BUT if the Reformation brought with it Protestant hostility and new tribulations to the outcasts of humanity, it also proved the cause of fresh persecution on the part of Catholicism. Even while the Popes at Rome tolerated or cherished the Jews, their agents abroad, the wandering Friars, and all those soldiers of orthodoxy by whose fanatical zeal the fabric of Papal supremacy had been reared and was maintained, exerted themselves strenuously and furiously to oppose the spreading epidemic of rebellion. In their eyes the Jews were the most implacable enemies of Christ and the eternal promoters of dissent and heresy. It was, therefore, against the Jews that they directed their deadliest shafts. The belief prevailed that the first step to the conquest of Judaism was the cremation of Jewish books, which after the invention of the printing press had multiplied. This new attack on Judaism, as so many other attacks in the past, was led by a renegade Jew, John Pfefferkorn by name, and a butcher by trade--also convicted of burglary and otherwise an unlimited miscreant.[123] ♦1509♦ This gentleman, acting in concert with the Dominicans of Cologne, obtained from the Emperor Maximilian authority to confiscate all Hebrew writings opposed to the Christian faith--a very comprehensive sentence which would have been carried out, but for the efforts made on behalf of literature and commonsense by John Reuchlin, the Father of German Humanism. This great scholar had restored Hebrew and promoted Greek studies in Germany. He was attracted by Hebrew mysticism and had many friends among the Jews. In 1490, whilst on a visit in Italy, he had made the acquaintance of Pico de Mirandola whose Cabbalistic doctrines he embraced and expounded in his work _De Verbo Mirifico_. In 1492 he was employed on a mission to the Emperor at Linz, and it was there that he met Jacob Loans, the Emperor’s Jewish physician, under whose guidance he began to read Hebrew. Although a good Catholic, Reuchlin was a broad-minded man, and his leaning to Cabbalistic theosophy and the esoteric wisdom of the Rabbis, without making him an admirer of the Jews as a people, induced him to defend their books. Summoned by Maximilian to express his opinion on Pfefferkorn’s proposal, Reuchlin did so in a manner which, while saving the Jewish writings from the fire, exposed the defender to the utmost rigour of the disappointed Dominicans; from whose clutches, however, after a severe struggle, he was rescued by the enthusiastic assistance of his brother-humanists.