Steven Avery
Administrator
One classic row, where such clashes of principle became entangled with clashes of personality, centred on the lawyer and humanist Greek and Hebrew scholar Johannes Reuchlin and his struggle with Johannes Pfefferkorn of Cologne.
Pfefferkorn was a converted Jew whose zeal for converting his people to Christianity had a destructive agenda. He was disturbed by the current humanist enthusiasm for cabbalistic mystical Jewish literature, regarding such works (quite rightly) as a threat to Christian orthodoxy. He demanded that the Holy Roman Emperor sponsor a campaign of mass destruction of Hebrew religious books. All the theological faculties of the universities whom the Emperor consulted supported Pfefferkorn, but Reuchlin, brought in to give a legal opinion in 1509, was the lone voice in disagreement: he did not mind the confiscations, but wanted the books preserved. Thereafter Reuchlin’s noisy protests against the united academic front supporting the Emperor’s command for confiscating and destroying Jewish writings escalated, until he was put on trial and was eventually sent to Rome to be fined for heresy. Humanists were furious and interpreted this messy feud as being about freedom of thought: a consortium of them produced a biting satire on Reuchlin’s opponents, Letters of obscure men (1515, expanded in the significant year 1517).43
43- M. R. Ackermann, Der Jurist Johannes Reuchlin (Berlin, 1999)
p. 103-104
By his last years Erasmus realized that princes like Henry
VIII and Francois I had cruelly deceived him in their elaborate negotiations
for universal peace, but his belief in the potential of princely power for
good remained undimmed. Princes should even decide theological disputes:
Erasmus was predictably horrified at the treatment of Johannes Reuchlin in
the 1510s, and he was insistent that the Emperor Charles V should take on
the responsibility of silencing Reuchlin’s tormentor Pfefferkorn.
In a letter to his friend Abbot Paul Volz, antiquary and future Lutheran
preacher, written to preface the 1518 edition of the Enchiridion, Erasmus
asked the rhetorical question ‘What is the state (‘civitas’) but a great monas-
tery?’.72 This had important implications. First, it was rejecting the idea that
there was anything distinctive or useful about monasteries: if the city-state
or commonwealth (that is, the whole of society) was to become a monastery,
then the monastic vocation which Erasmus himself loathed and had escaped
from was put firmly in its place, and perhaps his own personal guilt at his
flight was exorcized. Second, in Erasmus’s ideal society everyone was to be
an active citizen of a ‘civitas’ as in the city-states of ancient Greece, and
everyone had a duty to behave as purely as monks were supposed to do
under a monastic rule. Third, the person to make sure that they did so was the prince.
p. 689
Desiderius Erasmus set the tone for those who considered themselves in
Europe’s intellectual vanguard by being a notable hater of Jews. He loaded
onto them all his prejudices about ceremonial religion, plus his deep distrust
of cabbala and other mystical literature. When he savagely attacked Reuch-
lin’s opponent Johannes Pfefferkorn he made much of the fact that Pfeffer-
korn was a converted Jew, implying that this was why he was standing in
the way of truth.33 Criticizing the scholar Wolfgang Capito, the kindly
future reformer of Strassburg who showed a rare positive enthusiasm for
Hebrew studies, Erasmus sneered in 1518: ‘I see [the Jews] as a nation full
of most tedious fabrications who spread a kind of fog over everything:
Talmud, Cabala, Tetragrammaton, Gates of Light - words, words, words.
I would rather have Christ mixed up with Scotus than with that rubbish of
theirs.’ One of the reasons that the great humanist gave for not taking up
his repeated warm invitations to Spain was that the place was full of Jews.34
In this respect Erasmus was at one with Luther, whose theological stress
on Law’s replacement by Gospel was not calculated to make him love the
Jews. Characteristically, Luther can be found saying precisely opposite
things on the subject, and equally true to form, his more generous thoughts
came earlier in his career, in a widely read tract of 1523 that pointed out
the obv ious, That Jesus Christ was born a Jew. Luther's two main motives
in writing this pamphlet had little to do with positive feelings for Jews and
much to do with his wish both to defend himself and attack Catholics: he
wanted first to explain that he was not denying the virgin birth when he had
.
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