Sigismund. When a Jew at the Emperor's court desired,
with many prayers, to become a Christian, he was at last ad-
mitted to baptism, and afterwards was tested, but prematurely
and beyond his strength. For immediately after his baptism
the Emperor had two fires built, calling the one the fire of
the Christians, the other the fire of the Jews, and bade the bap-
tized Jew choose in which of them he preferred to be burned.
"For," said he, "you are now baptized and holy, and it is hardly
likely that you will ever become a better man than you now
are." The miserable man showed that his faith was either
pretended or weak by choosing the fire of the Jews; as a Jew
he leaped into it, and as a Jew he burned. The story of the
will of the baptized Jew of Cologne[1] is also well known, and
there are many others.
But I think the cause of this ill-repute is not so much the
Jews' obstinancy and wickedness, as rather their absurd and
asinine ignorance and the wicked and shameless life of popes,
priests, monks and universities. They give the Jews not a
single spark of light or warmth, either in doctrine or in Chris-
tian life, but, on the contrary, they alienate the Jews' hearts
and consciences by the darkness and the errors of their own
traditions and by examples of the worst possible morals, and
only impart to them the name of Christian, so that you may
justly suppose that Christ's word[2] was spoken to them, "Woe
unto you, scribes and Pharisees, who compass sea and land to
make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold
more the child of hell than yourselves." They find fault with
the Jews because they only pretend to be converted, but they
do not find fault with themselves because they only pretend
to convert them; nay, they seduce them from one error into
another that is worse. What glory is it, pray, nay, what mad-
ness for a teacher if he gives a bright and promising boy
only the most pestilential teaching, then shows him in his own
life only the most corrupt morals, and afterwards washes his
hands and says he learned nothing good from him? Thus a
bawd may teach a girl to be a harlot and afterwards charge
her with not living in virginity. That this is the way the Jews
