The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  Looking deeper into the pontificate of Pius V we see him acting as the patron and protector of an important occult infiltrator, Sixtus of Siena (1520-1569), a Judaic pseudoconvert to Catholicism. Sixtus’ Kabbalistic recidivism was detected by true Catholics and he was imprisoned, and then released from prison by order of Pope Pius and given safe haven within the Dominican Order, again at the request of the pope. In 1559, “the pope dispatched Sixtus to burn the Talmud in Cremona, Italy,” which he did. We could end our narrative there, as do the majority of historians, and another gem would be added to the spiritual tiara of Pius V.

  The Cremona Conspiracy: The truth is very different from the appearance, however. Like many Renaissance pontiffs, Pope “Saint” Pius V seems to have been inordinately fond of the Kabbalah and the necessity of its dissemination. When he was Cardinal Michele Ghisleri, seven years before he would be elected pope, he was sacro totius Christrianae Inquisitionis Senatui praeesset (head of the Christian Inquisition). He learned that a treasure trove of two thousand copies of the Kabbalah were sitting in Cremona vulnerable to being burned. How might the future Pius V rescue that precious horde without causing a scandal among Conservatives and possibly blowing the cover of the Hermetic-Kabbalistic conspiracy of the Renaissance prelates and pontiffs?

  The provenance of those Kabbalistic books, specifically hundreds of copies of the Zohar, is itself deserving of mention. They were published in 1559 by the Catholic printer Vincenzo Conti in association with Vittorio Eliano, the grandson of Elias Levita, whose patron and protector had been Cardinal Giles of Viterbo. 65

  Conti served as the publisher for the textbooks used in Rabbi Yosef Ottolenghi’s yeshiva (rabbinic school). Ottolenghi was also “editor in chief” at Conti’s Catholic printing house! 66 Catholics in Cremona campaigned against this obscenity and petitioned the Inquisition for the destruction of Conti’s entire print run of the Zohar. But Conti operated with the knowledge and permission of the future Pope “Saint” Pius V. A clever ruse was then devised to protect the beloved copies of Satan’s Zohar. Sixtus of Siena was dispatched to Cremona on a devious mission: find and burn to great fanfare any copies of the Talmud. The official account stops there.

  Hence, the myth has it that the future pope ordered the burning of the Talmud and his sincere Judiac convert protégé faithfully performed his duty on behalf of the Inquisition. The Talmud was burned in Cremona; end of story.

  Here, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story: the Talmud-burning was a diversion. In the midst of the spectacular bonfire, Sixtus requisitioned the two thousand copies of the Zohar and placed them in safety. “Sixtus came to destroy, and he did destroy, but he returned from his journey to Cremona with…the satisfaction of having saved the edition of the Zohar that had just been produced by Vincenzo Conti.” 67

  The Cremona Conspiracy: Two steps forward, one step backward.

  For the Renaissance papacy and its top theologians and intellectuals—such as Francesco Giorgio, Paul Ricci, Ludovico Lazzarelli, Petrus Galatinus, Cardinal Giles of Viterbo, Agostino Steuco, Antonius Hieronymus Lunarius de Recaneto, and Johannes Reuchlin—the Kabbalah, and in particular the Kabbalistic book of the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah (“Yesirah”) had canonical status. As the Counter-Reformation came into its own in the sixteenth century, and began to more vociferously and publicly lay claim to the medieval Catholic mantle of anti-Judaism, the Talmud was increasingly the subject of both real and theatrical, criticism and suppression.

  According to plan, the many thousands of magnificent copies of the Talmud already published by Italian Catholic printers with the permission of popes from Leo X forward, and distributed and secreted throughout Europe by rabbis and gentiles alike for decades, made the prospect of the Talmud’s extirpation only a few decades later, during the Council of Trent, exceedingly difficult and improbable. But as theatre, and for rhetorical purposes, the declamations contra the Talmud made for an effective buttress for the propaganda that the Church of Rome was the relentless foe of the Talmud.

  While punitive attention in this time period was focused on the Talmud, simultaneously in Catholic Europe: “there was an explosion of Kabbalistic publications in the years immediately following the burning of the Talmud (1553 in the papal states; 1559 in Cremona, as we have seen)…” 68

  Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891), a German-Judaic historian, believed that he detected the Hermetic-Kabbalistic hand of the papacy in this stratagem. He argued that the Zohar volume of the Kabbalah was: “Schoßkind des Papstums” (“the favorite child of the papacy”). His thesis was that the early modern popes believed, in keeping with their covert Hermetic theology, that the mysticism of the Zohar, and the books of the Kabbalah in general, were more compatible with the Renaissance-Catholic religion than the Talmud. 69

  From the mid-fifteenth century onward, Kabbalistic popes were a dime a dozen. Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, pontiff from 1534 to 1549), was the acclaimed “Counter-Reformation pope,” convener of the Council of Trent, bane of adulterous English King Henry VIII, patron of the founding of the Jesuit Order, and of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine chapel. Paul III’s curriculum vitae is sure to warm the heart of the “traditional” and “conservative” Catholic. A closer examination of Paul’s papacy vis a vis the occult conspiracy is in order, however. Pope Paul III put the fox in charge of the hen house when, in 1538, he appointed as Director of the Vatican Library, the Neoplatonic-Hermetic Kabbalist Agostino Steuco.

  “Still more favored were the Jews by Paul III. (1534-50)…Paul permitted all the Jews who had been banished from Naples, as well as those coming from Palestine and Africa, to settle in Rome. He abolished the passion-plays in the Colosseum, at which Jews had often been murdered, and he granted permission (1545) to Antonio Bladao, Isaac ben Immanuel de Lattes, and Benjamin ben Joseph Arignano to establish a Hebrew printing-press in Rome.” 70

  Furthermore, Paul III was the patron of Michelangelo and Loyola in public, but in private he was an equally momentous patron of the Catholic-Kabbalist who published under the unwieldy moniker, “Antonius Hieronymus Lunarius de Recaneto.”

  Like Giles of Viterbo before him, Recaneto envisioned the papacy as the chosen vehicle for ushering in the Kabbalistic age. Where Cardinal Giles hallowed Leo X as the holy enabler of that magical epoch, Recaneto assigned the role to Pope Paul III and dedicated his book of Kabbalah advocacy (Discursus de Reformatione Ecclesiae) to the pontiff.

  In neither case did either man suffer any punishment of any kind from the popes to whom they dedicated their occult blasphemies. On the contrary, Kabbalistic papalolaters like Recaneto and Giles of Viterbo were protected and elevated. Cardinal Viterbo was nearly elected pope in 1522.

  As we have noted, legend has it that Leo X did get around to issuing a censure of Reuchlin in June, 1520, years after Reuchlin’s case had been made, his career and reputation secured and his book rendered a cause célébre.

  In 1511, Reuchlin had published his Augenspiegel in time for the Frankfurt Autumn Fair, where it attracted attention and sympathy. Reuchlin challenged not only the ban on rabbinic literature, but Pfefferkorn’s theological patron, the highly regarded conservative Dominican theologian Fr. Jacob von Hoogstraeten (1460-1527), prior of the Dominican monastery in Cologne, who judged the Augenspiegel a subversive defense of the Talmud. The local Dominican Order in Cologne insisted on a trial and Reuchlin was prosecuted in a church court in 1513. Pope Leo X manipulated the outcome to obtain the exoneration of Reuchlin. Just as a guilty verdict was about to be read on October 12, the local ordinary, Uriel, the Archbishop of Mainz, ordered the court shut down, the lengthy written verdict suppressed and the four conservative theologians trying the case, dismissed.

  Reuchlin’s colleague, Bishop Georg of Speyer, was appointed by the Vatican to hear Hoogstraeten’s appeal in the German church’s appellate court. Speyer in turn stacked the kangaroo court by naming two lead justices and three co-judges. They were all humanists and opposed to Hoogstraeten. Of the f
ive, four were personal pals of Reuchlin. The case dragged into 1514. During one hearing, Johann Pfefferkorn courageously appeared at the door of Speyer’s court and nailed an announcement declaring that the ecclesiastical court in Cologne had already condemned Augenspiegel.

  Only an intervention from Pope Leo X could rescue Reuchlin. Leo delivered. The pontiff ruled that no other court had jurisdiction over Reuchlin and his book than Speyer’s tribunal, which had sole papal authorization. Pfefferkorn was rebuked and nearly excommunicated. The Cologne theological court’s verdict was nullified and on April 24, 1514, Bishop Georg and his trial judges completely exonerated Reuchlin’s writings about Jews and Judaism. The humiliated Hoogstraeten was ordered to pay all court costs, as well as damages to Reuchlin personally in the amount of 111 gulden. If Hoogstraeten failed to do so, then he who was one of the leading Catholic theologians in Germany at the time, would be excommunicated. The Catholic world was being sent a message: Johannes Reuchlin must be given a free hand with which to operate his Neoplatonic-Hermetic mission on behalf of the Talmud and Kabbalah. Any churchman of whatever distinction who obstructed him would be fined and degraded, or even excommunicated. Truth was no defense.

  Truth may have been no defense, but Hoogstraeten and Pfefferkorn believed it would prove sufficient in the eyes of God. The Prior of the German Dominicans proceeded with another appeal and here we take note of the extensive judicial process which was in place and which represented the legacy of medieval Catholic justice, though now it was tragically sullied at the hands of a Medici pope. In the late summer of 1514, Hoogstraeten was buoyed by news of a condemnation of Reuchlin’s Judaic apologia issued by the most prestigious of all theology faculties, the University of Paris. Their assessment was subsequently published as The Acts of the Parisian Doctors Against the Augenspiegel.

  The appeal hearing in Rome in January 1515, featured two appointed judges, Domenico Grimani and Pietro Accolti, who were well-disposed toward Reuchlin. Grimani rebuked Hoogstraeten for seeking the judgment from the University of Paris theology faculty. The court’s rebuke served to neutralize the Paris judgment in terms of its impact on the legal case. By the summer of 1516, Leo X’s cousin, Cardinal Guilio de’ Medici (the future Pope Clement VII) was added to a “commission” of assessors who would assist in hearing the appeal.

  Among the judicial commission members was the Superior General of the Franciscans (Bernardo Prati), and of the Dominicans (Thomas Cajetan). Also serving on the commission was the Superior General of the Augustinians, Giles of Viterbo. The appeal was heard partly (two of four sessions) in the Sistine Chapel, where Cardinal Giles spoke on the value to Christianity of the teachings of the Talmud and Kabbalah. The final session on July 2, 1516, of what turned into yet another kangaroo legal spectacle, produced a nearly unanimous decision to sustain Bishop Speyer’s exoneration of Reuchlin on all the charges brought against him by the Dominican theologian Hoogstraeten. The acquittal of the certainly guilty Reuchlin caused outrage among true Catholic theologians. A scandal simmered for years, with conservatives appealing to Leo X to reverse the rigged verdict, unaware that the pontiff to whom they were appealing was responsible for Reuchlin’s exoneration. Great pressure from on high had been bought to bear on behalf of the guilty Talmudic apologist and popularizer.

  So commanding was Reuchlin’s influence with the pontiff, curia and among the haute monde of Renaissance humanists led by Erasmus, that for three years Pope Leo resisted all calls for a reversal of the verdict. The Dominican theologian Hoogstraeten meanwhile, was left to twist in the wind. The fledgling Protestant movement was emboldened by the sight of the vulnerable Hoogstraeten, a leading member of the Inquisition in Germany, left hanging in an anxiety-ridden limbo. One consequence of the Renaissance papacy’s Hermetic Neoplatonism was the strengthening of the Lutheran revolution, which was quick to detect a paradigm shift in the bowels of the Roman Church with regard to Reuchlin and the growing circle of Neoplatonist-Hermeticists high in the Vatican and operating under the title of “humanist.” As a result, the hierarchy of the Church of Rome was giving a morale boost to the early Protestant movement. As a measure of the symbiosis at work, both among the inner circle of the Church of Rome and among Lutherans, Reuchlin was a sympathetic and favored figure.

  Out of anxiety in the face of the growing Lutheran satisfaction over the Vatican’s special immunities for Reuchlin, which appeared to pit a Neoplatonic humanist papacy against the Catholic Inquisition in Germany, it was impressed upon Leo X that Reuchlin could be supported and rewarded in private, but that in public, the continuing immunity for the Talmudic-Kabbalist Reuchlin would make it all too glaringly plain where the papacy’s sympathies had lain; some facade of inquisitorial anti-Judaism had to be reinstated.

  In the aforementioned Epistolae obscurorum vivorum written by Reuchlin’s secret allies, we find this statement: “Reuchlin hath more friends here (in Rome) than in Germany, and many more cardinals and bishops and prelates and curialists love him.” In 1520 Pope Leo revoked the acquittal and condemned the Augenspiegel. By this Vatican stratagem, to those without knowledge of the details of the years of papal machinations and delaying tactics in favor of Reuchlin, it can be baldly stated to a clueless posterity, “The record shows Reuchlin was censured by Leo X.” Yet this was effectuated long after the censure no longer substantively mattered, on the eve of the publication of the Talmud in Italy: “…the Papal decision came too late…The Reuchlin dispute, thus decided all too late by Rome, was the forerunner of a far more important contest…71

  Luther was not the only irritant. Having rejected the Vulgate, Erasmus was having success with his 1516 Greek New Testament. He was, in his private correspondence, an ally of Reuchlin—but not so private that elite opinion in parts of Europe were unaware of it. In one letter to Albrecht of Brandenburg, in October 1519, which was subsequently leaked beyond Albrecht’s immediate circle, Erasmus criticized theologians who resisted Reuchlin and the “blossoming of the humanities.” In a reference to Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, Erasmus mocked those who also resented “the revival of the authors of antiquity.”

  Reuchlin had the support of the rabbinic religious network in central Europe through his ally, Rabbi Josel of Rosheim, who Selma Stern, in her eponymous book, rightly termed the “Commander of Jewry in the Holy Roman Empire.” For Rabbi Joel, Reuchlin was a hero, and his work “a miracle within a miracle.” Meanwhile, a libel apparatus was set into motion against Pfefferkorn. The leader of this organized false witness in defense of the “upright” Reuchlin, a man of “proven virtue and learning,” was Erasmus of Rotterdam who, like Renaissance popes, mounted a traditional smokescreen from time to time by offering stern words of disapprobation for the Talmud and other rabbinic texts. All the while he did the dirty work of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspiracy by dragging the name and reputation of the noble Judaic convert Pfefferkorn through the dirt, in a vitriolic tirade:

  “Pfefferkorn’s writings, and particularly his activist campaign, attracted much attention during the ongoing Reuchlin affair, but his reputation was lastingly damaged by this event. The strong Humanist defense of Reuchlin…and the smears on his (Pfefferkorn’s) and his wife’s integrity, meant that Pfefferkorn and his writings were literally ignored by later polemicists and scholars.

  “Erasmus of Rotterdam’s condemning characterization of Pfefferkorn may be representative for other voices. He stated that Pfefferkorn, that ‘half-Jew Christian by himself has done more harm to Christendom than the whole cesspool of Jewry’ and claimed, ‘that fellow chose to be baptized for no other reason than to be in a better position to destroy Christianity, and by mixing with us, infect the whole people with his Jewish poison. Now that he has put on the mask of the Christian, he truly plays the Jew. Now at last he is true to his race. They have slandered Christ, but Christ only. He raves against many upright men of proven virtue and learning. He could not have done a more welcome favor to his fellow Jews than pretending to be an apostate and betraying the Christian
cause to the enemy.’

  “Erasmus blamed Pfefferkorn for having destroyed the harmony of the scholarly world, and asserted, in another clear reminder of the convert’s origins, that it would have been better if ‘he were a Jew all over, and that his circumcision extended to his tongue and hands.’

  “…Reuchlin was indeed not forgotten…Offered a chair in Greek and Hebrew at (the Catholic universities of) Ingolstadt and then Tübingen, which he held until his death in 1522, he remained highly respected…as a defender of Judaism. Pfefferkorn, however, was forgotten.” 72

  The circumstances of Pfefferkorn’s death aren’t certain. He passed away in obscurity, with no known support from any quarter. Reuchlin, on the other hand, died an honored Catholic professor at prestigious German-Catholic universities. Pfefferkorn was above all the victim of a campaign of lying. The lies of Erasmus in this regard are typical of the tidal waves of libel aimed at Pfefferkorn by the now exceedingly powerful conspiracy inside the Church.

  Leo X’s legate, Gian Pietro Carafa, who had conferred with Erasmus in England (where Erasmus had arrived in 1511 under the sponsorship of St. John Fisher), forbade the Dominican faculty at Cologne from examining the works of Erasmus for heresy.73 Fisher himself is an intriguing study. He prized his copy of Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica and was highly sympathetic to Reuchlin and the Kabbalah. (Fisher’s correspondence with Reuchlin is said to be “lost”).

  “In June 1516 Fisher praised Reuchlin to Erasmus: ‘He seems to me, in comparison with everyone else whose works I have read so far, to be the best man alive today, especially in knowledge of the recondite field that lies between theology and philosophy and touches on both. In a long letter to Reuchlin of that same month Erasmus wrote in detail of Fisher’s admiration for him: ‘No words of mine can possibly express the enthusiasm and deep respect felt for you by the bishop of Rochester.” 74