefold Cabbala: Viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mystical, or, Divinely Moral. By Henry More Fellow of Christs College
in Cambridge. Thomason Tracts / 187:E.1462[2]. London : Printed by James Flesher, and are to be sold by William
Morden bookseller in Cambridge, 1653., 1653., intro
34 ibid
35 ibid

16
Jacob Kuppermann

own capacity for rational thought.36 This isn’t quite a case of simple egoism, though. More goes

on to state that the human capacity for “Ratio mobilis” (italics More’s), or evolutionary

reasoning, “is really a participation of that divine reason in God.”37 More’s Conjectura is thus

Kabbalistic, or received, by virtue of its use of rational reasoning to divine the divine— a

uniquely rationalist twist on a mystical philosophy.

Yet in the three-fold analyses that More includes in the first half of his Cabbala,

Kabbalah is hard to find. The first, the “Literal” Cabbala, is simply a retelling of the Pentateuch’s

story of creation up to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden. It features little in the

way of analysis, and its inclusion in the work largely seems to be an exercise for More to prove

his Hebraist bona fides. It’s in the second and third “Cabbalas” that More enters interesting

territory for chasing an intellectual genealogy of Christian Kabbalah.

In short, More’s “Philosophical” and “Moral” sections are explanations of the dynamics

of the story of creation. It’s essentially a midrash, a kind of Jewish exegesis that seeks to find the

meanings behind the text, in the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism. And though More does not cite

any post-Biblical Jewish sources— either Rabbinic or directly Kabbalistic— in these sections,

his wordings indicate a broad familiarity with the concepts undergirding Kabbalah. For example,

More refers repeatedly to a division between the “aethereal” and “earthly” in creation, and in

creation itself as an “outward” event.38 These references match broadly to the Kabbalistic

division between the “en-sof” and “sephirot” — that is, the infinite and formless God and that

God’s emanations into the world. More also spends time talking about the “Feminine”

(capitalization More’s) aspects of God and Adam, a concept common to Kabbalistic texts.39 Yet

36 ibid
37 ibid
38 ibid, 23.
39 ibid, 45.

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Jacob Kuppermann

other parts of More’s text are more Platonic than Kabbalistic— More references the “Seminal

Forms” of animals, for example.40 On the whole, though, More’s writing in the Conjectura

Cabbalistica is more Judaic than Kabbalistic.

More’s use of “Cabbala” as a concept, then, instead speaks to the rhetoric value that

Kabbalah had rather than any true fealty to its intellectual lineage. When More talks about

Kabbalah, he uses it to signify the mystical and ancient knowledge of a (mostly imagined)

Judaism. That mystical knowledge, as accessed by More’s own rationalist foundations, to him

represents a path towards a deeper understanding of the true nature of God and the intangible.

Through the next few years, More’s writing would drift away from topics relating to

Kabbalah and Judaism. By the start of the 1670s, though, he would become acquainted with a

number of fellow intellectuals and philosophers who saw something similar in Kabbalah to

More. The difference between these new interlocutors and More, though, is that they had actual

read Kabbalistic texts.

The most important figure in this circle of more well-read Cabbalists was Van Helmont.

After his 1663 release from Roman prison, he returned to Sulzbach, and furthered his study of

Jewish texts. He even began writing his own work, for distribution beyond the ears of Christian

August. Van Helmont’s first publication was 1668’s Kurtzer Entwurff des eigenlichen

Naturalphabets der heiligen Sprache, known in English as the Alphabet of Nature. Van

Helmont’s thesis, essentially, was that Hebrew was a natural language, with symbols that

inherently correspond to the true nature of things. In the text’s prologue, his close collaborator

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth evocatively makes for the case for Hebrew’s primal power:

“Because the Emperor Charlemagne spoke German, the German

nations take this as a great honor for themselves, and they strive
mightily to prove to the French that the greatest glory of this

40 ibid, 23.

18
Jacob Kuppermann

Empire had Germany for its fatherland, and that Charlemagne

passed this honor first and foremost from the Greeks to his own
people, not to the French. If this is therefore the glory of the
German language, namely that it was spoken by that highest and
most glorious monarch, how much will this increase the glory and
dignity of the Hebrew tongue since it is used by God himself, the
absolute Lord of all lords and kings?”41

Van Helmont does not engage directly with Kabbalah in his Alphabet, but his reasoning

for pursuing a study of Hebrew reflects the appeal that Kabbalah held for him. It is not just— as

was a common belief held by Protestants at the time— that Hebrew was the original, and thus

truest language of scripture, ahead of the Greek and Latin versions held up by other Christian

denominations.42 Van Helmont was aware of the scope of Hebraist scholarship at the time— von

Rosenroth’s prologue even references “the most learned Henry More” and refers to the

Conjectura Cabbalistica as a text that “no one can read without admiration.”43 Van Helmont’s

case for Hebrew is far more mystical than that, and reflects an understanding of the power of the

sacred words in themselves. Van Helmont spends a large portion of the text, which is presented

as a series of dialogues between “H” and “M,” discussing the various natural potencies of the

shapes of Hebrew letters. In his reading, each character, from ‫ ﬡ‬to ‫ﬨ‬, is imbued with a meaning

derived from its shape or the way it forms in the mouth. Aleph (‫)ﬡ‬, the first Hebrew letter, is

described as a “bull,” for example.44 By paying attention to Hebrew texts for meanings beyond

just the literal and obvious, Van Helmont was engaging with them in a way that would be

familiar, if a bit uncanny, to a Jewish Kabbalist.

41 Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van, Taylor Corse, and Allison Coudert. The Alphabet of Nature. Aries Book
Series. Leiden: Brill, 2007. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=252730&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
42 For a broader discussion of these Reformation era Hebraists, see Burnett, Stephen G. From Christian Hebraism
to Jewish Studies : Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century /. Leiden ; Brill,
1996. and Burnett, Stephen G. Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500-1660) : Authors, Books, and the
Transmission of Jewish Learning. Leiden : BRILL, 2012.
43 Helmont, The Alphabet of Nature, 17.
44 Helmont, The Alphabet of Nature, 109.

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Jacob Kuppermann

Yet Van Helmont’s engagement with Kabbalah would not fully flourish until he

connected with Christian Knorr von Rosenroth to write the Kabbalah Denudata, perhaps the

most significant Christian Kabbalist text of all. Knorr von Rosenroth was Van Helmont’s closest

creative partner, a man with a similar upbringing and passion for uncovering universal secrets

through the use of Jewish texts. Born in 1636 to a noble family in Silesia, his training was

principally in Oriental languages and texts.45 While he also wrote a number of hymns, he is

chiefly known for publishing the first Latin translations of many prominent Kabbalist texts in the

Kabbalah Denudata, which he co-wrote with Van Helmont.46 Kabbalah Denudata, which was

published from 1677 to 1684, is a far-ranging text. Its first few sections solely consist of

translations of older Kabbalist texts, from the Zohar itself, which had not been translated into a

language commonly understood to European Christian scholars until then, and Lurianic texts,

which had at the time of von Rosenroth and van Helmont’s work scarcely passed out of Ottoman

Palestine.

These translations in their own right are significant in the context of Christian uses of the

Kabbalah. Their influence lasted far beyond the lifetimes of the two translators— in fact, the first

few sections of the Kabbalah Denudata were among the texts translated by early 20th century

British thaumaturgist and mystic S. L. Macgregor Mathers, who was a founder of the Hermetic

Order of the Golden Dawn.47 Yet the translations themselves do not give us a particularly strong

window into the thought processes behind the Sulzbach Kabbalists that put in years of work to

bring these texts to a broader Christian audience.

45 “ROSENROTH, BARON VON (CHRISTIAN KNORR).” In Jewish Encylcopedia, 1906.

http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12857-rosenroth-baron-von-christian-knorr.
46 “Freiherr Christian Knorr von Rosenroth | Hymnary.Org.” Accessed June 3, 2019.
http://hymnary.org/Rosenroth_CKv/.
47 Mathers’ translation, published as “The Kabbalah Unveiled,” is a fascinating picture of the early 20th century
occultist mind— its prologue manages to connect the Kabbalah to the Bhagavad Gita.

20
Jacob Kuppermann

For that understanding, we must instead look at the later sections of the Kabbalah

Denudata. Specifically, the best explanation of von Rosenroth and van Helmont’s Christian

Kabbalism can conveniently be found in van Helmont’s Adumbratio Kabbalæ Christianæ, or

Sketch of Christian Kabbalah. It is in this work, which was included as both an ending section of

the Kabbalah Denudata and published separately, that van Helmont captures most clearly his

philosophy, both in theory and practice. The theoretical goal of his Christian Kabbalah was

announced loud and clear on the work’s frontispiece: Kabbalah was useful in that it lead to “THE

FORMATION OF HYPOTHESES THAT LEAD TOWARDS THE CONVERSION OF THE

JEWS.”48 Yet the body of van Helmont’s writing in his Sketch belies that simple goal of

conversion. It is not just, as Allison Coudert writes in her biography of van Helmont, that the

version of Christianity that the Sketch contains seems “far more Jewish than Christian.”49 Instead,

the Sketch seems utterly disinterested in making the case for conversion at all, even to a Judaized

version of Christianity. The text, which consists of a dialogue between a “Kabbalist” and a

“Christian Philosopher,” shows the two agreeing almost entirely. Every issue and disagreement

between the two is smoothed out as issues within translation, and terms within either man’s faith

are swapped interchangeably. The two talk not as protzletyzer and target but as two learned men

from slight variations within the same tradition. The trick of van Helmont’s Kabbalah is not that

it creates a Judaized Christianity or an onramp for Jewish conversion to Christianity, but that it

seems to blur the lines completely between the two faiths into a deeper syncretic faith, where

principles from either religion cannot be extricated or regarded as unnecessary grafts or

48 Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van, and Sheila A. Spector. Francis Mercury Van Helmont’s “Sketch of Christian
Kabbalism.” Aries Book Series. Leiden: Brill, 2012. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=460926&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
49 Coudert, 109.

21
Jacob Kuppermann

compromises. It is hidden as the weaponry of conversion, but philosophically it is more of a

plowshare than a sword.

In the Sketch, a few key details of van Helmont’s Kabbalah become clear. He spends the

third chapter of the dialogue outlining, point-by-point, the equation of the Christian messiah and

the Lurianic Adam Kadmon— the first spiritual creation, and a distinct figure from Adam Ha-

Rishon, or the first physical creation. For every point that the “Kabbalist” raises as a facet of the

spiritual Adam, his Christian counterpart is able to bring up an exact correspondence with

something about his Christ. On most of these points, the more important thing is the

correspondence, not the theological matter in itself. Yet if one point of substance comes up

repeatedly in this third chapter, it is on Adam/Jesus’ substance itself. The Kabbalist tells his

interlocutor that “the first substance produced was your messiah,” a claim that the Christian

backs up with a quote from Colossians.50 The Kabbalist goes on to discuss the nature of the

Adam Kadmon as having “assimilated all possibilities, in the same similitude and image” —

which is to say that the first spiritual man contained all future souls of man within itself.

Therefore, all men have some aspect of the divine within them. Though this belief is not one

common to Christianity, van Helmont musters enough evidence from the New Testament to keep

both halves of his Christian Kabbalist equation coherent. Taken as a whole, van Helmont’s

synthesis of Christian faith and Kabbalist paths of understanding is internally coherent and a

compelling balance of the two philosophical schools.

The key element allowing for van Helmont’s connection of Christianity to Kabbalah is

Luria’s theory. The cosmic drama of Lurianic creation myth— the contraction of the divine away

from a point, and the shattered vessels that must be repaired and refilled with divine light— is

50 ibid.

22
Jacob Kuppermann

transposed throughout van Helmont’s dialogue to refer in various ways to Christianity and the

redemption of the souls of man that Christ brings. As van Helmont goes from discussing the

shattered state of the soul to the soul’s salvation, he has the Kabbalist state the goal of his

dialogue, declaring, “Up to here, your explanation has been like ours. Now, you must show how

your Messiah is the author of restoration.” 51

So what are we to make of the syncretic faith of van Helmont’s Kabbalah? His

contemporaries, upon greater study of his work, were mixed in their reaction. More, upon

exposure to a version of Christian Kabbalah that actually engaged with pre-existing Kabbalistic

sources, soured on the concept. Though he kept up a correspondence and friendship with van

Helmont throughout the 1670s and 1680s, he grew dismissive of actual Kabbalah, criticizing

some of its dictates on the sefirot of God as “altogether gross and crass” in the way they are

formed in different modes.52 More viewed van Helmont’s Kabbalah to be a dangerous flirtation

with pantheism.

There was, though, one group of Christians that looked on van Helmont’s Kabbalah

positively. The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, which began earlier in the

seventeenth century as a separatist group off of the Anglican Church. Quakers tended towards

millenarianism and a radical belief in internal religious equality, with no division between clergy

and laymen. Furthermore, Quakers believed in the doctrine of the “inner light” — that “God will

dwell in men.”53 Such a doctrine matched up well with van Helmont’s reading of the Kabbalah,

and as such certain Quakers were attracted to Kabbalah. One such Quaker was George Keith,

who wrote to Knorr von Rosenroth in 1676 to discuss the connection of Christ to the “Sier

51 ibid, 139.
52 Coudert, 235
53 Fox, George. “Great Mystery of the Great Whore Unfolded” in the Works of George Fox, volume 3, pp.181-82

23
Jacob Kuppermann

Anpin” of Kabbalah, and how such a connection would justify his belief in a “most divine soul

that is everywhere extended.”54 The “Sier Anpin” that Keith refers to is the Kabbalistic Ze`ir

Anpin/ ‫ זְעֵיר ַאנפִּין‬, also known as the Microprosopus, or smaller face of God. In a manuscript

written by Chayyim Vital, the Kabbalist discusses how the Ze’ir Anpin, identified with six of the

ten sefirot, is the source of “Human souls,” via the “Adam of the World of Emanation, which is

the Name MaH(45) whose inner aspect is called the ten sefirot of the middle level of soul

(ruach).”55 By linking the Ze’ir and Christ, Keith found evidence for Quaker doctrine by virtue of

human souls rooting through the World of Emanation.

Another English figure at the late seventeenth century intersection between Kabbalah

and Quakerism was the Lady Anne Conway, who became deeply invested in both traditions

while being treated by van Helmont, in his role as physician, for chronic pain in the 1670s.

While van Helmont did not do much to alleviate her physical pain, he did teach her the basics of

the Kabbalah, which she took to with an intellectual fervor. While none of her writings were

published under her name in her lifetime, the posthumous collection published in 1690 in

Amsterdam under the name The Principles Of The Most Ancient And Modern Philosophy gives a

good overview of her thought. That work’s frontispiece promises “Annotations taken from the

Ancient Philosophy of the Hebrews,” and the text follows up on that— the first chapter alone

cites von Rosenroth and van Helmont’s texts six times.56

54 Coudert, 187.
55 Vital, Chayyim. “Notes from a Manuscript.” in The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of
Isaac Luria: The Palace of Adam Kadmon., trans. Donald Wilder Menzi & Zwe Padeh. Book-mart Press, Inc, (North
Bergen) 1999. The middle level of the soul and the name MaH are identified with the Ze’ir Anpin.
56 Conway, Anne. Anne Conway: The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Edited by Allison P.
Coudert and Taylor Corse. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511597978. Also accessible
http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/conway/principles/principles.html

24
Jacob Kuppermann

While the posthumous publication of Conway’s “Principles” is perhaps colored by her

status as a “Woman learned beyond her Sex,” the work stands as a worthy entry in the

Christian Kabbalist canon regardless.57 Conway’s distillation of the connections between Adam

Kadmon and Jesus are much cleaner than van Helmont’s— she eschews the dialogue format

and simply outlines how the Adam Kadmon/Christ is used by God as an “Instrument, by which

he co-operates in his Creatures; because it is, in regard of its Nature, more near unto them.” 58

Conway’s posthumous work is the last major work of Christian Kabbalah written by van

Helmont’s intellectual circle, and its elucidation of Christian Kabbalist philosophy incorporates

many insights from the texts that came before it.

IV: Later Christian Uses of the Lurianic Kabbalah

Even after the dissolution of the core group of seventeenth century Cabbalists, the

specter of Kabbalah still held some rhetorical or philosophical heft among mystically inclined

Christians. Consider the odd case of the Apocalyptica Cabbala: or a history of the millenium, an

essay written in 1726 and published in London in 1741. Published anonymously, but dedicated

to the “Collegians of Oxford and Cambridge,” the text purports to show “the great revolutions,

changes, and accidents, that will happen to the whole moral, animal, vegetable, marine,

mundan, and aethereal world, even to the end of the world.” 59 It explicitly cites “Dr. Henry

57 advertisement, ibid.
58 ibid, Chapter V.
59 Apocalyptica Cabbala: or a history of the millenium. Which shews the great revolutions, changes, and accidents,
that will happen to the whole moral, animal, vegetable, marine, mundan, and aethereal world, even to the end of
the world. Humbly dedicated to the Collegians of Oxford and Cambridge. Unto whom the Author appeals for a
Verdict, desiring to be weighed in their Ballaneo, and to be heard at their Judgment Seat. Written in the year of our
Lord, 1726. London: printed by G. Parker, at the Star In Salisbury-Court in Fleet-Street, and sold by the booksellers
of London and Westminster, [1741]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed June 23, 2019).
http://find.galegroup.com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/ecco/infomark.do?
&source=gale&docLevel=FASCIMILE&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=stan90222&tabID=T001&docId=CW3325202

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Jacob Kuppermann

Moor’s Philosophical Moral, and Mosaical Cabbala” as its inspiration, and the text’s

introduction quotes heavily from More.60 It does not seem to actually engage with Kabbalist

literature itself, but instead uses Kabbalah much as More did almost a century beforehand. To

the anonymous writer of the Apocalyptica, a “Cabbala” is simply any detailed, mystical analysis

of scripture. It’s a term that’s lost its specificity. Even More’s use in the early 1650s, before the

publication of Kabbalah Denudata, is more contextually appropriate. In More’s use, at least,

there was some Judaic analysis being conducted. The Apocalyptica is thus not even a Christian

Kabbalist work— it is merely a Christian work that references Christian Kabbalah obliquely, at a

remove of several steps from the Lurianic Kabbalah itself.

Yet even a spurious use of Kabbalah shows what appeal it had to certain groups of

mystically-inclined European Christians. The writer of the Apocalyptica appears to be on the

outskirts of the intellectual society of Georgian Britain, as evidenced by the anonymous nature

of the work and the writer’s title page plea to the scholarly elite of Oxford and Cambridge, a

group that the writer clearly does not claim membership to. Yet the claims advanced in the

work are provocative— its introduction closes with a warning to all who would prevent the

works’ publication that to do so would hasten “the World’s undergoing and suffering the heavy

Judgment,” as the Cabbala contains “Rules” and knowledge necessary for the world’s (or at

least England’s) salvation. Those rules, contained in the third section of the work, seem to

mostly entail the mass conversion to the writer’s preferred variety of Christianity, which

appears to be a slightly altered version of Catholicism. More significant is not the specific faith

mentioned but the mood of the work, which (as is evident from just the title), is consumed with

084&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0.
60 ibid, introduction.

26
Jacob Kuppermann

a paranoia and fear for the end of the world and disgust for the “corrupt doctrines” that “the

clergy of all nations” propagate.61

In general, the shared factor between all of these Christian invocations of Kabbalah is a

belief that only through their Cabbalistic insights can the true secrets of the divine be revealed,

and so through that revelation create some kind of universal religion. The scheme of that

religion differs between its architects, ranging from a fairly orthodox form of Catholicism to

syncretic meldings of Judaism and Protestant theology. Yet the aim is shared. To these

philosophers, the power of Cabbala is in its ancient and esoteric nature. Their invocations of

Cabbala, regardless of connection to Kabbalah, are attempts to break from a confusing and

continually splintering religious and cultural landscape and harken back to a tradition so old and

arcane that its wisdom must be indisputable.

The Christian use of Kabbalah is easy to read as a cynical appropriation or conversion

tool, and for many of its practitioners this is an undeniable truth. Yet the school of thought

headed by van Helmont is not one that is so obviously cynical. Unlike many of those who came

before and after, van Helmont’s Northern European group of Hebraists were deeply engaged

with the study of the actual Hebrew and Aramaic texts that make up the Kabbalist canon. And

in their unique ideas about the divine and continuance in Lurianic doctrines about emanation,

chaos, and the Adam Kadmon, they come close to serving as a true lineage of Kabbalistic

thought. While the set of Dutch, German, and English gentry and religious dissenters that made

up this school of thought lacked the traditional decades of study in Yeshiva in Jewish texts, their

version of the Kabbalah is not so easy to write off as mere forgery.

61 ibid, 168.

27
Jacob Kuppermann

Just as the Lurianic telling of Kabbalah features at its core a divine light that is degraded

as it passes through successive vessels, each further from the source, so can the authentic

influence of Lurianic Kabbalah be seen as being degraded as it passes through each Christian

source away from Luria and Vital. The relatively faithful work of hebraists like van Helmont and

Knorr von Rosenroth, which was based on their own translation of Luria, Vital, and other

significant Kabbalists like Cordovero, captured much of the essence of Kabbalah, even as it

manipulated it for idealistic, syncretic goals. Their contemporaries— More, Conway, and the

quakers— used a mix of elements from van Helmont’s translations and commentaries to create

a more inconsistent view of Kabbalah that still bore some resemblances to the original doctrine.

By the mid 1700s, works like Apocalyptica Cabbala had arrived, bearing no connection to Luria

and only a passing, confused reference to figures like More on van Helmont.

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———. Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510 : A Survey /. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
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direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=132905&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

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