I. Rare early edition of this anti-Jewish publication first published by Lützenkirchen in the previous year. Hess, a Christian convert, cites excerpts from rabbinic and kabbalistic sources in Hebrew letter, in phonetic transcription and in German translation, to illustrate the truth of Christianity and persuade other Jews to convert. Deutsch writes that Hess and other late 16th century converted German Jews followed on from Pfefferkorn, von Carben and Margaritha who had "laid the foundations for ethnographic writings about the Jews" in Germany and began to widen the range of topics and subjects under discussion, "Christian focus moved from the study of Judaism to the study of Jews and the things they do".
"Hess was born to Jewish parents, probably in the area of the Cologne ecclesiastical province; perhaps, if it can be inferred from his surname, he may have come directly from the Hessen region. In about 1580–1581, he was baptized into the Catholic Church in the town of Brühl, which is situated near Cologne. The Archbishop of Cologne lived in the water fortress there from 1567, and as Hess’s two Christian names suggest, and the dedication of the second work confirms, no less than Archbishop Ernest of Bavaria (1554–1612) and his brother Duke Ferdinand of Bavaria (1550–1608) became his godfathers. Hess dedicated the afore-mentioned Speculum Iudeorum to their nephew, the coadjutor of the Cologne Archdiocese Ferdinand of Bavaria (1577–1650), who was an auxiliary bishop to his uncle. His first work, Flagellum Iudeorum, written in 1598, however, was dedicated to another ecclesiastical authority, namely the Archbishop of Mainz and the Prince-Elector Wolfgang von Dalberg (1538–1601), on whose estates in Fritzlar, Hessen, Hess stayed after his conversion and wrote both polemical works. Perhaps it could have been the city from where Hess came and where he did his medical practice. It was probably sometime after 1584 that he visited Rome, where he was present at the public catechesis of Jews, which was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in a papal bull (Sancta mater ecclesia, 1 September 1584). It cannot be ruled out that it was the missionary effort, which he praised also with his protector the Archbishop of Mainz, that led him to publish two of his texts." (Soukup).
II. The Catholic polemist Georg Witzel's (1501-73) treatise on Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving was first published in Leipzig 1535, this being the fourth and last edition.
"Witzel was an engaging and prolific author who strains conventional categories. A pupil of Martin Luther and an early convert to Lutheranism, he was also one of the first to reject Luther, returning to the church of Rome and devoting a long life to Rome's defence and church reunion... Those bent on tracing the great division that arose in Christianity in the age of the Reformation can study the great liturgist Georg Witzel with profit; throughout his life this priest occupied a perilous position precisely at that line of division" (Dolan).
Provenance: Jesuit inscription at head of title dated 1632. Modern circular bookstamp on fly-leaf of Oliver Locker-Grütjen.
I. VD17 3614:736563X. Y. Deutsch, "Representations of Jews in Sixteenth-Century Germany" in Jews, Judaism and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (2006), pp. 335-336. Daniel Soukup "Holy Curiosity: Circumcision as a Rhetorical Concept in a Bohemian Catholic Sermon from the 18th Century" in Judaica Bohemiae 54 (2019).
II. VD16 W4054. John M. Dolan entry in Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Reformation, vol. 4 pp. 287/8.
