370 A History of Judaism
common to depict the story of the book of Esther in scrolls used for the
celebration of Purim, and highly ornate marriage contracts (ketubot )
were often decorated with fine illustrations of wedding scenes, some-
times copied widely through engravings.
It is significant that in London the architecture of Bevis Marks was
that of non- conformist Christians, since Jews sometimes identified in
social terms with minorities within a divided Christian culture. In the
Habsburg domains, Jews were careful to be seen as loyal to the Catholic
regime, but as the Catholic Church fragmented with challenges to its
interpretation of the Bible, Judaism was perceived by some Protestants,
including Christian humanists such as Reuchlin and Erasmus, and by
the leaders of Reformation within the Church, as a repository of an
older scriptural truth. The ‘battle of the books’ from 1507 to 1521
between Reuchlin and Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Jew who had converted
to Christianity in c. 1504 in Cologne, placed attitudes to the Talmud at
the centre of controversy between reactionary and liberal trends within
the Catholic Church. Pfefferkorn, coached by the Dominicans of
Cologne, attacked the Talmud and demanded that the emperor Maxi-
milian authorize the confiscation of all Jewish books apart from the
Bible. When he was opposed by Reuchlin, the two sides engaged in a
pamphlet war of extraordinary vitriol and a great deal of personal
abuse on both sides. It was not accidental that Martin Luther’s theses
were posted in Wittenberg in 1517 at the height of the controversy, in
which the obscurantism of elements in the Church had been so effect-
ively revealed by Reuchlin’s supporters, who included many of the
leading humanists of the day. Both Reuchlin (who intervened to help the
Jews of Pforzheim) and Luther originally condemned the persecution of
the Jews as well as the confiscation of rabbinic literature. But from the
mid- 1520s Luther grew more hostile to contemporary Jews, as they
failed to accept Christianity even when presented in his enlightened
form, and in the three years before his death in 1546 he published a ser-
ies of pamphlets, starting with On the Jews and their Lies in 1543,
which urged that the Jews be banished or kept in subjection. Ultimately
the Lutheran Church he founded retained as great an abhorrence of
Judaism as the Catholicism from which he had broken away. Luther’s
antagonism may have been influenced by his desire to oppose Judaizing
among such Protestant sects as the Sabbatarians, whom he condemned
unequivocally.^10
Luther’s younger contemporary, John Calvin, was as vituperative
about Jews as Luther was, but he had little contact with real Jews in the