Luther’s Jews
by Thomas Kaufmann, OUP, £18.99
Martin Luther’s venomous writings against the Jewish people were part of what Thomas Kaufmann describes as “a specifically pre-modern anti-Semitism”. This was an era during which absurd rumours about Jews ritually murdering Christian children were commonplace, and in which Jews were vilified as Christ-killing contaminants who deserved to languish in isolation and servitude. Even at his most splenetic, in his later writings, Luther was “only saying out loud, at length and obscenely, what many people already thought”. The phrase “later writings” is crucial, however. In his 1543 tract, On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther argued for expulsions, the razing of synagogues and the eradication of Jewish books. Jews, he averred, “wish us every kind of harm with curses, slanders and spitting beyond imagining” and they would always “remain bitter, virulent and vicious enemies of Christians”. And yet, just 20 years earlier, Luther had been writing his book That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, in which he proposed unconditional toleration of Jews in Christian society.
