The Reformation and the Jewish People: Part VI

by Jeffrey Gutterman

Luther’s relationship with the Jewish people.

A noted figure of the Reformation wrote of the Jewish People-

•  I  believe that Christ was a Jew born of a virgin, that I might perhaps also win some Jews to the Christian faith. Our fools, the popes, bishops, sophists, and monks - the crude asses' heads - have hitherto so treated the Jews that anyone who wished to be a good Christian would almost have had to become a Jew. If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian.

• I hope that if one deals in a kindly way with the Jews and instructs them carefully from Holy Scripture, many of them will become genuine Christians and turn again to the faith of their fathers, the prophets and patriarchs.

• If the apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would never have been a Christian among the Gentiles.

• When we are inclined to boast of our position we should remember that we are but Gentiles, while the Jews are of the lineage of Christ.

• For they have been led astray so long and so far that one must deal gently with them, as people who have been all too strongly indoctrinated to believe that God cannot be man.

• If we really want to help them, we must be guided in our dealings with them not by papal law but by the law of Christian love. We must receive them cordially, and permit them to trade and work with us, that they may have occasion and opportunity to associate with us, hear our Christian teaching, and witness our Christian life. If some of them should prove stiff-necked, what of it? After all, we ourselves are not all good Christians either.

      The author of these words was Martin Luther who wrote, That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, in 1523. He makes some strong and true statements. With the spread of Protestantism, Luther naively looked for mass conversions  by the Jewish populations, which were not forthcoming. He grossly misread the situation.

      Martin Luther (1483-1546) had wanted to see the church correct the error of its ways but instead he found himself leading a new movement. His intention was to reform the Catholic Church from within. He never wanted to start a Reformation Movement separate and apart from the Church. Luther saw the Jews as a people that had not embraced Christianity and he believed that he now knew the REAL reason that they had not embraced Jesus as their Messiah.

      Luther concluded that the Jews all along had seen the corruption of the Church in Rome and would have never agreed to become part of that unrighteous body. BUT NOW that the Reformation had addressed this corruption and come against it, any barriers to Jewish conversion had been removed and Luther believed that the Jews would come to faith en masse.

      Talk about misreading a situation.

     The Jews saw the Reformation as perhaps taking some of the persecution off of them as a group. Perhaps this new movement opposing the practices of the Catholic Church would draw some heat away from the Jewish people. While they hoped that this would happen, at the same time, they didn’t embrace this new movement either. They saw Protestantism as just another form of Christianity, which they saw as a false religion if not outright idolatry. In fact, it was the brutal treatment that they had received from Christians over the centuries that only proved that they were right to avoid Christianity. After all is said and done, they believed that a Christian was a Christian and that almost always meant trouble for the Jews.

      The Roman Catholic Church suspected that the Jews might support Protestantism since they both opposed the Church, so they carefully monitored the actions of the Jewish populations in the Roman Catholic areas that did not embrace the Reformation. This led to the establishment of the Ghettos where the Jews were isolated in the Catholic cities.

     As usually happens throughout history, Catholics blamed the Jews for the Reformation and the Marranos (Jews who converted to avoid the persecution of the inquisition) were particularly suspected. In the city-states of Europe of those days, it was thought that these Marranos were the most likely to be traitorous to the local government and they were often treated as such.

      The Marranos were seen as undependable. They had renounced their Judaism to survive. If they could change their mind once, how could one depend on them to be good Christians? In fact, many Jews had adopted the beliefs that the culture they were in professed. They often accepted Anabaptism, which was not well received by many Christians.

      Luther sorely miscalculated the position of the Jews and when they did not embrace Protestant Christianity he turned on them with much condemnation. The Jews refused these invitations to receive Jesus as their Messiah by stating that the Talmud and their rabbis taught the Bible more accurately than Christians. Some of the Rabbis then had the audacity to invite Luther to become Jewish.

      In 1526 Luther criticized them for their stubbornness. In 1537 he influenced their expulsion from Saxony and in the decade of the 1540’s he provoked their removal from many towns in Germany. In 1543 he wrote, On the Jews and Their Lies.  

      Again how could Luther have so misread this situation? How could a man express such positive attitudes towards the Jews and yet twenty years later, in 1543, viciously condemn them? 

      It makes sense when one realizes that the work in 1523, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew” was written in response to accusations that Rome was making about Luther’s beliefs about the virgin birth and more. It had suited Luther’s purposes to blame the church for the Jewish refusal to receive Jesus as their Messiah.