On the occasion of Reformation Day: Was Martin Luther an anti-Semite?

[Anzeigenhauptmeister]

in honor of today's feast, you Catholics call it "Halloween", we Protestants call it Reformation Day. According to Philip Melanchthon, 31 October 1517 was the day German Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Electorate of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire. Historians and other experts on the subject argue that Luther may have chosen All Hallows' Eve on purpose to get the attention of common people, although that has never been proven.

Martin Luther certainly was one of the greatest humans in the history of mankind (along with Johannes Gutenberg). However, his legacy fell victim of a smear campaign initiated by them papists, whose most prominent representative murdered six million Jews.

"On the Jews and their lies" - this is the name of a writing by the reformer from 1543, three years before his death. A writing that clearly showed his hatred of Jews. But within Judaism there have been very different perspectives on Martin Luther over the past 500 years.
"That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew" - that is the title of Martin Luther's first Jewish writing, in which the reformer rejected the previous violent oppression of the Jews in 1523. A writing that met with a positive response in Judaism.

According to the ecclesiastical historian Thomas Kaufmann, Luther at times seems to have been something of a beacon of hope for Judaism. It was hoped that a development would then take place that would open up more permanent prospects for the Jews.

A hope that was bitterly disappointed no later than 20 years later with the publication "On the Jews and their Lies". The confrontation with Luther's late literary work led to violent reactions, such as that of the spokesman for contemporary Jewry, Josel von Rosheim. He took action against the hate speech at the Reich level and at the Strasbourg Council. With success: in Strasbourg and some other cities, the anti-Judaist diatribe was banned.

But Luther's alleged anti-Semitism fell more and more into oblivion in the following centuries. In the 19th century, many Jews saw Luther primarily as a German hero of freedom and a representative of the ideals of the Enlightenment. In 1817, many Jews celebrated when the Lutherans celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Reformation.

Many Jews associated a specific hope with a special tribute to the reformer - for example with a view to his importance for the German language: better integration into the German Empire.

Rabbi Leo Baeck (1873-1956) later developed a much more critical view of Luther.
Rather, Leo Baeck saw Luther as someone who took Protestantism in a theologically wrong direction, forgetting the important Jewish roots of Christianity.

Only with the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1890s were Luther's later writings noticed again in Judaism - with astonishment.
That Luther wasn't known; one was used to the liberal Luther.

But the National Socialists in particular, who otherwise did not want to hear much about Christian theology, repeatedly referred to the reformer in their anti-Semitism. An impact story with murderous consequences.

In recent years, the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) itself has taken a critical look at Luther's hatred of Jews. The Judaist Christian Wiese hoped for a constructive dialogue about the Christian-Jewish relationship in the anniversary year 2017, "in which one can still feel that there is horror at the history of the impact and that there are also present tendencies to downplay the history of the impact. Keeping this current is the most important task for the Reformation anniversary for the Christian-Jewish dialogue."

PS: Sorry for my NoN-UnDeRsTaNdAbLe PrOsE™!

[TDAS04]

Martin Luther was like Winston Churchill in the sense that he was extremely good and extremely bad.

[Anzeigenhauptmeister]

Someone has really reported that thread? Wow...

[Antonio the Sixth]

Of course he was. That's not even a question.

He was still right about corruption in the Church and on at least some of the underlying theological points of dispute, though.

(Basically what TDAS said.)

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Someone has really reported that thread? Wow...

If it's been reported, I'm not seeing it yet.

[Anzeigenhauptmeister]

Someone has really reported that thread? Wow...

If it's been reported, I'm not seeing it yet.

The only other post I wrote yesterday was a link for MAE that shows a journalist arguing in favor of Twitter as a research instrument.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Someone has really reported that thread? Wow...

If it's been reported, I'm not seeing it yet.

The only other post I wrote yesterday was a link for MAE that shows a journalist arguing in favor of Twitter as a research instrument.

It's possible that that one was reported for some copyright issue with the link. That's almost as common as reports for everything else.

Regardless, please take this to the moderation issues thread or the user complaints thread.

[Brother Jonathan]

I think he probably was, and it is reflected in his personal as well as public writings, including those he exchanged with Jewish leaders. Early on, as noted, the publication of That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew made some Jewish leaders think that Luther was sympathetic to their plight, and so they wrote to him in hopes that he might use his influence to help lift certain restrictions. In particular I know that Josel of Rosheim wrote to Luther seeking a meeting to discuss the right of Jews to travel in Saxony. Luther's response declining the meeting, written in 1537, pre-dates most of his vitriolic public statements but reveals the same tendencies

“I would gladly have appealed to my most gracious lord on your behalf, both orally and in writing, for my [previous] publication has served all of Jewry so well; but because your people so shamefully misuse my service and undertake such things, which we Christians cannot accept from them, they themselves have thereby taken from me any influence that I otherwise might have had with dukes and lords...

Luther also notes in the letter that he hopes to write a tract which will "...win several from your paternal stock of the holy patriarchs and prophets, and bring [them] to your promised Messiah..."

You can also make an argument that Luther is responding in the letter, by the line "and undertake such things as we Christians cannot accept," to the supposed influence of the Jewish community in Moravia, which was one of the factors that led him to publish Against the Sabbatarians in 1538, which is particularly interesting in that it contains (if I recall) Luther's first public attack on the character of Jewish people, rather than just a theological argument against them though it remains largely theological.

I suppose given all of that I find it difficult to say that Luther wasn't an anti-Semite, and that his apparent sympathy for the Jewish community in Europe was essentially rooted in a desire to convert them with honey rather than vinegar, but in either case he was determined to convert them and expressed rage throughout his writings that Jews were so obstinate in the face of conversion efforts. I think Richard Rubenstein makes the point that this frustration was particularly common among European Christian intellectuals, as Jews remained the only group which really managed to retain a unique religious identity long after most of the pagan faiths had been abandoned, which was made the worse in their mind by the fact that the Jews had historical knowledge of Jesus. At the end of the day Luther's only interest in the European Jewish community was their ultimate conversion and dissolution into Christian society, a point which you can see even in That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew

Therefore, I will cite from Scripture the reasons that move me to believe that Christ was a Jew born of a virgin, that I might perhaps also win some Jews to the Christian faith. Our fools, the popes, bishops, sophists, and monks-the crude asses' heads-have hitherto so treated the Jews that anyone who wished to be a good Christian would almost have had to become a Jew. If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian.

So I, for one, doubt that Luther ever changed his mind on European Jews, his only interest in them was as a potential source of converts or as useful rhetorical tool against the Catholic Church from time to time. It seems that On the Jews and Their Lies was the culmination of, not a departure from, Luther's general thought, perhaps compound by a certain frustration with the way his earlier works had been received.

[PSOL]

Of course he was. That's not even a question.

He was still right about corruption in the Church and on at least some of the underlying theological points of dispute, though.

(Basically what TDAS said.)

Believing and acting upon something obvious and harmful is not a virtue that cleanses all personal ills.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Of course he was. That's not even a question.

He was still right about corruption in the Church and on at least some of the underlying theological points of dispute, though.

(Basically what TDAS said.)

Believing and acting upon something obvious and harmful is not a virtue that cleanses all personal ills.

maeks u think

[Aurelius]

Yes, but I don't really care. It's like the 1000th most interesting or relevant thing about him.

[PSOL]

Of course he was. That's not even a question.

He was still right about corruption in the Church and on at least some of the underlying theological points of dispute, though.

(Basically what TDAS said.)

Believing and acting upon something obvious and harmful is not a virtue that cleanses all personal ills.

maeks u think

If you aren’t going to actually respond to an argument without taking it as a personal attack, how can you even go about your life functioning in the real world?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Of course he was. That's not even a question.

He was still right about corruption in the Church and on at least some of the underlying theological points of dispute, though.

(Basically what TDAS said.)

Believing and acting upon something obvious and harmful is not a virtue that cleanses all personal ills.

maeks u think

If you aren’t going to actually respond to an argument without taking it as a personal attack, how can you even go about your life functioning in the real world?

What argument? This is word salad, my dude.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Not even modern Lutherans deny Luther was an antisemite.

[afleitch]

Oh horrendously so. What's worse is that he became more anti-semitic in his later life. And there's something frightfully 'modern' (in that anti-semitism is an old trope) in his rantings that is jarring

Calvin was too of course (side eye from Servetus) so he was in good company.

There was a growth, iirc, in academic Judaism at the time which fostered both study of older texts by reformationists, 'debate' etc but also leading to a reformed Christianity that still didn't attract mass Jewish conversion. And that frustrated the worst offenders.

[RINO Tom]

Yes, and he’s rightfully remembered for other things.

[ingemann]

Not even modern Lutherans deny Luther was an antisemite.

Why should we? He was a theologian not a prophet. Even in his lifetime some of his own followers and allies called him out on some of his bullsh**t like his anti-Semitism.

But it still had a big effect on some of the early Lutheran Churches. The Scandinavian, Mecklenburg and Baltic City states churches as example were among the more anti-Semitic ones (but they were already deeply anti-Semitic while Catholic). But at the same time the regions where early Lutheran anti-Semitism were strong was also where 19th century anti-Semitism and later Nazism were weak.

[pbrower2a]

Like many, Luther became frustrated and embittered with age. He had the hope that jews would convert en masse to Lutheranism as they had not done to Catholicism, and they did not. He faulted the Jews for that. Knowledge of the dynamics of personality was primitive and unreliable in those days; people still believed that witchcraft and demonic possession were real. 

[ingemann]

Like many, Luther became frustrated and embittered with age. He had the hope that jews would convert en masse to Lutheranism as they had not done to Catholicism, and they did not. He faulted the Jews for that. Knowledge of the dynamics of personality was primitive and unreliable in those days; people still believed that witchcraft and demonic possession were real. 

Let’s not excuse Luther, while he had many good sides, he also had some very unpleasant aspects like his religious intolerance and his anti-Semitism grew from those. But in the end he lead no pogroms and the Lutheran countries was no more unpleasant to Jews than their Catholic counterpart, at most the Lutheran countries with no Jewish population simply kept their border close for Jewish emigration. Compare that to the mass expulsion of Jews from Catholic Iberia.