This fate--of being taken seriously--befell, in a particularly amusing way, what is perhaps the most amusing of all the _Letters_. I refer to the second epistle in the first series. “Magister Johannes Pelzer” sends his greeting to “Magister Ortwin Gratius,” and asks help on a matter which gives him “great searchings of heart.” He tells Ortwin how, being lately at a Frankfort fair, he took off his cap and saluted two men, who seemed reputable and looked like Doctors of Divinity. But his companion then nudged him and cried: “God-a-mercy, what doest thou? Those fellows are Jews.” Magister Pelzer goes on to argue with delicious seriousness as to the nature of his sin, and begs his correspondent’s help to decide whether it was “mortal or venial, episcopal or papal.” Now when Schudt came to compile his farrago of attacks on the Jews, he actually included this Frankfort incident as an authentic example of “Jewish insolence.” It was indeed painful for such as Schudt to be unable to discern any difference between a Jew and a gentleman. How the authors of the _Letters_ would have chuckled over Steele and Schudt! Reuchlin had struck a decisive blow in behalf of the Jewish contribution to European culture. The _Letters_ drove the blow home. But, after all, the fools were not permanently suppressed. No, ridicule rarely slays folly outright. It scotches the snake, and then in a favorable environment the reptile revives. Just as folly is perennial, so should the lash be kept in constant repair. Anti-Semitism ought not to be allowed to go on its way in our age unscathed by ridicule. We badly need a new Ulrich von Hutten to give us a modern series of Letters of Obscure Men. DE ROSSI’S “LIGHT OF THE EYES” Towards dusk, on a mid-November Friday in the year 1570, Azariah de Rossi descended from his own apartments to those of his married daughter. It was in Ferrara, and for some hours past earth-tremblings had made people anxious. Within an hour of his lucky visit to his child De Rossi’s abode was wrecked.