Reuchlin, Johannes

Abstract

Johannes Reuchlin, German humanist, diplomat, and Hebraist, is one of the fathers of German humanism; he was also a pioneering figure of Jewish studies in the Christian world and is remembered as the most prominent figure of the intellectual and spiritual movement known as Christian Kabbalah, founded by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The most momentous event of his career was his involvement in the “Battle of the Books” from the year 1509 to his death. Reuchlin was consulted by the emperor in order to produce a legal advice to justify the destruction of all the books in Jewish hands, with the exception of the Bible. He took a courageous stand opposing the campaign of undifferentiated persecution of the Jewish literature, suggesting that this literary corpus should rather be studied before any censorship could take place. On the occasion, he produced, almost incidentally, the first history and systematical outline of Jewish postbiblical literature. Moreover, he had already published a Hebrew grammar and a dictionary (1506), the first one of this scope in Latin in order to allow the Christians to get acquainted with the original text of the Bible and with later Jewish exegetical literature. The core of his intellectual interest, though, was the mystical literature of the Kabbalah, which forms the focus of his two most important works: De verbo mirifico (1494) and De arte cabalistica (1517), both in the form of Platonic dialogues showing that the doctrines and the methods of Kabbalah were in the best position to demonstrate the truth of Christian faith. His intellectual and religious endeavors, especially the fight against scholasticism, the critique of the Vulgate, and the advocacy of the superior value of the Hebrew original of the Old Testament, can be seen as leading to Protestant Reformation, but, since he refused to adhere to Luther’s reform movement, he is best described as a genuine humanist of the period preceding Reformation, whose function as a precursor could be vindicated by different trends of the European intellectual panorama of the subsequent generations.