Reuchlin's engagement with Jewish mysticism began with De Verbo Mirifico (1494) and reached its mature statement in De Arte Cabalistica (On the Art of Kabbalah, 1517), a dialogue in which he set out to show that the Kabbalah, properly read, confirmed Christian doctrine, treating Hebrew letters and their numerical values as carrying a hidden wisdom compatible with, and in his reading pointing toward, Christian revelation.
He followed directly in the path opened by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose 1486 theses had first proposed that Kabbalah could support Christian belief, and Reuchlin's more systematic and philologically careful treatment made him the figure through whom Christian Kabbalah passed into wider circulation among the German humanists of the next generation, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Johannes Trithemius among them. Reuchlin died on 30 June 1522, and De Arte Cabalistica remained a standard reference for Christian occult philosophy for the rest of the sixteenth century. Unlike Pico, who wrote in the dense, aphoristic form of formal theses, Reuchlin cast De Arte Cabalistica as a dialogue among a Christian, a Muslim philosopher and a Jewish scholar named Simon, using the exchange to present Kabbalistic material with more sustained explanation than Pico had offered, which is part of why Reuchlin's book, rather than Pico's theses, became the working reference later Christian Kabbalists actually read.