>>A Christian scholar's defense of Jewish rights
By Gabriel A. Sivan
March, 12 2001
(March 12) - A Christian scholar combined his defense of Jewish rights with an objective survey of rabbinic literature. In 1505, Johannes Pfefferkorn (a recently converted Jew) offered his services to the Dominican order in Cologne. Though only one of the numerous apostates who maligned their discarded faith and brethren throughout the ages, Pfefferkorn was destined to play a crucial role in the history of antisemitism.
Pfefferkorn became a willing tool in the hands of the Dominicans, who were anxious to "spread the flames of the Inquisition that in 1492 had lapped up the last remnants of Jewish life and culture in Spain."
He wrote venomous treatises which alleged that all Jewish writings apart from the Bible contained "blasphemous attacks" on Christianity. He demanded the suppression of rabbinic works. Curiously enough, the "author" of these pamphlets had little knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish literature and none whatsoever of Latin (the language in which his tracts appeared).
Emperor Maximilian I was nevertheless persuaded to order the confiscation of Jewish books, and nearly 2,000 volumes were seized in the Rhineland (1509-10). Since an earlier apostate, Nicolas Donin, had instigated the burning of countless rabbinic manuscripts in Paris (1242), the Frankfurt Jews vehemently protested and Archbishop Uriel of Mainz lent them his support. In July 1510, the Emperor asked various churchmen and scholars to determine whether Christian interests would be served by the destruction of Jewish books. Jakob van Hoogstraeten, one of those approached, was the heresy-hunting Cologne inquisitor and Pfefferkorn's blinkered patron.
Another scholar, Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), a humanist and law professor, despised "the meshummad" and his Recommendation set a historic precedent. As the leading Christian Hebraist in Germany, Reuchlin was at first more concerned to preserve Jewish books than to defend Jewish rights. In his view, Hebrew and the Kabbala were primary sources of Christian truth, the basis for his own works on Hebrew grammar and Jewish mysticism.
After agreeing to write an assessment of the Talmud, however, Reuchlin adopted a more positive attitude toward Jews. This emerged at the very outset of the "Battle of the Books" (1511-21), when Reuchlin's Augenspiegel ("Eyeglass") exposed the antisemitic claptrap in Pfefferkorn's Handspiegel ("Hand Mirror").
REUCHLIN'S TREATISE, an extract from his Augenspiegel, was translated into modern German. For the first time, a Christian scholar combined his defense of Jewish rights with an objective survey of rabbinic literature, tearing away "the veil of strangeness and the pall of superstition surrounding these books in the popular consciousness."
After summarizing the arguments for and against the Talmud's destruction, Reuchlin explains why - on legal, logical and religious grounds - it should not be suppressed or burned. "If someone wished to write against mathematicians, and had not mastered simple arithmetic, he would be made a laughingstock."
Accordingly, since no Christian in Germany has mastered the Talmud, "it is unreasonable for the ignorant to cast aspersion on it." Reuchlin also observes that the Talmud contains "many useful medical prescriptions... as well as many admirable legal decisions compiled by knowledgeable Jews."
Alluding to Pfefferkorn and his ilk, Reuchlin declares: "I do not feel bound by what certain coreligionists have written against the Talmud, being apprised that some of these self-appointed critics have never so much as perused its pages."
Thus, "not every fool can trample it with his unwashed feet and claim to grasp its meaning!"
Turning to the place of Jews in Christian society, Reuchlin maintains that "just as we are not bound by the Laws of Moses, so they are not subject to the laws of Jesus." Jews had the right to practice their religion within the framework of the Roman Empire long before the advent of Christianity; and legally speaking (he implies) they are subject, like Christians, to the Empire's laws and not to the jurisdiction of the Church.
"Having to endure, year after year, the public calumny we heap upon them in our churches on Good Friday, calling them 'perfidious Jews,' they might rightfully reply among themselves: 'They [the Christians] slander us. We have never disavowed our faith' "
Reuchlin even affirms that "the Jew is as worthy in the eyes of our Lord God as I am... How can we pass judgment on the soul of another?"
Reuchlin paid heavily for his courageous stand: opponents denounced him as a heretic and Pope Leo X condemned his books in 1520. By then, Martin Luther (one of Reuchlin's supporters) had embarked on the Reformation, and it is grimly ironic that Luther's failure to convert the Jews turned him into a rabid antisemite.
Even so, but for Reuchlin, all those confiscated Jewish volumes would have been destroyed and Jewish intellectual life might have been shattered.
To quote Josel of Rosheim, German Jewry's chief spokesman at the time: "Our enemies, and the oppressors from among our own people [i.e., Pfefferkorn], arose to abolish the written Torah. Then God performed a double miracle, for the Torah was restored to its former glory [the books were returned] by a sage among the nations [Johannes Reuchlin]." One might add that, in 1520, Daniel Bomberg (a Christian printer) began printing the first full edition of the Babylonian Talmud.
Some of the most vicious, ill-informed attacks on Jews and Judaism have latterly been published by Moslem clerics and the Arabic-language media. The scene has shifted to the Middle East, but the calumnies have not changed. Thanks to translator Peter Wortsman, we now have access to Reuchlin's "modest little text," a pioneering Gentile defense of Jewish culture.<<
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