Luther, vol. 5 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

In exoneration of Luther it has been said that, in this case, in making use of such “shocking comparisons,” he was not merely following his natural bent, on the contrary, “in his angry zeal he deliberately sought for them.” It is perfectly true that neither his angry zeal nor his deliberate intention can be denied any more than his desire to “stir up the world against what was in itself shameful and disgusting,” and his longing to do something towards its removal. But surely there was another kind of language and a different tone with the help of which he might have effected more, such, for instance, as had been used by great and pious men in the past whose inspired and glowing words contrast glaringly with Luther’s hideous obscenities.

The results achieved by Luther with these two writings were but of trifling importance.

We hear practically nothing of any conversions of Jews or apostate Christians being due to them. Luther had been wise himself to declare that he did not expect any conversions to result from them. In the Saxon Electorate, however, the unjust enactment of 1536 was, on May 6, 1543, revived against the Jews by a public mandate abrogating that mitigation of it which Josel Rosheim had been successful in obtaining. “Official reports go to prove that the cruel persecution of the Jews [in the Saxon Electorate] was no mere paper measure; only after Luther’s death did things settle down.”[1621] In Hesse a severe decree against the Jews, issued in 1543, seems to have owed its origin “to the writings of the Reformer. This being so the rebuff with which Luther met in the Electorate of Brandenburg must have been all the more annoying.”[1622]

One of the lasting effects of these two screeds was, that, in the subsequent anti-Jewish risings the charges there contained, and couched in language so fervid and eloquent, were constantly appealed to in vindication of the measures used. No distinction was made between what was true and what was false, or between the horrible exaggerations and the actual fact, though the unreliability of many of the statements is often quite palpable.

Even in the few passages we had room to quote the reader may have seen how Luther’s charges against the Jews amount to calumnies; the Jews, he alleges, were in the habit of cursing and blaspheming God and all that is God’s; “regardless of God” they made out right to be left and left right. His love of exaggeration leads him to say that all Jews curse the Christians every Sabbath, and are ever desirous of stabbing them and their wives and children. Theft and robbery he makes into crimes common to every Jew; all of them he accuses indiscriminately of murder; “all their most heartfelt sighing, hopes and longings are set on this, viz. to be able to treat us heathen as they treated the heathen in Persia in the days of Esther ... for they fancy they are the chosen people in order that they may murder and slay the heathen ... just as they had made this plain to the world by the way they had treated us Christians in the beginning, and would still gladly do even now were they able, yea, have often done so.”[1623]

It is true he refuses credulously to believe all the crimes with which rumour charged them, for instance, their poisoning of the wells.[1624] The calumnies he made his own were, nevertheless, so great, that, after the magistrates of Strasburg had been repeatedly approached by Josel von Rosheim with the proposal to forbid the circulation of the two writings, they finally decided to prohibit their being printed in the city. The councillors were of opinion that the very enormity of the assertions would prove the best refutation. They wrote, that it was better to keep silence and to leave the calumnies to sink into oblivion; to this the petitioner agreed.[1625]

Josel von Rosheim, the zealous spokesman of the Jews, achieved a brilliant success with the Emperor Charles V. Certain extensive privileges were guaranteed him on April 3, 1544, and were made public in 1546, whereby all the rights and liberties of the Jews were confirmed.

Nor was there any lack of condemnation of these two writings of Luther at the hands of the Protestants themselves.

On Dec. 8, 1543, Bullinger of Zürich made to Bucer his complaint already referred to, concerning the “lewd and houndish eloquence” of the Wittenberger; he adds that such effusions were unseemly in a theologian already advanced in years; no one could tolerate a work so obscenely (“impurissime”) written, as “Vom Schem Hamphoras”; Reuchlin, were he still alive, would declare, that, in Luther, all the old foes of the Jews—Tungern, Hoogstraaten and Pfefferkorn—had come to life again [though their language fell short of Luther’s]: he was sorry for Luther’s murderous hatred of the Hebrew commentators and for the undue stress he laid on his own German translation, which was far from being devoid of prejudice.[1626] Bullinger expressed himself much more strongly, in 1545, when the split between Zürich and Wittenberg had been accentuated by Luther’s “Kurtz Bekentnis”: No one writing on questions of faith and matters of grave importance had ever expressed himself in a way so utterly at variance with propriety and modesty as Luther, etc.[1627]