Johannes Pfefferkorn - Anti-Jewish Writings

Anti-Jewish Writings

Pfefferkorn became an assistant to the prior of the Dominican friar order at Cologne, Jacob van Hoogstraaten, and under the auspices of the Dominicans published several libelous pamphlets in which he tried to demonstrate that Jewish religious writings were hostile to Christianity. Pfefferkorn had a limited knowledge of the subject.

In Der Judenspiegel (Cologne, 1507), he demanded that the Jews should give up the practice of usury, work for their living, attend Christian sermons, and do away with the Books of the Talmud. On the other hand, he condemned the persecution of the Jews as an obstacle to their conversion, and, in a pamphlet, Warnungsspiegel, defended them against charges of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes. In Warnungsspiegel, he professed to be a friend of the Jews, and desired to introduce Christianity among them for their own good. He urged them to convince the Christian world that the Jews do not need Christian blood for their religious rites and advocated seizing the Talmud by force from them. "The causes which hinder the Jews from becoming Christians," he wrote, "are three: first, usury; second, because they are not compelled to attend Christian churches to hear the sermons; and third, because they honor the Talmud."

Bitterly opposed by the Jews on account of this work, he virulently attacked them in: Wie die blinden Jüden ihr Ostern halten (1508); Judenbeicht (1508); and Judenfeind (1509). In his third pamphlet he contradicted what he had written earlier and insisted that every Jew considers it a good deed to kill, or at least to mock, a Christian; therefore he deemed it the duty of all true Christians to expel the Jews from all Christian lands; if the law should forbid such a deed, they do not need to obey it: "It is the duty of the people to ask permission of the rulers to take from the Jews all their books except the Bible...." He preached that Jewish children should be taken away from their parents and educated as Catholics. In conclusion he wrote: "Who afflicts the Jews is doing the will of God, and who seeks their benefit will incur damnation."

In the fourth pamphlet, Pfefferkorn declared that the only way to get rid of the Jews was either to expel or enslave them; the first thing to be done was to collect all the copies of the Talmud found among the Jews and to burn them.