Martin Luther’s venomous writings against the Jewish people were part of what Thomas Kaufmann describes as “a specifically pre-modern anti-Semitism”. This was an era during which absurd rumours about Jews ritually murdering Christian children were commonplace, and in which Jews were vilified as Christ-killing contaminants who deserved to languish in isolation and servitude. Even at his most splenetic, in his later writings, Luther was “only saying out loud, at length and obscenely, what many people already thought”. The phrase “later writings” is crucial, however. In his 1543 tract, On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther argued for expulsions, the razing of synagogues and the eradication of Jewish books. Jews, he averred, “wish us every kind of harm with curses, slanders and spitting beyond imagining” and they would always “remain bitter, virulent and vicious enemies of Christians”. And yet, just 20 years earlier, Luther had been writing his book That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, in which he proposed unconditional toleration of Jews in Christian society.
Why this shift? The nub of Kaufmann’s analysis is that any apparent transformation is deceptive. Its not as if, back in 1523, Luther was a lover or admirer of Judaism. Tolerance was only ever deemed prudent because it increased the potential for conversions. Jews, for Luther, were still the “object of God’s wrath”, they still offered misleading interpretations of the Old Testament, and Luther’s theological opposition to Judaism was as deep-seated as it would be two decades later.
One of Luther’s chief goals was to demonstrate that the Church of Rome had been making a hash of the duty to convert the Jewish people. Treating them “like dogs and not human beings” was counterproductive and led, at best, to sham conversions motivated by fear. Moreover, Rome was accused of failing miserably to make Christianity seem like a viable theological alternative.
“If I had been a Jew,” Luther wrote, “and had seen such idiots and thickheads in charge of teaching the Christian faith I would have rather been a pig than a Christian.” Luther’s apparent sympathy for Europe’s Jews was just one more polemical weapon in his protest against Roman Catholicism. A manifesto for freedom of religion it most certainly was not.
The trouble was, when Luther’s supposedly gentler methods of conversion failed to pay dividends, blame had to be allotted. The message of the new faith could hardly be held responsible, so Luther began to announce that Judaism’s obduracy and pride had proven to be insurmountable obstacles. Jews just wouldn’t open themselves up to the obvious truth. Into the bargain, Luther became increasingly convinced that he was the target of fantastical Jewish assassination plots and, at the time of the infamous 1543 tract, he was riddled with illness and grieving over the death of his daughter Magdalena. As he wrote to a friend the previous autumn, “by stoking up my indignation I reduce my tears”.
For Luther, Judaism was, as Kaufmann puts it, “something like a walking corpse”, a faith that had been superseded, and whose suffering was ample proof of God’s abandonment. Kaufmann also detects a “proto-racist” tone in some of the outbursts: eg essentialist talk of a Jewish “nature”. Luther can hardly be held responsible for deeds centuries after his time, but such sentiments had a tragic future ahead of them.
In this anniversary year, as well as exploring all of Luther’s dynamism and achievements it will also be necessary to confront his more loathsome attitudes. On the 500th anniversary of Luther’s birth, back in 1983, the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) called On the Jews and Their Lies “calamitous”. That sounds about right.
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