Covert Jewish Sources of Christian Kabbalah: the Case of Guillaume Postel and ʿIyyun Traditions

The article focuses on Guillaume Postel’s Latin Zohar Commentary (1553), with the aim of uncovering a hitherto unknown influence of the medieval ʿIyyun Corpus on Postel’s Kabbalistic thought. Following a prefatory methodological exposition it is demonstrated that in addition to the more common Kabbalistic doctrines, such as those of the Zohar and other central theosophical-Kabbalistic treatises, Postel was also influenced by a different trend of Kabbalah, namely, the anonymous thirteenth-century mystical corpus originating in Languedoc, designated in scholarship as the ʿIyyun Writings. A reliable analysis of Kabbalistic Christian writings requires acquaintance with the writers’ sources, especially given the extent and divergence of medieval Kabbalistic literature. Therefore, we cannot make do with locating overt citations or references to known Kabbalistic treatises found in these writings, but also aim at uncovering covert Kabbalistic traditions which influenced them, as in the case of Postel and the ʿIyyun Corpus.