The extraordinary influence which Reuchlin’s Kabbalistic Treatises exercised upon the greatest thinkers of the time and upon the early reformers may be judged of from the unmeasured terms of praise which they bestowed upon their author. The Treatises were regarded as heavenly communications, revealing new divine wisdom. Conrad Leontarius, writing to Wimpheling on the subject, says—“I never saw anything more beautiful or admirable than this work (i.e., De Verbo Mirifico), which easily convinces him who reads it that no philosopher, whether Jew or Christian, is superior to Reuchlin.” Aegidius, general of the Eremites, wrote to the holy Augustine “that Reuchlin had rendered him, as well as the rest of mankind, happy by his works, which had made known to all a thing hitherto unheard of.” Philip Beroaldus, the younger, sent him word “that Pope Leo X had read his Pythagorean book greedily, as he did all good books; afterwards the Cardinal de Medici had done so, and he himself should soon enjoy it.” [107] Such was the interest which this newly-revealed Kabbalah created among Christians, that not only learned men but statesmen and warriors began to study the oriental languages, in order to be able to fathom the mysteries of this theosophy. 1450–1498. Whilst the Kabbalah was gaining such high favour amongst Christians both in Italy and Germany, through the exertions of Mirandola and Reuchlin, a powerful voice was raised among the Jews against the Sohar, the very Bible of this theosophy. Elia del Medigo, born at Candia, then in Venetia, 1450, of a German literary family, professor of philosophy in the University of Padua, teacher of Pico de Mirandola, and a scholar of the highest reputation both among his Jewish brethren and among Christians, impugned the authority of the Sohar. In his philosophical Treatise on the nature of Judaism as a harmonizer between religion and philosophy, entitled An Examination of the Law (‏בחינת הדת‎), which he wrote December 29, 1491, he puts into the mouth of an antagonist to the Kabbalah the following three arguments against the genuineness of the Sohar: 1, Neither the Talmud, nor the Gaonim and Rabbins knew anything of the Sohar or of its doctrines; 2, The Sohar was published at a very late period; and 3, Many anachronisms occur in it, inasmuch as it describes later Amoraic authorities as having direct intercourse with the Tanaite R. Simon b. Jochai who belongs to an earlier period. [108]