Kabbalah

PART VII BELIEFS, PRACTICES, ISSUES, AND APPROACHES CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR KABBALAH Peter J. Forshaw MEDIEVA L J E W IS H KAB B AL AH K abbalah has its origins in the Middle Ages, for it is in twelfth-century France that we ind the irst historical stages of this form of Jewish mysticism described as ‘Kabbalah’ and practitioners who call themselves ‘Kabbalists’ (Scholem 1978, p. 42ff). The Hebrew term Kabbalah is generally translated as ‘reception’, ‘received lore’, or ‘doctrine received by oral tradition’, referring to a series of revelations stretching back variously to Moses, Abraham and, for some, even Adam, that had been preserved in the form of a secret oral tradition, passed down over the generations from master to disciple. In Christian Cabala the most commonly reported tradition described a twin revelation on Mount Sinai when Moses, receiving both the Law and the knowledge of wondrous things, was told ‘These words shalt thou declare, and these shalt thou hide’ (2 Esdras 14:6). Consequently, while the Ten Commandments were revealed to all, a secret teaching was transmitted only to the elect few. There are, of course, Jewish practices and texts that serve as precursors to the Kabbalah, for example, the Hekhalot or Heavenly Halls literature, dating back to late antiquity, and the inluential Sefer Yetzirah or Book of Formation, variously dated as second to fourth century ce, which while classed as proto-Kabbalah is undeniably one of the most important sources of inspiration for Kabbalistic commentaries. Strictly speaking, the irst text generally recognized as a work of Kabbalah is the Sefer ha-Bahir (Book of Illumination), dated back to the second half of the twelfth century. The Bahir presents itself as a series of dialogues between master and disciples, providing commentaries on the irst chapters of Genesis, on the hidden signiicance of the Hebrew letters, on statements from the Sefer Yetzirah, and so forth. It introduces for the irst time the concept of the ilan or divine tree, with ten branches, a system of emanations, which constitute the divine pleroma. These emanations, the ten seirot had already been introduced in the Sefer Yetzirah as corresponding to ten fundamental ‘numerations’, but it was in the Bahir that they irst came to be regarded as divine attributes, powers emanating from the Godhead (Scholem 1978, p. 96ff). The following century bore witness to the appearance of the Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendor) by Moses ben Shem Tov de Leon in Spain, who claimed to be drawing 541 – Peter J. Forshaw – from pre-existing manuscript material reaching back to the second-century rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. The Zohar is a vast collection of texts, including Sifra diTzni’uta (Book of the Hidden), Idra Rabba (Great Assembly), Idra Zuta (Smaller Assembly), Ra’aya Meheimna (Faithful Shepherd) and Midrash haNe’elam (Hidden Midrash), which present the reader with commentary on the Torah, ranging from the nature of God, the structure of the cosmos, the primordial man, Adam Kadmon, the emanation of the four worlds Atziluth, Beriah, Yetzirah, & Assiah, the nature of souls, the notion of redemption, the forces of evil (kliphot), and how the individual practitioner relates to God and the rest of creation. Two major points of focus involve Ma’aseh Bereshit (Work of Creation), based on the exegesis of Genesis 1 and 2, and Ma’aseh Merkavah (Work of the Chariot), visions and speculations involving the Throne on its Chariot in the irst chapter of Ezekiel (Matt 1983; Liebes 1993; Giller 2001). Following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and then from Portugal in 1497, these kabbalistic works and ideas enjoyed a wide dissemination throughout Europe in Sephardic and Hasidic communities, so much so that the Zohar became the authoritative text for most Jewish Kabbalists. By this time, as Moshe Idel has shown, there were three major models of Kabbalah: the ecstatic or prophetic Kabbalah of the school of Abraham Abulaia (1240–91) with its emphasis on the permutations of the Shemot (divine names) for possible union with the divine, the Theosophical-Theurgical Kabbalah, as exempliied by Menahem Recanati (1250– 1310) with its focus on the Seirot, and the astromagical Kabbalah articulated by Yohanan Alemanno (1435-c.1504) (Idel 2011, p. 328ff). Each of these represents different combinations and considerations of the balance between speculative and practical Kabbalah, between scriptural exegesis and action. B EGINNINGS O F CHRIS TIAN KAB B AL AH Various candidates have been proposed for the origins of a speciically Christian Kabbalah. The oldest record of a conversion to Christianity due to kabbalistic exegesis of scripture is found in Abulaia’s writing, where he reports a group of disciples who converted to Catholicism (Scholem 1997, p. 25). Early candidates are the conversos Raymund Martini (1220–85), whose Pugio Fidei (Dagger of Faith) contained Christological speculations that contributed to the notion of a Christian appropriation of Kabbalah and the philosopher and anti-Jewish polemicist Abner of Burgos (b. c.1270) (Scholem 1997, p. 18; Idel 2011, pp. 227–35). Also proposed is their contemporary, the Majorcan mystic Ramon Lull (1225–1315), under whose name appeared the pseudepigraphic De auditu Kabbalistico (On Kabbalistic audition), which, despite its title, displays little evidence of any knowledge of the Jewish tradition (Blau 1944, p. 117; Hames 2000, p. 27). Paulo de Heredia’s (d. 1486) Iggeret ha-Sodot (Epistle of Secrets) is sometimes considered to be the irst recognizable work of Christian Kabbalah, one cited by inluential Christian exponents, including Petrus Galatinus (1460–1540) and Athanasius Kircher (1601/2– 1680), though of a somewhat dubious reputation, given Heredia’s tendency to cite from unidentiied, possibly non-existent Kabbalistic works and to distort quotes from genuine sources like the Zohar (Scholem 1997, p. 30ff). 542 – chapter 54: Kabbalah – GIOVANNI P ICO D E L L A M IRAND O L A: FATHER OF CHRIS TIAN KAB B AL AH A watershed in the history of Hebrew studies in Europe, however, most convincingly occurs with the syncretic Italian philosopher Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), the irst Christian by birth known to have studied Hebrew and Aramaic in order to learn about Kabbalah and generally credited as being the irst to introduce Kabbalah into Christian circles, thereby earning the title of father of Christian Cabala (Idel, in Reuchlin 1993, p. 16). So great was Pico’s enthusiasm for this Jewish mystical tradition that in 1486 at the age of 23 the ‘Phoenix of his Age’ published 900 Philosophical, Kabbalistical and Theological Conclusions, with plans for a debate in Rome before the Pope and leading theologians and scholars of his day. The debate never took place but the Pope ended up condemning a number of Pico’s theses as heretical, including the declaration that ‘There is no science that assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and Cabala’ (Farmer 1998, p. 497). The forty-seven ‘Cabalistic Conclusions according to the secret doctrine of the Hebrew Cabalist Wisemen’ (taken directly from Jewish sources, such as Menahem Recanati’s Commentary on the Pentateuch, Joseph Gikatilla’s Gates of Justice, and the Bahir) and seventy-two ‘Cabalistic conclusions according to my own opinion, strongly conirming the Christian religion using the Hebrew Wisemen’s own principles’ (drawing from works by Abulaia, Azriel of Gerona, and Recanati, whose writings contain numerous quotes from the Zohar), supplemented by further references to Kabbalah in other groups of Conclusions, and the claims that Pico made concerning the Kabbalah were to leave an enduring impression on early modern esoteric thought (Secret 1964 Cap. III; Reichert 1995, pp. 195–207). Two of Pico’s favoured authors were Recanati and Abulaia, who represent the bipartite division Pico proposes in his Cabalistic Conclusions Conirming the Christian Religion, where he asserts ‘Whatever other Cabalists say, in a irst division I distinguish the science of Cabala into the science of seirot and shemot, as it were into practical and speculative science’ (Farmer 1998, p. 519). This division implies two different conceptions of kabbalah: the speculative kabbalah of the seirot and the practical or ecstatic, prophetic kabbalah of the divine names. Pico’s irst set of kabbalistic conclusions is almost exclusively concerned with the seirot, while the second set, which begins with the above distinction, considers both approaches. Although Pico does not enter into a detailed or systematic discussion of the important Kabbalistic doctrines of the seirot, the paths of wisdom, and the gates of intelligence, he does show that he is aware of these teachings and understands their relation to kabbalistic theories of creation and revelation. We ind many of the themes to be adopted by later Christian Cabalists, such as the vital signiicance of the Hebrew letters and their connection to the seirot, as well as the privileged status of the Hebrew language with relation to magic. Pico expressly declares that his primary motivation for adopting certain exegetical techniques found in Kabbalah is their use for evangelical purposes against Jews and heretics. His interpretation of kabbalah attempts to fuse a speciically Christian concept of the Divine act of redemption through Jesus with notions of creation and revelation common to both Judaism and Christianity, in order to provide a Christian interpretation to existing texts and adopt recognizable doctrines, symbols and 543 – Peter J. Forshaw – methods for apologetic and polemical purposes. The kabbalistic method of reading Hebrew texts without diacritic marks, that is, without any vowel indicators, increases interpretative possibilities, giving rise to multiple readings of a single text, including the possibility of proving the supremacy of the name of Jesus and the mystery of the Trinity. The signiicance of Pico’s Kabbalah should not, however, be restricted simply to Christian apologetics, for he goes beyond the conirmation of Christianity. In his desire to establish the unity of truth, he is keen to point out correspondences between not just Judaism and Christianity, but also show the relation between them and Platonism, between mysticism and magic. Chaim Wirszubski emphasizes that Pico viewed Kabbalah from an entirely new standpoint, arguing ‘he is the irst Christian who considered cabala to be simultaneously a witness for Christianity and an ally of natural magic’ (Wirszubski 1989, p. 151). Indeed, the extreme nature of the claims Pico makes regarding the role of Kabbalah was instrumental in ensuring a widespread interest in this mystical Jewish tradition, among both sympathetic and antagonistic audiences. A German contemporary of Pico, the humanist scholar Johannes Reuchlin (1455– 1522) represents a more systematic and in-depth engagement with Kabbalah. Reuchlin was the irst German scholar to promote the study of Hebrew, indeed the leading Christian Hebraist of his time. Amongst his publications are two of the most inluential books of Christian Cabala, the De Verbo Miriico (On the WonderWorking Word, 1494) and the De Arte Cabalistica (On the Cabalistic Art, 1517). In these works Reuchlin introduced the Latin West to the names and theories of some of the important Jewish and Kabbalist thinkers, including Azriel of Gerona, Eleazar of Worms, Menahem Recanati, and most of all Joseph Gikatilla. At the same time as being a propagator of Christian Cabala, Reuchlin also claimed to be a restorer of the doctrines of Pythagoras, one of the prisci sapienti or ancient wise men. Reuchlin propounds the fundamental similarity between Pythagorean and Kabbalistic teachings, the intention of both being ‘to bring men’s minds to the gods, that is, to lead them to perfect blessedness.’ He deines Kabbalah in Pythagorean terms as ‘symbolic theology’ (Reuchlin 1993, pp. 233, 241). Both traditions communicate their mysteries by means of symbols, signs, adages and proverbs, numbers and igures, letters, syllables and words. Hence the symbolic similarities between the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, the powerful divine name of four letters YHVH, and the Pythagorean Tetraktys (Zika 1976). One of the main reasons why Christians like Pico and Reuchlin were interested in the Kabbalah, was the novel use it made of hermeneutical techniques, an approach that introduced Christian exegetes to a radically new concept of language. The Jewish method of exegesis, employed in midrashic and kabbalistic texts, was fundamentally different to Christian methods of interpretation: while the latter concentrated on the semiotic level of meaning of text, the Jewish approach reshaped and transformed the text itself, seeing signiicance in the shapes and parts of the individual letters, the vocalization points, their numerical values, and so forth, discovering an almost ininite variety of new meanings in scriptural material (See Copenhaver 1999). These textual elements were combined and permuted following three main techniques, described in Joseph Gikatilla’s (1248–c.1305) Ginnat Egoz (Nut-Garden), in which the three letters of the Hebrew word for ‘Garden’ (GNTh – Ginnat) denote the 544 – chapter 54: Kabbalah – techniques of Gematria (arithmetical computations), Notarikon/Notariacon (manipulation of letters into acronyms and acrostics, e.g. Ginnat) and Temura or Tseruf (permutation, commutation, or transposition of letters) (Morlok 2011, pp. 72, 225). Because every Hebrew letter possesses an inherent numerical value, every letter, word and phrase in the Torah has a mathematical signiicance by which correspondences can be found with other words, revealing internal resonances within seemingly disparate sources (Dan & Kiener 1986, p. 11). The 32 ‘wondrous paths of wisdom’ with which the Sefer Yetzirah opens, for example, can be represented by the Hebrew letters Lamed (with the value 30) and Beth (with the value 2), which combine to form the Hebrew word ‘Leb,’ meaning ‘heart’ (Kaplan 1979, pp. 23, 36). These two letters are also the irst and last letters of the Torah – the Beth of Bereshit, the irst word of Genesis 1:1 and the Lamed of Israel, the last word of Deuteronomy 34:12. Thus the ive books of Moses constitute the ‘heart’ of the Kabbalah, together with the ten seirot and the 22 letters of the alphabet that form all the shemot or divine names (Idel 1990, p. 67). One of the most inluential examples of Gematria provided by both Pico and Reuchlin relates to the most powerful Jewish name for God, the ineffable Tetragrammaton, YHVH. By cumulatively adding up the values of these letters when they are aligned according to the points of the Pythagorean Tetraktys, that is by adding Yod (10) to Yod-He (15) to Yod-He-Vau (21) to YodHe-Vau-He (26), we reach the signiicant total 72, associated, for example, with 72 psalmodic verses and related angelic powers (Farmer 1998, p. 543; Reuchlin 1983, p. 267). Reuchlin is fascinated with Kabbalistic ideas concerning the multiple names of God. The main thrust of De Verbo Miriico reveals his interest in proving the supremacy of the Christian Kabbalist Pentagrammaton or ive-letter name of Jesus, YHSVH, the ‘true Messiah’, that supersedes the Jewish four-letter YHVH. Pico and Reuchlin stand at the head of a series of Christian thinkers who engaged with Kabbalah, including the Jewish converts, Paulus Ricius (1470–1541), who published an inluential translation of Joseph Gikatilla’s Gates of Light (1516), containing the irst depiction of the Tree of Life outside a Jewish text and his own four-part religio-philosophical synthesis of kabbalistic and Christian sources, De Cœlesti Agricultura (On Celestial Agriculture, 1541) (Blau 1944, pp. 67–74; Black 2007) and Petrus Galatinus (1460–1540), who, at the request of Pope Leo X and Emperor Maximilian I, wrote De arcanis catholicae veritatis (On the Mysteries of Catholic Truth), published in 12 books in 1518, which quickly became an important text of Christian Kabbalah. Another signiicant igure is undoubtedly the Venetian scholar Francesco Giorgio (c.1460–1540), author of two large volumes 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 is central to the themes developed, and the Zohar, for the irst time, was used extensively in a work of Christian origin (Busi 1997). One of Giorgio’s disciples, Arcangelo da Borgonuovo (d. 1571) published a Dechiaratione sopra il nome di Giesu (Declaration on the Name of Jesus, 1557), essentially an expansion of the inal chapters in Reuchlin’s De Verbo Miriico, later followed by a commentary on Pico’s kabbalistic theses, Cabalistarum selectiora, obscurioraque dogmata (More Select and Obscure Dogmas of the Cabalists, 1569) (Wirszubski 1974). The famous preacher and humanist poet Egidio da Viterbo (1465–1532), who was to become the General 545 – Peter J. Forshaw – of the Augustinian Order in 1503 and be elected cardinal in 1517, translated many of the texts fundamental to Christian Kabbalah. Aside from minor works on the Hebrew language, the majority are kabbalistic in nature, including passages from the Zohar and the Bahir, Gikatilla’s Ginnat Egoz (Nut-Garden) and Sha’areh Orah (Gates of Light), Sefer Raziel (Book of Raziel), Recanati’s Commentary on the Pentateuch, and the Sefer Yetzirah. In his Historia viginti saeculorum (History of Twenty Centuries) Giles writes a mystical history of the Church, stating that it cannot be understood without kabbalah. One of Giles’s most important treatises is the Libellus de litteris hebraicis (1517), which discusses the spiritual signiication of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Drawing not only from kabbalistic literature, but also from the Greek and Latin poets and Neoplatonic philosophers, the longer Scechina (1530) treats of numbers, letters and divine names, with a focus on the importance and meaning of the tenth seira, Malkuth, personiied in kabbalistic literature as the Shekinah, the feminine manifestation of God in creation, who in Giles’s work reveals the Kabbalah to Clement VII and Charles V (Stein Kokin 2011; Secret 1964, pp. 106–26). An important French representative of Christian Kabbalah is Guillaume Postel (1510–81), expelled from the Jesuits by Ignatius Loyola in 1545 due to unorthodox mystical tendencies, including prophetic visions and the unusual relationship he had with Mother Jeanne, his spiritual mother and guide, identiied by Postel after her death as the Venetian Virgin, the Shekinah, the feminine manifestation God on earth. Postel’s illuminism, in which the themes of the soul of the Messiah and the doctrine of Gilgul or metempsychosis, the ‘revolution of souls’ dominate, provoked censure in both Italy and France. For Postel, Hebrew was the key to true knowledge; once everyone spoke it the universe would be understandable and men would once more be able to communicate directly with God. Like Pico, Postel employs Kabbalah to show how a single current of truth runs through all philosophies, attaining its most profound expression in Christian revelation. In De orbis terrae concordia (On the Concord of the Earth, 1544), he advocated a universalist world religion, calling for the uniication of all Christian churches, arguing that all Jews, Muslims and heathens could be converted once they recognized that the common foundations of all religions, i.e. love and praise of God, love and succor of Mankind, was best represented in the Christian religion. By 1548 Postel had made a translation with commentary of the Zohar and in 1552 he published Latin translations of the Zohar, the Sefer Yetzirah, and the Sefer ha-Bahir, predating the irst Hebrew printing of these works by ten years; although his Zohar commentary was unpublished during his lifetime, it circulated in manuscript and was known to many Christian Kabbalists of his time (Bouwsma 1954; Kuntz 1981). The igure arguably most responsible for shaping the Western image of early modern Christian Kabbalah is the German humanist theologian Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), whose encyclopedia of esoteric thought, De Occulta Philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533) was to become one of the most consulted sources for information about kabbalistic theories and practices, albeit a presentation of Kabbalah derived almost exclusively from the works of his co-religionists Pico, Reuchlin, Ricius and Giorgio. Agrippa presents a similar intermingling of Pythagorean, Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic ideas, emphasizing similar claims to the natural signiication of Hebrew as the original language and the 546 – chapter 54: Kabbalah – signiicance of its 22 letters as the foundation of the cosmos. Book Two of De Occulta Philosophia displays an interest in practical kabbalah and arithmology, in the occult signiicance of numbers; Book Three indicates kabbalah’s importance for Agrippa’s notion of a sacralized magic (Scholem 1978, p. 198; Lehrich 2003, pp. 149–59) Strictly speaking, the irst known author to write of a ‘Christian’ Kabbalah, is the Franciscan Jean Thenaud (d. 1542) whose unpublished manuscript Traité de la Cabale or Traité de la Cabala chrétienne (c.1521), summarizes some of the earlier Latin studies (Blau 1944, p. 89ff; Secret 1964, p. 153ff). The irst published work to explicitly describe itself as ‘Christian Kabbalist’ is the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom, 1595/1609) of the German theosopher Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), who openly acknowledges the inluence of Reuchlin and Agrippa on his work, but goes further than either of them in arguing that ‘Kabbalah, magic, and alchemy shall and must be combined and used together’ (Scholem 2006, p. 91; Khunrath 1608, p. 87). Khunrath promotes an analogous harmony between alchemy and Christian Kabbalah, the former having as its goal the Philosophers’ Stone as ‘Son of the Macrocosm’, the latter the union of man with YHSVH Christ, ‘Son of the Microcosm’ (Khunrath 1609, p. 203; Forshaw 2007, p. 263). The irst circular igure of Khunrath’s Amphitheatre, his Sigillum Dei (Seal of God), includes the Hebrew Decalogue, angelic orders, Hebrew alphabet, seirot, shemot, and and Cruciform Christ at the centre, surrounded by the pentagrammaton in a iery pentagram. SEVENTEENTH-CE NTU RY D E VE L O P M E NTS The mid seventeenth century was witness to two major esoteric publications that engaged with Jewish Kabbalah. The irst of these is a work of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1601/2–1680), Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian Oedipus, 1652– 54), which as well as discussing hieroglyphs also devotes hundreds of pages to the presentation of not only Cabala Hebraeorum (Kabbalah of the Jews), but also to Cabala Saracenica (Kabbalah of the Arabs and Turks), including information on divine and angelic names in kabbalistic amulets. Kircher approaches the subject with an antiquarian fascination for unraveling the signiicance of many of the magical amulets and talismans, but constantly maintains a highly condemnatory attitude to most of the beliefs and practices of the non-Christian subjects under study. He does, however, provide a great deal of information of value for understanding occult philosophy, with material drawn from Pico, Reuchlin, Agrippa, Galatinus, and many other primary and secondary sources. Oedipus Aegyptiacus contains two of the bestknown images of early modern material on Kabbalah: Kircher’s elaborate version of the Tree of Life, representing all four kabbalistic worlds (Archetypal, Angelic, Celestial and Elemental) and his ‘Speculum Cabalae mysticae’ (Mirror of Mystical Kabbalah), which serves as a visual distillation of major kabbalistic themes, revealing how Kircher adapts them to further the universalist ideology of the early modern Catholic Church (Stolzenberg 2004). Here too we ind Reuchlin’s YHSVH at the heart of the diagram, as ‘Jesus Christ, the centre of all nature, in whose name all the other divine names are concentrated’. The intent viewer can ind the Hebrew Kabbalist 12-letter divine name, from which emanates the 42-letter name, then a 72-letter name, or rather Kircher’s variant of the Jewish tradition, with 72 four-letter names of God, representing the 72 547 – Peter J. Forshaw – nations that comprise all humanity. As Daniel Stolzenberg has argued, by this stratagem, Kircher transformed the notion of the divine names as instruments for theurgical invocation into the representation of the totality of humanity under the inluence of the Christian-Kabbalist divine Pentagrammaton, as a universal revelation and promise of salvation to all peoples (Stolzenberg 2013, pp. 162–74). The other major seventeenth-century publication was the great anthology of kabbalistic texts, Kabbala denudata, seu doctrina Hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque Theologica (The Kabbalah Unveiled, or the Transcendental, Metaphysical and Theological Doctrine of the Hebrews), the irst volume of which was published in Sulzbach between 1677 and 1678 by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89), in collaboration with Francis Mercurius Van Helmont (1614–98), and dedicated to ‘the lover of Hebrew, Chemistry, and Wisdom’. This compilation was superior to anything that had previously been published on Kabbalah in a language other than Hebrew, providing a non-Jewish readership with translations of authentic texts that were to be the principal source for Western literature on Kabbalah until the end of the nineteenth century. The irst volume includes a Key to the Divine Names of the Kabbalah, i.e., the explanation and division of all divine names according to the seirotic degrees, derived from the Zohar, Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim – Garden of Pomegranates and Joseph Gikatilla’s Gates of Light. It also included some of the works by, or inspired by, the originator of the modern school of kabbalistic thought, Isaac Luria (1533–72), Emek ha-Melekkh (Valley of the King) by the Lurianic Kabbalist Napthali ben Jacob Bacharach, an abridged version of the Portuguese Rabbi Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Sha’ar ha-Shamayim (Gate of the Heavens), along with a detailed Lurianic explanation of the Tree of Life, and a summary of a Jewish alchemical treatise, the Esch Mezareph – The Reiner’s Fire, suggesting correspondences between the seirot, planets and metals. A second volume, Kabbalae denudatae tomus secundus, id est Liber Sohar restitutus (The Second Volume of the Kabbala Unveiled, i.e., the Book of Zohar Restored), published in Frankfurt in 1684, emphasizes Knorr’s missionary intent. It begins with a systematic resumé of the Zohar’s doctrines, to which is added a Christian interpretation, in which Knorr juxtaposes various doctrinal points of the kabbalistic system with passages drawn from the New Testament, so as to show the intimate correlation between Jewish and Christian traditions. The same technique is used in the Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae […] ad conversionem Judaeorum, the last, anonymously authored, treatise in the Kabbala denudata, which was in fact written by Van Helmont and published separately because of its alleged importance in the task of converting Jews to Christianity. The Adumbratio is set as a dialogue between a ‘Kabbalist’ and a ‘Philosophus Christianus’, in which they explain their respective religious doctrines, enabling Van Helmont to show the concordance between the two traditions. This volume also contains Pneumatica cabbalistica, introducing kabbalistic ideas about spirits, angels and demons, the soul and various states and transformations included in the kabbalistic theory of metempsychosis; plus Latin translations of Lurianic works, including chapters on angelology and demonology from Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Beth Elohim (House of the Lord) and Hayyim Vital’s Sefer ha-Gilgulim, translated as De revolutionibus animarum (On the Revolutions of Souls). 548 – chapter 54: Kabbalah – Several of the treatises in the two volumes of the Kabbalah Unveiled promote the magical creative power of language. Bacharach’s Valley of the King describes the Hebrew letters as building blocks of the universe and Vital’s On the Revolutions of Souls describes how just and pious men can create angels and spirits through prayers. Cohen de Herrera’s Gate of the Heavens makes a similar claim that everything was created through combinations of Hebrew letters, connecting the letters with the creation and characteristics of the irst man, Adam Kadmon and with the ten seirot. All three of these works are by followers of Isaac Luria and it is worth noting that although the Kabbala denudata contains material by kabbalists from other traditions, there is a distinct bias in favour of Lurianic material, including the doctrine of tzimutzum, the withdrawal or contraction of God into Himself in order to provide room for Creation, elaborations on earlier kabbalistic doctrines of the shattering of the seirotic vessels in their original emanation and their subsequent reformation into the stable structure of the Tree of Life, plus an emphasis on man’s role in the process of tikkun or restoration, and the human actions by which souls, trapped among the shards of the shattered vessels, can be reunited with the divine light. For Rosenroth and Van Helmont, the kabbalah offered a permeable barrier between Christians and Jews. Inspired by the Lurianic Kabbalah with its optimistic philosophy of perfectionism and universal salvation, they rejected many of the orthodox Christian views of the Fall, Salvation and the Trinity, tending towards Arianism, with the Son regarded as a creation of the Father rather than his co-equal: in the Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae one reads, ‘Precisely what you call Adam Kadmon, we call Christ’ (Coudert, Impact of Kabbalah, 1999, p. 127). Rather than an emphasis on the doctrine of original sin and on man’s fallen nature, instead there was the implication that every individual was innately capable of salvation through their own efforts; all were potentially if not actually divine. C O NCL U S IO N The early modern occult philosopher interested in Kabbalah had a wide variety of material at hand, both from genuine Jewish sources and in material adopted, adapted, distilled or despoiled, mutilated or transmuted by its Christian adherents. Much Christian Kabbalah is undoubtedly alien to Jewish practitioners, it is questionable whether some of the material ever was Kabbalah strictu sensu and orthodox Christians could be forgiven for wondering whether the ideas espoused by Rosenroth and Van Helmont belonged within the Christian fold. Be that as it may, the material contained in the publications mentioned exerted a profound inluence on modern practitioners like A. E. Waite, Aleister Crowley, and Dion Fortune and Kabbalah represents an important current in Western esotericism. REFERENCES AND F U RTHE R RE AD ING Black, C 2007, ‘From Kabbalah to Psychology: The Allegorizing Isagoge of Paulus Ricius, 1509–41,’ Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 136–73. Blau, JL 1944, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance, Columbia University Press, New York. 549 – Peter J. Forshaw – Bouwsma, W 1954, ‘Postel and the Signiicance of Renaissance Cabalism,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 15 (1954), pp. 218–32. Busi, G 1997, ‘Francesco Zorzi: A Methodical Dreamer,’ in J Dan (ed.), The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and Their Christian Interpreters, Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Mass. Copenhaver, BP 1999, ‘Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tsade, the Closed Mem, and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel,’ in A Grafton and N Siraisi (eds), Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Coudert, A 1993, ‘The Kabbala denudata: Converting Jews or Seducing Christians?’ in RH Popkin & GM Weiner (eds), Jewish Christians and Christian Jews, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. ——1999, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698), Brill, Leiden. Dan, J & Kiener, RC 1986, The Early Kabbalah, Paulist Press, New Jersey. Dan, J 1997, ‘The Kabbalah Of Johannes Reuchlin and Its Historical Signiicance,’ in J Dan (ed.), The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and Their Christian Interpreters, Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Mass. Farmer, SA 1998, Syncretism In The West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) – The Evolution Of Traditional Religious And Philosophical Systems, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Arizona. Hames, HJ 2000, The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century, Brill, Leiden. Idel, M 1983, ‘Introduction,’ in Johann Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah, translated by Martin and Sarah Goodman, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. ——1990, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artiicial Anthropoid, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. ——2011, Kabbalah in Italy, 1280–1510: A Survey, Yale University Press, New Haven. Kaplan, A 1979, The Bahir Illumination: Translation, Introduction, and Commentary, Samuel Weiser, York Beach, Maine. Khunrath, H 1608, De Igne Magorum Philosophorumque secreto externo & visibili, Strassburg. Kilcher, A 2010, ‘Philology as Kabbalah,’ in B Huss, M Pasi, K Von Stuckrad (eds), Kabbalah and Modernity: Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations, Brill, Leiden. Kuntz, ML 1981, Guillaume Postel: Prophet of the Restitution of All Things-His Life and Works, Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Hague. Lehrich, CI 2003, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, Brill, Leiden. Liebes, Y 1993, Studies In The Zohar, translated by A Schwarz, S Nakache & P Peli, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Matt, DC 1983, Zohar, The Book of Enlightenment, Paulist Press, New Jersey. Morlok, E 2011, Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Hermeneutics, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen. Reichert, K 1995, ‘Pico della Mirandola and the Beginnings of Christian Kabbala,’ in KE Grözinger & J Dan (eds), Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. Scholem, G 1978, Kabbalah, Meridian Books, New York. ——1990, Origins of the Kabbalah, edited by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, translated by Allan Arkush, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. ——1997, ‘The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,’ in J Dan (ed.), The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and Their Christian Interpreters, Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Mass. 550 – chapter 54: Kabbalah – ——2006, Alchemy and Kabbalah, Spring Publications, Putnam, CT. Secret, F 1964, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens de la Renaissance, Dunod, Paris. Stein Kokin, D 2011, ‘Entering the Labyrinth: On the Hebrew and Kabbalistic Universe of Egidio da Viterbo,’ in I Zinguer, A Melamed & Z Shalev (eds), Hebraic Aspects of the Renaissance: Sources and Encounters, Brill, Leiden. Stolzenberg, D 2004, ‘Four Trees, Some Amulets, and the Seventy-two Names of God: Kircher Reveals the Kabbalah,’ in P Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man who Knew Everything Routledge, New York & London. ——2013, Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Wirszubski, C 1974, ‘Francesco Giorgio’s Commentary on Giovanni Pico’s Kabbalistic Theses,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 37, pp. 145–56. ——1989, Pico Della Mirandola’s Encounter With Jewish Mysticism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Zika, C 1976, ‘Reuchlin’s De Verbo Miriico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century,’ The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 39, pp. 104–38. 551