Esoteric Texts
De Arte Cabalistica
Also Known As On the Art of the Kabbalah The English title of the modern translation.
Kabbalistic Texts
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
De Arte Cabalistica is Johannes Reuchlin's treatise on kabbalah, published in 1517 and cast as a three day conversation in Frankfurt between a Jew, a Muslim and a Pythagorean. It is the first full length Christian account of the subject and the one that fixed how Renaissance Europe understood it, treating the divine names, the sefirot and the letter techniques as an ancient wisdom that a Christian reader could take up. Reuchlin had already defended Hebrew books against a campaign to have them burned, and the treatise belongs to that defence: it argues that the tradition is worth Christian attention rather than destruction. Its readings were not accepted by the Jewish tradition whose material it used, and the book is best read as the founding statement of a Christian enterprise rather than as an account of a Jewish one.
Facts
Text
Literary Form Scholarship
Critical EditionMartin and Sarah Goodman's English translation, published in the twentieth century, is the standard modern edition used by English language scholars of Renaissance Christian Kabbalah. 1 First PublishedFirst printed at Hagenau in 1517 and dedicated to Pope Leo X, a dedication scholars read as part of Reuchlin's effort to defend the study of Hebrew texts against contemporary church censorship attempts. 3 Origins
Era of Composition Attributed Author / Compiler Transmission
Manuscript TraditionMartin and Sarah Goodman's twentieth century English translation is the standard modern edition used by English language scholars of Renaissance Christian Kabbalah. 1 Structure
StructureThree days of conversation in Frankfurt between a Jew, a Muslim and a Pythagorean, one book to a day. The Pythagorean is the device by which the material is presented to a Christian reader as ancient philosophy rather than as another people's religion. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteReuchlin cast the work as a dialogue among a Muslim, a Pythagorean and a Jew, using Christian Hebraist scholarship to argue that Kabbalistic number symbolism confirmed Christian doctrine, a reading modern scholars treat as a Renaissance appropriation rather than an account of Jewish mysticism on its own terms. 1 Learn More
Three Speakers and What the Choice of Them Argues
Reuchlin sets his treatise as a conversation over three days in Frankfurt between a Jew, a Muslim and a Pythagorean, and the arrangement is the argument. By putting a Pythagorean in the room he places kabbalah beside Greek philosophy as a body of ancient wisdom rather than as the internal property of one community, and by having the Jewish speaker teach the other two he grants that the tradition's own custodians are the ones who know it. Neither move was neutral in 1517.
The three days give the work its structure: the frame and the conditions of the enquiry, then the doctrine of the sefirot and the divine names, then the letter techniques and the reading of scripture through them. Each stage is presented as something a Christian reader may take up without ceasing to be a Christian, which is the whole purpose of the book. The result is a treatise that is scrupulous about its Jewish sources and unrecognisable as Judaism in its conclusions. Reuchlin reads the tradition as pointing to Christ, a reading the tradition does not make and has never accepted. The atlas records the work as the founding statement of Christian kabbalah, which is a Renaissance European enterprise with its own history, rather than as an account of the Jewish material it draws on.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Attributed To
Sources
1. On the Art of the Kabbalah (De Arte Cabalistica), English translation
Johann Reuchlin; Martin Goodman and Sarah Goodman (trans.), University of Nebraska Press, 1993
2. Origins of the Kabbalah
Gershom Scholem, translated by Allan Arkush, Princeton University Press, 1987View the Source 3. The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance
Joseph Leon Blau, Columbia University Press, 1944
De Arte Cabalistica (On the Art of Kabbalah)
Kabbalah: New Perspectives
Moshe Idel, Yale University Press, 1988
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.