Cokky van Limpt

Reuchlin is still waiting to be rehabilitated

Translation of an article which earlier appeared in Trouw on 30 january 2006.

In his own time the German humanist and jurist Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522) was as famous as Erasmus. He was also a pioneer in the field of Hebrew, the first Christian to introduce the Kabbalah in Germany and a defender of the religious autonomy of the Jews in the face of his own Roman Catholic Church. The Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam is showing an exhibition devoted to this precursor of religious tolerance.

Those who bear the family name of Reuchlin in the Netherlands are most certainly distant relatives. But the German humanist Johann Reuchlin, who died childless, is not very well known here. Unjustly so, it appears, because he was one of the foremost Renaissance humanists north of the Alps.

Contemporaries considered Reuchlin to be on a par with Erasmus. Centuries later Goethe, too, would speak with great respect of Reuchlin. He called him ’Zu seiner Zeit ein Wunderzeichen’, a miracle of his age.

But wheras Erasmus’ reputation continued to shine throughout Europe, Reuchlin’s fame faded.

But this has changed, says Cis van Heertum, one of the curators of the Amsterdam Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, who compiled an exhibition on Reuchlin.

Many studies on Reuchlin have been published in the past fifty years, in England, the US, Australia and of course in Germany, which nurtured a lasting interest in its famous native son.

The Reuchlinforschungsstelle in his birthplace Pforzheim has been very active in the past ’Reuchlinjahr 2005’. Matthias Dall’Asta and Gerald Dörner of the Forschungsstelle have published the first two volumes of Reuchlin’s correspondence and the third volume is under way.

It took Van Heertum about a year to prepare the exhibition. „I even went on a holiday pilgrimage, to Pforzheim and Stuttgart”. The fascination for Reuchlin grew quickly. During a tour of the exhibition she talks about Reuchlin’s life and works with great enthusiasm.

Reuchlin is already an established jurist, when he makes his first Italian journey in 1482 to act as interpreter for his employer Count Eberhard von Württemberg. The Count and Reuchlin, who is fluent in French, Latin, Greek and Italian, are received in Florence by Lorenzo de’ Medici. Reuchlin deepens his Greek studies in Rome, where he is taught by one of the many Greeks who found a haven in Italy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. During his second Italian journey, in 1490, he encounters the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who introduces him to the Jewish Kabbalah.

Van Heertum: „One of the outstanding features of the Renaissance, characteristic for the tolerant climate before the Reformation, is the interest in other religious and philosophical traditions. The Popes, too, were interested in Hermetic philosphy, in Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Orpheus, Kabbalah. In this open climate the first edition of the Talmud was dedicated to Pope Leo X. The same Leo who would also condemn Reuchlin, partly because of his tolerant attitude towards Jews.”

Reuchlin carried the enthusiasm for the ‘prisca theologia’ of Italy to Germany. Prisca theologia stands for a sort of ‘primal theology’, a universal wisdom which was to have preceded the Christian tradition.

The original revelation of this wisdom by the mythical philosopher Hermes Trismegistus was to have culminated via a chain of ‘inspired sages’ like Moses, Plato and Pythagoras in the divine revelation through Christ.

Portrait of ‘Johann Reuchlin’ in Johann Nicolaus Weislinger, Huttenus delarvatus. Konstanz and Augsburg, Martin & Thomas Wagner, 1730

Johann Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica, Hagenau, Thomas Anshelm, 1517

Reuchlin, caught by the Kabbalah, continues his Hebrew studies. He is taught amongst others by the personal physician to the Emperor Ferdinand, Jacob ben Jechiel Loans, later by the physician and Kabbalist Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno.

„In his time there were no University Chairs in Hebrew”, says Van Heertum. Towards the end of his life Reuchlin taught both Hebrew and Greek at the Universities of Ingolstadt and Tübingen.

For Reuchlin Hebrew is the langauge in which God and the angels communicate with chosen men.

He writes about it in De verbo mirifico (1494). His Hebrew grammar, De rudimentis hebraicis (1506) is one of the first Hebrew grammars by a Christian scholar. In 1517, when Luther fastens his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Reuchlin publishes his kabbalistic work De arte cabalistica.

His own conflict with the Church has by then been going on for a number of years. The prelude takes place in 1509, when the converted Jew Johann Pfefferkorn seeks his support in the matter of converting his former co-religionists. One of Pfefferkorn’s proposed methods is to destroy their religious works, amongst which the Talmud.

Van Heertum: „Some Christian scholars also alleged that the Jews corrupted the text of the Bible on purpose to suppress allusions to Christ.”

Pfefferkorn manages to catch the attention of Emperor Maximilian I. The latter institutes a committee in 1510. Four universities are asked for advice, and three individual authorities: the Dominican Inquisitor Jacob Hoogstraeten, the converted Jew Victor von Karben and Johann Reuchlin, one of the few Christian Hebrew specialists at the time.

Reuchlin was the only one to reject Pfefferkorn’s plan. He did hope for the conversion of the Jews (he remained a devoted Christian, after the death of his second wife he is even admitted to an Augustinian brotherhood and was entered as a lay priest in their records). The conversion of the Jews, however, should be effected with arguments and without pressure.

Van Heertum: „As long as they remained Jews, their religion ought to be respected and not compromised, he felt. They were not heretics, because they had never been Christians. Which is a remarkable point of view at the time.” That open and forbearing mind makes Reuchlin a precursor of religious tolerance. „Pope John Paul II called the Jews ’the elder brethren’ of the Christians. Reuchlin in a way said the same this five hundred years earlier.”

The several advisory reports to the committee and to the Emperor were not to be made public, but Pfefferkorn, being a mandatory, knew of their contents. Reuchlin’s advice infuriated him to such an extent that he shortly afterwards attacked him in a pamphlet entitled Handspiegel, which contained numerous insinuations and distortions of parts of Reuchlin’s advice. Reuchlin hits back with his Augenspiegel (1511), in which he refuted Pfefferkorn’s lies.

Van Heertum points to the title-page of the Augenspiegel, the title-page of which is adorned with a pair of spectacles. „Nobody needs to put glasses on my nose, I can very well see without”, was Pfefferkorn’s spiteful comment later.

Reuchlin would have to pay dearly for his Augenspiegel.

The Inquisiteur Van Hoogstraeten and the Dominicans of Cologne brought heresy charges against him in 1513. His case was taken as far as Rome. Pope Leo X called the Augenspiegel „a vexatious book, offensive to pious Christians and inadmissably favourable towards the Jews”. He condemns Reuchlin to eternal silence and payment of the trial costs on 23 June 1520.

Eventually not the books of the Jews are burnt, but the Augenspiegel, which defends the religious freedom of the Jews.

Many thought that the verdict against Reuchlin was so strict because Luther was already harassing Rome at the time. Although Reuchlin himself did not want to be associated with Luther. Luther’s right hand, Philipp Melanchton (Schwarzerdt), was related to Reuchlin. He was given his humanist name Melanchton – Greek for ’black earth’ by Reuchlin. When his relative turned to Luther, the disappointed Reuchlin decided to leave his library not to Melanchton but to the city of Pforzheim.

Reuchlin encountered Erasmus in Stuttgart in 1514, when he is already deep in trouble. Van Heertum: „Compared to Reuchlin, Erasmus was a rationalist and not mystically inclined. Although Erasmus strongly advocated the study of Greek and Latin and also Hebrew, he himself had no affinity for that language. Nor did he feel strongly about the Old Testament, or the Kabbalah.”

Yet Erasmus came to Reuchlin’s defence – as a humanist, and against the Dominicans. He was greatly amused by the satirical writings of Reuchlin and his advocates. But he was also fearful for the cause of humanism and felt that the personal attacks went too far.

In his Praise of Folly Erasmus, too, attacked thelogians, but he never wrote ‘ad hominem’ attacks. After their encounter Erasmus and Reuchlin remained in correspondence.

The Pfefferkorn affair was a great burden for Reuchlin.

He felt abandoned and calumnied. He died in Stuttgart in 1522. „And he has never been rehabilitated by Rome”, says Van Heertum. „The Reuchlin scholars in Pforzheim went to the Vatican library in search for his trial documents, but they could not be found.”

For the Reuchlinforschungsstelle visit: www.reuchlin-forschungsstelle.de