John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony. He went to Saxony with letters of high recommendation to that prince from the magistrate of Strasbourg and to Martin Luther from the Alsatian reformer Capito. But Luther had become embittered against the Jews on account of their faithfulness to their creed, and he refused every intercession, so that Josel did not obtain even an audience with the elector. But at a meeting in Frankfurt (1539) he found occasion to speak to the prince, whose attention he attracted by refuting, in a public dispute with the reformer Bucer, some spiteful assertions about the Jews. In the same Reichstag Philipp Melanchthon proved the innocence of the thirty-eight Jews who had been burned in Berlin in 1510, and this helped to induce Kurfürst Joachim of Brandenburg to grant Josel's request. The Elector of Saxony then also repealed his order of expulsion. Josel wrote in his memoir that their situation was "due to that priest whose name was Martin Luther — may his body and soul be bound up in hell!! — who wrote and issued many heretical books in which he said that whoever would help the Jews was doomed to perdition." Michael writes that Josel asked the city of Strasbourg to forbid the sale of Luther's anti-Jewish works; they refused initially, but relented when a Lutheran pastor in Hochfelden argued in a sermon that his parishioners should murder Jews. Refutation of Luther's charges The same year Josel heard that the Hessian Jews had to suffer many persecutions because of a pamphlet by Bucer. He therefore wrote a defense of Judaism in Hebrew, to be read in synagogue every Sabbath for the comfort of his coreligionists. The magistrate of Strasbourg having expressed the belief that attacks on Christianity were contained in the defense, Josel had a verbatim translation made and sent to him. Soon Josel had to defend the Jews against the attacks of Luther himself, who in 1543 had published a very spiteful pamphlet, titled Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies), which had led to harsh treatment of Jews in various Protestant districts. Josel refuted Luther's assertions in a voluminous petition to the magistrate of Strasbourg, and the latter thereupon inhibited a new edition of Luther's book. In 1541 Josel appeared as "chief of the Jews in the German lands" at the Reichstag of Regensburg, and succeeded in averting