Cracking open those nuts would take work, however, for the Psalms were a notoriously difficult text. In both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, they were attributed to the warrior-king David. As later analyses have shown, however, they were probably composed by many different hands over a period of five or more centuries, beginning during or before the tenth century B.C.E. The air of peril and disquiet in them reflected the turmoil of that period, with its pervasive court intrigue, frequent mutinies, and never-ending threat of invasion. Probably used in worship services at the time of the first Temple, the Psalms contain many technical terms related to ancient Israelite liturgy and rituals. Because ancient Hebrew used no vowels, words were frequently mangled in translation, and centuries’ worth of scribal errors had added to the confusion.
Luther asked Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, the Wittenberg printer, to produce an edition of the Vulgate text of the Psalms with wide margins and generous spaces between the lines so that he could insert his own comments. He was, in a sense, wiping the scriptural slate clean of all the glosses and marginalia that had accumulated over the centuries. By examining the text free of such encumbrances, Luther hoped to grasp its meaning anew.
His lectures were due to begin in August 1513, and in anticipation he began collecting commentaries and other scholarly aids. He had an edition of the Postillae perpetuae in universam S. Scripturam by Nicholas of Lyra, the most widely read book of medieval exegesis. Called “the second Jerome,” Lyra knew Hebrew and frequently quoted Rashi, the great twelfth-century Jewish exegete, but, like almost all medieval theologians, he read the Old Testament from start to finish as a testament about Christ, and Luther would echo him. Today, Lyra is known mainly for a droll couplet describing his place in Reformation history: Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus non cantasset—“If Lyra had not played his lyre, Luther would not have sung.”
But Luther would venture far beyond such traditional approaches. For years he had been avidly following the exciting new developments in the field of sacred philology. He knew of the many searching questions being raised about the Vulgate and of the critical methods being used to address them. As he prepared his lectures on the Psalms, he eagerly sought out the stimulating new works issuing from the humanist presses.
One was the Quincuplex Psalterium. Appearing in 1509, it offered the Psalter in five Latin translations: the Old Latin version, three Latin translations by Jerome, and a synthesis of all four versions by its editor, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, France’s leading humanist. Of the five versions of the Quincuplex, the one that caused the greatest stir was the Psalterium Iuxta Hebraeos, Jerome’s translation of the Psalms directly from the Hebrew. It was considered far more accurate than his two other versions, both of which were revisions of the Old Latin text. Precisely because it was based on the Hebrew rather than on the authorized Greek Septuagint, however, the Church had rejected this translation, and for centuries it had languished in monastic scriptoria. Now, however, Jerome’s Hebrew Psalter was readily available, and Luther kept it by his side as he worked his way through these verses.
Even Jerome’s Psalter was a translation, however, and Luther, in his resolve to unlock the meaning of the text, wanted to be able to consult the Hebrew directly. Doing so meant venturing into the burgeoning new field of Hebraic studies. Parallel to the resurgence of interest in Greek as a means of restoring the New Testament, there had arisen a new interest in Hebrew as an aid to understanding the Old. Learning Hebrew, though, was even more difficult than learning Greek. Most Hebrew presses were in Italy, and the wars in the north of that country had kept most of their volumes from crossing the Alps; as a result, Hebrew Bibles and grammars were hard to come by.
So were instructors. The only people qualified to teach Hebrew were Jews. Once a fixture in communities across Western Europe, however, the Jews had—through inquisition, expulsion, dispossession, and pogrom—been steadily forced out. England had expelled its Jews in 1290 and France had done the same in 1306 (and again in 1394). In 1492, Spain, after waging a fierce campaign to coerce its Jews to convert, had expelled all those who had refused. By the start of the sixteenth century, most of Germany had become judenrein, free of Jews. Even in the few places where they remained, Jews were often reluctant to teach Hebrew to Christians for fear that the knowledge would be used against them. The Talmud actually prohibited Jews from teaching the Torah to Gentiles (though this was sometimes disregarded because the work could be quite lucrative).
In the end, though, the main barrier to learning Hebrew came from other Christians. While Greek was reviled for being the language of schismatics, those schismatics were at least Christian. Hebrew was the language of the accursed children of Israel, who had killed Christ and who continued to reject him. Hebrew was seen as an agent of contagion, infecting wavering Christians with doubt and skepticism. Jews were suspected of aiding and abetting heretics; some Christian dissenters actually did seek refuge with them. Any Christian who studied Hebrew was thus considered contaminated.
In 1506, however, there had appeared De Rudimentis Hebraicis (“The Rudiments of Hebrew”). Prepared by the renowned German humanist Johannes Reuchlin, this bulky 625-page folio was a milestone in the field of sacred studies. Offering both a grammar and a lexicon of biblical Hebrew, it enabled Christians for the first time to study the Hebrew Bible on their own. Luther was among those taking advantage of it. In 1508, while in Erfurt, he had obtained a copy of the book, and by the time he began preparing his notes on the Psalms, he had fully absorbed it. As Luther sought to puzzle out the meaning of these hymns, he could now look beyond the Vulgate to the underlying Hebrew (though his knowledge of that language remained limited).
While Luther in his study was preparing his notes on the Psalms (beginning in the early summer of 1513), he would be deeply affected by a fierce controversy taking place outside it, with Reuchlin at its heart. A campaign was under way to confiscate and destroy all Jewish books (except for the Hebrew Bible) in the Holy Roman Empire, and a battle had broken out among Christian theologians and scholars as to whether this was justified. The fight was being waged largely through bitter broadsides turned out by the printing presses. The battle over Jewish books marked the first great clash over free expression in the age of print. It pitted the forces of tradition and orthodoxy against the proponents of humanist studies and the use of languages to understand Scripture. Luther in Wittenberg was closely following this conflict, and it would provide a critical backdrop to his lectures on the Psalms.
Today, Luther is known as one of history’s most violent haters of Jews. In his later years, he would produce some of the most vitriolic anti-Jewish tracts ever written. Historians have pored over his earlier writings to see when such sentiments first surfaced. It is surprising how many have neglected his lecture notes on the Psalms. As they show, Luther’s hatred for the Jews was present from a very early point. They also show that this hatred, far from occupying some remote recess of his mind, was in fact central to his theological development. It is thus impossible to understand the genesis of Luther’s new gospel without taking into account the pervasive anti-Jewish sentiment of the period, as shown most vividly by the unhappy experience of Johannes Reuchlin.
Almost single-handedly, Johannes Reuchlin helped usher in the new era of Hebraic studies in Christian Europe. At a time when scholars saw Hebrew as alien and subversive, and few wanted anything to do with it, Reuchlin extolled it as holding the key to ancient truths. Hebrew, he declared, is simple, pure, sacred, concise, and eternal. It was the language that man used to communicate with the angels and that had been spoken on earth before the chaos of Babel. When reading it, Reuchlin wrote, he seemed to see God himself speaking. “We Latin people drink from the morass, the Greeks drink from the brooks, the Jews drink from the wells.” Eager to draw from those wells, Reuchlin managed, through a combination of perseverance, luck, and expenditure, to learn Hebrew, and he would prove equally adept at infecting others with his enthusiasm.
Reuchlin
’s intoxication with Hebrew was all the more striking in that he was a pillar of Christian society. Born in the Black Forest town of Pforzheim, Württemberg, in 1455, he was judicious in temperament, cautious in judgment, and regal in bearing (he was said to look like a Roman senator). An esteemed jurist and a skilled diplomat, he spent much of his career in the courts of the powerful, helping to mediate dynastic disputes and resolve territorial conflicts. In matters of faith, he was completely devoted to the Church, believing that it offered the one true path to salvation. After the outbreak of the Reformation, when so many of his colleagues went over to it, Reuchlin remained loyal to Rome. But it was his very devotion to Christianity that had led him to Hebrew and that would sustain him in his effort to learn it at a time when it was nearly impossible for Christians to do so.
In addition to Hebrew, Reuchlin knew Latin and Greek, making him one of the first Europeans since Jerome to master all three biblical tongues. Well before Erasmus became captivated by biblical studies, Reuchlin was proclaiming the revelations to be had by applying philology to Scripture, and his work with the Hebrew Bible would help prepare the way for both Erasmus’s later revision of the New Testament and Luther’s translation of the Old Testament into German.
Like most of Germany, Württemberg had few Jews. In the mid-1480s, Reuchlin managed to find a learned Jew named Calman to teach him the aleph bet, but beyond that he was unable to go. A turning point came in 1490, while he was visiting Italy and met Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the great Renaissance prodigy. A devoted reader of the Kabbalah, a set of Jewish mystical teachings, Pico was the first of many Christians to claim that it was really about Christ and that only they (and not the Jews) could mine its wisdom. Reuchlin was captivated. For all his forward-looking interest in languages, he remained at heart a man of the Middle Ages, with an intense interest in magic and the occult, and in the Kabbalah he felt he had stumbled upon the fountainhead of all philosophical and religious knowledge. The Kabbalah’s mathematical rules made it possible, he believed, to prove all kinds of metaphysical propositions, including such key Christian doctrines as the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the messiahship of Jesus.
In 1494, Reuchlin came out with his first Hebraic work, The Miracle-Working Word. Using kabbalistic arithmology, he tried to show that, by adding the Hebrew letter shin (signifying logos) to YHWH (Yahweh)—the unpronounceable tetragrammaton of God—one got YHSWH, or Yehoshua (the Hebrew name of Jesus). This was the miracle-working word—the divine talisman that, as used in the New Testament, helped cure the sick, raise the dead, and make the floodwaters recede. As this shows, Reuchlin was interested in Hebrew mainly for its ability to bare Christian truths. According to a Christian character in The Miracle-Working Word, God rejected the Jews because they had “perverted and obscured the secrets of salvation” and had persecuted Christians “with eternal hatred.” For all his love of Hebrew, Reuchlin at this point remained a captive of anti-Jewish stereotypes.
By now, Reuchlin yearned to read the Hebrew Bible itself, but his knowledge of Hebrew remained too limited. In 1498, however, he again visited Italy, and while in Rome he was directed to Obadiah Sforno. Though only twenty-three, this future rabbi and physician already stood out for his brilliance. Jews, Sforno believed, should teach Hebrew to Christians to promote understanding between the two faiths, and he agreed to give Reuchlin lessons. They were very expensive, causing Reuchlin to grumble throughout, but by the end of his two years in Rome he finally had a firm grasp of the language.
On his return to Germany, Reuchlin—appointed to a high judicial post in Stuttgart—spent his every spare moment with the Hebrew texts he had brought back from Italy. Marveling at the spiritual truths he was drawing from the wells of the Jews, he wanted to help other pious Christians drink from them, too, and so he set out to produce a manual for Latin-speakers. On his estate outside Stuttgart, Reuchlin prepared a rudimentary guide to Hebrew. In 1506, the work was done. “I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze,” Reuchlin declared, echoing Horace’s Odes. In addition to a guide to Hebrew grammar and pronunciations, The Rudiments of Hebrew offered of a massive lexicon of biblical Hebrew, from av (“father”) to tisha (“nine”). Throughout, he was critical of Jerome and sought to correct the Vulgate (thus helping prepare the way for Erasmus’s philological work on the New Testament). The volume’s appearance marked the true start of Hebraic studies in Europe. A print run of 1,500 copies was prepared. Sales lagged, however. The book was expensive, and since Hebrew texts remained rare in Germany, students had few opportunities to use it. Hundreds of copies were stashed away in a warehouse. Reuchlin seemed destined to join the ranks of authors who, after expending great effort on a beloved subject, see their work sink from view.
In the end, though, obscurity would no doubt have been preferable to the type of fame Reuchlin would achieve—the product of a storm so fierce that Luther, hunched over the Psalms in his study in Wittenberg, would feel its force. The first suggestion of trouble came in 1509, when Reuchlin received a visit from a Jewish convert to Christianity named Johannes Pfefferkorn. Like many such converts in that period, Pfefferkorn turned violently against his former coreligionists, and in 1507 he began bringing out a series of venomous anti-Jewish pamphlets in Latin and German with titles like Mirror of the Jews, The Enemy of the Jews, and How the Blind Jews Observe Their Easter. The Jews, Pfefferkorn wrote, were “criminal dogs” who took unending delight in cursing Christ, mocking Mary, and sucking the blood of hardworking Christians through their usurious practices as moneylenders. He urged the authorities to drive them from their lands. If, however, the Jews were to remain, they should be compelled to attend Christian sermons and their children forced to undergo baptism. They should be set to work cleaning the streets, sweeping chimneys, emptying cesspools, and removing dog manure. Through the Talmud and similar writings, Pfefferkorn charged, the rabbis had perverted Jewish law, and he called for the seizure of all Jewish books except the Bible from libraries, homes, and synagogues. If the Jews were deprived of their books, he believed, they would abandon their false beliefs and accept Christian ones.
Had he been operating on his own, Pfefferkorn would probably not have gotten very far, but in 1509 he had gone to work for the Dominican priory in Cologne. Along with the Franciscans, the Dominicans led the anti-Jewish agitation in Europe. The prior at Cologne, Jacob van Hoogstraten, hated Jews and humanists in equal measure. As Germany’s inquisitor-general, he could tap into a powerful network of militant prosecutors stretching from Cologne to Louvain, Paris to Rome. With Hoogstraten’s help, Pfefferkorn was able to arrange a meeting with Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was then in Padua waging war against Venice. Because the Jews were a lucrative source of tax revenue, Maximilian was initially reluctant to move against them, but Pfefferkorn was able to win him over, and in August 1509 the emperor signed a mandate granting Pfefferkorn the authority to confiscate and examine any and all Jewish books in the empire. All volumes that were found to be “in contradiction to the books and laws of Moses and the prophets” or that ridiculed or offended the Christian faith were to be seized, though the process was to be carried out with the knowledge of the local city council and in the presence of the clergy.
As his first arena of operations, Pfefferkorn chose Frankfurt, home to Germany’s most thriving Jewish community. On the way there, he stopped in Stuttgart. Given Reuchlin’s great prestige as the author of The Rudiments of Hebrew, Pfefferkorn hoped to get his blessing for the imperial mandate. Their conversation was amicable, and though Reuchlin remained noncommittal, Pfefferkorn left convinced that they shared the goal of ending the practice of Judaism in Germany.
He traveled on to Frankfurt. On September 28, 1509, Pfefferkorn, flanked by three priests and two magistrates, entered its synagogue, considered the most distinguished in the empire. One hundred sixty-eight books were seized. But the Jews resisted, and they sent envoys to plead their case before both Uriel, the archbishop of Mainz, and Maximilian. In November 15
09, the emperor issued a new mandate that called for the creation of a review panel led by the archbishop to examine the Jewish texts for objectionable material. It was to include four universities, one of which was Cologne, and three experts, two of whom were Hoogstraten and Reuchlin. The mandate, though, also authorized the further confiscation of books, and in the following months the seizures continued in Frankfurt and other communities. The Frankfurt city council, however, came out in opposition to the seizures, arguing that the Jews should be allowed to keep their books because they were beneficial to Christianity and, furthermore, that they had a right to them so that they could practice their faith. The council was motivated in part by fears that its Jewish tax base would be eroded. In addition, Jewish booksellers sold many volumes at the Frankfurt book fair, and the council was reluctant to see this trade disrupted. Nonetheless, by April 1510, nearly 1,500 volumes had been confiscated.
Gradually, those commissioned to review the books issued their opinions. All four universities and two of the three individuals supported the confiscations. Not just the Talmud but all Jewish books, they argued, should be impounded and subjected to strict review, and they expressed confidence that the books would be found so full of errors and blasphemies as to merit destruction. Hoogstraten’s opinion, titled The Consultation Against the Filthy Jewish Books, held that all Jewish books except the Bible and commentaries on it should be burned and that if the Jews refused to recant the falsehoods in them, they should be burned, too.
There was one dissenter: Reuchlin. In a forty-plus-page analysis of Hebrew literature, he absolved all Jewish books of the charges of slandering Jesus, Mary, and the Christian faith, with the exception of two minor volumes that, he said, the Jews themselves had shunned. He devoted the longest section of his assessment to the Talmud, trying to show that it had religious value and so should not be suppressed or burned. Many Jewish biblical commentaries, he wrote, were indispensable to Christian study, and it was a disgrace for theologians to misrepresent what was in the Hebrew Scriptures out of a lack of knowledge of the language. He recommended that the emperor direct schools of higher learning in Germany to hire two instructors in Hebrew for a ten-year term. If such a course of action were followed, he wrote, “I have no doubt but that in a very few years our students will be so conversant in the Hebrew language that they will be ready and able by means of logical and friendly discourse to gently lead the Jews into our camp.”
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