A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (21 page)

After Jews asked the emperor to reconsider his stand, Maximilian turned to Johannes Reuchlin, a Christian scholar and humanist, for advice. Reuchlin recommended preserving Hebrew books, because they might help Christian scholars in “deriving proof of our Christian faith.” He scorned those who wanted to destroy Jewish books even though they had never read one: “If someone wished to write against the mathematicians and was himself ignorant in simple arithmetic or mathematics, he would be made a laughingstock.”

Reuchlin also questioned whether Christians had the right to burn Jewish books. In his view, both Jews and Christians were “citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, we Christians by virtue of the Emperor’s choice by electors, the Jews through their submission [to the emperor] and their public profession [of loyalty].”
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Still, even though he regarded Jews as “legal equals” living “under one civil law and one civil peace,” Reuchlin, as a faithful Christian, insisted that unless Jews showed “signs of improvement”—for example, by no longer charging interest for loans—they could and should be exiled.

Reuchlin’s argument was a complicated mixture of toleration and prejudice, but it persuaded Maximilian. The emperor ordered the books returned to their owners. Josel of Rosheim, a rabbi who served as an advocate for Jews in their dealings with the Holy Roman Empire, described the decision as a “double miracle”: first, the books were returned unharmed, and second, they had been saved by a Christian.

Enraged by Reuchlin’s success, Pfefferkorn and his supporters published pamphlets attacking Reuchlin. Reuchlin and his supporters replied with pamphlets of their own. In one, Reuchlin claimed that Pfefferkorn was wrong to insist that “Divine Law forbids our holding [everyday contact] with Jews; this is not true. Every Christian must go to
law with them, buy from them…. It is allowed to converse with and learn from them, as St. Jerome… did. And lastly, a Christian should love a Jew as his neighbor; for all is founded on the law.”
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It was an amazing statement at a time and in a place in which most Christians saw Jews as evil and dangerous. Not surprisingly, the statement stirred up further controversy.

Before long, dozens of pamphlets had been printed, as each side in the debate attacked the other with passion and often venom. The battle of the pamphlets raged wherever scholars gathered. Those at the universities of Mainz, Cologne, Erfurt, Heidelberg, and Paris sided with Pfefferkorn; they remained faithful to the traditional policies of the church. Reuchlin’s supporters saw themselves as “fosterers of the arts and of the study of humanity.” Unlike Pfefferkorn’s supporters, they were not gathered at one university or even a group of nearby schools but were scattered among the faculty at universities throughout Europe.

In 1514, the Dominican friars at the University of Cologne tried to end the controversy by charging Reuchlin with the crime of “Judaizing.” They wanted to put him on trial before an inquisition in Cologne. Fearful that he wouldn’t get a fair hearing in a city where the Dominicans had great influence, Reuchlin asked Pope Leo X to transfer the trial to another city. Leo agreed; he referred the matter to the bishop of Speyer, who ruled in Reuchlin’s favor in 1516.

But the controversy was not over. Reuchlin’s enemies asked the pope to overturn the bishop’s decision. In 1520, Leo found Reuchlin guilty and condemned him to silence. He could no longer participate in public debates or discussions. Reuchlin died two years later.

In 1517, as the controversy still raged, Martin Luther, a young professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, nailed a list of 95 theses, or arguments, to his church door. This was what scholars traditionally did when they wanted to spark a debate: they posted their ideas in a public place. The issue Luther wanted to discuss was the pope’s sale of indulgences—cancellations of part or all of the penance due for a person’s sins. Leo X needed money for the renovation of St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome. He had hired Raphael, one of the most famous artists of his time, to enlarge the church and make it grander. Leo planned to raise the funds he needed for the church by selling more indulgences.

Many Christians were outraged by the pope’s actions. Some resented the idea of raising large sums of money to beautify a church in Rome
rather than those in their own cities and towns. Others were troubled by the idea of selling a cancellation of God’s punishment.

Luther was among those who wanted to end such practices. He thought that the sale of indulgences turned God’s forgiveness into an object that could be bought and sold rather than a divine gift to those who sincerely repented. Thus he saw the sale as contrary to the spirit and teaching of the Bible, which for him and his followers was the ultimate religious authority. Indeed, he would later translate the Bible into German so that ordinary people could read it or, if they could not read, at least hear it and understand the meaning of the words. Luther believed that Christians did not need a priest to interpret the Bible or to speak directly with God on their behalf. They could do so themselves.

Luther was not the first Christian to call for reforms in the church. About a hundred years earlier, Jan Hus, a priest from Prague in what is now the Czech Republic, had expressed similar beliefs; in 1415, he was burned as a heretic. Some historians believe that Luther might have suffered a similar fate had the printing press not been invented. By 1520, more than 500,000 copies of his works had been printed and sold—an amazing number at a time when most Europeans still could not read. Because Luther’s ideas were so widely known and discussed, the pope and other religious leaders were reluctant to deal with him the way their predecessors had dealt with Hus and earlier heretics.

Still, in 1520, Leo X issued a bull condemning Luther’s books and speeches as heresy. Before the order went into effect, however, the pope offered Luther an opportunity to recant—that is, to take back his words. Luther responded by burning the paper on which the bull was printed. He was excommunicated in January 1521.

Emperor Charles V, the new head of the Holy Roman Empire, also saw Luther as a serious threat. Charles was particularly troubled by Luther’s insistence that Christians be guided solely by their understanding of the Bible rather than by papal laws. After all, if Christians could ignore the orders of a pope, they could also ignore those of an emperor.

Charles had been chosen as Holy Roman emperor in 1519 at the age of nineteen, after the death of his grandfather Maximilian I. Charles knew very little about the lands he now ruled. He had spent nearly all of his life in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain—lands he inherited from his other grandparents, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. But Charles was very much aware of Luther’s popularity.

In 1521, Charles invited Luther to meet with his diet in the city of Worms. In the Holy Roman Empire, a diet was an assembly of the powerful
princes who had elected, or chosen, the emperor. At the assembly, Charles and the electors urged Luther to recant his teachings. Luther asked for time to think. The next day he appeared before the princes and made a long speech in which he tried to explain his beliefs, only to be interrupted by the young emperor, who asked him to directly answer the question: Will you recant? Luther replied, “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by clear reason, I cannot and will not recant anything, for it is neither safe nor honest to act against one’s conscience.”

The diet declared Luther an outlaw, which meant that no one could offer him help. Even owning his books was now a crime. The declaration did not stop Luther from writing, nor did it reduce his popularity—mainly because Prince John Frederick, the elector of Saxony and one of Luther’s strongest supporters, chose to ignore the diet’s declaration by hiding Luther and his followers from the authorities. Frederick knew he would not be punished; even Charles was reluctant to challenge such a powerful prince.

At first Jews paid little attention to what they saw as a quarrel among Christians. Then, in 1523, Luther published a pamphlet entitled “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew.” It was a response to attacks on his ideas. In the essay, he condemned the way the church treated Jews:

[I]f I had been a Jew and had seen such idiots and blockheads ruling and teaching the Christian religion, I would sooner have become a [pig] than a Christian…
.

I would advise and beg everybody to deal kindly with the Jews and to instruct them in the Scriptures; in such a case we could expect them to come over to us. If, however, we use brute force and slander them, saying that they need the blood of Christians to get rid of their stench and I know not what other nonsense of that kind, and treat them like dogs, what good can we expect of them?… Finally, how can we expect them to improve if we forbid them to work among us and to have social intercourse with us, and so force them into usury?

If we wish to make them better, we must deal with them not according to the law of the pope but according to the law of Christian charity. We must receive them kindly and allow them to compete with us in
earning a livelihood, so that they may have a good reason to be with us and among us and an opportunity to witness Christian life and doctrine; and if some remain obstinate, what of it? Not every one of us is a good Christian.
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Many readers, including some Jews, were surprised by the final lines of the essay, which seemed to show an astonishing degree of religious toleration. Perhaps that’s why some Christians used the essay as “proof” that Luther was a “Judaizer”—a Christian who is attracted to Jewish beliefs and practices. But a more careful reading suggests that Luther seemed to regard Jews in much the way Christians did at the time of the first crusade in 1096. Like them, he saw the conversion of the Jews as the ultimate goal. He, too, viewed “toleration” as little more than enduring the presence of Jews until they became Christians.

But Luther’s ideas about Jews were not exactly the same as those of the crusaders. The crusaders tended to regard Jews as an evil people who had murdered their Lord—an act that required revenge. Luther’s view was more complicated. An early hymn often attributed to Luther contains the following stanza:

Our heinous crime and weighty sin
Nailed Jesus to the cross, God’s true Son.
Therefore, we should not in bitterness scold
You, poor Judas, or the Jewish host.
The guilt is our own
.
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These words express the idea that Jesus died to redeem all people from their sins and therefore that all people are responsible for his death. The idea of Christians assuming any guilt for the crucifixion would not have been accepted by the crusaders.

Many German peasants were inspired by Luther’s teachings about the importance of liberty, of following one’s conscience, and of reason. Some applied his ideas to their own lives. Others turned to the Bible for inspiration. Increasingly, both groups used their newly discovered understanding to challenge the basic unfairness that defined their relationship with princes and other nobles. A chronicler at the time wrote “Calling upon the Gospel as their justification, the common folk rose against their lords in protest against the injustices, taxes, burdens, and the general oppression under which they were forced to live.”
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The peasants did not realize that when Luther wrote about freedom, he was talking about spiritual freedom,
not political or social liberty. And he certainly did not want to overturn the structure of society, which he believed was ordained by God.

In fact, Luther was outraged by this revolt. He felt that the rebels had misunderstood his ideas and misread the Gospels. Like many people both then and now, he feared the violence often associated with protests and rebellions. In 1524, as an uprising began in southwestern Germany, he published a pamphlet called “Against the Murdering Hordes of Peasants,” in which he urged German princes to “strike, throttle and crush” the rebels. He went on, “Let everyone who can smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing is more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.”

Jews listened to the arguments and watched the violence spread farther and farther north with concern. In times of war or political upheaval, Jews had often been falsely accused of ritual murders, kidnappings, and desecrations of the host (see
Chapter 5
). There were 49 accusations of ritual murder alone in the 1400s and 1500s, and more than half of them occurred in German-speaking lands.
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Many Jews feared that this new violence would only add fuel to a smoldering fire. As the conflict grew, a number of Jewish communities asked a
shtadlan
, or advocate, to “keep his eyes open in special care of the community.” The man they chose was Rabbi Joseph ben Gershon, popularly known as Josel of Rosheim.

Josel had a reputation as a man who could get things done. He also understood how precarious life was for Jews in the Holy Roman Empire. In 1470, three of his uncles had been killed after being falsely charged with ritual murder. In 1514, Josel himself and several other Jews were falsely accused of desecrating the host. They were held in prison for several months before they were able to establish their innocence.

Josel’s job as
shtadlan
required not only knowledge of Judaism and Christianity but also skill as a writer and speaker. As early as 1507, Josel had successfully argued for the right of Jews to have free access to all the markets in the Holy Roman Empire by reminding the authorities of the concept of
civibus Romanis
(Roman citizenship). Perhaps his most important quality, however, was his knack for making friends.

In 1525, rebellious peasants in Alsace (then a part of Germany) turned their anger on the Jews and wanted to drive them from Rosheim and other Alsatian towns. Two of Luther’s followers tried but failed to change their minds. Yet somehow Josel succeeded where they had failed. He convinced the peasants to leave the Jews in peace.
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How did Josel persuade the leaders of this peasant group to even meet with him, let alone to consider a change in plans? One of the rebel leaders was Ittel Jörg. He, like Josel, was from Rosheim, so Josel may have appealed to him as a neighbor or even a friend. No one knows exactly what their relationship was, but Josel was able to convince Jörg and the others to talk with him. Although they were unable to keep most of their promises, the peasants did not attack the Jews of Rosheim.