Kabbalah in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica

The library collects works belonging to the 'Christian Kabbalah', including Johannes Reuchlin's De verbo mirifico (first edition 1494) and De arte cabalistica (first edition 1517), Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia (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 in Latin authentic Hebrew kabbalistic works (e.g. Sefer Yetzirah and parts of the Zohar) together with Christian kabbalistic works (for instance of the convert Leone Ebreo, whose Dialoghi d'Amore fused kabbalistic views with neoplatonism). 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, the collections contain some of the 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 commentaries 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 Chayyim Vital, the most important follower of Isaac Luria. Lurianic Kabbalah was introduced for the first time in European learned circles in the Kabbala denudata mentioned above. The library does not collect works of the later mystical movements such as the late 17th-century Sabbateans or the 18th-century Chasidim; its focus in this being on the Renaissance and its aftermath.

The library also holds a reference section of modern (post 1800) works on Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, foremost a number of works of the great modern scholar of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem; indeed, Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and the Encyclopedia Judaica have been gratefully rifled to provide the information for the following descriptions! Since Scholem's researches, professor Yehuda Liebes, one of today's most distinguished scholars of Jewish mysticism, has supplemented some of Scholem's views, see the entries on the Zohar (authorship) and Sefer Yetzirah (date of composition).

19th-century historical 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, as is Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition (1834-1853). 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, as an example of the reception of kabbalistic thought in these circles.

The following is a selection of works by Hebrew and Christian Kabbalists present in the BPH. I should like to thank Dov Shlein for transliterating and translating material from the BPH's books in Hebrew for me. The descriptions of the Hebrew manuscripts were kindly supplied by Benjamin Richler of the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, that of the amulet by Esther Liebes of the Jewish National and University Library.

Cis van Heertum