Chapter XXXIII (2)

One controversy which greatly excited Luther at this time was that with the Swiss Sacramentarians. Once more his old feud with Zwinglianism was to break out and embitter his days. When, in 1542, the elevation was abolished in the parish church of Wittenberg (to some extent out of deference to the wishes of the Landgrave of Hesse who objected to this rite), some people too hastily concluded that Luther was renouncing his own doctrine in favour of that of the Swiss; hence he deemed it necessary once more to deny, in language too clear to be mistaken, any intention to make common cause with a company, which, as he puts it, had been “infected and intoxicated with an alien spirit.”

Moreover, Caspar Schwenckfeld, with the object of moving the feelings of Luther’s opponents, made known to them Luther’s rude and so discreditable letter.[1583] The animosity of the Swiss and of their South German sympathisers now assumed serious dimensions. Luther accordingly determined to address the reply which he had been planning for some time to the Sacramentarians as a body, declaring that that “slanderer” Schwenckfeld was not worth a single line.

He was also very desirous of once more before his death giving vigorous and lasting expression to the positive faith which he still shared and to which he was wont eagerly to fly when hard pressed by the devil. The spectre of scepticism of which, as many of his statements show, he dreaded the advent among his followers as soon as he himself had been taken away, was to be exorcised beforehand.

The writing against the Swiss is the work just alluded to, which appeared at the end of Sep., 1544, under the title “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament.”[1584]

After briefly disposing of their arguments, with which he had already sufficiently dealt, the work culminates in a most outspoken condemnation of the errors and arbitrary opinions of the Swiss, the most striking sentence of all being the following: “Hence, in a word, either believe everything fully or else nothing at all.”[1585] This was practically what the Catholic Church had said to him at his own apostasy: The principle of faith permits of no picking and choosing between the truths revealed by God and guaranteed by the Church’s teaching authority; one must choose between either accepting the whole body of the Church’s doctrines, or leaving her.[1586]

For the rest the writing was another bad example of the boundless fury and offensiveness of his mode of controversy. In the first lines he declares: “It is quite the same to me ... when the accursed mob of fanatics, Zwinglians and the like praise or abuse me, as when Jews, Turks, Pope or all the devils in unison scold or laud me. For I, who am now about to go down into the grave, am determined to bring this testimony and this boasting with me to the Judgment-seat of my dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that I have with the utmost earnestness condemned and shunned the fanatics and Sacramentarians, Carlstadt, Zwingli, Œcolampadius, Stinkfield and their disciples, whether at Zürich or wherever else they were, according to His command, Titus iii. 10: ‘A man that is a heretic avoid.’”[1587]—He goes on to call the Zwinglian Sacramentarians “devourers and murderers of souls, who have an endevilled, perdevilled, supradevilled and blasphemous heart and a lying jaw.” “Hence no Christian can or ought to pray for the fanatics or to assist them. They are reprobates.... They want to have nothing to do with me, and I want to have nothing to do with them. They boast that they have nothing from me, for which I heartily thank God: I have borrowed even less from them, for which, too, God be praised.”[1588]

In this writing against the Zwinglians Luther also attacks the Papacy with unspeakable coarseness. Was it perhaps that he was seeking to atone in this way for his apparent agreement with the Catholics in their belief in the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament? This agreement with the Papacy was, however, as he boasts, only due to his holding fast to the ancient doctrine, to that doctrine which the “true olden Christian Church has held for fifteen hundred years.”[1589] He did not bethink himself of his treatment of many other doctrines of this “true, olden Church.” Moreover, even his doctrine of the Sacrament was but a shadow of the ancient one. He insisted on denying any change of substance in the Bread and on affirming that the Body of Christ is actually and everywhere in heaven and on earth present as a body. He is also known to have praised Calvin for a writing in which the latter belied the “local presence” of Christ in the Bread,[1590] and that he declared his readiness to “learn something from so able a mind.” Thus what he retained was but a distorted fragment of the ancient doctrine of the Sacrament, salved from the shattered treasure of his former Catholic convictions.

_Calvin_

Very different from that which he displayed towards Zwingli and his co-religionists was Luther’s attitude towards Calvin, the head of the theocracy of Geneva, whose power in the “Swiss Rome” had developed so amazingly since 1541, when he had returned after six years’ exile at Strasburg in the companionship of Bucer.

Thanks to Bucer, Calvin’s opinions, which in the main had always been Lutheran, had been directed more towards that form of Lutheranism represented by Bucer and Melanchthon, his earlier humanistic education making this all the easier. On account of his views some have, not so wrongly, dubbed him the “South-German Lutheran,”[1591] though his stiffness and harshness were not at all in keeping with the South-German character. Being in close touch with Lutheranism he had frequently visited Germany during his theological wanderings, and as the representative of the Strasburg Protestants. He had taken a part in the negotiations at the Frankfurt Convention and at the religious conferences at Hagenau, Worms and Ratisbon.

Calvin esteemed Luther far higher than Zwingli. “If we compare them,” he wrote to his friend Guillaume Farel, “Luther towers far above him, as you yourself are well aware.”[1592]

Calvin’s doctrine, as exemplified in his frequently quoted “_Institutio religionis christianæ_” (1536) and in his later writings, like that of Luther, excludes any participation of the human will in the work of salvation; all freedom is abolished, everything being enacted by the unchangeable “_Providentia Dei_” in the deterministic sense; with him, as with Luther, Adam’s fall was inevitable, owing to the divine Predestination, and so was the consequent enthralling of the whole of the human race under the bondage of sin.[1593]

On the elect, however, more particularly on those who follow Calvin’s doctrines and admonitions, the assurance of salvation is infallibly bestowed, just as he possesses it himself. Those thus predestined cannot be lost, while such as are predestined to hell must inevitably incur the penalty of eternal suffering; amongst the latter are not only all the heathen, but also those who oppose the new belief; they are a reprobate mass of humanity who have forfeited all right to live by rising up against God and the authorities.[1594] In his doctrine of predestination Calvin, who is the more logical of the two, sets aside the distinction insisted on by Luther between the Revealed Will of God that all men should be saved and His Hidden Will which nullifies it. The predestinarian ideas of both are at bottom identical, but with Luther, as Friedrich Loofs expresses it, “reprobation tends to recede more and more into the background and thus to hold only a secondary place; Calvin, on the other hand, is ever and of set purpose dwelling on this background, because (according to him) it is also part of the revealed doctrine of salvation, and also because it is only another aspect of predestination.”[1595]

Calvin taught Justification in the same way as Luther, and, like him, denied entirely any merit to good works.

It was with unmixed joy that Luther saw “so able a mind” coming forward as a champion of the new theology against the Roman errors.

* * * * *

This explains how Melanchthon could announce to Bucer at Strasburg, in a note evidently intended for Calvin himself, that, though certain persons had tried to incite Luther against Calvin on account of a statement [on the Supper] which was at variance with Luther’s views, “Calvin stands in high favour [with Luther]” (“_magnam gratiam iniit_”). Calvin himself with great satisfaction quoted this passage in a letter to Farel.[1596] As for Luther, writing to Bucer on Oct. 14, 1539, he sent his “respectful greetings” to Calvin and mentioned that he had perused “with peculiar pleasure”[1597] his writing (the “_Responsio_” against Jacopo Sadoleto in which was the incriminated statement).

When, in April, 1545, Luther glanced through a newly published Latin translation of Calvin’s principal work on the Supper, “Petit traicté de la sainte cene” (1541), he observed, that the author was a learned and pious man; had Œcolampadius and Zwingli expressed themselves in this way from the beginning, then no such quarrel would have arisen. Thus Luther accepted the Genevese theologian’s essay “in a friendly way and without misgiving”—though “in it, Calvin recognised a bodily presence in Luther’s sense as little as before.”[1598] On the contrary, Calvin agrees in the main with Zwingli’s denial of the Real Presence, though he insists very strongly on the spiritual working of the Body of Christ enthroned in heaven on the recipients of the Supper, so strongly indeed as to speak of the “real substance of His Body and Blood” which Christ communicates.[1599] As Loofs puts it: “He had come nearer to Luther’s view, at least so far as terminology went.” Later on, however, so Loofs adds, “the delusive terminological approximation to Luther disappeared”; in support of this Loofs quotes from the 1559 edition of the “_Institutio_”: “Christ breathes life into our souls from the substance of His Flesh ... though the flesh of Christ does not enter us.”[1600]

It was fortunate for the relations between the leaders at Wittenberg and Geneva that Luther was no longer amongst the living when Calvin expressed such a view of the Supper.

The amenities and courtesies between the two heads would have ceased and Luther’s wrath would have once again asserted itself. As a matter of fact the ambiguity of which Calvin had learnt the use in Bucer’s school came to an end very shortly after Luther’s death, when Calvin and Farel reached an agreement with Bullinger of Zürich (The “_Consensus Tigurinus_”); here the Genevese without any reservation put forward the theses: “Any idea of a local presence of Christ [in the Sacrament] must be set aside ... it is a wrong and godless superstition to circumscribe Christ as man under elements of this world.”[1601] The words “This is My Body” are, on the contrary, to be understood by metonymy, the name of the thing represented being transferred to the “sign.”—Now it was just the fact that Zwingli and the sacramentarians made of the Eucharist nothing more than a “sign” that had kept alive Luther’s indignation against them even till his last hour.

“_On the Jews and their Lies._” “_On Shem Hammephorash_,” 1543

Amongst the prominent events of the day in Central Germany the Jewish movement deserves a place; on the one hand there was an increase in the influence and power of the Jews, and, on the other, repressive measures secured their banishment from several territories. In this movement Luther took a leading part.

In the Saxon Electorate the expulsion of the Jews had taken place in 1536 by virtue of an edict of Johann Frederick’s. They were even refused the usual safe conduct through the country and threatened with the severest penalties should they be caught within the borders. In the matter of this regulation Luther sided with the sovereign. When the Jew, Josel Rosheim, a zealous advocate of his race, besought Luther repeatedly in the most urgent manner by letter to procure him an audience with the Elector, Luther not only refused to do anything for him, on the grounds that the Jews were hostile to Christianity, but even declared his intention to attack their obstinacy in print as soon as God granted him time and opportunity.[1602]

It was the accounts he received towards the close of 1542 of the intrigues and the spread of the so-called Sabbatarians, a sect of Christians settled in Moravia who had been led astray by the Jews to introduce circumcision, the observance of the Saturday-Sabbath and other Mosaic ceremonies, which prompted him to undertake a slashing work against the Jews.

He had been acquainted with the sect since 1532. In his lectures on Genesis he lamented that the plague of Sabbatarianism was flourishing greatly in those districts where the madness of the Catholic rulers would not permit of the Evangel taking root; the Sabbatarians were the very apes of the Jews and were busy Judaising Austria and Moravia.[1603] In March, 1538, he had sent to the press his “Brieff. ... wider die Sabbather” in which he proves that the Messias had already come and had abrogated the Mosaic law.[1604] In the preface which Justus Jonas prefixed to his Latin translation of the letter it was pointed out, that the treasure of Holy Scripture had been unlocked in this age by the preaching of the Evangel; that it was the duty of the Evangelical teachers to strive to bring the Jews into the right path by means of the new light; and that the Jews in every country would be well advised to be guided by Luther’s booklet.[1605]

The idea of defending Christianity in detail by the light of the new knowledge of the Scriptures against the madness of the Jews took firm hold on Luther’s imagination; he cherished the idea that “perchance some among them might be won over.”[1606] He was greatly incensed against Ferdinand, the German King, who, as he said, was laying waste the Evangelical Churches, while permitting the Jews—who in their insolence oppress the Christians—to reside in his lands.[1607] On May 18, 1542, he received news of the expulsion of the Jews from Bohemia and other territories. But later in the year a writing of the Sabbatarians was sent him, which, in dialogue form, attacked him and proselytised for the sect. This Jewish movement began also to gain ground outside the borders of Moravia.

This gave the necessary stimulus “to the fanatical campaign against the Jews which the Reformer started in the winter of 1542.”[1608]

At the end of 1542 he published his “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen,” and in March, 1543, his “Vom Schem Hamphoras.”[1609]

In the first he begins by proving against the Jews the Messianic character of Christ, answers their objections and lays bare their falsehoods, after which he considers how the Jews should be dealt with. In the second he discusses the Jewish legend concerning Christ’s miracles, and in particular scourges the superstitions connected with the use of the “Shem Hammephorash”; he then examines the genealogies of Christ in the Gospels in order to refute the objections of the Jews in this connection, and again discusses the proofs that Christ was the Messias, at the same time defending in detail His birth of a Virgin. Both writings he addresses to the Christians in order to strengthen them in the faith in view of the dangers which threatened from Judaism.

Full of zeal for the defence of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, the coming and the benefits bestowed by the Messias, he refutes at great length the supposed learned proofs of his Jewish opponents. On the other hand, he thunders furiously against the blasphemies, the unseemly behaviour and the usury of the Jews who stood in high favour at several of the Courts; he even demands with “great earnestness” that their synagogues and private houses, the scene of their blasphemies, be set on fire and levelled to the ground (“Let whoever can, throw brimstone and pitch upon them”[1610]), that their books be taken away from them and “not one page left,” that their Rabbis be forbidden on pain of death to teach henceforth, and that all be hindered from “praising God publicly, thanking Him, praying or teaching”;[1611] further, that the streets and highways be closed against them, that they be forbidden to practise usury, and be expelled from the land unless indeed willing to earn their bread at the sweat of their brow with axe and spade, spindle and distaff. All these counsels were, of course, addressed primarily to the authorities, but, such was their nature, that they might easily have provoked the people to an unchristian persecution of their Jewish fellow-citizens. These writings, with their unmeasured vituperation and their obscenity, also bear painful witness to the deterioration of his language with advancing years.

“Fie on you,” he cries, “fie on you wherever you be, you damned Jews, who dare to clasp this earnest, glorious, consoling Word of God to your maggoty, mortal, miserly belly, and are not ashamed to display your greed so openly.”[1612]—“Whenever you see or think of a Jew, say to yourself: Look, that mouth that I see before me has every Saturday cursed, execrated and spat upon my dear Lord Jesus Christ Who redeemed me with His precious Blood, and also invoked malediction on my wife and child and all Christians that they might be murdered and perish miserably; he himself would gladly do it if he could, if only in order to get hold of our goods; mayhap he has already to-day many times spat on the ground, as it is their custom to do, when the name of Jesus is mentioned, so that his venomous spittle still hangs about his mouth and beard and leaves scarcely room to spit again. Were I to eat, drink or speak with such a devilish mouth, I might as well eat and drink out of a can or vessel brimful of devils, and thus become partaker with the devils who dwell in the Jews and spit at the Precious Blood of Christ. From which may God preserve me.”[1613]

“I, accursed ‘Goi’ that I am, cannot understand whence they [the Jews] have this great art, unless it is, that, when Judas Scharioth hanged himself and his bowels gushed forth, and, as happens in such cases, his bladder also burst, the Jews were ready to catch the Judas-water and the other precious things, and that then they gorged and swilled on the merd among themselves, and were thereby endowed with such a keenness of sight that they can perceive glosses in the Scripture such as neither Matthew, nor Isaias himself, nor all the angels, not to speak of us accursed ‘Goiim,’ would be able to detect; or perhaps they looked into the loins of their God ‘Shed’ and found these things written in that smokehole.”[1614]

“Where are they now, those dissolute Christians who have been made or wish to become Jews? Here for a kiss! The devil has eased himself and emptied his belly again. That is a real halidom for Jews and would-be Jews to kiss, batten on, swill and adore; and then the devil in his turn also devours and swills what these good pupils spue and eject from above and from below. Hosts and guests are indeed well met and the dishes are well-cooked and served.” The devil should have been an angel but “became a devil, who with his angelic snout devours what exudes from the oral and anal apertures of the Jews; this is indeed his favourite dish on which he battens like a sow behind the hedge about St. Margaret’s Day; that is just as he would have it! Therefore the Jews have got their deserts.” They renounced their dignity as the chosen mouthpiece of God, therefore the “devil defiles and bespatters them so much that nothing but devil’s ordure bursts forth from him everywhere; this indeed is quite to their taste, and they wallow in it like the swine.”[1615]

In this way Luther unloads himself of his fury against both devil and Jews; two things are characteristic of his hatred of the Jews; first, that the devil is made to bear the greater share,[1616] though the latter promptly shifts the burden back on to the shoulders of the Jews; secondly, that the presumption of the Jews in seeking to be first everywhere is castigated with all Luther’s native coarseness.

“It is thus that the wicked, scoundrelly foe mocks at his captive Jews; he makes them say ‘Schem Hamphoras’ and believe and expect great things from it; he, however, means ‘Scham Hamperes,’ i.e. ‘hither filth,’ not that which lies in the gutters, but that which forthcomes from the belly.... The devil has taken the Jews captive so that they must do his will (as St. Paul says) and deceive, lie, blaspheme as also curse God and everything that is God’s. In return for this he makes a mock of them with his ‘Scham Hamperes,’ and leads them to believe that this and all their other lying and tomfoolery is something precious.”[1617]

The blinded presumption of the Jews is nevertheless so great that they fancy themselves far superior to the Christians. “Do you think a Jew is so badly off? God in heaven and all the angels must laugh and dance when they hear a Jew ructate, that you, accursed ‘Goi,’ may know for the future how fine a thing it is to be a Jew.” And yet they lie and use bad language if a man ventures to hold up to public obloquy, as an “arch prostitute,” one of his pious cousins.[1618]—“Have I not told you above, what a grand and precious gem a Jew is; he has but to break wind, for God to dance and all His angels, and even were he to do something even grosser, it would still be looked upon as a golden Talmud; what such a man voids, whether from above or from below, that the accursed ‘Goiim’ are forsooth to regard as a holy thing.”[1619]

“Nay, were a Rabbi to ease himself into a vessel under your nose, both thick and thin, and to say: ‘Here you have a delicious conserve, you would have to say you had never tasted a better dish in your life. Risk your neck and say differently! For if a man has the power to say [like the Rabbis] that right is left and left right, regardless of God and all His creatures, he can just as well say that his anus is his mouth, that his belly is a pudding-dish and that a pudding-dish is his belly.”[1620]

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]

The Nuremberg preacher, Andreas Osiander, at that time one of the greatest authorities on Hebrew and on Rabbinic writings, wrote so strong a letter about the untruth of certain of Luther’s anti-Jewish strictures that no one ventured to bring it under the Reformer’s notice. Cruciger relates that Osiander afterwards withdrew some of the strongest things he had said in the letter, but that he still maintained that Luther had not in the least understood what the Shem Hammephorash meant to educated Jews.[1628]

The Shem Hammephorash or “peculiar name” was, according to Luther, a cabalistic formula of the Jews, supposed to be endowed with the most marvellous magic power; it was made up of seventy-two three-lettered names of angels, themselves formed from a rearrangement of the letters of the Scripture text, Ex. xiv. 19-21, concerning the pillar of cloud that went before the Jews on their departure from Egypt. To each of these angelic names was appended a verse from the Psalter with the “great name of God, Jehovah, also called the Tetragrammaton.” So great was the power of this magic formula that it could strike blind or dumb all Christians everywhere in the world, could drive them mad, nay, kill them outright, if only the words were rightly uttered and in a mood pious enough. Even the superstitious use of the Tetragrammaton alone, was, according to Luther, responsible, in the case “of the devil and the Jews,” for “much sorcery and all kinds of abuse and idolatry.”[1629] They call it the Tetragrammaton because they are chary of pronouncing the four consonants of the all-too-sacred name of Jehovah, but, “in their heart they abuse and blaspheme God.” They do not see that they are “using the Holy Name in the shameful abuse they practise with their ‘Scham Hamperes.’”[1630]

The cause of the mad aberrations of the Jews is, however, in Luther’s eyes, due to the “Word of God not enlightening them and showing them the way.” Now, however, God’s Word has risen and shines brightly; it even casts its beam into those parts where the Papacy reigns ... for there “thick darkness, lies and abominations were worshipped with Masses, Purgatory, Invocation of Saints, monkery and one’s own works.”[1631] It was a great and godly work that he had undertaken in unmasking not only these but also the many Jewish abominations.

* * * * *

As to the sources whence Luther derived his information, he uncritically took his material mainly from anti-Jewish writings. The book “_Victoria adversus impios Hebrœos_” of the Carthusian, Porchetus de Salvaticis, dating from the beginning of the 14th century, provided him with the Jewish blasphemies against Christ, and in particular with the supposed mysteries of the Shem Hammephorash; Antonius Margaritha supplied him with more recent material in his work “Der gantz jüdisch Glaub” of 1530. It is probable that he also made use of the “_Dialogus_” against the Jews by Paul of Burgos (1350-1435), which he quotes in his lectures on Genesis. He also mentions incidentally as his authorities Jerome, Eusebius, and Sebastian Münster.[1632]

_Comparison with an earlier Jewish writing of Luther’s_

A more accurate insight into the psychological and historical significance of the two screeds against Judaism is obtained by comparing them with an earlier writing of Luther’s, dating from 1523, which is perfectly fair to the Jews. The comparison will lead the reader to ask what was the real reason for his extraordinary change of attitude.

Filled as yet with great and unrealisable hopes of that conversion of the whole Jewish race which he fancied he saw coming, Luther had, in 1523, published a booklet entitled “Das Jhesus Christus eyn geborner Jude sey.”[1633]

In it he points out that the Jews were blood-relations, cousins and kinsmen of the Saviour. No other people, so he warmly declared, had been so marked out by God, hence they must be dealt with amicably and soberly instructed out of Holy Scripture and not be scared away by pride and contempt, as had hitherto been the wont; the fools, Popes, bishops, sophists and monks, the great dunderheads, had hitherto indeed behaved in such a way that any good Christian would have preferred to become a Jew. Hence he exerts himself in this work, in a calm and friendly way, to prove to the Jews from the Bible, that their Messias had already come. At the same time he indignantly scourges “the lying tales” and false charges brought against them, as for instance, that, “to repress their stench they must have the blood of Christians.” The main thing was to treat them according to Christian, not Popish, charity.

So far was he disposed to go the better to win over the Jews, that he was even desirous that Christ should not at the outset be put before them as the God-man, but merely as the Messias. He also declared in a sermon shortly after, that, when instructing a Jew on Christ, the catechumen was only to be told that Christ was a man like other men, sent by God to do good to mankind; only when the heart had been stirred to love of Him was mention to be made of His Godhead.[1634]

“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.

“The wrath of God has come upon them,” he writes in one such passage, “of which I do not like to think, nor has this book been a cheerful one for me to write, for I have been forced to avert my eyes from the terrible picture, sometimes in anger, sometimes in scorn; and it is painful to me to have to speak of their horrible blasphemies against our Lord and His dear Mother, to which we Christians are loath indeed to listen; I can well understand what St. Paul means in Romans x. 1, when he says that his heart was sore when he thought of them; such is the case with every Christian who earnestly dwells, not on the temporal misery and misfortune of which the Jews complain, but on their addiction to blasphemy, to cursing, to spitting at God Himself and all that is God’s, even to their eternal damnation, and who yet refuse to listen or lend an ear but will have it that all they do is done out of zeal for God. O God, our Heavenly Father, turn aside Thy wrath and let there be an end of it for the sake of Thy dear Son. Amen.”[1645]

“O my God,” he groans elsewhere, “my beloved Creator and Father, do Thou graciously take into account my unwillingness to have to speak so shamefully of Thine accursed enemies, the devil and the Jews. Thou knowest I do so out of the ardour of my faith and to the glory of Thy Divine Majesty, for it pierces me to the very quick.”[1646]

If, however, we look more closely into the matter we shall see that the “ardour of his faith” was also fed from other sources. There was, for instance, the reaction of his own protracted struggle in defence of the new doctrines and against the Papacy, a struggle which left deep marks on all his labours and on all his writings.

Towards the end of a career which had worked such untold disaster to the Christianity of the past he feels keenly the need of vindicating the dignity of Christ if only to soothe his own conscience; he was resolved to hammer it in with the utmost defiance, just as formerly he had clung to the idea that, by his doctrine, he was defending the rights of Christ against the Pope. He is now resolved again to take his stand on this, his efforts becoming the more violent the more the sight of the ruin wrought by his own work affrights him. Hence his eagerness to take advantage of Jewish attacks on the pillars of the faith in order, while triumphing over them, to enjoy the sense of his comradeship with Christ, the Son of God now so soon to come in Judgment. Here again he allows his vanity to mislead him and to paint his intervention on behalf of the great truth of Christianity as far more successful than that of any of the Popes; this helps him to close his eyes to the wounds which the inner voice tells him he had inflicted on the Christian truths and on the public life of Christendom. For was he not doing for Christ what the Pope was quite unable to do? Indeed, “the world, the Turk, the Jew and the Pope are all raging blasphemously against the name of the Lord, laying waste His Kingdom and deriding His Will; but ‘greater is He that is with us than he that is with the world’; He triumphs,” so he wrote at that time to some foreign sympathisers, “and will triumph in you to all eternity; may He console you by His Holy Spirit in which He has called you to oneness with His Body.”[1647]

It is true, so he says elsewhere, that the Pope admits the existence of Christ, but, in spite of this, neither Jews nor Turks are quite so bad; the Jews have far better arguments than the Papists for themselves and their religion; the foundations of the latter are easily shaken; the Papist Church is a worse “den of murderers” than Turks, Tartars, or Jews.[1648]

All the more glorious and creditable to the new Evangel is therefore the victory won by Luther over the Jews; it may serve to show the world that his school’s study of the Bible could furnish the weapons to bring about such a result. The Pope, with his unbiblical treatment of the Jews, had merely succeeded in making them doubly un-Christian; but to us God has unlocked the Holy Books, hence on us devolves the duty of pointing out to the Jews their errors.[1649] Luther accordingly claims, that his “Von den Jüden” was the first real work of instruction on Judaism, one which “might teach us Germans from history what a Jew is and warn our Christians against them as against veriest devils.” It was only fitting that he who had unearthed Scripture should also “wipe clean the holy old Bible from Jewish ‘Hamperes’ and ‘Judas-water.’”[1650]

Nevertheless everything else—even his yeoman service in the cause of the Bible, and his shaming of the Papacy, which had so ineffectively struggled against the Jews—recedes into the background before his determination to crown his whole life-work by snatching from the Jewish devil the honour of Christ our one Salvation.

This was admittedly his motive for taking up his pen yet a third time.

_The Third Work against the Jews, 1543_

As early as June, 1543, Luther was engaged on a new polemical work against the Jews entitled “On the last words of David.”[1651] It is a lengthy essay on 2 Kings xxiii. 1-7, and certain other striking passages, with the object of proving that the Messias was to be a God-man and of vindicating the mystery of the Trinity.

He intended to show by these examples how helpful Hebrew learning and Bible study can be in defending Scripture against the attacks of unbelievers; he also wanted to establish that neither Jews nor Papists possessed the real key to the Bible, viz. the knowledge of Christ; “for in this all sticks, and lies, and rests: Whosoever has not or will not have this man called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom we Christians preach [the new Evangel undefiled], let him avoid the Bible; such is my conscientious advice, else he will certainly come a cropper, and become ever blinder and more crazy the more he studies.”[1652]

In David’s final words on the Messias, Luther saw something peculiarly solemn; David, when “about to die and depart,” gives his parting injunction and adds: “This is my firm belief; on this I stand fast and immoveable.... Hence I am joyful, and will gladly live or die as and when God wills.”[1653]

“Whoever can boast [like David] that the Spirit of the Lord speaks through him, and that His word is on his tongue, must indeed be very sure of his cause.”[1654]

In this writing the Jews are not attacked in such unmeasured language as in the two others just considered; the tone of the whole is much calmer, indeed comparatively kind. It may be that the representations made to him concerning his violence had not been without some effect.

The end, like the beginning, expresses the wish that, without suffering ourselves to be led astray by the false readings of the Jews, we should “plainly and clearly find and recognise our dear Lord and Saviour in Holy Writ.”[1655] This is what leads Melanchthon to praise the work as enjoyable reading, because there is nothing sweeter to the pious than to deepen their knowledge of the God-man and to learn the art of real prayer so different from that of the heathen, the Jew and the Turk.[1656]

_Against the Turks_

The honour of Christianity and of its Divine Founder was also what Luther had at heart in the two books which in his later years he was instrumental in publishing against the Turks, viz. his “Vermanunge zum Gebet wider den Türcken” (1541) and his new edition (1542) of an old work against the Koran, the “Verlegung des Alcoran Bruder Richardi.”

In one passage of the Vermanunge he even couches this thought in the form of a prayer:

“Yes, indeed, this is our offence against them [the Turks], that we preach, believe and confess Thee, God the Father, as the only True God, and Thy Beloved Son our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost as one eternal God.” “Thou knowest, God the Father Almighty, that we have not sinned in any other way against the devil, Pope or Turk and that they have no right or power to punish us.” Most fervently, as in the very presence of God, he declares that he must withstand the devil who is helping the Turk to set up “his Mahmed in the stead of Jesus Christ Thy Beloved Son.”[1657] Speaking of prayer against the Turk he makes every Christian say to God: “Thou tellest, nay, compellest, me to pray in the name of Thy Beloved Son Our Lord Jesus Christ.”[1658]

In this writing he strongly reprobates both the public disorders on the side of the new Evangel and the Papists’ obstinate resistance to the Word of God; both would be terribly punished by means of the Turks unless people set about amending their lives and giving themselves up to earnest prayer. Now, after the Evangel had been preached for so many years, “everyone knew, thank God, what each class and individual man should do or leave undone, which, alas, formerly we did not know, though we would gladly have done it.”[1659] Should our prayer fail to achieve the desired object, “then let us say a longer and a better one.” “How happy should we be were our prayers against the Turk again to prove of no avail, but, instead, the Last Day came—which indeed cannot any longer be far off—spelling the end of both Turk and Pope as I do not for a moment doubt.”[1660]

At any rate Luther might have used better weapons against the Turks than he actually did in this so-called admonition.

About the time he wrote it we hear Luther occasionally expressing a hope that the Turks may be converted to the Evangel, now shining so brightly and convincingly.

“I should like to see the Evangel make its way amongst the Turks, which may indeed very well happen.” “It is quite in God’s power to work a miracle and make them listen to the Evangel.... If a ‘Wascha’ [Pasha] were to accept the Gospel we should soon see what effect it would have on the Grand Turk; and as he has many sons it is quite likely one of them might reach it.”—He despaired of the overthrow of the Turkish empire, but was fond of dreaming of the coming of a “good man who should withstand the dogma of Mohamed.”[1661]

“The Turk rules more mightily by his religion than by arms”; such was Luther’s opinion. He had to be confronted with the belief in Christ, that belief which Luther had learnt “amidst the bitter pangs of death,” viz. “that Christ is God”; in great temptations nothing could help us but this faith, “the most powerful consolation that is bestowed on us”; this same article of faith God was vindicating, even by miracles, against Turk and Pope. To this he too would cleave in spite of any objections of reason.[1662]

He did not, however, patiently wait till the “good man” came who was to oppose the dogma of the Turks; he himself set about this undertaking in March, 1542.[1663] After having, shortly before, become acquainted with the Koran in a poor translation, he proceeded himself to translate into German a work against the Koran, written in 1300, by the Dominican Richardus (Ricoldus). To it he appended a preface of his own and a “Treue Warnung.”[1664]

He had undertaken, so he says, to disclose and answer the devil-inspired “infamies” contained in the Alcoran, “the better to strengthen us in our Christian faith.”[1665]—This out-of-date book of a mediæval theologian was, however, hardly the work to furnish an insight into the Koran, particularly as it built far too much on badly read texts and doubtful stories uncritically taken for granted; from such defects the refutation was bound to suffer.

Some of Luther’s own additions are characteristic.

Here he gives up all hope of any conversion of the Moslem; he likewise despairs of the success of the Christian armies.[1666]—“Mahmet,” so he teaches, “leads people to eternal damnation as the Pope also did and still does.” He reigns “in the Levant” as the Pope does “in the land of the setting sun,” thanks to a system of “wilful lying.”[1667] “Oh, Lord God! Let all who can, pray, sigh and implore that of God’s anger we may see an end,” as Daniel says (Dan. xi. 36).[1668]

Bad as Mahmet was, Luther was loath to see in him Antichrist; “the Pope, whom we have with us, he is the real Antichrist, with his ‘Drecktal,’ Alcoran and man-made doctrines.” “The chaste Pope takes no wife, but all women are his.... Obscene Mahmet at least makes no pretence of chastity.... As for the other points such as murder, avarice and pride, I will not enumerate them, but here again the Pope far outdoes Mahmet.” “May God give us His grace and punish both the Pope and Mahmet together with their devils. I have done my part as a faithful prophet and preacher.”[1669]

Words such as these were certainly as little calculated to further the common cause of the Christians against the Turks as had been the somewhat similar thoughts which, at an earlier date, he had been wont to weave into his exhortations to resist the Turks.[1670]

As a last straw Luther in the “Treue Warnung” goes on to declare, that, unless Christians mend their life, are converted to the Evangel and live up to it, it is to be hoped that the Turkish arms will prove victorious.

For amongst those who “pretend to be Christians and to constitute the holy Church” there are, so he declares, so many who “knowingly and wantonly despise and persecute the known truth and vindicate their open and notorious idolatry, lying and unrighteousness.” Such Christians, of whom the forces that had been raised chiefly consisted, formed, so he thought, an army which might itself well be styled Turkish. “If then two such ‘Turkish’ armies were to advance against one another, the one called Mahmetish and the other dubbing itself Christian, then, good friend, I should suggest you might give Our Lord God some advice, for He would assuredly need it, as to which Turks He is to help and carry to victory. I, the worst of advisers, would counsel Him to give the victory to the Mahmetish Turks over the Christian Turks, as indeed He has done hitherto without any advice from us and even contrary to our prayers and complaints. The reason is, that the Mahmetish Turks have neither God’s Word nor those who might preach it.... Had they preachers of the Godly Word they might perhaps, some of them at least, be presently changed from swine into men. But our Christian Turks have the Word of God and preachers, and yet they refuse to listen, and from men become mere swine.”[1671]