The Jews and the Reformation
KENNETH AUSTIN
(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 288 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 020 7799 4064

In 1543, Martin Luther published a tract entitled On the Jews and their Lies. This violent polemic called upon Christian rulers to exercise a “sharp mercy” towards these “miserable and accursed people”. It justified driving them out of society like “mad dogs, so that we do not become partakers of their abominable blasphemy and all their other vices”. Luther’s vicious diatribe has, unsurprisingly, cast a long shadow over our understanding of the relationship between the Jews and the Reformation. It has obscured the more complex and ambivalent consequences of this religious revolution for the Jewish communities of early modern Europe deftly delineated in Kenneth Austin’s new book. Interweaving analysis of theology, scholarship, ecclesiastical politics and social relations, Austin’s judicious and balanced survey sheds fresh light on how Protestants, Catholics and Anabaptists wrote and thought about the Jewish people and their religion in the wake of a movement that ignited intense conflict, fractured Christendom and fostered unprecedented pluralism.

The book begins by sketching the contested inheritance of the Middle Ages, when Jews had enjoyed the status of a despised and marginalised but protected minority, before re-evaluating how attitudes towards them evolved over the course of the Reformation era. It shows how Luther’s own initial optimism about the mass conversion of the Jews gave way to a growing disillusionment that provided a mandate for discrimination and persecution.