Renaissance and early modern philosemitism, inasmuch as it existed, resulted directly from the renewed interest of Renaissance humanists in the ancient past, and particularly from the emergence of Christian Hebraism. Early modern Christian Hebraism and the myth of the Jewish or Hebrew origins of human knowledge were a direct outcome of Renaissance humanism. The scholars who created this field of study, mostly participants in the northern Renaissance beyond the Alps, widened the original humanistic definition of classical learning beyond the Greek and Roman sources beloved by Italian Renaissance humanists, to ancient Hebrew, among other eastern sources. This Hebraic tendency joined the general antiquarian movement of that period that enthusiastically, even obsessively, collected, cataloged, and compared knowledge on cultures and societies. These they considered exotic, whether they were forgotten esoteric ancient cultures or those recently unearthed in the great voyages of exploration.

The English seventeenth-century scholar Ben Jonson chose to put the following words, so descriptive of this widespread phenomenon, into the mouth of a madwoman: