Johannes Reuchlin

Johannes Reuchlin was born in Pforzheim in the Holy Roman Empire on 29 January 1455 and became one of the outstanding Greek and Hebrew scholars of his generation, serving at various points as a lawyer, diplomat and judge alongside his scholarly work. His Hebrew grammar and dictionary, De Rudimentis Hebraicis (1506), gave Christian European scholars their first serious tool for reading the Hebrew Bible in the original since antiquity, and later fed the biblical humanism of the early Reformation.

In 1509 the converted Jew Johannes Pfefferkorn, backed by the Dominicans of Cologne, sought imperial authority to confiscate and destroy Jewish books as blasphemous. Reuchlin, consulted as an expert, argued forcefully against the confiscation, defending the scholarly and religious value of the Talmud and other Hebrew texts. The resulting controversy, fought out in pamphlets and eventually in Rome, cost Reuchlin years of his life and much of his personal fortune, but it rallied European humanists, Erasmus among them, to his side and left him remembered as a defender of scholarship against censorship as much as for his own original work. He taught Greek to his young great-nephew Philipp Melanchthon, who went on to become the leading systematic theologian of the Lutheran Reformation, so Reuchlin's scholarly household reached directly into the next generation's religious upheaval even though Reuchlin himself remained a Catholic humanist and took no side in the Reformation proper.

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.