Иоганн Андреас Айзенменгер и его антисемитская работа «Разоблаченное иудаизм»

German Orientalist (1654–1704)
Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654 in Mannheim – 20 December 1704 in Heidelberg) was a German orientalist scholar from the Electorate of the Palatinate, now best known as the author of Entdecktes Judenthum (Judaism Unmasked), which was published in two volumes in 1711 and 1714. In this work, Eisenmenger sought to expose the allegedly secret and nefarious practices of Jews, and he claimed that Judaism was a false religion that had been invented by the ancient Israelites in an attempt to deceive the world. Financier Samuel Oppenheimer, one of the most influential Jewish members of the Court of the House of Habsburg, fearing that the book's publication would give additional strength to the prejudice against them, denounced it as a malicious libel, and tried to have the work banned. He failed, but subsequently his rival, the financier and rabbi Samson Wertheimer successfully petitioned Emperor Leopold I to have the book banned. His work was widely read and had a significant influence on European attitudes toward Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is considered an early example of modern anti Semitism and played a role in shaping the negative stereotypes and prejudices that were held against Jews in Europe at the time. Despite being debunked by scholars, his work remains a controversial and influential text in the history of anti Semitism.

The son of an official in the service of the Elector of the Palatinate Charles I Louis (who had, in 1673, offered Spinoza a chair in philosophy at Heidelberg), Eisenmenger received a good education, despite the early loss of his father to plague when he was 12 years old. He distinguished himself at the Collegium Sapientiae at Heidelberg by his zeal for Hebrew studies and Semitic languages. He eventually mastered Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. He was sent by the Elector to England and Holland to pursue his studies there. He studied rabbinical literature with Jewish assistance for some 19 years both at Heidelberg and Frankfurt, under the pretense, it was rumoured, of wishing to convert to Judaism. In Holland he established amicable relations with figures like Rabbi David ben Aryeh Leib of Lida, formerly of Lithuania, and then head of the Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam. An intended sojourn in Palestine was interrupted by the death of his sponsor in August of 1680. Later scholars cite two episodes during his sojourn in Amsterdam, which may or may not be apocryphal, to account for the formation of his anti Judaic outlook. It is said that he was a witness, in 1681, to "otherwise unknown" attacks against Christianity by a senior rabbi there, identified as David Lida, Anti Christian polemics were, uniquely to Europe, published in Amsterdam and Eisenmenger's anger was aroused when Lida quoted Rabbi Isaiah ben Abraham Horowitz to the effect that the archangel Samael, king of the devils, was a celestial representation of Christians.

The Catholic theologian August Rohling exploited the material in Eisenmenger's book in order to construct the fabrications of his antisemitic polemic Der Talmudjude (1871). The Lutheran biblical scholar Franz Delitzsch subjected Rohling's book to a close examination and found that he not only drew on Eisenmenger, but introduced many significant distortions. Rohling's book however coincided with a rise in antisemitism and often influenced humanist critics and/or antisemites, who often cite him, rather than Eisenmenger's own voluminous treatise. One such example is afforded by Sir Richard Francis Burton, who, in his antisemitic volume The Jew, Gypsy, and El Islam (1898), relied in part on Rohling's text. In recent decades the kind of material from rabbinical sources which Eisenmenger exploited to attack Judaism in general has been often discussed in contextualising certain extremist currents in modern Jewish fundamentalism, of the kind observed in religious political movements like those associated with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Meir Kahane, Abraham Isaac Kook and his son Zvi Yehuda Kook, such as Kach and Gush Emunim. An English abridgment of Eisenmenger's volumes was published by John Peter Stehelin in 1748 under the title The Traditions of the Jews, with the Expositions and Doctrines of the Rabbins. A 19th century German edition of Entdecktes Judent[h]um, edited by F. X. Schieferl, was published by Otto Brandner, Dresden, 1893.

Eisenmenger edited with Johannes Leusden the unvocalized Hebrew Bible, Amsterdam, 1694, and wrote a Lexicon Orientale Harmonicum, which to this day has not been published.