Pico, Reuchlin and the Renaissance Claim

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola published nine hundred theses at Rome in 1486 and offered to defend them against all comers. Among them was the claim that no science better assures us of the divinity of Christ than magic and kabbalah. The debate never took place, several of the theses were condemned, and Pico wrote an apology defending them, but the claim itself set the terms for everything that followed.

Johann Reuchlin gave the enterprise its first substantial treatises, De Verbo Mirifico in 1494 and De Arte Cabalistica in 1517. The second is a dialogue in three books and is the founding work of the field as a body of learning rather than a set of assertions. Reuchlin was also, in the same years, the leading Christian defender of Hebrew books against a campaign to have them destroyed, which is a reminder that the movement's relation to Jewish learning was not simply appropriative.

The argument these writers made was that the sefirot, the divine names and the letter techniques of the Hebrew tradition, read correctly, testified to the Trinity and to the incarnation. Joseph Leon Blau's study of the Christian interpretation of the cabala in the Renaissance remains the standard survey of how that argument was constructed and by whom, and Moshe Idel's work on the Jewish material shows how much of what the Christian readers took as a single tradition was in fact several.