Johannes Reuchlin

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all De verbo mirifico, De arte cabalistica and the Augenspiegel.

Back to the Hebrew

Reuchlin's first lesson is to go to the source. The Scriptures were given in Hebrew, and the Latin of the Church, however venerable, is a translation that can err; so the student learns the language, its letters, its grammar and its words, and reads the text itself. Where Jerome's Latin goes astray he says so, and gives the rule he worked by: he reveres Jerome as an angel and honours the commentators as masters, but he worships the truth as God. Hebrew, for him, is the oldest of tongues, the one in which God spoke to the fathers.

The wonder-working word

In On the Wonder-Working Word three men talk: Sidonius, a philosopher of the school of Epicurus; Baruchias, a Jew learned in the Kabbalah; and Capnion, a Christian, who bears Reuchlin's own name put into Greek. They ask what word has the power to work wonders, and find the answer in the names of God. In the age of nature, Capnion says, God was named with three letters, Shaddai, as the Lord tells Moses: “I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.” In the age of the Law he was named with the four letters that may not be spoken. In the age of grace he is named with five: the letter shin, set in the midst of the four, makes the name of Jesus, and the name that could not be spoken becomes one that can.

That, for Capnion, is the wonder-working word: the name in which God and the human being meet, as the Word was made flesh. It is a Christian reading. The Jewish masters from whom he learned the letters read the same names to other ends, as Two streams sets out.

Kabbalah means receiving

On the Art of the Kabbalah brings three new speakers together: Simon, a Jew; Philolaus, a Pythagorean; and Marranus, a Muslim. Kabbalah, Simon teaches, means receiving: it is the symbolic theology that Moses received with the Law and that was handed on by mouth, in which letters, names and numbers are signs of divine things. It has two parts, the work of creation, which studies the making of the world, and the work of the chariot, which rises in contemplation toward the throne of God. Its whole purpose is the soul's ascent, from the senses to the mind and from the mind to God.

Letters and numbers

The Kabbalists read the Scriptures by three arts. Gematria counts the value of the letters, since each Hebrew letter is also a number, so that words of equal sum are joined in meaning. Notarikon reads a word as the first letters of a sentence, or makes one word from the first letters of many. Temurah exchanges letters by a fixed rule, finding one word hidden in another.

By such means the seventy-two names of God are drawn from three verses of Exodus, each of seventy-two letters, read together letter by letter. And the Kabbalists speak of fifty gates of understanding and thirty-two paths of wisdom, by which the soul climbs.

Pythagoras reborn

The Pythagorean in the dialogue is there for a reason. Pythagoras too taught in symbols, and Reuchlin holds that his school and the Kabbalah are one way of thinking: both teach that the visible points to the invisible, that number is a ladder toward God, and that the soul must be cleansed and raised from the senses to the mind. In his dedication to Pope Leo X he writes that as Ficino had given Plato back to Italy, and Lefèvre d'Étaples Aristotle to France, so he would give Pythagoras, reborn through the Kabbalah, to Germany.

The books must not be burned

Asked whether the books of the Jews should be taken from them and burned, he answered no, and printed his reasons in the Eye Glass. The Talmud and the Kabbalah should be kept and studied, for they serve learning and the understanding of Scripture; only a book plainly written to slander, and proved so in a court, may be taken away. The Jews are fellow citizens of the Empire under its law, their books are their own property, and the law protects them as it protects anyone's.

Nothing is won by burning. Let every university in Germany keep two teachers of Hebrew for ten years, he proposes, and let Christians answer Jews with reasons, gently and kindly, never with force.