Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism
THOMAS KAUFMANN, TRANSLATED BY LESLEY SHARPE AND JEREMY NOAKES

In the reckoning after the Second World War, reproachful British and American commentators drew a straight line between Martin Luther’s hostility towards the Jews and the greatest crime of European history. Unrepentant Nazis acknowledged the connection. Julius Streicher, doyen of anti-Semitic propagandists, told his Nuremberg judges that Luther should be sitting in the dock. Luther’s defenders, on the other hand, argue that it is anachronistic to label him as “the father of the Holocaust”. His attitudes, though regrettable, were the conventional ones of his day, and there is a crucial difference between old-fashioned religious anti-Judaism and modern racial anti-Semitism.

Thomas Kaufmann brings exciting new insights to what I had suspected was a worn-out debate. His subject is not “Luther and the Jews” – the reformer never had much contact with actual Jewish people. Rather, it is “Luther’s Jews”, a construct and a fantasy, though one that Kaufmann sees as central, not marginal, to Luther’s preoccupations after his break with the Church of Rome.

The principal challenge is to bridge the gap between two contrasting texts. In 1523, Luther wrote the pamphlet “That Jesus Christ was born a Jew”. It was, for late medieval Germany, a remarkable intervention, condemning oppressive treatment and arguing that Jews must be treated in a “brotherly” manner. Twenty years later, Luther published another tract, On the Jews and Their Lies. It fell short of advocating extermination, but only just: Hebrew writings were to be seized, Jewish worship banned, Jewish homes destroyed.