Eden:
Yes. His writing became more hateful the further and further he moved away from the Church.
Just so we’re on the same page, you therefore agree Luther’s nagativity towards the Jews after 1538 was
not because he moved away from the distinct doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. This was not a factor causing him to write what he did.
I’m not one to blame Luther’s anti-Jewish writings on something he gleaned from the RCC. However, the RCC didn’t help the situation during the midieval period and the sixteenth century, but along with Luther, many of its “members” perpetuated anti-Jewish sentiment.
Recall that Martin Luther was born into a society of animosity toward the Jews. The Jews were stigmatized as those who killed Christ, and deserved to experience God’s wraith as His rejected people. They had become the scapegoats of society, blamed for countless evils befalling the medieval age. The populace had gone as far to create fictional crimes to charge to their account. They were said to partake in ritual murders: slaughterers’ of Christian children for blood to use during Passover.
Early in his career, Luther was to say of the Jews:
“The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are plagued everywhere, and scattered about all countries, having no certain resting place. They sit as on a wheelbarrow, without a country, people, or government; yet they wait on with earnest confidence; they cheer up themselves and say: It will soon be better with us."
Luther found blatant anti-Jewish sentiment inherent in his culture, and in the Roman Catholic Church:
“Our fools, the popes, bishops, sophists, and monks—the crude (Donkeys’)’ 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. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property. When they baptize them they show them nothing of Christian doctrine or life, but only subject them to popishness and monkery. When the Jews then see that Judaism has such strong support in Scripture, and that Christianity has become a mere babble without reliance on Scripture, how can they possibly compose themselves and become right good Christians? I have myself heard from pious baptized Jews that if they had not in our day heard the gospel they would have remained Jews under the cloak of Christianity for the rest of their days. For they acknowledge that they have never yet heard anything about Christ from those who baptized and taught them.
I hope that if one deals in a kindly way with the Jews and instructs them carefully from Holy Scripture, many of them will become genuine Christians and turn again to the faith of their fathers, the prophets and patriarchs. They will only be frightened further away from it if their Judaism is so utterly rejected that nothing is allowed to remain, and they are treated only with arrogance and scorn. If the apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would never have been a Christian among the Gentiles. Since they dealt with us Gentiles in such brotherly fashion, we in our turn ought to treat the Jews in a brotherly manner in order that we might convert some of them. For even we ourselves are not yet all very far along, not to speak of having arrived."
Luther was convinced that by exposing the errors and abuses of the papacy, and treating them with kindness, the Jews would be converted:
“If I were a Jew, I would suffer the rack ten times before I would go over to the pope. The papists have so demeaned themselves that a good Christian would rather be a Jew than one of them, and a Jew would rather be a sow than a Christian. What good can we do the Jews when we constrain them, malign them, and hate them as dogs? When we deny them work and force them to usury, how can that help? We should use toward the Jews not the pope’s but Christ’s law of love. If some are stiff necked, what does that matter? We are not all good Christians."
Regards,
James Swan
I feel sorry that you spent so much time working on this game when you totally missed the point of my post on this. Several pro-Luther posters have stated that Luther’s anti-Semitism was influenced by Catholic anti-Semitism. I said that if Luther was anti-Semitic because he was infected by Catholic anti-Semitism wouldn’t he have been at the height of his anti-Semitism when he was a Catholic? As you have stated in previous threads, Luther was most vitriolic in his anti-Semitism toward the end of his life. Thus, Luther’s brand of anti-Semitism was his own.
