ABSTRACT
On September 19, 1595, Superintendent Heinrich Heshusius (1556-97) stood before a large crowd in the Hildesheim market square and delivered a blistering sermon against local Jews. These Jews, he argued, “frighten their children with the name Jesus, like the Lord is an evil spirit or a devil.” “What is worse,” he continued, “they publicly slander God, routinely denying the divinity of Jesus, and calling Jesus a bastard, saying that Mary begat him in adultery with Joseph a carpenter.”1 After a half-hour of similar anti-Judaic tirades and accusations, which Heshusius delivered from a special stage built by the city council for the baptism of an adult Jew in the community, Heshusius concluded that Hildesheim’s Jews should be forcibly expelled from the city. His message was clear: those who would not convert to Christianity and the evangelical faith, like the present baptismal candidate, were dangerous subversives who threatened the community by their very presence. Although the acerbic sermon and baptism that followed offer historians a fascinating insight into Hildesheim’s lateReformation struggles-a topic I examine in Chapter 6 below-what is equally significant is that within the space of a few months Heshusius was preaching and publishing again against confessional rivals, and this time in opposition to a much longer list, which included Calvinists, Anabaptists, Turks, Jews, and “papists.” Most significantly, Heshusius called a local group of Jesuit fathers “rabble-rousers” and “Esauiter,” the second term being a derogatory reference to Jacob’s rebellious older brother Esau in Genesis Chapter 25. Just as he had done with the Jews, Heshusius tried to expel the Jesuits in Hildesheim by lobbying fellow pastors, the mayor, the town council, and local guilds (all of whom agreed with him) and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, who refused the request, and in fact demanded that the Jesuits be left where they were according to the terms of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg.2
