Unhappily many of his contemporaries thought that the first step to the conversion of the Jews was to take from them their books. This view had for its chief advocate the bigoted Johann Pfefferkorn (1469-1521), who secured the ear of the emperor Maximilian. In 1510 Reuchlin was summoned in the name of the emperor to give his opinion on the suppression of the Jewish books. He proposed that the emperor should decree that for ten years there be two Hebrew chairs at every German university for which the Jews should furnish books. The other experts proposed that all books should be taken from the Jews ; and, as the emperor still hesitated, the bigots threw on Reuchlin the whole blame of their ill success. Pfefferkorn circulated at the Frankfort fair of 1511 a gross libel (Handspiegel wider and gegen die Juden) declaring that Reuchlin had been bribed; and Reuchlin retorted as warmly in the Augenspiegel (i5i I). His adversary's next move was to declare the Augenspiegel a dangerous book; the Cologne theologi cal faculty, with the inquisitor Jakob von Hochstraten (d. 1527), took up this cry, and on Oct. 7, 1512, they obtained an imperial order confiscating the Augenspiegel. Reuchlin was timid, but he was honesty itself. He was willing to receive corrections in theology, which was not his subject, but he could not unsay what he had said ; and as his enemies tried to press him into a corner he met them with open defiance in a Defensio contra Calumniatores (1513). The universities were now appealed to for opinions, and were all against Reuchlin. Even Paris (August 1514) condemned the Augenspiegel, and called on Reuchlin to recant. Meantime a
formal process had begun at Mainz before the grand inquisitor, but Reuchlin by an appeal succeeded in transferring the question to Rome. Judgment was given in July 1516; and then, though the decision was really for Reuchlin, the trial was simply quashed. The result had cost Reuchlin years of trouble and no small part of his modest fortune, but the obscurantists received a crushing blow in Germany. No party could survive the ridicule that was poured on them in the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum.
Reuchlin did not long enjoy his victory in peace. In 1519 Stutt gart was visited by famine, civil war and pestilence. Reuchlin sought refuge in Ingolstadt and taught there for a year as pro fessor of Greek and Hebrew. He was now called to Tubingen and again spent the winter of 1521-22 teaching in his own sys tematic way. He died at the baths of Liebenzell on June 3o, 1522, leaving in the history of the new learning a name only second to that of his younger contemporary Erasmus.
See L. Geiger, Johann Reuchlin (1871), which is the standard biography ; also D. F. Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten; S. A. Hirsch, "John Reuchlin, the Father of the Study of Hebrew among the Christians," and his "John Pfefferkorn and the Battle of Books," in his Essays (London, 1905). Some interesting details about Reuchlin are given in the autobiography of Conrad Pellicanus (q.v.), which was not published when Geiger's book appeared. See also the article on Reuchlin in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopidie, and literature there cited.