Renaissance Discoveries: The Kabbalah

The Hebrew language was long despised by or unknown to Christian scholars in the West. The only reason to learn it, most Christians believed, was to refute Jewish arguments. Against this background of anti-Semitism, a young Italian scholar, Giovanni Pico, the Prince of Mirandola, began studying Hebrew in the 1480s. He planned to incorporate Jewish insights—in particular, the mystical tradition known as Kabbalah—into a universal philosophy and religion that also encompassed Christianity, Greek philosophy and even Islam. His plan to give a public demonstration of this wisdom in Rome before the pope in 1487 ended with his arrest and imprisonment on charges of heresy. But the mystical strands that Pico teased out of medieval Judaism would soon be woven into the fabric of Western philosophy and culture.