Written in the Middle of a Book Burning Case

The treatise cannot be read apart from the dispute that surrounded it. Reuchlin had already argued in an official opinion against a proposal to confiscate and destroy Jewish books in the Holy Roman Empire, and that opinion drew a prolonged attack on him from the campaign's supporters. The case ran for years through ecclesiastical and imperial courts, generated a large pamphlet literature on both sides, and made Reuchlin a standing example of the scholar defending the study of a language against those who wanted its books gone.

De Arte Cabalistica belongs to that defence, and it makes the case in the strongest available form: not that Hebrew books are harmless but that they contain wisdom Christendom needs. Reuchlin dedicated it to Pope Leo X, which is a deliberate move rather than a courtesy, addressing the argument to the authority that could settle it. It was not his first work on the subject. An earlier and shorter treatise had already taken up the divine names, and the later book is the mature statement. Together they carried the material to readers across Europe who had no Hebrew and no access to Jewish teachers, which is how the Renaissance came to have a version of kabbalah at all, and why that version is shaped by one man's polemical situation.