Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany

Abstract

Martin Luther’s writings against the Jews have embarrassed later generations, both by their substance and by their tone. Their initial argument is theological. Both in the Old Testament and in Luther’s time, Jews profess that they can lead a life pleasing to God without the help of divine grace. For their rejection of the Messiah, they have been punished with exile, and Christians should not persecute them but leave them in their misery as a dreadful warning. However, the notorious later treatises, Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (1542) and Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (1543), denounce the Jews wholesale as blasphemous criminals and urge Christian princes to destroy their houses, burn their synagogues and schools, and set them to hard labour. With their cloacal imagery, these treatises are steeped in the rhetoric of late-medieval antisemitism. Commentators since 1945 have stressed the theological thrust of Luther’s anti-Judaism and pointed out that despite its fury it is at least free from the racial antisemitism that developed in the nineteenth century. Before 1945, however, as Christopher Probst argues, these treatises provided ample ammunition—more than is generally realized—for antisemites in the German Lutheran Church. Thus their reception is an important topic in the generally dispiriting history of the Church’s relations with Nazism, in which individuals sympathetic to Jews, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, formed a small minority.