Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present ed. by Irene Aue-Ben-David et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present ed. by Irene Aue-Ben-David et al. Darrell Jodock Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present. Edited by Irene Aue-Ben-David, Aya Elyada, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Christian Wiese. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020. viii + 280 pp. In recent years, Luther's harsh teachings against the Jews have received a good deal of attention, as have Nazi appeals to Luther and the response(s) of the church in Germany. Less attention has been given to Protestant-Jewish relations from the Reformation to the present. Drawing on lectures from a conference in Israel in 2017, this book endeavors to fill this gap. Its thirteen essays, written by scholars from Germany, Israel, England, Canada, the United States, and the Czech Republic, examine developments from the Reformation and post-Reformation era, the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Nazi years, and the decades following the Holocaust. Although the book does not offer a unified narrative, the articles are arranged chronologically and convey a sense of historical development. It has a helpful introduction and benefits from a detailed index. One valuable feature is that, in addition to Protestant views of Judaism, the book discusses Jewish attitudes toward the Reformation and how those attitudes changed. The opening chapter, for example, examines "The Impact of the Reformation on Early Modern German Jewry." The Jewish community, it argues, was not isolated. It absorbed changes in communal organization and educational priorities, while at the same time resisting those influences that conflicted with its communal and historical concerns. The next chapter observes that Jews focused on Luther's earlier (1523) view [End Page 104] of the Jews and appreciated how the Protestant movement reduced the power of Roman Catholicism. They found affinity with the Protestants' rejection of (what both perceived as) worship of the saints. In the nineteenth century there was a tendency among German Jews to view Luther as a forerunner of the Enlightenment and its tolerance. Among Protestants, "only in the 1830s, following the first modern edition of Luther's writings, did Luther's anti-Jewish writings gain renewed attention" (7). Later, during the Second Reich, Luther came to be viewed as the German national hero who mobilized his people against their enemies. A more völkisch-racist understanding of German-ness emerged. The goal of integration was replaced by more sharply drawn lines of separation. The diversity of topics and approaches makes identifying a single theme difficult, but one clear impression is the complexity of attitudes. So, for example, the clergy who wrote articles in American Protestant periodicals in 1938 "fought against anti-Semitism and tried to aid Jews, though not without slipping into the language of enduring anti-Jewish prejudices" (227) and not without giving their primary concern to the persecution of Christians. One of the more interesting topics in the book is its discussion of the Pietists. They tended to follow Luther's earlier approach, which Professors Sluhovsky and Elyada characterize in the book's introduction as instructing "Jews kindly and carefully in Scripture, according to its 'true Christian' (namely Lutheran) understanding," and allowing "the Jewish minority to integrate into Christian society, as a means of exposing them to Christian belief and way of life" (4). In order to approach Jews effectively, the Pietists "equipped their evangelists with knowledge of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture" (92). This prompted them to do what had not often happened among Christians earlier: they paid attention to lived Judaism, including its culture and languages and its diversity. They wrote reports regarding their encounters. One discovery was the extensive poverty among the Jews. This prompted the Pietists to advocate for improved civil and economic opportunities for the Jews as well as defending them against libel. The Pietists also translated the Bible into Yiddish, as a kind of "scripture alone" for Jews. Previous translations were [End Page 105] available but were overly literal and included a lot of Midrashim. Although the Pietists regarded Christianity to be superior to Judaism, they "proposed a non-supercessionist [sic] understanding of the Jews," most often perceiving them "as a people carrying a special mission" (102). Jewish leaders...