“The Jews merely interest him,” says Reinhold Lewin, speaking of this book, “as subjects for conversion; this is the standpoint from which he regards the whole Jewish question.” “Should the new method not succeed and kindness prove of no avail ... then it will not be worth while any longer to make use of it; harsher measures will then serve the purpose better.”[1635] The same writer also quotes the preface to the Latin translation by Justus Jonas as expressive of the wish of the Wittenbergers: “May the Jewish business speed its way as rapidly as the outspreading of the Word of God which has wrought so marvellous a change and so sublime a work of God.”[1636]
It is perfectly true that, had the optimistic expectations of Luther and his friends been realised, it would have been of incalculable advantage to their cause, for they would have succeeded where the ancient Church had failed. “The conversion of the Jews,” says Lewin, “an idea which can be read between Luther’s lines without any danger of forcing them—is to be the coping-stone of the grand edifice he had erected; the Papacy [in Luther’s view] had failed, not merely because it had recourse to wrong methods but above all because its foundations rested on forgery and falsehood.”[1637]
The fact is, however, that no increase in the number of conversions took place. This disappointing experience, the sight of the growing insolence of the Jews, their pride and usury, not to speak of personal motives, such as certain attempts he suspected them to have made on his life at the instigation of the Papists, brought about a complete change in Luther’s opinions in the course of a few years. As early as 1531 or 1532, when a Hebrew baptised at Wittenberg had brought discredit upon him by relapsing into Judaism, he gave vent to the angry threat, that, should he find another pious Jew to baptise he would take him to the bridge over the Elbe, hang a stone round his neck and push him over with the words: I baptise thee in the name of Abraham; for “those scoundrels,” so he adds, “scoff at us all and at our religion.”[1638]
From that time he begins to put the Jews in the same category with the Turks and the Papists.
The more he studies the text of the Old Testament, and the Old Jewish commentators, the more indignant he grows at the misrepresentations and trivialities to be met with in the works of the Rabbis. According to him, they are oxen and donkeys; they are as bad as the monks; with their droppings they make of Holy Scripture, as it were, a sink into which to empty their obscenity and stupid imaginings.[1639] He is also aghast to discover that they led astray even great churchmen like St. Jerome, and Nicholas of Lyra of whom he was particularly fond.[1640] What was even worse, they were ensnaring learned contemporaries who were familiar with Hebrew, particularly those who fancied they could improve upon Luther’s translation of the Old Testament thanks to their closer acquaintance with the original text, men, for instance, of the type of Sebastian Münster of Basle (the pupil of the Jewish grammarian Elia Levita). Münster, according to Luther, was a regular “Judaiser,” seeing that he paid heed neither to the faith, nor to the words, nor to their setting; albeit hostile to the Jews, he, too, was undermining the New Testament. Much of Luther’s anger in his writings against the Jews was intended for their Judaising pupils. Hence on the publication of the work “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen” we hear him declaring: “We have been at great pains with the Bible and been careful that the sense should agree with the grammar. This has not pleased Münster. Oh, those Hebrews—including even our own—are great Judaisers; hence I had them also in mind when I wrote my booklet against the Jews.”[1641]
Some special motives for his Polemics against the Jews
The real cause of Luther’s deadly hostility, voiced in his later writings against the Jews, was the blasphemous infidelity displayed in their treatment of Scripture and in their life as a whole.
“The Jews with their exegesis,” he says, “are like swine that break into the Scripture”; the end and object of their life and intercourse with us, is, as the movement started in Moravia proves, to make us all Jews; “they never cease trying to entice Christians over.”[1642] They are quite at liberty to prefer, as indeed they do, the law of Moses to the Papal decretals and their mad articles,[1643] but they have no right to prefer it to the pure Evangel. Sooner than this let us have a struggle to the death!—Such were the thoughts uppermost in his mind when he sat down to pen those two writings which constitute a phenomenon in the history of literature.
On the other hand, Luther’s most recent biographer is wrong when he explains the whole controversy by saying: “There can be no doubt that the radical change in his attitude on the Jewish question was an outcome of his increasing depression.”[1644] That, on the contrary, it was Luther’s religious excitement which was the prime psychological mover is plain from many of the effusions contained in both these writings. That, however, his state of depression had some share in it is perfectly true.