I once had the privilege of co-pastoring a Lutheran church where I live in Burlington, Canada. I’m an Anglican priest but Anglicans are in full communion with the largest Lutheran denomination in the country. The people I met, whether they were born in Canada or in Germany or the Baltic, were kind, generous and faithful. I once preached about my heritage, about my three Jewish grandparents and my Jewish background. The response was so supportive that there were tears in my eyes at the end of the homily. Tears in the eyes of some in the congregation too.
But what of the eponymous founder of their church, the German monk Martin Luther, who was arguably the central personality behind the 16th-century Protestant reformation? It’s an especially pertinent question at the moment because of some of the sweeping comments being made about Israel and Palestine in some parts of the Christian world.
In 1523 Luther wrote an essay entitled “That Jesus Was Born a Jew” and lambasted Roman Catholicism because it “dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property”. He was convinced that if the discrimination and persecution stopped, there would be a mass conversion of Jewish people to Christianity.
That, of course, didn’t happen. Rather than accepting and respecting what was surely understandable if not inevitable, Luther rebounded into sheer hatred. He was instrumental in having the Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537, campaigned against Jewish rights, and in 1543 published The Jews and Their Lies. In the 65,000-word treatise, he called for the destruction of synagogues, Jewish schools and homes, for rabbis to be forbidden to preach, for the stripping of legal protection of Jews on highways, and for the confiscation of their money.
He wrote that the Jews were “base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth”. His morbid obsession continued for the rest of his life, and one of his final sermons concerned what he called a “final warning against the Jews”.
Luther was far from unique in his Christian antisemitism, that grotesquely paradoxical birth defect of the church, but the violence and obscenity of his words are extraordinary. They also had direct and hideous consequences. The Nazis emphasised and exploited Luther’s antisemitism, and it was one of most powerful forces behind the creation of the Nazified and racist faction of Deutsche Christen, or German Christians, within the German Lutheran church.
It goes deeper, however. Religion has long informed culture, and culture has shaped behaviour. It’s simply disingenuous to claim that German antisemitism emerged from some type of vacuum, with no connection to one of the country’s most famous and influential sons. Consider the case of Martin Sasse, bishop of the Evangelical Church of Thuringia. He applauded Kristallnacht in 1938, and tied the pogroms and the mass destruction of synagogues and Jewish businesses to Luther himself.
He distributed a pamphlet entitled “Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them!” in which he made the case that the Nazis were acting as Christians in their violent antisemitism, and that this was exactly what Luther would have wanted.
Yet there was also a courageous anti-Nazi movement within Lutheranism. The Confessing Church, for example, was formed in opposition to the Hitler regime’s attempt to unify all German Protestants into a single pro-Nazi organisation. Leaders Martin Niemöller and Heinrich Grüber were sent to concentration camps but managed to survive. Writer and activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was accused of being part of a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, was not so fortunate.
In 1994, the five million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America denounced “the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews” and in 2016 the Lutheran Church in Germany condemned Luther’s writings and “the part played by the Reformation tradition in the painful history between Christians and Jews”.
In 1998, on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria issued a declaration that “it is imperative for the Lutheran Church, which knows itself to be indebted to the work and tradition of Martin Luther, to take seriously also his anti-Jewish utterances, to acknowledge their theological function, and to reflect on their consequences. It has to distance itself from anti-Judaism in Lutheran theology.”
Good and noble words but, it must be said, they did take a very long time to come. Today, the ghoul of antisemitism is more active and more confident than many of us thought possible. Churches do speak out, Lutheran churches included.
But I can’t help thinking when I hear certain Christians discussing Israel that there’s an agonising disconnect, perhaps an inability, to grasp context and to face up to their own responsibility. Recently on social media, I politely took issue with a leading North American “left-wing” Christian for his use of the term “Holocaust hermeneutic” when discussing the Middle East. His reaction was to block me. I do wonder if all of my fellow Christians have embraced history’s painful lessons, Lutheran or otherwise.
