Luther and the Jews: Putting Right the Lies

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Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them. But 500 years later, have lessons been learned and wounds healed? Is the world a better and kinder place now because Christians have realized their colossal failures, stemming from one part of the church’s founding figures? It’s a layered answer. The Roman Catholic Church formally rejected its doctrinal anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, and Catholics have worked diligently and genuinely to build bridges with the Jewish world since then. And outside of fringe conservative movements within the church, Rome has been largely successful. Protestantism is diverse by its very nature. Evangelical conservative Christians frequently adopt a Christian Zionist stance and are passionate supporters of Israel, even if often for mangled reasons; the underlying theology looks to the world’s Jews moving to Israel en masse, thus hastening the second coming and the end times. Lots of fire and mayhem to come—sinners beware. However, we must avoid confirming them in their wanton lying, slandering, cursing, and defaming. Nor dare we make ourselves partners in their devilish ranting and raving by shielding and protecting them, by giving them food, drink, and shelter, or by other neighborly One especially repugnant case is that of Martin Sasse, the Bishop of the Evangelical Church of Thuringia during Kristallnacht in 1938. He feted the pogroms and the mass destruction of synagogues and Jewish businesses, and even tied it explicitly to Luther himself; just days after what was in effect the beginning of the organized slaughter of the Jews, he distributed a pamphlet entitled Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them! in which he claimed the Nazis were acting as Christians in their violent anti-Semitism, and that this was precisely what Luther would have wanted.

Bainton, Roland. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1978. ISBN 0-687-16894-5.Luther’s writings on Jews and Judaism mark an abominable moment in the history of Christian anti-semitism. In Wittenberg, the parish church where Luther often preached featured a frieze of a “Judensau,” an obscene and sacrilegious image of a “Jew-pig.” Luther wrote his anti-semitic works in a prevailing European culture characterized by demonizing stereotypes and slanderous rumors of poisoning, usury, and blood libel. It was also furthered by portions of his theology that conflated Judaism with the other “false religions” of Islam and Roman Catholicism and became the target of his savage polemics. But what will happen even if we do burn down the Jews' synagogues and forbid them publicly to praise Satan, to pray, to teach, to utter Satan's name? They will still keep doing it in secret. If we know that they are doing this in secret, it is the same as if they were doing it publicly. For our knowledge of their secret doings and our toleration of them implies that they are not secret after all and thus our conscience is encumbered with it before God. It’s party time in the religious world. On Oct. 31, Christians—or, to be more precise, Protestant Christians, with a surprising amount of support from the Vatican—celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, when legend has it that German monk and professor Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, thus lighting the fuse that blew European Christendom apart. Kaennel, Lucie. Luther était-il antisémite? ( Luther: Was He an Antisemite?). Entrée Libre N° 38. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1997. ISBN 2-8309-0869-4.

It matters far more than one might think, because it was not only religion but politics, culture, and economics that would change in that hammering’s wake. In the document, Luther made public his condemnation of the sale of indulgences—money paid to reduce the time spent in purgatory, a sort of waiting room before heaven, by relatives and loves ones. But this academic disputation went further than that, and it was a manifesto of criticism aimed at Roman Catholicism. History, as it were, was given a reboot.Michael states "Luther wrote of the Jews as if they were a race that could not truly convert to Christianity. Indeed, like so many Christian writers before him, Luther, by making the Jews the devil's people, put them beyond conversion." He notes that in a sermon of September 25, 1539, "Luther tried to demonstrate through several examples that individual Jews could not convert permanently, and in several passages of The Jews and Their Lies, Luther appeared to reject the possibility that the Jews would or could convert." [42] a b Wallmann, Johannes. "The Reception of Luther's Writings on the Jews from the Reformation to the End of the 19th Century", Lutheran Quarterly, n.s. 1 (Spring 1987) 1:72–97. "The assertion that Luther's expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have been of major and persistent influence in the centuries after the Reformation, and that there exists a continuity between Protestant anti-Judaism and modern racially oriented antiSemitism, is at present wide-spread in the literature; since the Second World War it has understandably become the prevailing opinion."