Jechiel, a Cabalistic Jew protected by St. Louis, possessed the secret of ever-burning lamps, claimed later by the Rosicrucians, which suggests the possibility that some kind of luminous gas or electric light may have been known to the Jews. In alchemy they were the acknowledged leaders; the most noted alchemist of the fourteenth century, Nicholas Flamel, discovered the secret of the art from the book of "Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer, and Philosopher," and this actual book is said to have passed later into the possession of Cardinal Richelieu.
It was likewise from a Florentine Jew, Alemanus or Datylus, that Pico della Mirandola, the fifteenth-century mystic, received instructions in the Cabala and imagined that he had discovered in it the doctrines of Christianity. This delighted Pope Sixtus IV, who thereupon ordered Cabalistic writings to be translated into Latin for the use of divinity students. At the same time the Cabala was introduced into Germany by Reuchlin, who had learnt Hebrew from the Rabbi Jacob b. Jechiel Loans, court physician to Frederick III, and in 1494 published a Cabalistic treatise De Verbo Mirifico, showing that all wisdom and true philosophy are derived from the Hebrews. Considerable alarm appears, however, to have been created by the spread of Rabbinical literature, and in 1509 a Jew converted to Christianity, named Pfefferkorn, persuaded the Emperor Maximilian I to burn all Jewish books except the Old Testament. Reuchlin, consulted on this matter, advised only the destruction of the Toledot Yeshu and of the Sepher Nizzachon by the Rabbi Lipmann, because