German: Biography of a Language by Ruth Sanders

Author:Ruth Sanders [Sanders, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780195388459
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-05-21T16:56:16+00:00

Luther against the Jews

By the 1540s, near the end of his life, distracted and choleric, obsessed with the Devil and convinced of an imminent second coming of Christ, Luther dispatched the subject of the Jews in vulgar and harsh terms which modern sensibilities find almost incredible in a man of God. His 1543 pamphlet Von den Juden und ihren Lügen ‘On the Jews and their lies’ has been taken in modern times as evidence that Luther was a forerunner of the Nazi anti-Semitic racism of four centuries later. Hateful and anti-Jewish as this pamphlet was, Luther’s ideas on the subject were not quite the same as those of Nazi anti-Semitism, however. Luther considered Jews a religious group rather than racially or ethnically distinct from or inferior to Christians, and he considered a converted Jew to be “a brother or sister in Christ,” though he “did not regard Judaism as a legitimate religious alternative” (Nestingen 2003b, 104–107). However that may be, it is undeniable that the Nazis in the twentieth century co-opted Luther’s pamphlet as a kind of argument from authority, quoting his statements to support their campaign against the Jews. Though Nazi ideology rejected belief in God, and had far from benign intentions toward Christianity, the Nazi government did not shy from using religious documents or religious authority to bolster its own position.

In an inexcusably late acknowledgement, the two major Lutheran groups in the United States finally, four centuries after the fact, repudiated Luther’s anti-Jewish writings (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod 1983; Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 1994). In 1998 the Lutheran Church of Bavaria, Germany, also officially repudiated Luther’s anti-Jewish writings and utterances and distanced itself from every expression of anti-Judaism in traditional Lutheran theology.

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