Martin Luther's anti-semitism: against his better judgment
Eric Gritsch
158 pp
Erdmans Publishing: Grand Rapids 2012
Gritsch is professor emeritus at the Lutheran seminary in Gettysburg, and here he seeks to examine anti-semitism in Luther's life and thought. The majority of the text comprises, first, a survey of antisemism; next a discussion of Luther; and then some of the aftermath. In a short conclusion, Gritsch explains his view of how to consider this history. The first section seemed rather superficial to me: it does not contribute much. The second section is short, but contains examples and chronology. Unevenness somewhat spoils the third section, which provides some useful information but also contains a number of unhelpful one or two sentence summaries of how various people reacted over the next half millennium
The story told by the second section is peculiar and inconsistent, though this is only natural, due to the peculiar inconsistencies of Luther's thought on these matters. The Reformation occurred when printing greatly reduced the cost of books, and new ideas circulated widely. Luther's attack on Rome involved, in part, a demand that congregations must be allowed to read and interpret scripture, rather than leaving this in the hands of the Roman priests, and at the time it was a personally dangerous stance. Luther later in his career would have had access to the critical translation work of the emerging humanists but did not much avail himself of that possibility, instead being concerned with his own projects and political circumstances more immediately relevant to him. Gritsch believes that Luther attempted to hold in his own mind simultaneously conflicting views, that derived from his theology and from considerations of church politics. As a result, Luther's expressed attitudes towards Judaism oscillated strangely during his life, in his striving to reconcile at any moment completely contradictory ideas. In 1523, he published a plea for tolerance; by 1543, he had published an infamous anti-semitic tract; and then, in the following year, he preached on a hymnal line "Oh, poor Judas, what did you do?":
But his last sermon, in 1546, was once again anti-semitic. The inconsistencies seem to be widespread: for example, Luther himself was what we would today call a Biblical literalist, and he wrote a well-known commentary on Paul's epistle to the Romans, but in his discussion of Paul he frequently violated the plain meaning of Paul's text, when discussing "the Jews"
In the end, his anti-semitism does not generally seem to have met with much favor. The standard Lutheran canon managed, almost completely, with the exception of perhaps as little as one sentence, to disregard the anti-semitic tirades. There was a brief period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when some of the obnoxious texts were republished by anti-semites -- and after that the texts were usually neglected, until the Nazis found it useful to revive them. The antisemitic texts played little role in the congregations' understanding of Lutheran theology, though around 1644, a Pastor Muller in Hamburg actually quoted portions of the 1543 "On the Jews and their lies" in a plea for some tolerance. It was much more popular to refer to the 1523 text "That Jesus Christ was born a Jew," as (say) Nicholas of Zinzendorf did in the eighteenth century:
In the last few pages, Gritsch, as a Lutheran theologian, explains his take on this strange history