Guillaume Postel was one of the greatest experts in oriental languages of the Renaissance and, at the same time, one of its most singular visionaries. He taught at the Royal College in Paris, was the first to translate fundamental Kabbalistic texts into Latin, and travelled as far as Constantinople and the Holy Land. But he also believed he was called to unite all humanity in a single faith, and he regarded a woman he met in Venice as the new Eve. In him, scholarship and prophecy cannot be separated.
Origins and early travels
Postel was born in 1510 at Barenton, in Normandy, into a modest family. Orphaned early, he paid for his studies by working as a servant in Paris and taught himself, with extraordinary speed, Greek and Hebrew.
In 1535 he left for Constantinople with the French embassy to Suleiman the Magnificent. There he learned Arabic, collected manuscripts and studied the languages and religions of the Ottoman Empire. On his return he published in 1538 a collection of the alphabets of twelve different languages and an Arabic grammar, among the first in Europe.
The professor and the dream of unity
Around 1538 Francis I appointed him lecturer in mathematics and oriental languages at the Royal College, the institution that would become the Collège de France. Postel was convinced that knowing languages was the key to uniting peoples: in the De orbis terrae concordia (1544) he argued that the fundamental truths of Christianity could be demonstrated rationally to Jews and Muslims, leading humanity to a universal concord under a single king and a single faith.
In 1544 he entered the Society of Jesus in Rome, but was dismissed the following year: his ideas about a universal French monarchy and his prophecies were incompatible with the obedience required.
Mother Joanna
The decisive turn came in Venice, where Postel worked as chaplain at the Ospedaletto of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. There he met an elderly woman devoted to the poor, called Mother Zuana or Joanna. Postel regarded her as a prophetic figure: the "new Eve", through whom the feminine principle of redemption would be manifested, just as the masculine principle had been manifested in Christ.
After her death Postel claimed to have received her spirit, which gave him a new birth. He wrote several works on this theme, including Les très merveilleuses victoires des femmes du Nouveau Monde (1553). Historians regard these ideas as sincerely lived by Postel, but without any confirmation outside his personal experience.
The translator of Kabbalah
Alongside his visions, Postel carried out remarkable philological work:
| Text | What Postel did |
|---|---|
| Sefer Yetzirah | Published its first printed Latin translation (Paris, 1552), with commentary |
| Zohar | Translated large parts into Latin, which remained in manuscript |
| Protevangelium of James | Made it known in the West in Latin translation |
These works made accessible to Christian readers texts that had previously circulated only in Hebrew and Aramaic, and helped spread Christian Kabbalah in the second half of the sixteenth century.
Inquisition and confinement
In 1555 the Venetian Inquisition examined his works. Instead of declaring him a heretic, the judges called him amens, out of his mind: a formula that saved his life. He was nonetheless imprisoned in Rome and released only in 1559 when, on the death of Pope Paul IV, the crowd opened the prisons of the Inquisition.
Back in France, he had another period of teaching, but his positions continued to arouse suspicion. From around 1562 he lived in retirement, under light surveillance, in the monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs in Paris, where he went on writing and receiving learned visitors until his death in 1581.
A double legacy
Postel remains an emblematic case of the esoteric Renaissance. On the one hand he was a pioneer of oriental studies and translation; on the other, a solitary prophet whose vision of universal concord sprang from genuine openness towards other religions but also from personal convictions that were hard to share. It is precisely this combination that made him, in the following centuries, an author loved by Kabbalists, utopians and Rosicrucians.
In short
- Guillaume Postel (1510-1581) was an orientalist, a lecturer at the Royal College in Paris and a traveller in the East.
- He dreamed of a universal concord of all religions, supported by the knowledge of languages.
- He regarded the Venetian Mother Joanna as the "new Eve" and made her the centre of his prophecies.
- He published the first printed Latin translation of the Sefer Yetzirah (1552) and translated parts of the Zohar.
