“The truth will rise from the earth and drive away the darkness.” This is what Johannes Reuchlin, diplomat, top lawyer, writer of comedies and one of the great scholars of Europe wrote in a letter shortly before his death. 500 years ago, on June 30, 1522, he died of yellow fever in Stuttgart at the age of 67.
Reuchlin’s grave in the Leonhardskirche there is inscribed in the three languages that the man passionately initiated the maintenance of: Latin, Greek and Hebrew. In the case of the latter two languages, this was a pioneering act, for even the educated theologians of the Middle Ages had only studied their Bible in the Latin translation of St. Jerome, not in the two original languages. Johannes Reuchlin said that although he worshiped Jerome, the truth was more divine when it came to textual criticism. And so he learned Hebrew from Jewish scholars, such as Jakob ben Jechiel Loans, the personal physician of Emperor Friedrich III. This is how Reuchlin became the founder of Christian Judaism.
That with the light of truth was such a thing in the era of the Renaissance and the religious disputes. which truth then? And with the triumph of the new media, in this case the printing press, both were brought into the world at the same time: humanism and hate speech.
A look at the Museum Johannes Reuchlin Pforzheim – it is built on the site of the destroyed library of the local castle and collegiate church.
(Photo: Winfried Reinhardt/Pforzheim Cultural Office)
Two years before his death, in 1520, the Vatican in Rome had finally attested to Reuchlin: his plea for the preservation of Jewish writings was a “scandalous book, illegally pro-Jewish and therefore objectionable to pious Christians”. The author must remain silent in the matter forever and bear the legal costs. Because a certain Martin Luther was causing trouble in Germany, Rome now wanted to set an example and show the limits of tolerance.
At the beginning of the century, this had been preceded by anti-Semitic pamphlets by a Cologne convert who had called for the destruction of Jewish books and had already organized them – in other words, the holy books were taken away from the already harassed Jewish communities. Along with other scholars and faculties, Reuchlin was asked by the emperor in 1510 for an expert opinion: “whether all the books of the Jews should be taken, disposed of and burned”. He was the only one who spoke out against the destruction of books.
Under the title “Augenspiegel” – the glasses symbol stood for clarity – Reuchlin argued threefold. Firstly, theologically: the Jewish expository writings are part of the history of salvation and are therefore also important for understanding the Old Testament for Christianity. “Our apostle Paul learned all Jewish wisdom and studied with the rabbis.”
Secondly, Reuchlin argued legally: According to Roman law, the Jews enjoyed legal protection as citizens of the empire, so no violent mission was permitted, they were protected by the protection of property and freedom of religion. The third argument was humanistic: in the spirit of “restoring the sciences”, sources must be preserved. Also the pagan writings of antiquity would not be destroyed, even if, from a Christian point of view, there were much worse things in it.
That was a brave position, a minority opinion, which brought Reuchlin a lot of trouble. One shouldn’t make him a committed philo-Semite because of this: As a Christian, he saw the Jews as wrong about the Messiah, and he shared the prejudices against them that were typical of the time. The Zionist and writer Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s friend and editor, also made this clear in his thorough Reuchlin biography, which appeared in 1965 and has now been republished in the Brod work edition. “The fate of the Jews in Germany,” writes Brod, “was then on the razor’s edge.” And adds sarcastically: “That’s actually almost always the case.”
Johannes Reuchlin: Advice on whether one should take all the books from the Jews, do away with them and burn them. Early New High German/New High German. Edited and translated by Jan-Hendryk de Boer. Reclam Verlag, Ditzingen 2022. 173 pages, 6.80 euros.
But Max Brod, whose brother was murdered in Auschwitz, also acknowledges that, unlike most of his contemporaries, Johannes Reuchlin “learned a great deal” about Judaism and praises “the special mildness and righteousness of Reuchlin’s character.” Reuchlin’s curiosity about Jewish mysticism was also unusual: in his trialogue “De arte Cabbalistica” (1517) he traced the relationship to early secret teachings – a Christian reading of the Kabbalah, but full of respect for the search for symbolically hidden divine revelation in all religions. An interest that Reuchlin shared with the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola, whom he had met in Florence. The German-Israeli religious historian Gershom Scholem recognized these merits when he received the Reuchlin Prize in Germany in 1969.
But these were things with which one could not become a national hero in Germany. “He was a mediator in every respect,” says Christoph Koch, who built the Reuchlin Museum, which opened in 2008, as a monument conservator in Reuchlin’s hometown of Pforzheim and acts as “Reuchlin Commissioner”. Although he helped facilitate the educational revolution that made German Protestantism great with all the consequences for national culture, Reuchlin did not really fit into the heroic Luther story. He did not join the Wittenberg reformers, but remained Catholic, although he recommended his pupil and distant relative Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s comrade-in-arms, as the first professor of Greek studies in Wittenberg and gave him his Greek name (“Melanchthon” for “Schwarzerdt”). However, he was not remembered as a real martyr of the Enlightenment either, because he was not burned at the stake.
Thomas Kaufmann: The printers. How the Luther generation unleashed the first media revolution. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2022. 350 pages, 28 euros.
In addition, Reuchlin’s defense of the Jews was, to put it mildly, not particularly prominent in the history of national Protestant reception for a long time – Luther’s late anti-Semitic writings, which appeared twenty years after Reuchlin’s death, were also readily overlooked. Reuchlin’s scholarly writings and Hebrew grammars, on the other hand, remained obscure to most, even though he was occasionally successful with one of his comedies (“Henno”), which was originally written in Latin.
Max Brod: Johannes Reuchlin and his fight. A historical monograph. With an afterword by Karl E. Grözinger. Wallstein Verlag, Goettingen 2022.
And today? In Stuttgart there are a number of in the commemorative year eventsbut especially holds Pforzheim the legacy of his most famous son alive. phorcensis called himself Reuchlin, coming from Pforzheim. In the city between Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, which was particularly badly damaged in the Second World War, Reuchlin’s birthplace can no longer be located exactly, but the Reuchlin Museum was cleverly built into the place of the destroyed library as an annex to the collegiate church. Next door are the graves of the Margraves of Baden, whose court later moved to Karlsruhe. On the 500th anniversary of his death scientific congress instead of; in a city with a high proportion of immigrants, Reuchlin is otherwise tried less as a philologist than as an advocate of multilingualism, curiosity and tolerance. In the jewelery museum – Pforzheim specializes in precision mechanics – Reuchlin’s passion for speech jewelery is revealed celebrated.
And above all hovers a dream of the humanistic way of life, which Johannes Reuchlin once described in a letter: “that all divine and human things are disputed impartially with cups always full until late at night, following the example of Aristotle”.