13

CHRISTIAN KABBALAH

P e t e r J. Fo r s h a w

G ershom Scholem argues that the primary motivation

for Christian kabbalists was a form of missionary activity: “Christian
Kabbalah can be defined as the interpretation of kabbalistic texts in the
interests of Christianity (or, to be more precise, Catholicism); or the use of
kabbalistic concepts and methodology in support of Christian dogma.”1 As
evidence, he points to the Christological speculations of Jewish converts,
such as the Pugio Fidei (Dagger of Faith) of Raymund Martini (1220–1285),
works that contributed to the growth of an incipient Christian Kabbalah.2

1 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the Dawn of Christian Kabbalah

Although the Majorcan mystic Ramon Lull (1225–1315) is sometimes cred-
ited with being the first Christian to show an acquaintance with Kabbalah in
his De auditu Kabbalistico, the work actually shows little familiarity with the
Jewish tradition. Christian speculation about the Kabbalah first took root in
the Florentine Renaissance. While Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was busy
translating and writing commentaries on the works of Plato, Plotinus, and
Hermes Trismegistus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) began
studying kabbalistic works. This was all part of Pico’s project of creating his
syncretic philosophia nova, his synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought
with esoteric doctrines gleaned from prisci theologi such as Zoroaster,
1
Gershom Scholem, “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” in The Christian Kabbalah:
Jewish Mystical Books & Their Christian Interpreters, ed. Joseph Dan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
College Library, 1997), 17–51, here 17.
2
Scholem, “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” 18. See also Moshe Idel’s
“Introduction to the Bison Book Edition,” in Johann Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah,
trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), v–xxix;
Idel, Kabbalah in Italy 1280–1510: A Survey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011),
227–235.

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144 Peter J. Forshaw

Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, and Pythagoras. Pico is the first author raised
as a Christian who is known to have read an impressive amount of genuine
Jewish Kabbalah. He marks a watershed in the history of Hebrew studies in
Europe.3
The fruit of Pico’s studies can best be found in his famous nine hundred
Conclusiones Philosophicæ Cabalisticæ et Theologicæ (1486). It was here that Pico
first introduced the Kabbalah into the mainstream of Renaissance thought by
means of forty-seven “Cabalistic Conclusions” according to “the secret
teaching of the wise Hebrew Cabalists” and seventy-two “Cabalistic con-
clusions according to my own opinion,” with further kabbalistic references
in other groups of “Conclusions,” including those on magic, Mercury
Trismegistus, Zoroaster, and the Orphic hymns.4
Pico’s two major kabbalistic influences were the Spanish kabbalist
Abraham Abulafia (1240–ca. 1291) and the Italian rabbi Menahem
Recanati (1250–1310). These men represent two quite different types of
Kabbalah, the one ecstatic, the other theosophical-theurgical. Recanati is
mainly concerned with the ten sefirot as divine emanations and engages in a
symbolic exegesis of Scripture as the way to unravel their mysteries. On the
other hand, Abulafia, the father of prophetic Kabbalah, tends to downplay
the importance of the sefirot and concentrates on the names (shemot) of God
and their permutations as a spiritual discipline by which man can attain union
with the divine.5 Though neither detailed nor systematic in his discussion,
for example, of the sefirot, paths of wisdom, and gates of understanding, Pico
nevertheless shows an awareness of these teachings and understands their
relation to kabbalistic theories of creation and revelation.
Pico’s alleged primary motivation for studying the Kabbalah is evangeliz-
ing against heretics and Jews. In the Apologia he composed in 1487 – follow-
ing the condemnation of thirteen of his theses as heretical – he avows that his
motive is “to do battle for the faith against the relentless slanders of the
3
On Pico and Kabbalah, see François Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens de la Renaissance (Paris:
Dunod, 1964), Cap. III; Klaus Reichert, “Pico della Mirandola and the Beginnings of
Christian Kabbala,” in Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, ed. Karl Erich
Grözinger and Joseph Dan (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 195–207; Pico della Mirandola:
New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), passim.
On Pico as creator of the “first true Christian Cabala,” see Bernard McGinn, “Cabalists and
Christians: Reflections on Cabala in Medieval and Renaissance Thought,” in Jewish
Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Richard H.
Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 11–34.
4
Steven A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional
Religious and Philosophical Systems (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies,
1998), 343, 421, 489, 497–503, 507, 511.
5
On Abulafia and Recanati, see Idel, Kabbalah in Italy, passim.

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 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 145

Hebrews.”6 As his second set of “Cabalistic Conclusions” explains, his

intention is one of “providing powerful confirmation of the Christian
religion from the very principles of the Hebrew Sages,” so that the Jews
can be refuted by their own kabbalistic books.7 He proposes to use the
Kabbalah’s own hermeneutical techniques to prove, for instance, the supre-
macy of the name of Jesus and the mystery of the Trinity.8
The significance of Pico’s Kabbalah should not, however, be restricted
simply to Christian polemic and apologetics. Chaim Wirszubski argues that
the “Cabalistic Conclusions” “outgrew their original purpose” and that Pico
viewed Kabbalah from an entirely new standpoint, being “the first Christian
who considered cabbala to be simultaneously a witness for Christianity and
an ally of natural magic.”9 Pico’s interest goes far beyond the simple con-
firmation of Christianity when in his “Magical Conclusions” he famously
asserts that the divinity of Christ is best demonstrated by the science of magic
and Kabbalah.10 Joseph Dan believes that with this thesis, Pico is less con-
cerned with promoting traditional Catholicism than with implying that
Christianity should discover a new meaning, one outlined in his nine
hundred theses.11 The extreme nature of the claims Pico makes, such as
that “no magical operation can be of any efficacy unless it has annexed to it a
work of Cabala,” created a widespread interest in this Jewish tradition.12
Pico’s alliance between Kabbalah, magic, and theology produced a signifi-
cant development in Christian Kabbalah: From then on, a Christian kabbalist
could be a theologian or a magus or both.

2 Johann Reuchlin’s Influential Formulations on the Word

and the Art
During the time Pico was active in Florence, he was visited by the German
scholar Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), universally regarded as one of the key

6
Brian P. Copenhaver, “The Secret of Pico’s Oration: Cabala and Renaissance Philosophy,”
in Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 56–81, here 75.
7
Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J. W. Miller,
and Douglas Carmichael (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 29, 32.
8
Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 523.
9
Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), 151, 185.
10
Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 497.
11
Joseph Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin and Its Historical Significance,” in Dan,
The Christian Kabbalah, 55–95, here 57.
12
Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 499.

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146 Peter J. Forshaw

figures of European scholarship and intellectual life at the turn of the

sixteenth century. Reuchlin wrote two of the most influential books of
Christian Kabbalah, the De Verbo Mirifico (On the Wonder-Working Word,
1494) and De Arte Cabalistica (On the Kabbalistic Art, 1517).13 One of the main
attractions of Kabbalah for him was the multiplicity of divine names in
Hebrew. In his “Conclusions,” Pico had briefly referred to the name of
Jesus in a kabbalistic context; in De Verbo Mirifico, Reuchlin launched into a
full-blown declaration of how the Jewish four-letter name the
Tetragrammaton, YHVH, had been superseded by the five-letter Christian
Pentagrammaton, the name “above all others,” YHSVH.
Reuchlin’s first kabbalistic work was significant for its ideas about lan-
guage and the contribution it made to the Renaissance debate on the occult
powers and properties of words and names. It contained extraordinary
examples of marvelous deeds achieved through the wonder-working word,
from feeding the hungry and curing the sick to exorcizing demons and
reviving the dead.14 By the time he published De Arte Cabalistica, Reuchlin
was the leading Christian Hebraist of his age and had become involved
in the controversy with the Cologne Dominicans over the Talmud,
sometimes referred to as the “Battle of the Books.” Reuchlin wrote his
second kabbalistic work “as a form of special pleading for the protection of
Hebrew books against burning because of their ‘Christian’ content.” This
was a particularly courageous stance to take and a radical departure from the
standard theological antagonism toward the Talmud.15
An important aspect of the new concept of language found in kabbalistic
sources was a set of exegetical techniques having no counterpart in the
Christian interpretation of Scripture. In De Arte Cabalistica, Reuchlin
provides examples of the Jewish techniques of gematria (or arithmetic),

13
On Reuchlin, see Karl E. Grözinger, “Reuchlin und die Kabbala,” in Reuchlin und die Juden,
ed. Arno Herzig and Julius H. Schoeps (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1993), 175–
187; Bernd Roling, “The Complete Nature of Christ: Sources and Structures of a
Christological Theurgy in the Works of Johannes Reuchlin,” in The Metamorphosis of
Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R.
Veenstra (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 213–266; Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Einleitung:
Johannes Reuchlin und die Anfänge der christlichen Kabbala,” in Christliche Kabbala, ed.
Schmidt-Biggemann (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2003), 9–48.
14
Charles Zika, “Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth
Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976), 104–138.
15
Joseph Leon Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1944), 50; Joseph Dan, “Christian Kabbalah in the
Renaissance,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff
(Leiden: Brill, 2006), 991; Reichert, “Pico della Mirandola and the Beginnings of
Christian Kabbala,” 197.

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 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 147

Notariacon (manipulation of letters), and Themura (commutation of letters),

all for the sake of proving the supremacy of the Christian religion.
Somewhat incongruously, Reuchlin’s Jewish representative, Simon ben
Eleazar, promotes Christian Trinitarian doctrine with his explanation of
how the twelve-letter name Ab Ben Veruach Hakadosh (Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit) flows from the Jewish Tetragrammaton YHVH.16 So informa-
tive was Reuchlin’s exposition that from his time, no writer who touched
on Christian Kabbalah with any thoroughness did so without using him as a
source.

3 Other Significant Sources for Early Christian Kabbalah

One of the central figures in sixteenth-century Christian Kabbalah is
undoubtedly the Venetian scholar Francesco Giorgio (ca. 1460–1540),17
author of two large volumes on Kabbalah that were widely read: De
Harmonia mundi totius cantica tria (Three Canticles on the Harmony of the
Whole World, 1525) and the Problemata (1536). In both books, the
Kabbalah was central to the themes developed, and the Zohar, for the first
time, was used extensively in a work of Christian origin. Elaborating on the
works of Pico and Reuchlin, in De Harmonia mundi Giorgio presents
the major ideas of Renaissance kabbalists. In the process, he takes the
Christianization of Kabbalah far beyond that found in Pico’s theses. One
of Giorgio’s disciples, Arcangelo da Borgonuovo (d. 1571), borrowing
extensively from the works of his teacher and Reuchlin, published a
Dechiaratione sopra il nome di Giesu (Declaration on the Name of Jesus, 1557),
essentially an expansion of the final chapters in Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico.
This was later followed by a commentary on Pico’s kabbalistic theses,
Cabalistarum selectiora, obscurioraque dogmata (More select and obscure dogmas
of the Cabalists, 1569).18
The German Jewish convert Paulus Ricius (1470–1541) likewise discov-
ered in Kabbalah the mysteries of the Trinity, the eternal generation of the
Son of God, redemption through the passion and blood of the Messiah, and
his resurrection. Rici was widely read in Hebrew sources, and with the zeal
of a convert he published a series of short tracts under the title Sal Fœderis (Salt

16
Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala, 57–59.
17
Giulio Busi, “Francesco Zorzi: A Methodical Dreamer,” in Dan, The Christian Kabbalah,
97–125; Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1979; reprinted 2001), 33–44.
18
Chaim Wirszubski, “Francesco Giorgio’s Commentary on Giovanni Pico’s Kabbalistic
Theses,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), 145–156.

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148 Peter J. Forshaw

of Covenant) in 1507, intended to defend Christianity against the calumnies of

the Jews. In 1514, Rici became physician to Emperor Maximilian I, for
whom in 1519 he prepared a new Latin translation of the Talmud, with
commentary. In 1516, he published what was to become an influential
translation of Joseph Gikatilla’s Gates of Light (1516), containing the first
depiction of the Tree of Life outside a Jewish text. The most famous of his
kabbalistic works is the four-part religio-philosophical synthesis of kabbalistic
and Christian sources, De Cœlesti Agricultura (On Celestial Agriculture, 1541).
Book Four consists of an introduction to the Kabbalah in a series of fifty
theorems, as well as a translation of main passages from Gikatilla’s Gates of
Light. Ironically, despite his Jewish origins and obvious erudition, and despite
the orthodox, non-magical nature of Rici’s Kabbalah, he was accused by a
priest of not propounding true Kabbalah “because he presented this doctrine
in another light than that of Pico.”19
The individual responsible, however, for providing the most enduring
image of early modern Christian Kabbalah is the German theologian
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), in his encyclopedia of esoteric
thought, De Occulta Philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy,
1533). This work was to became one of the most widely consulted sources
for Kabbalah in the Christian world – despite (or perhaps because of) the
fact that Agrippa only shows knowledge of the works of Christian kabbalists
such as Pico, Reuchlin, Rici, and Giorgio, rather than direct engagement
with Hebrew or Aramaic sources. Agrippa presents a similar intermingling
of Pythagorean, Neoplatonic, and kabbalistic ideas to Reuchlin, iterating
the same claims to Hebrew being the “original language” and the signifi-
cance of its twenty-two letters as the foundation of the world. Scholem
observes that the place of honor in De Occulta philosophia is accorded to
practical Kabbalah and arithmology, for it is a rich source of information on
the occult and kabbalistic significance of numbers; at the same time, we
should not neglect the importance of Kabbalah for Agrippa’s notion of a
sacralized magic.20

19
Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens, 89. On Ricius, see also François Secret, “Notes sur Paolo
Ricci et la Kabbale chrétienne en Italie,” Rinascimento 11 (1960), 169–192; Crofton Black,
“From Kabbalah to Psychology: The Allegorizing Isagoge of Paulus Ricius, 1509–1541,”
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 2:2 (2007), 136–173.
20
Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Meridian Books, 1978), 198; Zika, “Reuchlin’s
De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate,” 138. See also Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language
of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 149–159. On
Christian Kabbalah’s relations with occult philosophy, see Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens,
ch. 11.

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4 A Cabalchemical Hybrid: Experimental Fusions of Kabbalah

and Alchemy
During the course of the sixteenth century, a pronounced trend emerged
toward the permeation of Christian Kabbalah with alchemical symbolism.21
This convergence of alchemy and Kabbalah was perhaps to be expected as
both arts were concerned with knowledge of creation. Both arts, too,
advocated a secret transmission of knowledge from master to pupil, with
initiations, ordinations, and revelations from God and his angels. To a certain
extent, the kabbalists’ reduction of language to its elemental letters corre-
sponded to the alchemists’ reduction of matter to its primal state; the
permutation of letters and words corresponding to the circulation and
combination of elements and substances.
The first known combination of alchemy and Kabbalah can be found in
the works of the Venetian priest Giovanni Agostino Panteo (d. 1535), who
develops a hybrid “Kabbalah of Metals” in two works: the Ars transmutationis
metallicae (Art of metallic transmutation, 1519) and Voarchadumia contra alchimiam
(Voarchadumia against alchemy, 1530).22 In the most kabbalistic-sounding
chapter of the Voarchadumia, concerned with the “Mixture at the roots of
the Unity of the 72 Voarchadumic elements,” Panteo numerically analyzes a
small collection of words connected with alchemical substances. We learn
that the mysterious substance Risoo is called Thélima in Greek, and in Hebrew
Reçón, both terms appearing in Panteo’s list of synonyms for gold. Both
words translate literally as “Will,” but the alchemico-kabbalistic significance
lies in the realization that the Hebrew Reçón shares the same letters as Eretz,
one of the Hebrew words for “earth.”23 In this opaque way, Panteo attempts
a kabbalistic elucidation of the secrets of the powers of alchemical substances
and processes. He makes no direct reference to Jewish texts, but he does
mention Pico and provides three magical alphabets derived from Hebrew,
one of which subsequently appears in Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia.
Another is the Enochian alphabet, well known to those familiar with John
Dee’s communications with spirits.
21
Gershom Scholem, Alchemy and Kabbalah (Dallas: Spring Publications, 2006); Raphael Patai,
The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), 152–169.
22
On Pantheus, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1941), Vol. 5, 537–40; Hilda Norrgrén, “Interpretation
and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee’s Reading of Pantheus’s Voarchadumia,” Ambix 52:3
(2005), 217–245.
23
Nicolas Séd, “L’or enfermé et la poussière d’or selon Moïse ben Shémtobh de Léon (c.
1240–1305),” Chrysopoeia, Tome III, fasc. 2 1989, 121–134, at 131.

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150 Peter J. Forshaw

The French Paracelsian David De Planis-Campy (1589–ca. 1644) identi-

fied Dee, the Elizabethan magus, as one “most versed in Chymical Cabala.”
This is doubtless because of the composite alchemical symbol “mathemati-
cally, magically, cabbalistically, and anagogically” elucidated by Dee in his
Monas Hieroglyphica (1564).24 Dee is familiar with the kabbalistic exegetical
techniques of “the Tziruph (or Themura) of the Hebrews” and speaks of the
“cabbalistic expansion of the quaternary,” thereby introducing a
Reuchlinian reference to the Pythagorean tetraktys. It is evident, however,
that he is less convinced of the importance of Hebrew than Pico or Reuchlin.
Dee also shows a marked tendency to forge his own Kabbalah of Greek and
Roman letters and geometrical, astrological, and alchemical symbols to dis-
cover the secrets of God and creation. Despite being classed by Méric
Casaubon as “a Cabalistical man, to his ears,” Dee gives the distinct impres-
sion that he is not particularly interested in kabbalistic textual interpretation.
In the Monas, he pointedly makes a distinction between a “Kabbalah of the
Real” and a “Kabbalah of the Word,” the former relating to the Book of
Nature, the latter to the Book of Scripture. Dee turns from an exclusively
“literal” kabbalistic reading of printed books to one connected with natural
magic and deciphering the hieroglyphs or signatures of the created world.25

5 The Sigillum Dei in Heinrich Khunrath’s “Christian-Cabalist”

Amphitheatre
So far our story of Christian Kabbalah has primarily been one of Catholic
exponents.26 However, it is a Lutheran acquaintance of Dee, the German
theosopher and alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), who appears to
be the first person to publish a work explicitly describing itself as “Christian
Cabalist”: The Christian-Cabalist, Divinely Magical and Physico-Chymical
Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1595 and 1609).27 Familiar with Agrippa’s
24
Peter J. Forshaw, “The Early Alchemical Reception of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica,”
Ambix 52:3 (2005), 247–269, at 263.
25
Philip Beitchman, Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1998), 242–243.
26
On Dee’s switches from Protestantism to Catholicism and back, plus possible contacts with
Familism, see Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and
the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 129, 149.
27
On Khunrath, see Peter J. Forshaw, “Curious Knowledge and Wonder-Working Wisdom
in the Occult Works of Heinrich Khunrath,” in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to
the Enlightenment, ed. R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 107–
129. Khunrath’s usage is antedated in manuscript, however, by Jean Thénaud (d. 1542)
whose La Saincte et trescrestienne cabale dates from around 1521. See Blau, The Christian
Interpretation of the Cabala, 89–97; Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter, 185 n.1.

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 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 151

De Occulta Philosophia, it is likely that Khunrath deepened his knowledge of

Christian Kabbalah through a compendium published while he was studying
medicine in Basel: the Artis Cabalisticæ: hoc est, Reconditae Theologiae et
Philosophiae, Scriptorum, Tomus I (Volume 1 of the Cabalistic Art, that is, of the
Writers of Recondite Theology and Philosophy, 1587) of Johannes Pistorius of
Nidda (1546–1608). This collection has been called the “Bible of Christian
Cabala,” containing as it does works by Pico, Reuchlin, Rici, Arcangelo da
Borgonuovo, Leone Ebreo, and a Latin translation of the Sefer Yetzirah.28
Khunrath’s knowledge of the Kabbalah most clearly reveals itself in the
Amphitheatre’s engraving of Christ, the Sigillum Dei (Seal of God) or Sigillum
Emet (Seal of Truth). As Raphael Patai remarks, one “has the impression of
seeing a complex Jewish emblem written in Hebrew,” a central figure (of
Christ cruciform) from which radiate eight concentric rings, five in Hebrew
letters, forming “a veritable brief anthology of important quotations and
names of Jewish religious significance.”29 It includes the Ein Sof, ten sefirot,
ten Names of God and ten angelic orders, the twenty-two letters of the
Hebrew alphabet, and the Hebrew text of the Decalogue. The debt
Khunrath owes to Reuchlin is nowhere more evident than at the heart of
the engraving where five large tongues of flame appear, each bearing one
letter of the wonder-working word YHSVH.
It appears that we are now quite far from Christian Kabbalah as primarily
missionary activity aimed at converting the Jews. For Khunrath, kabbalistic
reception of divine revelation is to be used for the recognition of the divine
Father and Son and the understanding of what he calls the “Three Books” of
Nature, Man, and Scripture, as represented in the best-known engraving
from his Amphitheatre, the “Oratory-Laboratory.” Khunrath’s claims of being
“ineffably rapt in God” and inspired by “Sophia Enthusiastica” include a new
dimension of personal revelation (through dreams and angels) to his kabba-
listic experience in the Oratory. In the Laboratory, one of the products of
Khunrath’s emphasis on the necessary conjunction of Kabbalah, magic, and
alchemy is the “Divine” Philosophers’ Stone, with its “Physico-Magical,
Hyperphysico-magical, Theosophical and Kabbalistic” uses.30

28
Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiennes, 280.
29
Patai, The Jewish Alchemists, 156.
30
Forshaw, “Curious Knowledge and Wonder-Working Wisdom,” 115, 128; Dan,
“Christian Kabbalah in the Renaissance,” 639. See Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes
Reuchlin,” p. 62, on the opposition between Kabbalah and mysticism: “the first
emphasizes tradition and marginalizes individual experience, whereas the latter includes
the notion of an original discovery of a truth by an individual.”

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152 Peter J. Forshaw

6 Zoharic and Lurianic Influences: Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala

denudata
Interest in Kabbalah and alchemy reappears in the seventeenth century’s most
prominent anthology of Jewish and Christian kabbalist texts. With the
conviction that the Kabbalah was an original secret revelation that contained
all the spiritual evolution of humanity from the creation of the world, and
that the Jewish and Christian religions were identical from the point of view
of their esoteric core, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1631–1689) decided
to publish a Latin translation of the most significant parts of the Zohar, along
with other kabbalistic treatises and commentaries to assist the reader’s under-
standing. This resulted in the publication, in 1677, of the first volume of the
Kabbala denudata, seu doctrina Hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque
Theologica (The Kabbala Unveiled or the transcendental, metaphysical and theological
doctrine of the Hebrews), dedicated “to the Hebrew-, Chymistry-, and
Wisdom-loving reader.” Whereas previously the most influential Hebrew
sources had been the works of medieval authors such as Recanati, Gikatilla,
and Abulafia, the Kabbalah Unveiled espouses the works of a new form of
Kabbalah with a stress on redemption and the millennium, promoting what
Scholem calls the “true theologia mystica of Judaism.”31
In keeping with the interests of earlier Christian kabbalists such as
Reuchlin and Agrippa, this volume includes a “Key to the Divine Names
of the Kabbalah” and an edition of Gikatilla’s Gates of Light. New, however,
are works of the Safed mystic Isaac Luria (1534–1572) and other Lurianic
kabbalist works, including a detailed explanation of the Tree of Life and a
summary of an unusual Jewish alchemical treatise, the Esch Mezareph (The
Refiner’s Fire), giving correspondences between the sefirot, planets, and
metals, plus several speculative kabbalistic works by the Cambridge
Platonist Henry More (1614–1687).
A second volume of the Kabbalah Unveiled, the Liber Sohar restitutus (The
Book of Splendour restored, 1684), emphasizes Knorr’s missionary intent,
beginning with a systematic résumé of the Zohar’s doctrines, to which is
added a Christian interpretation. The same technique is used in another text
included in the volume, the Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae . . . ad conversio-
nem Judaeorum (Outline of Christian Kabbala . . . for the conversion of the Jews), a
dialogue between a “Kabbalist” and a “Christian Philosopher,” in which

31
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books,
1954), 284.

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 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 153

they explain their respective religious doctrines, showing the concordance

between the two traditions.
Inspired by the Lurianic Kabbalah with its “optimistic, vitalist philosophy
of perfectionism and universal salvation,” Rosenroth and his collaborator in
the publishing enterprise, Frans Mercurius van Helmont (1614–1699),
rejected many of the conventional Christian views of the fall, salvation, and
the Trinity, as well as the particularly Protestant focus on divine justice,
predestination, man’s helplessness, and the concept of an eternal hell. They
tended to minimize or allegorize Christ’s role in the redemptive process,
preferring instead the Lurianic vision of a universe restored to its original
perfection through human effort.32
This second volume also contains work that would later be of great interest
to occult societies such as the Golden Dawn, in particular, a section entitled
Pneumatica cabbalistica, introducing kabbalistic ideas about spirits, angels and
demons, the soul, and the various states and transformations included in the
kabbalistic theory of metempsychosis. Also included were Latin translations
of Lurianic works, including chapters on angelology, demonology, and the
magical creative power of language, describing how pious men can create
angels and spirits through prayers. The Kabbala denudata was superior to
anything that had previously been published on the Kabbalah in a language
other than Hebrew, providing a non-Jewish readership with authentic texts
that were to be the principal source for Western literature on Kabbalah until
the end of the nineteenth century.33

7 Christian Kabbalah on the Threshold of Modernity: Oetinger

and Molitor
Moving to the eighteenth century, the best known representative of Christian
Kabbalah is undoubtedly the Lutheran pastor Friedrich Christoph Oetinger
(1702–1782), who sought a philosophia sacra as a substitute for the systems of
profane philosophy developed by thinkers such as Descartes and Hobbes. He
found this in various guises, including the philosophy of Leibniz, the
Neoplatonically kabbalistic works of Henry More, the writings of Paracelsus
and other alchemists, the theosophy of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), the works

32
Allison P. Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought
of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999), 345.
See especially ch. 6: “Christian Knorr von Rosenroth and the Kabbalah Denudata”; eadem,
“The Kabbala Denudata: Converting Jews or Seducing Christians,” in Pokin and Weiner,
Jewish Christians and Christian Jews, 73–96.
33
Scholem, Kabbalah, 416.

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154 Peter J. Forshaw

of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), and in the Jewish

Kabbalah. Oetinger was especially drawn to the Lurianic Kabbalah, with the
Etz Hayim (Tree of Life) of Luria’s main disciple Hayim Vital (1543–1620), a
major source for his Öffentliches Denckmahl der Lehrtafel einer weyland
württembergischen Princeßin Antonia (Public Monument of the Didactic Painting of a
Former Württemberg Princess Antonia, 1763).34 This was his description and
analysis of an emblematic triptych commissioned for the Church of the Holy
Trinity at Bad Teinach in the Black Forest by Princess Antonia of
Württemberg (1613–1679), one of the daughters of the alchemist and occultist
Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg. In his commentary on Princess Antonia’s
Lehrtafel, Oetinger sets forth a system of Christian Kabbalah based on his
reading of the Zohar, containing separate chapters comparing the philosophies
of Newton, Boehme, and Swedenborg with that of Kabbalah.
For our final representative of Christian Kabbalah, we are back with a
Catholic scholar, in the figure of the German philosopher Franz Josef
Molitor (1779–1860). Like Rosenroth and Oetinger before him, Molitor
collaborated with Jewish scholars and developed his kabbalistic program over
decades of research into primary Jewish sources. His four-volume Philosophie
der Geschichte, oder über die Tradition (Philosophy of History, or On Tradition,
1827–1853) was the nineteenth century’s most erudite and profound con-
sideration of the Kabbalah’s significance for Christians, earning Scholem’s
praise as “the crowning and final achievement of the Christian Kabbalah.”35

8 Conclusion
What has become clear is that Scholem’s negative image of a Christian
Kabbalah primarily engaged in evangelical activity against the Jews requires
some modification. While it is justified on the surface by the overt declara-
tions of Pico and Reuchlin (no doubt balancing on a knife edge, ever aware

34
Miklós Vassányi, Anima Mundi: The Rise of the World Soul Theory in Modern German
Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 128ff; Eva Johann Schauer, “Friedrich Christoph
Oetinger und die kabbalistische Lehrtafel der württembergischen Prinzessin Antonia in
Teinach,” in Mathesis, Naturphilosophie und Arkanwissenschaft im Umkreis Friedrich Christoph
Oetingers (1702–1782) ed. Sabine Holtz, Gerhard Betsch, and Eberhard Zwink (Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 165–182. On Oetinger, see also Ernst Benz, Christian Kabbalah:
Neglected Child of Theology, trans. Kenneth W. Wesche (St. Paul, MN: Grailstone Press,
2004).
35
Scholem, Kabbalah, 200–201; Arthur Verlsuis, Theosophia: Hidden Dimensions of Christianity
(New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1994), 76. On Molitor, see also Katharina Koch, Franz Joseph
Molitor und die jüdische Tradition: Studien zu den kabbalistischen Quellen der “Philosophie der
Geschichte” (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006).

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 C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 155

of the Inquisition), it misrepresents some of the Christian Kabbalists discussed

here, who each had his own motives, ranging from novel biblical interpreta-
tion, greater awareness of the prehistory of Christianity, Church reform and
the revitalization of religion, to insights into the theories of alchemy and the
practices of magic.36
Here Dan’s more irenic reading should be considered, with the suggestion
that even the early Christian kabbalist works included a different, additional
message: that non-biblical Jewish sources also held great relevance for their
Christian readers, not only as a way of strengthening and upholding their
faith, but as a way of discovering a deeper, more profound understanding of
the nature of their own religion. True, the aim of conversion often lurked in
the background, but with it also the hope of reinvigorating the Christian
religion, together with the possibility of personal transformation and spiritual
transfiguration. There is surely some historical irony in the fact that it was the
Christian kabbalists who were the first to publish and promulgate Jewish
esoteric material. With its implication of tolerance and even respect toward
the tradition of another religion, their belief in the relevance of Jewish
Kabbalah for its Christian counterpart is “very nearly unique in the history
of the three scriptural religions.”37

36
Cf. Yvonne Petry, Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation: The Mystical Theology of Guillaume
Postel (1510–1581) (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 82.
37
Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin,” 55–56, 68.

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