Johannes Reuchlin was born in Pforzheim in the Holy Roman Empire on 29 January 1455 and became one of the outstanding Greek and Hebrew scholars of his generation, serving at various points as a lawyer, diplomat and judge alongside his scholarly work. His Hebrew grammar and dictionary, De Rudimentis Hebraicis (1506), gave Christian European scholars their first serious tool for reading the Hebrew Bible in the original since antiquity, and later fed the biblical humanism of the early Reformation.
In 1509 the converted Jew Johannes Pfefferkorn, backed by the Dominicans of Cologne, sought imperial authority to confiscate and destroy Jewish books as blasphemous. Reuchlin, consulted as an expert, argued forcefully against the confiscation, defending the scholarly and religious value of the Talmud and other Hebrew texts. The resulting controversy, fought out in pamphlets and eventually in Rome, cost Reuchlin years of his life and much of his personal fortune, but it rallied European humanists, Erasmus among them, to his side and left him remembered as a defender of scholarship against censorship as much as for his own original work. He taught Greek to his young great-nephew Philipp Melanchthon, who went on to become the leading systematic theologian of the Lutheran Reformation, so Reuchlin's scholarly household reached directly into the next generation's religious upheaval even though Reuchlin himself remained a Catholic humanist and took no side in the Reformation proper.