Christian Kabbalah

What it is

The Christian appropriation and adaptation of Jewish Kabbalah, beginning in the Italian Renaissance and running through into modern occultism.

A convention distinguishes the three strands by spelling, and while it is not universal it is useful:

• Kabbalah — the Jewish tradition, treated under Hebrew letter mysticism
• Cabala — the Christian reception from the fifteenth century
• Qabalah — the occult version developed by nineteenth-century magical orders

They are not the same thing, and the third is furthest from the first.

Where it came from

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola began it. In his 900 Theses (1486) he became the first Christian to make substantial use of Kabbalistic material, and his claim was explicit: no science, he wrote, better assures us of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah.

That is the motive stated plainly. Pico was not studying Jewish mysticism on its own terms. He believed it contained, encoded, the truths of Christianity — and that demonstrating this would prove Christianity from Judaism's own sources, and convert Jews in the process.

Johannes Reuchlin developed the technical case. In De Verbo Mirifico (1494) and De Arte Cabalistica (1517) he argued that inserting the letter shin into the Tetragrammaton YHVH produces YHShVH — the name of Jesus — making the Christian messiah the pronounceable form of the unpronounceable Name. It is gematria and notarikon deployed for a conversionary conclusion, and it was enormously influential.

And then Reuchlin did something else. In 1509 the convert Johannes Pfefferkorn obtained imperial authority to confiscate and destroy Jewish books across the Empire. Reuchlin, consulted as the leading Christian Hebraist, argued against it — that the books were legally protected property, that they were valuable, and that Jews were fellow citizens of the Empire entitled to their own literature. The resulting controversy consumed a decade, generated one of the great satires of the period, and put Reuchlin under Inquisition proceedings.

He is therefore both figures at once: a scholar who took a tradition in order to refute it, and one who risked his position to stop its texts being burned. The section is not tidy.

Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata (1677–84) is the transmission point that matters most for what followed. This vast Latin compilation, including translations from the Zohar and Lurianic material, became the principal source through which Kabbalah reached later Christian and occult readers who could not read Hebrew — including Éliphas Lévi and, through him, the Golden Dawn.

How it is practised

As exegesis and as speculation rather than as devotion. Christian Cabalists analysed divine names, applied Hebrew letter techniques to Christian doctrine, and mapped the sefirot onto the Trinity and the persons of Christ.

The later occult Qabalah went operative: the Tree of Life as a map for ritual and initiation, correspondences to tarot, astrology and the elements — the system now familiar in modern magical practice, and derived from Knorr and Lévi rather than from Jewish sources.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the reception is historically real and important. Christian Cabala shaped Renaissance philosophy, and through the occult revival it shaped nearly everything in modern Western magic.

We can say it is not Jewish Kabbalah, and the differences are not incidental. The Christian versions detach the material from halakhah, from the community that produced it, from the Hebrew language, and from the traditional requirement of grounding in Talmudic study — and reach conclusions Jewish Kabbalists would reject entirely, since demonstrating the divinity of Christ is not a Kabbalistic project.

We can say the conversionary motive is documented rather than inferred. Pico said so. It is uncomfortable and it is on the record.

We can say the pattern is the one described under cultural appropriation, with an unusual sharpness: material was taken from a persecuted minority in order to argue that the minority should cease to exist as such. And it was taken by some of the same scholars who defended that minority's right to its books. Both things happened.

We cannot say the tradition produced nothing of value. Reuchlin's Hebrew scholarship advanced Christian understanding of Judaism substantially, and the occult Qabalah is a working system that has occupied serious people for a century and a half. What can be said is that it should not present itself as Jewish Kabbalah, and where it does, that is a claim the record does not support.

Further reading

• Joseph Dan (ed.), The Christian Kabbalah (1997).
• Gershom Scholem's writing on the Christian reception, which is unsparing.
• Erika Rummel, The Case Against Johann Reuchlin (2002) — on the books controversy.