But all those that are baptized are not converts. Martin Luther was too shrewd not to perceive the distinction. How he would have dealt with such hypocrites he tells us with charming frankness: “If a Jew, not converted at heart, were to ask baptism at my hands, I would take him on to the bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him into the river; for these wretches are wont to make a jest of our religion. Yet, after all, water and the Divine Word being the essence of baptism, a Jew, or any other, would be none the less validly baptized, that his own feelings and intentions were not the result of faith.”[117] Yet, even such cases of pseudo-conversion were rare. The Jews, as a sect, far from yielding to the efforts of the Christians to make them embrace Christianity, entertained hopes of the Christians embracing Judaism. The Protestant’s devotion to the study of the Hebrew language, and the extraordinary vogue which Cabbalistic mysticism had obtained among the early Reformers through Reuchlin’s books, encouraged this notion. But Luther assures them that “their hope is futile. ’Tis they must accept our religion, and of the crucified Christ, and overcome all their objections, especially that of the alteration of the Sabbath, which sorely annoys them, but ’twas ordered by the apostles, in honour of the Lord’s resurrection.”[118] It was in vain that Luther changed his ground, and, abandoning his attacks on the religious prejudices of the Jews, turned his artillery against their racial pride, and endeavoured to prove that their vaunted purity of blood was a myth: “During the 70 years when they were captives at Babylon, they were so confused and mingled together, that even then they hardly knew out of what tribe each was descended. How should it be now, when they have been so long hunted and driven about by the Gentiles, whose soldiers spared neither their wives nor their daughters, so that now they are, as it were, all bastards, none of them knowing out of what tribe he is?”[119] Luther knew not that the sentiment of nationality depends far more on community of interests and aspirations, of memories of the past and hopes for the future, than on any physiological similarity of blood. Nevertheless, despite his occasional successes, Luther himself was aware of the futility of his endeavours. He sorrowfully recognises the impossibility of reconciling Jew and Gentile: “In the porch of a Church at Cologne there is a statue of a dean, who, in the one hand holds a cat, and in the other a mouse. This dean had been a Jew, but was baptized, and became a Christian. He ordered this statue to be set up after his death, to show, that a Jew and a Christian agree as little as a cat and a mouse. And truly they hate us Christians as they do death.”[120]