Reuchlin, Johann. Augenspiegel (1511).
“The Rare Book Collection of Frank L. Herz” focuses on the famous Renaissance controversy between the Christian Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin, who introduced the study of Hebrew to Germany, and the anti-Jewish agitator Johannes Pfefferkorn, who was trying to lobby for the destruction of all Jewish books. Many of the 109 books were published in the early 16th century (the earliest in 1501), but some commentaries/reprints date from the 17th century. This controversy was one of the earliest public international debates about who controls access to information and had a substantial influence on the events which led to the Reformation. The core document in the collection is Reuchlin’s “Augenspiegel,” one of the earliest treatises against anti-Semitism and intolerance and an advocacy of humanism. Frank L. Hertz (1908-2006), a passionate collector of Renaissance books, assembled this collection to write a manuscript on the life and thoughts of Johannes Reuchlin and was particularly interested in the question of how Reuchlin defended Jewish rights and fought against the anti-Semitism of the Christian church. The German historian Dr. Sibylle Quack inherited the collection from Frank L. Hertz and donated it to the Library of the Leo Baeck Institute. Private digitization funds were used to digitize 25 seminal 16th-century texts from this collection.
- View the digitized titles of The Rare Book Collection of Frank L. Herz
- View a description of The Rare Book Collection of Frank L. Herz (the link “View record in the classic catalog” leads to an item list (at the bottom of the record) of all the titles in the collection).
- Access the manuscript by Frank L Herz: Johannes Reuchlin’s “Opinion on Jewish Literature”, a landmark on the road to toleration. Southbury, CT, 1978, in the LBI Archives (MS 262)
- 2016 exhibition Burning Words: The Battle of the Books
- Dramatic Reading of Burning Words – A History Play by Peter Wortsman on April 3, 2016 at the Center for Jewish History
- Article: Family of Rare Book Donor Visits LBI
Contact: Renate Evers, Director of Collections, at revers@lbi.cjh.org
