Johannes Pfefferkorn

[1][2] Pfefferkorn actively preached against the Jews and attempted to destroy copies of the Talmud, and engaged in a long running pamphleteering battle with humanist Johann Reuchlin.

[4] In Der Judenspiegel (Cologne, 1507), he demanded that the Jews should give up the practice of what the Church deemed usury (lending money against interest), work for their living, attend Christian sermons, and do away with the books of the Talmud.

[3] On the other hand, he condemned the persecution of the Jews as an obstacle to their conversion, and, in a pamphlet, Warnungsspiegel,[4] defended them against charges of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes.

"[4] 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).

[3] Through the help of the Elector and Archbishop of Mainz, Uriel von Gemmingen, the Jews asked the emperor to appoint a commission to investigate Pfefferkorn's accusations.

[3] In 1520, Pope Leo X declared Reuchlin guilty with a condemnation of Augenspiegel, and Pfefferkorn wrote as an expression of his triumph Ein mitleidliche Klag (Cologne, 1521).

[3] Diarmaid MacCulloch writes in his book The Reformation: A History (2003)[5] that Desiderius Erasmus was another opponent of Pfefferkorn, on the grounds that he was a converted Jew and therefore could not be trusted.