Josel of Rosheim - in Bohemia

In Bohemia

While still occupied with the Augsburg articles, Josel had to hurry to the court of Charles V of Brabant and Flanders in order to defend the calumniated German Jews there (1531). In this to him most inhospitable country—for no Jews were living there then—he spent three months, occupying himself, when he was not officially engaged, with Hebrew language studies. Though his life was once in danger, he succeeded in attaining the object of his journey. At the Reichstag of Regensburg (1532) he tried in vain to dissuade the proselyte Solomon Molko from carrying out his fantastic plan to arm the German Jews and to offer them as a help to the emperor in his wars with the Turks. Molko did not follow Josel's advice, and soon after was burned as a heretic. In 1534 Josel went to Bohemia to make peace between the Jews of Prague and those of the small Bohemian town of Horovice (Horowitz). He succeeded in his mission, but the Jews of Horowitz plotted against his life, and he had to seek refuge in the castle of Prague.

In 1535 Josel traveled to Brandenburg-Ansbach to intercede with the margrave Georg in favor of the Jews of Jägerndorf, who had been falsely accused and thrown into prison; and he obtained their freedom. Two years later Josel tried to help the Saxon Jews, who were threatened with expulsion by John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony. He went to Saxony with letters of high recommendation to that prince from the magistrate of Strasbourg and to Martin Luther from the Alsatian reformer Capito. But Luther had become embittered against the Jews on account of their faithfulness to their creed, and he refused every intercession, so that Josel did not obtain even an audience with the elector. But at a meeting in Frankfurt (1539) he found occasion to speak to the prince, whose attention he attracted by refuting, in a public dispute with the reformer Bucer, some spiteful assertions about the Jews. In the same Reichstag Philipp Melanchthon proved the innocence of the thirty-eight Jews who had been burned in Berlin in 1510, and this helped to induce Kurfürst Joachim of Brandenburg to grant Josel's request. The Elector of Saxony then also repealed his order of expulsion.

Josel of Rosheim tried to help the Jews of Saxony. He wrote in his memoir that their situation was "due to that priest whose name was Martin Luther — may his body and soul be bound up in hell!! — who wrote and issued many heretical books in which he said that whoever would help the Jews was doomed to perdition." Michael writes that Josel asked the city of Strasbourg to forbid the sale of Luther's anti-Jewish works; they refused initially, but relented when a Lutheran pastor in Hochfelden argued in a sermon that his parishioners should murder Jews.