1  ---
 2  aliases:
 3    - The Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn Affair
 4  citekey: TheModernHermeticist2022
 5  tags:
 6    - "#bibnote"
 7  ---
 8  
 9  > [!book] Bibliography
10  > The Modern Hermeticist, dir. 2022. _The Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn Affair_. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5XbslL06TU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5XbslL06TU).  
11  
12  >[!meta]- Metadata  
13  > **FirstDirector**:: The Modern Hermeticist  
14  ~  
15  > **Title**:: The Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn Affair  
16  > **Year**:: 2022  
17  > **Citekey**:: TheModernHermeticist2022  
18  > **itemType**:: videoRecording
19  
20  ___
21  
22  >[!focus] Goal (Selection Intent):
23  >- To support the chapter on the battle of the books in [[r.Jones2020|The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History]]
24  
25  >[!eye] Overview
26  > - 
27  
28  ## Notes
29  
30  - Emperor Maximilian [](b.Jones2020.md) to be returned, which was met with elation from the Jews
31  - Reuchlin's response to the emperor ends up in the hands of [[1150.6a Johannes Pfefferkorn]], sparking a "war fought with ink and quill, press and pamphlet".
32  - This debate occurred in a very public manner, with both sides leveraging the newly invented printing press.
33  	- Reuchlin believed some Jewish texts should be destroyed i.e. [[Sefer Toledot Yeshu]], which has many blasphemies, but compared to the larger body of Jewish writings it was miniscule.
34  - Reuchlin claimed that although the Jewish books might have conflicted with Christianity, they were true according to their own faith (relativism)
35  - Pfefferkorn gained the favor of the Dominicans and Arnold von Tongern who aimed to suppress the spread of Reuchlin's pamphlets which slandered Pfrefferkorn and his movement
36  	- This spawned the 2 factions across Europe, Arnoldist vs Reuchlinist
37  	- **[[Noise suppression in the information age]]**
38  - Scholarly bickering ensued back and forth and got so out of control that an international council was assembled by the Medici Pope Leo X, who demanded bickering cease. The Pope was ignored and the conflict grew, escalating to the point where a group of Arnoldists killed Reuchlinists.
39  	- This controversy split apart Europe's leading intellectuals, pitting them against each other
40  	- These tensions laid the groundwork for humanist-scholastic relations leading up to the Protestant Reformation
41  - A compilation of satirical letters was published titled The _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_ (Letters of Obscure Men) in support of Reuchlin, which mocked Christian theologians who thought that blasphemous Jewish books should be burned. It contained slanderous accusations such as suggesting Hardwin von Grätz was intimate with Pfefferkorn's wife. The book ended up being widely banned and Pope Leo X excommunicated the authors for implying that burning Jewish books was the a view held by most Christian scholars.^[Falk, A., "An Indefatigable Lobbyist", in _A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews_ (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), pp. [514–518](https://books.google.com/books?id=z10-Xz9Kno4C&pg=PT514&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false)]
42  - The controversy began to die out once public interest shifted to Luther's Reformation, which Reuchlin was grateful for since he finally had some peace.
43  	- He wrote the Christian interpretation of the Kabbalah and dedicated it to Pope Leo X
44  - Reuchlin was appointed a professor of Hebrew at the University of Wittenberg, only to be replaced by his nephew and protégé, Luther collaborator Phillip Melanchthon.
45  - The pope was convinced that the Talmud was not a threat to the Church, so with his approve and the help of the printing press, it made a big comeback and was quickly integrated into Christian libraries throughout Europe.
46  - Daniel Bomberg, the son of a merchant, was widely regarded as the most important printer of Jewish literature. He was the first to print all 12 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud with rabbinical commentaries.
47  - Thus the battle of the books affair finally came to a close in 1520 when the pope condemned Reuchlin's Augenspiegel, a pamphlet written in defense of Jewish books which was the centerpiece of the whole battle of the books affair.
48  	- Pfefferkorn essentially disappeared from history once the Reformation was in motion and dies in 1523, just one year after Reuchlin's death in 1522. 
49  - Reuchlin's contribution to western esotericism and occult philosophy cannot be understated. His work was studied diligently by this highly influential occult writer [[Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa]], who compiled a complete survey of Reuchlin's Hebrew way of synthesizing the Kabbalah with Christian theology.
50  
51  
52  ___
53  >[!sticky]+ Notes Cited
54  >```dataview 
55  TABLE WITHOUT ID file.link AS "Links to this page" FROM "" WHERE contains(file.outlinks, this.file.link)
56  >```