Over and above the similarity of contents, with all the dissimilarity of method, there is another reason why one thinks of the works of Aboab and Ibn Habib together. Though Aboab wrote considerably before Ibn Habib, their books appeared for the first time in print almost simultaneously. Ibn Habib’s book came out as the author compiled it; in point of fact it was the son who completed the publication, because Jacob Ibn Habib died while the earlier sections of his work were passing through the press. If, as seems probable, the Lamp was first kindled in 1511, or 1514, and the Well began to pour its fertilizing streams in 1516, Aboab had the start; but these dates are uncertain. All that we can state with confidence is that both books appeared in print quite early in the sixteenth century, not later than 1516. The earliest editions of both books are scarce, and from a simple cause. Few copies have survived because the owners of the copies wore them out. Read and re-read, thumbed by many hands, by “the Jewish woman, the workman, the rank and file of Israel,” the copies were used up by those who treated books as something to hold in the hand and not to keep on a shelf out of reach. My own edition of the Candelabrum, that of Amsterdam (1739), boasts justly of the excellent paper on which it is printed. None the less does this copy, too, show signs of frequent perusal. The best books were the worst preserved, because they were the best treated. What better treatment of a book can there be than to read it so often that its pages no longer hold together, its margins fray, and its title-page suffers mutilation?
“LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN”
Does ridicule kill? If it did, then, as fools are always with us, folly would ever possess the flavor of novelty. And yet to-day’s fool looks and does very much the same as yesterday’s, even though wise men laughed their fill at the latter. Folly, one rather must admit, is immortal. Wise men come and wise men go, but fools go on forever. Wisdom can at most make the fool look foolish for a while.
At rare intervals, however, history offers an example of the slaying power of satire. Idolatry was killed by ridicule. Some people—among them Renan, who ought to have known better—deny to ancient Israel a sense of humor. But who can doubt that the most effective of the attacks on idolatry were Elijah’s sarcastic invective against the Baal of the populace (I Kings 18. 27) and Isaiah’s grim yet droll picture of the carpenter taking some timber and using part of it to bake his bread and the rest to make his god (Isaiah 44. 15)? It is far from our purpose to recite the success, in after ages, of less inspired efforts by satirists. Satire has been termed the “chief refuge of the weak”; it has certainly been a weapon by which one, standing alone, has often equalized the odds against him. It would be delightful to give illustrations of the methods by which the various warriors of the pen have used their sword: to contrast a pagan Juvenal and a Hebrew Kalonymos—both writing in Rome, but with more than a millennium between them—or to revel in the feats of Rabelais’ Gargantua (1534), Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1656), and Voltaire’s eighteenth century Candide. We are now concerned with a work and a group of authors who first made Europe laugh in 1515. Ulrich von Hutten and his associates, in their “Letters of Obscure Men” (Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum), did just the right thing at the right moment. What they attempted, what they accomplished, will now be told. Cervantes, tilting against the wearisome nonsense of the later romances of chivalry, Pascal exposing—even though he did it unfairly—the dangers of casuistry, Voltaire plumbing the shallow optimism of Leibnitz, served good ends. But far higher than these was the cause triumphantly upheld by the Letters of Obscure Men. The cause was humanism, another name for intellectual freedom and width of view.
Briefly put, at the crisis in the fortune of the new learning in Europe, when the struggle was at its sharpest between ignorance and enlightenment, the vindication of the Talmud became identified with the overthrow of intellectual bigotry. Pfefferkorn wished to burn the Talmud. He was a shady character, and from his first condition as a bad Jew became, in Erasmus’ phrase, a worse Christian (“ex scelerato Judaeo sceleratissimus Christianus”). Pfefferkorn hurled against his former coreligionists the usual missiles of abuse. Why is it that the converted Jew is so often a bitter assailant of Judaism? Some answer that it is because the renegade must prove that he forsook something execrable. Others would have it that intrinsic vileness of character is responsible. But is it not more probable that apostate virulence is due simply to ignorance? And this is the more obnoxious when the animosity takes the form of an attack on literature. “Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in matters of literature, a crime of the first order.” So said Joubert, and the remark can be freely illustrated from the Pfefferkorns. When a real scholar leaves the synagogue, he is rarely among the anti-Semites. Daniel Chwolson and Paul Cassel in their career as Judæo-Christians were champions of the Jewish cause against such very libels as a Pfefferkorn would circulate. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the defence of Judaism was in equally scholarly hands.
But it was not on Jews, whether by race or religion, that reliance was then placed. Reuchlin—as all the world knows—saw no reason why the Talmud should be condemned, and he expressed his opinion in clear terms. Reuchlin, be it remembered, was the most learned German of his age. “By a singular combination of taste and talents this remarkable man excelled at once as a humanist and a man of affairs, as a jurist and a mystic, and, above all, as a pioneer among Orientalists, so that it has been said of him, enthusiastically but not unjustly, that he was the ‘first who opened the gates of the East, unsealed the Word of God, and unveiled the sanctuary of Hebrew wisdom.’” (This sentence is quoted from the Introduction to Mr. Francis Griffin Stokes’ admirable Latin and English edition of the Letters, to which I cordially commend my readers.) Pfefferkorn rallied to his side the whole force of the Dominican organization. The issue was long uncertain.
Truth is usually unable to meet falsehood on equal terms; the genuine, for the most part, cannot soil its hands with the foul ammunition of imposture. Sometimes, however, truth is less squeamish. And so, when Pfefferkorn was engaged in slinging slime at Reuchlin, there was suddenly hurled at his own person an avalanche of mud, under which he and his party sank buried from heel to head. The Letters are remorseless in their personalities. But if it be impossible to deny their cruelty and even their occasional coarseness, yet their fame depends less on these scurrilous incidentals than on the essential truth on which they are based.
It is the highest merit of satire that it shall not be too obvious. Many who read Gulliver’s Travels enjoy it as a tale, and may not even realize that Swift was lampooning the society and institutions of his day. So long as this element in satire is not too subtle, it adds enormously to the merit of the performance. One recalls such stories as the Descent of Man, by Edith Wharton. The hero of that tale is an eminent zoologist, who is moved by the popularity of pseudo-scientific defences of religion to publish an elaborate skit. But he is so successful in concealing his object, that his “Vital Thing” is mistaken for a supreme example of the very type of work he is lashing. The Letters of Obscure Men avoided this danger. They hit the happy mean. They purported to be written by one obscurantist to another, and while the educated at once saw through the dodge, the illiterate (including Pfefferkorn himself) took them seriously. Within a few months of the appearance of the first series of the Letters, Sir Thomas More (in 1616) wrote to Erasmus: “It does one’s heart good to see how delighted everybody is with the ‘Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum’; the learned are tickled by their humor, while the unlearned deem their teachings of serious worth.” The foes of humanism—the new learning—are left to expose themselves, in the confidential correspondence which members of the gang are made to carry on in the most excruciatingly funny dog-Latin. As Bishop Creighton put it, they are made to “tell their own story, to wander round the narrow circle of antiquated prejudices which they mistook for ideas, display their grossness, their vulgarity, their absence of aim, their laborious indolence, their lives unrelieved by any touch of nobility.” No wonder Europe laughed, as it did in the following century at the self-revelation of obscuranists in Pascal’s Provincial Letters, obviously inspired by the work before us. (Compare Stokes, Epistolae, etc., pp. xlvi, xlix). It is not the least amusing feature in the comedy that Richard Steele actually regarded the Letters of Obscure Men as the correspondence between “some profound blockheads” who wrote “in honor of each other, and for their mutual information in each other’s absurdities.” (Stokes, p. viii).
This fate—of being taken seriously—befell, in a particularly amusing way, what is perhaps the most amusing of all the Letters. I refer to the second epistle in the first series. “Magister Johannes Pelzer” sends his greeting to “Magister Ortwin Gratius,” and asks help on a matter which gives him “great searchings of heart.” He tells Ortwin how, being lately at a Frankfort fair, he took off his cap and saluted two men, who seemed reputable and looked like Doctors of Divinity. But his companion then nudged him and cried: “God-a-mercy, what doest thou? Those fellows are Jews.” Magister Pelzer goes on to argue with delicious seriousness as to the nature of his sin, and begs his correspondent’s help to decide whether it was “mortal or venial, episcopal or papal.” Now when Schudt came to compile his farrago of attacks on the Jews, he actually included this Frankfort incident as an authentic example of “Jewish insolence.” It was indeed painful for such as Schudt to be unable to discern any difference between a Jew and a gentleman.
How the authors of the Letters would have chuckled over Steele and Schudt! Reuchlin had struck a decisive blow in behalf of the Jewish contribution to European culture. The Letters drove the blow home. But, after all, the fools were not permanently suppressed. No, ridicule rarely slays folly outright. It scotches the snake, and then in a favorable environment the reptile revives. Just as folly is perennial, so should the lash be kept in constant repair. Anti-Semitism ought not to be allowed to go on its way in our age unscathed by ridicule. We badly need a new Ulrich von Hutten to give us a modern series of Letters of Obscure Men.