The library’s interest in the Kabbalah begins, one might say, with the Renaissance, when what is now known as the Corpus Hermeticum (first edition 1471) was introduced in the Latin West through the translation of Marsilio Ficino. Ficino had translated the Corpus Hermeticum at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici, interrupting his translation of the works of Plato to do so. Cosimo had founded a Platonic Academy in Florence, which was later revived by his grandson Lorenzo. Attached to the Academy were amongst others Ficino and later also Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was greatly interested in the Kabbalah and who learnt Hebrew to study Kabbalistic works himself. Renaissance humanists such as Pico regarded Kabbalah as part of prisca theologia, ancient theology, or philosophia perennis, perennial philosophy, and so it was possible to see it in the syncretistic context of the Hermetism, Pythagoreanism and (Neo-) Platonism which were also being re-discovered and explored in the West. The aim was to harmonize the concepts of these various approaches to God and man’s relation to God with the Christian religion. This led to a category of authors which has been called the ‘Christian Kabbalists’: Christians interested in the Kabbalah, but interpreting (and mis-interpreting) kabbalistic concepts in a Christian framework. Jewish converts also employed the Kabbalah in this sense. On the part of the Jewish Kabbalists, such attempts met with derision and distrust; Kabbalah was later also envisaged by some Christians as a fit instrument in the conversion of the Jews.
The library collects the major works belonging to the ‘Christian Kabbalah’, amongst which are Johannes Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico (first edition 1494) and De arte cabalistica (first edition 1517), Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophica (first edition 1533), works of the Hebraist Guillaume Postel, compendia such as Johannes Pistorius’ Artis cabalisticae (1587) and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata (two parts, 1677 and 1684), which presented authentic Hebrew kabbalistic works (e.g. Sefer Yetzirah, first edition in Hebrew 1562, and parts of the Zohar) together with Christian kabbalistic works (for instance of the convert Leone Ebreo, whose Dialoghi d’Amore, first edition 1535, fused existing kabbalistic views with Neo-Platonism). 17th– and 18th–century interest in the Kabbalah, for instance in the works of the German theosopher Jacob Böhme, or in the works of the Dutch theosopher Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont and the English Cambridge Platonists (Ralph Cudworth c.s.) is also represented in the library.
Because the library’s collecting principle is ad fontes, to the source, we have some Hebrew kabbalistic works which were studied by the Christian Kabbalists. There is a copy of the second edition of the Zohar, printed in 1559–1560; several editions, in Hebrew and in Latin, of the Sefer Yetzirah, and also Kabbalistic commentaries on parts of the Bible, for instance a 16th–century commentary on the Song of Songs. The majority of these works is related to the medieval Spanish Kabbalists; there are also a few works connected with the Safedian Kabbalists of the sixteenth century, notably a manuscript compendium of Hayyim Vital, the most important follower of Isaac Luria. Lurianic Kabbalah, by the way, was incorporated in the Kabbala denudata mentioned above. The library does not actively collect works of the later mystical movements such as the late 17th–century Sabbateans or the 18th–century Hasidim; its focus in this being, as has been stated above, on the Renaissance and its aftermath.
The library also holds a reference section of modern works on the Kabbalah, containing a number of works of the great modern scholar of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, and also of Moshe Idel and Joseph Dan; indeed, some the works of Secret, Scholem and Idel, and the entire Encyclopedia Judaica have been gratefully rifled to provide the information for the following descriptions!
Serious 19th–century interest in the Kabbalah was already evinced amongst others by Adolphe Franck; his La kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux (1843) is present in the collection. The later 19th century also produced French and English occult societies interested in the Kabbalah; some of these texts are also to be found in this section.
The following entries list the Hebrew Kabbalistic sources in the BPH, and a selection from the works of the Christian Kabbalists; a list of the BPH’s reference section of modern works on the Kabbalah is also added.
I should like to thank Dov Shlein for his enthusiastic help in transliterating and translating the title-pages and other relevant information from the BPH’s books in Hebrew.
Cis van Heertum
August 2000