Background
Amid rumors of impending war, his father, a poor shoemaker, sought refuge between 1642 and 1645 at Augsburg.
Amid rumors of impending war, his father, a poor shoemaker, sought refuge between 1642 and 1645 at Augsburg.
Spaeth later went to Vienna and earned his living as a private tutor. On that occasion he wrote his first work: "Εκιαγραφια, Theologico-Philosophico Ænigmatica". The work found much favor with M. Spitzel, head of the board of theological studies at Augsburg, who recommended Spaeth to many influential personages in Strassburg and afterward to others in Frankfort-on-the-Main.
But this reconciliation did not last.
Even the Sermon on the Mount, as requiring an impossible ideality, did not escape his criticism. "From those words I understood the 53d chapter of Isaiah: the Jews bore the sins of the heathen, while they were daily persecuted by them.
From time immemorial they had been treated in a shameful manner. As the whole history of the Passion tended to render the Jews odious, so the same sort of thing happens nowadays.
Foreign instance, the Jews are said to have murdered a child, and to have distributed the blood in quills for the use of their women in childbirth.
Spaeth became converted at Cleves, taking the name Moses Germanus.
