Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Luther, the champion of spiritual freedom, could not forgive the Jews for differing from him in the interpretation of the Scriptures: “The Jews read our books, and thereout raise objections against us; ’tis a nation that scorns and blasphemes even as the lawyers, the Papists, and adversaries do, taking out of our writings the knowledge of our cause, and using the same as weapons against us.”[107] Yet the very tactics which Luther so ingenuously condemns in the Jews, lawyers, and Papists, he himself is the first to adopt. In his endeavours to convert the Jews he draws all his arguments, as others had done before him, from the Hebrew Bible: “I am persuaded if the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old Testament, many of them might be won, but, through disputing, they have become more and more stiff-necked, haughty, and presumptuous.”[108] And elsewhere: “I have studied the chief passages of Scripture that constitute the grounds upon which the Jews argue against us; as where God said to Abraham: ‘I will make my covenant between me and thee, and with thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant....’ Here the Jews brag, as the Papists do upon the passage, ‘Thou art Peter.’ I would willingly bereave the Jews of this bragging by rejecting the Law of Moses, so that they should not be able to gainsay me. We have against them the prophet Jeremiah, where he says, ‘Behold, the time cometh, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not as the covenant which I made with their fathers.’...”[109] On another occasion he tries to refute the Jews by quoting Jeremiah’s prophecy “touching Christ: ‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a King shall reign and prosper ... and this is the name whereby he shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.’ This argument the Jews are not able to solve; yet, if they deny that this sentence is spoken of Christ, they must show unto us another King, descended from David, who should govern so long as the sun and moon endure, as the promises of the prophets declare.”[110]

Luther in these passages, and passages like these, repeats all the well-worn arguments with which Christians from the earliest times strove to persuade the Jews that the Messiah had come. He insists that “the Law of Moses continued but for a while, therefore it must be abolished”; that “the circumcision was to continue but for a while, until the Messiah came; when he came, the commandment was at an end,” superseded by “the circumcision of the heart”;[111] that it was faith and not works that justified Abraham,[112] and so forth. But the Jews answered Luther’s arguments, as their fathers had answered the arguments of Justin Martyr, of Tertullian, and of other ancient authorities, and the arguments of the Dominican friars: “The covenant of the circumcision given before Moses’ time, and made between God and Abraham and his seed Isaac in his generation, they say, must and shall be an everlasting covenant, which they will not suffer to be taken from them.”[113]

Luther’s eloquence, or perhaps his power to protect them, occasionally prevailed with the Jews. He tells us that the two Rabbis, Schamaria and Jacob, who went to him at Wittenberg to solicit a safe conduct, “struck to the heart, silenced and convinced, forsook their errors, became converts, and the day following, in the presence of the whole university at Wittenberg, were baptized Christians.”[114] The long sufferings of the race, and the ever deferred fulfilment of the hope of redemption, sometimes produced heartsickness and despair: “In 1537, when I was at Frankfurt, a great rabbi said to me, ‘My father had read very much, and waited for the coming of the Messiah, but at last he fainted, and out of hope said: As our Messiah has not come in fifteen hundred years, most certainly Christ Jesus must be he.’”[115] And again, “A Jew came to me at Wittenberg, and said: He was desirous to be baptized, and made a Christian, but that he would first go to Rome to see the chief head of Christendom. From this intention myself, Philip Melanchthon, and other divines laboured to dissuade him, fearing lest, when he witnessed the offences and knaveries at Rome, he might be scared from Christendom. But the Jew went to Rome, and when he had sufficiently seen the abominations acted there he returned to us again, desiring to be baptized, and said: ‘Now I will willingly worship the God of the Christians, for he is a patient God. If he can endure such wickedness and villainy as is done at Rome, he can suffer and endure all the vices and knaveries of the world.’”[116]

But all those that are baptized are not converts. Martin Luther was too shrewd not to perceive the distinction. How he would have dealt with such hypocrites he tells us with charming frankness: “If a Jew, not converted at heart, were to ask baptism at my hands, I would take him on to the bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him into the river; for these wretches are wont to make a jest of our religion. Yet, after all, water and the Divine Word being the essence of baptism, a Jew, or any other, would be none the less validly baptized, that his own feelings and intentions were not the result of faith.”[117]

Yet, even such cases of pseudo-conversion were rare. The Jews, as a sect, far from yielding to the efforts of the Christians to make them embrace Christianity, entertained hopes of the Christians embracing Judaism. The Protestant’s devotion to the study of the Hebrew language, and the extraordinary vogue which Cabbalistic mysticism had obtained among the early Reformers through Reuchlin’s books, encouraged this notion. But Luther assures them that “their hope is futile. ’Tis they must accept our religion, and of the crucified Christ, and overcome all their objections, especially that of the alteration of the Sabbath, which sorely annoys them, but ’twas ordered by the apostles, in honour of the Lord’s resurrection.”[118]

It was in vain that Luther changed his ground, and, abandoning his attacks on the religious prejudices of the Jews, turned his artillery against their racial pride, and endeavoured to prove that their vaunted purity of blood was a myth:

“During the 70 years when they were captives at Babylon, they were so confused and mingled together, that even then they hardly knew out of what tribe each was descended. How should it be now, when they have been so long hunted and driven about by the Gentiles, whose soldiers spared neither their wives nor their daughters, so that now they are, as it were, all bastards, none of them knowing out of what tribe he is?”[119] Luther knew not that the sentiment of nationality depends far more on community of interests and aspirations, of memories of the past and hopes for the future, than on any physiological similarity of blood.

Nevertheless, despite his occasional successes, Luther himself was aware of the futility of his endeavours. He sorrowfully recognises the impossibility of reconciling Jew and Gentile: “In the porch of a Church at Cologne there is a statue of a dean, who, in the one hand holds a cat, and in the other a mouse. This dean had been a Jew, but was baptized, and became a Christian. He ordered this statue to be set up after his death, to show, that a Jew and a Christian agree as little as a cat and a mouse. And truly they hate us Christians as they do death.”[120]

All these sentiments, accompanied with suggestions for the suppression of the miserable people, were embodied by Luther in his published pamphlets.[121] The Reformer’s unmeasured hostility bears to the habitual tolerance of many popes the same relation as the mental horizon of the provincial monk does to the broader vision of the monarch of a great empire.

If Luther, the genial and joyous, entertained so uncharitable feelings towards the Jews, it is not difficult to understand the attitude of his morose and narrower successors, armed as they were by the sanction of his example. It has been well said, “the opinions of a great man are a valuable possession and a ruinous inheritance.” The denunciations of Israel by the early Fathers of the Church had continued to dictate Christian intolerance through the ages, and their authority was quoted in support of the persecutions and massacres which sullied mediaeval Europe. Luther’s utterances exercised a similar influence over the Protestant world, both in his own and in after times, down to the present day. Protestant Germany took up the tale of persecution in the sixteenth century where Catholic Germany had left off in the fifteenth. The Jews were given the alternatives of baptism and banishment in Berlin, were expelled from Bavaria in 1553, from Brandenburg in 1573, and the tragedy of oppression was carried on through the ensuing centuries. How vigorously the plant of anti-Judaism continued to flourish in Germany may be seen from the following incident.