1. Violence
2. Unclean language
3. Hostility to science and reason
4. Luther’s responsibility for later events in German history
5. Luther and German nationalism
a. Some misconceptions
b. Luther’s worldview
c. Modern nationalism
6. Luther’s anti-Semitism
a. David and Bathsheba
b. Luther’s biblical understanding of the Jews
c. What Luther did not believe about the Jews
d. Why Luther was angry at the Jews
c. What Luther did not believe about the Jews
What, then, was Luther’s problem with the Jews, and what provoked his anger in the last few years of his life when previously he had not been unduly concerned with them? Before exploring that in more detail, I think it will be helpful to show what Luther did not believe about the Jews. He was far removed from the weird philosophies that bubbled up out of human intelligence during the great turning away from faith in the beginnings of our vaunted modern era.
Unlike secular anti-Semites of the 19th century (who cared little or nothing about the crucifixion of Christ and specifically rejected religious issues), Luther did not believe that the Jews controlled the international banking system; that they were plotting to rule the world; that they were to blame for numerous and disconnected social ills; that they were scheming to destroy the German people by corrupting the purity of their blood, defiling their “sacred Aryan racial inheritance” by seducing Jewish women or even honourably marrying them.
Obviously, Luther did not share the much later view that Christianity was a false, Mediterranean, Semitic, Jewish ideology that had infected the German people and caused them to decline from their lofty, noble, and superior pre-Christian Germanic paganism. He did not believe, as did Schopenhauer, that the Jewish account of a divine creation had created a false and harmful dichotomy between the human and animal worlds. He did not blame the Jews, as Nietzsche did in The Antichrist, for creating the false, harmful, and socially destructive religion of Christianity. He did not agree with Richard Wagner that the Jews had corrupted an originally Indian Christianity and hence corrupted Europe via Semitic-Christian influence.
Luther also did not believe that the Jews were sub-humans and vermin who deserved only to be destroyed. He did not believe that the Germans were the master race; that people were only animals in a pitiless and amoral struggle for survival in which might made right; that Judaeo-Christian ethical values, including numerous New Testament teachings about mercy, kindness, honesty and forgiveness were nothing but delusions. Finally, Luther didn’t believe that war was healthy and morally uplifting for a nation, a normal means of progress and of weeding out the unfit. A number of other aspects of Nazi ideology could be presented, none of which Luther believed in. He was a man of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the foundational ideas of National Socialism would have been completely alien to him.
d. Why Luther was angry at the Jews
In his tract On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther gave a number of reasons for his outburst of hostility, an attack different from all of his previous writings, and endorsed by no other Protestant leaders of that time (or of later times). What initially provoked Luther’s response was a Jewish booklet attempting to persuade a German of the truth of Judaism. This was not the main point of the tract – German conversions to Judaism must have been extremely rare – and Luther devotes the tract to other issues.
One reason for Luther’s overreaction to the secondary issue of Jewish apologetics was insults ridiculing and despising Jesus, Mary, and Christians. That Mary was a whore, or that she had been raped and Jesus was born illegitimately as a result; that Jesus was a tool of the devil whose miracles were only sorcery; that Jesus was mentally defective; that Jews would curse the name of Jesus and say “May God exterminate his name”; that Jews cursed Christians, and hoped the coming Messiah would exterminate them – these and other comments provoked Luther’s fury.
Some of Luther’s information on this came from converted Jews such as Anthony Margarita and Alfonso Burgensis, whom he names in the tract. That his information was not completely wrong can be seen in a work like the Toldos Yeshu (or Toledoth Yeshu), a medieval Jewish satire that ridiculed Jesus. Jewish historian Abram Leon Sachar refers to this in his book A History of the Jews, and describes it as an embittered Jewish response “to centuries of persecution in the name of Jesus.” The Medieval Chronicle of Simon Bar Simson as described by Steven Katz (The Holocaust in Historical Context) confirms Luther’s angry charges (at least in part).
Luther’s response was unChristian and wrong. He should have reflected more on the suffering that led some Jews to have such bitter feelings against his religion. He should have remembered what it says in James: “For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God,” and “the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated…” Nevertheless, his response was ordinary and easily understandable human anger. I am sure if I lived in a conservative area of Israel and mocked Moses as the son of a whore and a mentally defective leader of a bandit gang I would not be well received.
Another reason for his harsh attacks was the claim that mere physical descent from Abraham made Jews superior. As Luther wrote in On the Jews and Their Lies, “…they boast of being the noblest, yes, the only noble people on earth. So if the Jews boast in their prayer before God and glory in the fact that they are the patriarch’s noble blood, lineage, and children, and that he should regard them and be gracious unto them in view of this…what do you suppose such a prayer will achieve?”
Thirdly, Luther was angered by Jewish complaints about life in Germany. He stated that no one had asked them to come and if they didn’t like it they could leave. He even made a comment about them returning to their ancestral homeland. As he wrote, “In addition, no one is holding them here now. The country and roads are open for them to proceed to their land whenever they wish.” This was of course in the days before the system of passports and visas which kept the Jews so agonizingly trapped in Hitler’s Germany before war broke out.
Luther also refers to common charges that the Jews poisoned wells, kidnapped children, and so on. He was not sure about these things, and expressed some doubt, but considered such accusations plausible, and called Jews “children of the devil who sting and work harm stealthily wherever they cannot do it openly.” He relates this to John 8:44 where Christ called those who were plotting to kill him children of the devil – but that Jesus was not speaking of the Jewish people as a whole is clear from verse 37. Here Luther was wrong in his interpretation of scripture (and not for the first time).
A final point (not that Luther presented them neatly separated and exactly in this order) was Jewish usury. Sachar’s above mentioned History of the Jews gives some useful information on this point. Although a great many Jews at this time eked out lives in great poverty, official Christian opposition to money lending as well as restrictions denying Jews the right to work in many areas did lead to “disproportionate numbers” of Jews serving as bankers and moneylenders. “Often they were usurious in their dealings,” Sachar states, but he also clarifies that the ultimate beneficiaries of this economic activity were the kings and nobles (chapter 19. 3). Luther failed to take these factors into account.
