The treatise by Andreas Osiander is one of the few texts in the time of the Reformation defending the Jews against the unjustified charges brought up against them since the Middle Ages. The most perfidious and dangerous of these charges was the blood libel accusation which claimed that the Jews stole Christian children in order to kill them and use their blood for ritual purposes. The Nuremberg Lutheran theologian Osiander (1498-1552) had studied Hebrew with the help of a Jewish teacher and knew the Jewish traditions. In ...
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The treatise by Andreas Osiander is one of the few texts in the time of the Reformation defending the Jews against the unjustified charges brought up against them since the Middle Ages. The most perfidious and dangerous of these charges was the blood libel accusation which claimed that the Jews stole Christian children in order to kill them and use their blood for ritual purposes. The Nuremberg Lutheran theologian Osiander (1498-1552) had studied Hebrew with the help of a Jewish teacher and knew the Jewish traditions. In his text he uses theological and philological arguments in order to demonstrate the absurdity of the anti-Jewish charges. This first commented edition of his text in today's German detects the Biblical and Talmudic sources used by Osiander which lead him to reject the blood libel charge.
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