In the Name of God by Selina O'Grady

In the Name of God by Selina O'Grady

Author:Selina O'Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00


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The man who probably did more damage to Jews than any other religious Christian leader in history was the reformer incarnate, Martin Luther. He was, as the Luther historian Martin Brecht points out, one of the ‘Church fathers’ of anti-Semitism.2 Luther had initially been certain that Jews would become ‘Lutherans’ (rather as Muhammad had been certain Jews would become Muslims). But when it became clear to Luther that the Jews were not convinced, he turned on these ‘poisonous envenomed worms’ in his viciously anti-Semitic work, ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’, written in 1543. ‘We are at fault in not slaying them,’ he wrote. ‘[They are] full of the devil’s faeces… which they wallow in like swine.’ Luther urged Christians to set fire to synagogues and Jewish schools, destroy their houses, confiscate their holy books, forbid rabbis to teach, abolish safe conduct for Jews on the highways since they had no business to be in the countryside, deprive them of all their gold and silver and prohibit usury or expel them from the country. All this was ‘to be done in honour of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians’. Four hundred years later the Nazi party displayed Luther’s pamphlet ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ during Nuremberg rallies. Hitler called Luther a great warrior, a true statesman and a great reformer. Himmler was also an admirer.

Under the promptings of Luther and Lutheran clergy, some of Germany’s new Protestant converts, including the rulers of Saxony, Hanover and Brandenburg, had expelled Jews from their cities. In Protestant Frankfurt Jews were confined in a ghetto outside the city walls.



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