Lessons in Contempt: Poul Ræff’s translation and publication in 1516 of Johannes Pfefferkorn’s The Confession of the Jews by Jonathan Adams (review)

In this scholarly edition of an early sixteenth-century Danish translation of a contemporaneous anti-Semitic text, Jonathan Adams takes on the challenging task of rendering comprehensible, if not palatable, both the text and context of a grotesquely distorted account of early modern, western European Judaism. Adams does an excellent job in both areas, particularly in the detailed textual apparatus and linguistic analysis that he provides. His treatment of the historical figures involved in the production of the original text and its translation is also engaging—he tells the story not only of the author Johannes Pfefferkorn, a putative Jewish criminal turned fervent Christian convert, and the translator Poul Ræff, a devoutly Catholic Danish printer willing to use any means necessary to defend his faith on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, but also of one of Pfefferkorn’s most outspoken critics, the scholar Johannes Reuchlin, who objected to Pfefferkorn’s political agitation to ban and burn all Jewish books, as well as the monk Ortwin Gratius and the community of Dominicans in Cologne to which he belonged, who used Pfefferkorn as a tool in their efforts to increase the influence of their order.

The book consists of six chapters, bracketed by an introduction and two appendices. The Introduction begins by reminding readers of the heroic rescue of Denmark’s Jewish population during World War II, then counters with the assertion that “the relationship between the Christian Danes and the Jews has not always been so cordial” (p. 2). The implicit claim seems to be that twentieth-century Christian Danish solidarity with Danish Jews was a historical anomaly, though Adams immediately points out that the text in question was published nearly a century before Jews were allowed to reside in Denmark and raises a number of important questions, all of which he addresses later in the book, about Ræff’s possible motivations for publishing Pfefferkorn’s anti-Semitic propaganda. Adams does not, however, make any attempt to account for the disconnect between Ræff’s publication of Denmark’s first anti-Semitic text and the willingness of Danish Christians to put themselves at risk in order to save their Jewish countrymen four centuries later. A complete history of Christian-Jewish relations in Denmark would, of course, be a book in its own right, but the author’s decision to invoke the rescue of the Danish Jews during World War II merely as a straw man without any further discussion has a rather jarring effect.

In the first chapter, which takes up more than a quarter of the book, Adams provides a detailed overview of the most significant anti-Semitic references in vernacular Danish literature prior to 1516. Since essentially no Jews lived in Denmark during this period, it is not surprising that the body of medieval Danish anti-Semitic literature is not extensive, nor that, as Adams notes, “in Scandinavia, the figure of the Jew was largely a stereotype imported from abroad” (p. 7). Adams demonstrates that the depiction of Jewish figures in medieval Danish devotional and didactic works makes almost no mention of contemporaneous Jewish life or practice; instead, such references tend to depict “’imaginary’ Jews … as examples to Christian audiences of evil, ignorance, and obstinacy” (p. 7). This type of characterization remains strikingly consistent—although descriptions of Jewish abuse of Christ become increasingly graphic, gratuitous, and appalling—from a runic inscription dated ca. 1200 on a baptismal font in Aakirkeby church on the island of Bornholm and St. Birgitta of Sweden’s fourteenth-century Revelations to early sixteenth-century Danish sermons, prayer books, and poetry.

The second chapter contains a wealth of information about and insightful analysis of the historical context...