Christian Knorr von Rosenroth

(1636–1689) — German Christian Hebraist, and the bottleneck through which the Kabbalah reached Europe. His Kabbala Denudata ("The Kabbalah Unveiled," Sulzbach 1677, Frankfurt 1684) put the Zohar's Idrot, Cordovero and the Lurianic material into Latin, and for two centuries this was how educated Europe read Jewish mysticism.

His scholarship was serious and his sources were real — he worked with Jewish teachers and read the originals. His purpose was not neutral: he and Francis Mercury van Helmont held that the Kabbalah demonstrated Christian doctrine, and the project belongs to a Christian-Hebraist tradition much of which was frankly conversionist — Jewish texts studied in order to argue Jews out of being Jewish.

That is stated here plainly and then left alone. It matters to this wing for one reason only: his Latin is the text Mathers worked from, and so it is the lens through which the entire English-speaking occult world has seen the Tree.