Three Speakers and What the Choice of Them Argues

Reuchlin sets his treatise as a conversation over three days in Frankfurt between a Jew, a Muslim and a Pythagorean, and the arrangement is the argument. By putting a Pythagorean in the room he places kabbalah beside Greek philosophy as a body of ancient wisdom rather than as the internal property of one community, and by having the Jewish speaker teach the other two he grants that the tradition's own custodians are the ones who know it. Neither move was neutral in 1517.

The three days give the work its structure: the frame and the conditions of the enquiry, then the doctrine of the sefirot and the divine names, then the letter techniques and the reading of scripture through them. Each stage is presented as something a Christian reader may take up without ceasing to be a Christian, which is the whole purpose of the book. The result is a treatise that is scrupulous about its Jewish sources and unrecognisable as Judaism in its conclusions. Reuchlin reads the tradition as pointing to Christ, a reading the tradition does not make and has never accepted. The atlas records the work as the founding statement of Christian kabbalah, which is a Renaissance European enterprise with its own history, rather than as an account of the Jewish material it draws on.