Christian Kabbalah

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola published nine hundred theses at Rome in 1486 and offered to defend them against all comers. Among them was the claim that no science better assures us of the divinity of Christ than magic and kabbalah. The debate never took place, several of the theses were condemned, and Pico wrote an apology defending them, but the claim itself set the terms for everything that followed.

Johann Reuchlin gave the enterprise its first substantial treatises, De Verbo Mirifico in 1494 and De Arte Cabalistica in 1517. The second is a dialogue in three books and is the founding work of the field as a body of learning rather than a set of assertions. Reuchlin was also, in the same years, the leading Christian defender of Hebrew books against a campaign to have them destroyed, which is a reminder that the movement's relation to Jewish learning was not simply appropriative.

The argument these writers made was that the sefirot, the divine names and the letter techniques of the Hebrew tradition, read correctly, testified to the Trinity and to the incarnation. Joseph Leon Blau's study of the Christian interpretation of the cabala in the Renaissance remains the standard survey of how that argument was constructed and by whom, and Moshe Idel's work on the Jewish material shows how much of what the Christian readers took as a single tradition was in fact several.

The enterprise was contested from both directions. Jewish authorities did not accept readings that made their own tradition testify to Christian doctrine, and the readings were frequently offered with conversion in view. On the Christian side the material was suspect as magic. Much of the Hebrew learning that reached Pico and his successors came through converts working as translators and through Latin versions, rather than through study inside the tradition, and the distortions that introduced are part of what later scholarship has had to disentangle.

Its long consequence is nonetheless plain. Kabbalistic vocabulary entered European occult learning through this channel and stayed there. Cornelius Agrippa drew on it, later compilers systematised it, and the Latin anthology Kabbala Denudata, published in the 1670s and 1680s, put a body of translated Jewish material into the hands of readers with no Hebrew at all.

That is the line along which the Tree of Life reached nineteenth century ceremonial magic and, from there, the whole modern occult revival. When a tarot system assigns cards to paths on the Tree, or a magical order builds a grade structure on the sefirot, it is working with material that came down this route rather than out of Jewish practice directly. The atlas records the descent because the difference matters: the two traditions share a diagram and a vocabulary, and very little else.