As that last comment shows, Reuchlin remained convinced that Christianity was the one true faith and that Judaism was inherently inferior to it; he never developed a principle of true tolerance toward the Jews. Nonetheless, his opinion represented an extraordinary moment in the history of medieval Christianity—one of the first times a Christian of such standing had defended the Jewish religious tradition and supported extending the rights of free worship and scholarship to the Jews. Reuchlin’s proposal to require German universities to hire instructors would in fact be carried out. By the 1530s universities across Germany and Switzerland would have chairs in Hebrew studies, helping to establish those countries as leaders in Old Testament scholarship—a distinction they hold to this day.
Reuchlin did not issue his opinion publicly; rather, he sent it under seal to the archbishop of Mainz for forwarding to Maximilian. Pfefferkorn quickly got hold of it, however, and when he and his Dominican backers read it, they were furious. Fearing that Reuchlin’s opinion would prove decisive with the emperor, Pfefferkorn sought to preempt him with another noxious pamphlet. Titled Handspiegel (“Magnifying Glass”), it questioned how much Hebrew Reuchlin really knew, assailed him for spending so much time with the Jews, and insinuated that he had been bribed by them. Stepping up his attack on the Jews themselves, Pfefferkorn cast them as murderous enemies of Christians and raised the deadly charges of blood libel (the killing of Christians and the use of their blood in Jewish rituals) and host desecration (vandalizing the bread of Communion).
At the 1511 spring fair in Frankfurt, Handspiegel was the fastest-selling item. Indignant, Reuchlin struck back with a sharp tract of his own, which he completed in time for the autumn fair. Titled Augenspiegel (“Eye Glasses”), it described what he said were more than thirty falsehoods and misrepresentations in Pfefferkorn’s text. Reuchlin denied that he had taken a penny from the Jews and decried the underhanded way in which Pfefferkorn had come into possession of his opinion. The Jews in the empire, he wrote, should be regarded not as serfs or slaves, as was traditional, but as concives, or fellow citizens, whose property deserved protection from seizure. But Reuchlin—wary of provoking the powerful theologians who stood behind Pfefferkorn—kept his tone temperate, and he sent conciliatory letters to several members of the Cologne faculty, affirming his full devotion to the Church.
They were not appeased. Prodded by Hoogstraten, the university lodged charges of heresy against Reuchlin, citing forty-three statements in Augenspiegel and claiming that it was “impermissibly favorable to Jews.” When Reuchlin saw them, he snapped. In his fierce Defense of Johannes Reuchlin Against the Cologne Slanderers, he denounced Pfefferkorn as an “ignorant butcher” and a “Jew sprinkled with water” who had written “a slanderous book” stitched together “out of the machinations of those pseudo-scholars and published under the name of the traitor.” The Cologne professors were not true theologians but “the vilest scoundrels, wickedest babblers, and lowlife slanderers.” All they were trying to do was extort money from the Jews. As to their anger over his calling the Jews fellow citizens, Reuchlin reaffirmed his position: “I want them to rage even more in anger, and I hope their guts burst, because I am saying that the Jews are our brothers.”
Rage they would. The Defense would prove a serious misstep for Reuchlin. In assailing not just Pfefferkorn but also the powerful interests backing him, he stirred the whole clamorous hive of orthodox doctricians, and they wasted no time in striking back. In August 1513, the Cologne faculty formally condemned Augenspiegel for its slanderous statements “savoring of heresy” and for its defense of the Jews, and Hoogstraten proposed to a commission of Dominican judges that they find Reuchlin’s tract full of heresies and errors. In an ominous development, he ordered Reuchlin to appear before an inquisitorial court in Mainz to account for his statements. Reuchlin in turn sent a letter in Hebrew to the Jewish physician of Pope Leo X (who had replaced Julius II in March 1513), urging him to appeal to the pontiff on his behalf. Leo proceeded to instruct the bishop of Speyer to judge the points at issue between Reuchlin and Hoogstraten.
During the Middle Ages, such controversies had been fought out on parchment within the walls of universities; now they were being waged in low-cost, highly readable, crudely illustrated pamphlets. It was an early demonstration of the power of the printing press to inform, provoke, and incite. With pro- and anti-Reuchlin factions forming in every town, the strife was widening the gulf between those committed to the traditional ways of interpreting the Bible and those embracing the new critical methods, in the first boisterous sign of Europe’s coming crack-up.
In March 1514, the commission appointed by the bishop of Speyer to investigate the matter issued its judgment, acquitting Reuchlin of all charges. Outraged, Hoogstraten left for Rome to lodge an appeal at the papal court; he would spend the next five years pursuing the case. Certain that more contention lay ahead, Reuchlin sought to use the commission’s decision to enlist additional allies. High on his list was Erasmus. In a letter to the Dutch scholar, who was then in England, Reuchlin revealed just how beleaguered he felt. His opinion on Jewish books had been attacked by the Cologne theologians “not in a manner suited to learned doctors but with violent tirades and insults directed at myself in the fashion of quite irresponsible buffoons.” When he wrote a defense of his actions, those same professors sought to burn his opinion in the city of Mainz “by order of the inquisitor of the Preaching Friars,” i.e., Hoogstraten; the preachers “swarmed to the spot like summer flies.” Reuchlin was now sending along the favorable ruling from the Speyer court so that Erasmus could press his case with his English friends and thus restore his reputation “in opposition to the burners of books.”
Given Erasmus’s outspoken support for free inquiry and independent scholarship along with Reuchlin’s pioneering work in biblical studies, his backing for Reuchlin would have seemed ensured, but he shrank from offering a public endorsement. All the name-calling and foul language provoked by the affair made him uncomfortable. If he came to Reuchlin’s aid, he might face similar abuse. With charges of blasphemy in the air, his very physical safety could be imperiled.
But there was a deeper reason for Erasmus’s reticence. While he felt bound to Reuchlin by their shared affection for sacred studies, he did not share Reuchlin’s passion for Hebrew. The language seemed to him crude and immature, and he disliked the Kabbalah, the Talmud—even the Five Books of Moses. As he would later write, he would rather “see the entire Old Testament done away with than to see the peace of Christendom torn to ribbons for the sake of the Jewish Scriptures.” Erasmus’s disdain for Jewish texts extended to the Jews themselves, as he made clear in a biting letter written years later to his friend Wolfgang Capito (who would become a leading Hebraic scholar):
I see them as a nation full of the most tedious fabrications, who spread a kind of fog over everything, Talmud, Kabbalah, Tetragrammaton, Gates of Light, words, words, words. I would rather have Christ mixed up with Scotus than with that rubbish of theirs. Italy is full of Jews, in Spain there are hardly any Christians. . . . If only the church of Christians did not attach so much importance to the Old Testament! It is a thing of shadows, given us for a time, and now it is almost preferred to the literature of Christianity.
Erasmus’s letters contained much abuse of this sort. Sometimes it took the form of disgust with Pfefferkorn, who he insisted remained a Jew intent on inciting Christians. “I wish he were an entire Jew—better still if the removal of his foreskin had been followed by the loss of his tongue and both hands,” he wrote. To Reuchlin himself, Erasmus wrote, “This half-Jew Christian by himself has done more harm to Christendom than the whole cesspool of Jewry. . . . Let us, my dear Reuchlin, forget these monsters, let us take our joy in Christ and pursue honorable studies.” “If it is Christian to detest the Jews,” Erasmus remarked elsewhere, “on this count we are all good Christians, and to spare.”
Erasmus’s rancor toward the Jews had little to do with their actual conduc
t; his writings contain few references to the moneylending or debt-holding that caused such resentment of them. Even the Jews’ rejection of Christ did not overly concern him. What he most objected to in the Jews was their Judaism. The Jewish faith, he believed, exemplified the mechanical, legalistic forms of worship that he so disliked in his own. With their rigid rules governing every aspect of diet and dress, prayer and the Sabbath, the Jews had infected Christians with a similarly obsessive concern for externalized displays of worship. Exactly how this contamination had taken place, Erasmus did not say. Nor did he stop to consider how much his own embryonic philosophy of Christ owed to the Golden Rule and other Jewish precepts. Instead, “Judaizing” became for him a convenient epithet to be applied to all those outbreaks of arid devotion that he felt were undermining the Christian faith. The rebirth of Hebraic studies, he feared, would further entrench this Judaic strain—“the most pernicious plague and bitterest enemy that one can find to the teaching of Christ.”
To find so liberal-minded a thinker as Erasmus expressing such intolerance might seem surprising, but Christian humanists were not immune to the swelling anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe. In fact, they were among its leading purveyors. The quest for new, more heartfelt forms of devotion then sweeping Western Europe was accompanied by a revulsion toward all those who stood outside the faith—heretics, apostates, infidels, and Jews. Reuchlin’s own interest in Hebrew was driven mainly by a desire to reveal Christian truths, and it was only over time, as he immersed himself in Hebrew studies, that he came to develop greater respect for the Jews.
So, even as Hebraic studies were flourishing among Christian scholars, the Jews themselves were being purged from Western Europe. Accusations of host desecration and blood libel proliferated, leading to executions and expulsions. The Jews were forced to leave Heilbronn in 1475, Tübingen in 1477, Esslingen in 1490, Mecklenburg in 1492, Magdeburg in 1493, Reutlingen in 1495, Württemberg and Würzburg in 1498, Nuremberg and Ulm in 1499, Nördlingen in 1507, and the state of Brandenburg in 1510. The banishment from Brandenburg was accompanied by the execution of thirty-eight Jews on charges of host desecration; the event took place in Knoblauch, just fifty miles north of Wittenberg. The highways of Germany filled with the wagons of Jewish families traveling eastward toward the one Christian country still willing to accept them—Poland, which was just beginning to assume its place as the center of Ashkenazi Jewry.
Many of those wagons passed through Saxony, and Luther may have seen them. He knew few actual Jews, however. Jews had been expelled from Erfurt in 1456 and from Wittenberg in 1304. In commemoration of their expulsion from the latter, there had been carved on an exterior wall of the town church a Judensau, or Jewish swine—a popular motif in German-speaking lands. It showed a sow with young piglets, with several Jews beneath it sucking its teats and a rabbi behind it peering into its hindquarters. (It is still there.)
In the absence of any contact with Jews, Luther’s attitudes toward them were shaped by his theological and intellectual milieu, which was then dominated by the Reuchlin affair. In 1514, while it was at its height, George Spalatin sought Luther’s opinion of a book attacking Reuchlin by Ortwin Gratius, a Cologne professor who had joined the campaign against Jewish books. In his letter, Luther called Ortwin a “dog” and a “ravenous wolf in sheep’s clothing” who had made “ridiculous arguments” and distorted the words and meanings “of the definitely innocent Reuchlin.” He expressed satisfaction that the matter had been referred to the Apostolic See. “Since Rome has the most learned people among the cardinals,” he wrote, “Reuchlin’s case will at least be considered more favorably there than those jealous people in Cologne—those beginners in grammar!—would ever allow.” He signed off: “Farewell and pray for me, and let us pray for our Reuchlin.” It is striking to see Luther fully embrace Reuchlin while Erasmus would not.
But Luther shared Erasmus’s disgust with the Jews, as would become apparent in the summer of 1513, when he prepared his notes for his lectures on the Psalms. As was the custom in medieval exegesis, those notes took two forms: brief glosses, entered between the lines and in the margins, and longer scholia, recorded on separate sheets of paper. It was mainly in the scholia that Luther worked out his theological ideas. Placing a piece of paper before him in his cluttered, book-crammed study, he pondered the first Psalm. Just six verses long, it describes in simple but lyrical terms the contrast between those who take delight in the law of the Lord and those who ignore it. With his raven quill, Luther wrote in his small, neat hand: “The first psalm speaks literally concerning Christ thus.”
With that brief notation, Luther was placing himself squarely in the medieval tradition of reading the Old Testament as fundamentally about Christ.
He then addressed the psalm’s first verse: “Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence.” The “man,” Luther wrote, refers to “the only Man” from whom fullness is received. Christ “did not consent to the designs of the Jews, who afterwards crucified Him.” The sinners referred to in the verse were the Jews. They had fashioned an idol for themselves in their hearts and refused glory to God. “This is what the Jews did against Christ then and are still doing until now.”
The “chair of pestilence,” meanwhile, referred to “that death-dealing doctrine by which the Jews corrupted, stained, and killed themselves and their own against Christ.” For the Jews to deny that it was a sin to have crucified Christ was worse than doing the actual crucifying. “Oh, what a horrible example that wrath is for us! Cursed be every pride that imitates that error to the present day!”
As Luther made his way through the first psalm, his rage steadily grew. The Jews, he wrote, meditate on vanities and false frenzies according to their own ideas about Scripture. They pierce the truth “with their extremely hard iron lies,” they “scourge, stone, and kill the prophets and scribes in the same way as did their fathers.” Sucking the living spirit from the Bible, they inspire heretics, who “seek to approve their own empty opinion by the authority of Scripture, Judaizing with Jewish treachery.”
Most of the crimes Luther attributed to the Jews in these opening pages were staples of late-medieval polemic. As he neared the end of that first psalm, however, he noted another pernicious feature that others had overlooked. The psalm’s final verse mentions the “way of the ungodly.” According to Luther, this was another clear reference to the Jews. They set up their own righteousness before God. By praying, fasting, and performing other such works, they believed they could become righteous in his eyes, but in every instance they were motivated by glory, worldly gain, or some other selfish end. This belief was sheer hypocrisy and deceit.
This Jewish self-righteousness seemed to run counter to what Augustine had taught in the Confessions. The bishop of Hippo, Luther observed in his notes, “did not set up his own righteousness nor justify himself or attribute anything to himself.” He did not make an idol for himself in his heart but “gave the glory to God in the fullest sense.” To avoid the sinful ways of the Jews, it was similarly necessary “not to attribute anything to oneself, but rather to establish and be subject to the righteousness of God.”
As he concluded his notes on this first psalm, Luther came up with an arresting paradox: It is not those who perform righteous deeds who win God’s grace, for God does not care about our deeds. Rather, it is the person who “is displeased with himself and hates his deeds” who will rise again. We cannot obtain divine favor unless our own righteousness falls and utterly perishes. The “more we judge and abhor and detest ourselves, the more abundantly God’s grace flows into us.”
This idea excited Luther. Since entering the monastery, he had resolutely followed the late Scholastics’ exhortation to do all that is within one so as to elicit God’s grace, thus opening a path to eternal life. Through the long, punishing sessions of confession and fasting, through the never-ending rounds of prayer and supplication, he had desp
erately sought reassurance about his everlasting fate. Instead, he had been overwhelmed by a sense of unworthiness. Now, in reading these ancient Hebrew verses, he was beginning to see why. No man can please God through his actions; by his very nature, he can only fall short. The Jews persisted in thinking that they could become righteous before God through their own acts—by trusting to their own power. As a result, they had been condemned to perish. Only by recognizing that one is an incurable sinner and incapable of doing good in God’s eyes is it possible to begin the process of receiving his grace.
Eagerly pursuing the implications of this idea, Luther filled page after page with observations about human inadequacy and divine grace, Jewish self-righteousness and Augustinian humility. In all, Luther prepared full commentaries on roughly one hundred psalms; only a handful of them were free of anti-Jewish polemic. Summing up his disgust with the Jews, he wrote that they “look for an exclusively human deliverance and do not yet see their own destruction.” Paraphrasing Augustine, Luther noted that “the sum total of all human knowledge is this: A man must know that by himself he is nothing.” Luther’s detestation of Jewish striving had combined with his embrace of Augustinian surrender to produce the foundation for a new spiritual vision, centered not in human agency but in divine grace.
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