"Even at the present time much of the same sort of thing happens in Poland and Germany, where circumstantial tales are told and songs sung in the streets, how the Jews have murdered a child, and sent the blood to one another in quills for the use of their women in childbirth. I have discovered this outrageous fraud in time, and abandoned Christianity, which can permit such things, in order to have no share in it, nor be found with those who trample under foot Israel, the first begotten Son of God, and shed his blood like water."
Moses Germanus was Paul reversed. The latter as a Christian, became a zealous despiser of Judaism; the former, as a Jew, an equally fanatical opponent of Christianity. He regarded its origin as gross fraud. One cannot even now write all that Moses Germanus uttered about the teaching of Jesus. He was not the only Christian who at this time "from love for Judaism" exposed himself to the painful operation and still keener shame and reproach of circumcision. In one year three Christians, in free Amsterdam to be sure, went over to Judaism, amongst them a student from Prague.
Even more than the anticipated greatness of Israel, Jewish literature attracted learned Christians, and inspired them with a sort of sympathy for the people out of whose mine such treasures came. The Hebrew language was studied by Christians even more than in the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the middle and towards the close of that century Hebrew Rabbinical literature was most eagerly searched, translated into Latin or modern languages, quoted, utilized, and applied. "Jewish learning" was, not as before a mere ornament, but an indispensable element, of learning. It was regarded as a disgrace for Catholic and Protestant theologians to be ignorant of Rabbinical lore, and the ignorant could defend themselves only by abusing these Hebraists as semi-rabbis.
The first Catholic critic, Father Richard Simon, of the congregation of the Oratory at Paris, contributed very much to the high esteem in which the Jews and their literature were held. This man, who laid the foundation of a scientific, philological, and exegetical study of the Old and New Testament, investigated Jewish writings with great zeal, and utilized them for his purpose. He was gifted with a keen understanding, which unconsciously led him beyond the limits of Catholic doctrine. Spinoza's criticism of the Bible induced him to make original inquiries, and since, as a genuine Frenchman, he was endowed with sound sense rather than metaphysical imagination, he was more successful, and his method is thoroughly scientific. Richard Simon was disgusted with the biblical exegesis of the Protestants, who were wont to support their wisdom and their stupidity with verses of Holy Scripture. He undertook, therefore, to prove that the biblical knowledge and biblical exegesis of the Protestant church, on which it prided itself before Catholics and Jews, was mere mist and error, because it mistook the sense of the original text, and had no conception of the historical background, the coloring of time and place, of the books of the Bible, and in this ignorance multiplied absurd dogmas.