Christian History Home > Issue 39 > Was Luther Anti-Semitic?
Was Luther Anti-Semitic?
ERIC W. GRITSCH Dr. Eric W. Gritsch is Maryland Synod Professor of Church History at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and director of the Institute for Luther Studies. | posted 7/01/1993 12:00AM
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Luther advised clergy, their congregations, and all government officials to help carry out these measures. Since most Jews had been expelled from Germany before 1536, Luther’s counsel was implemented by few officials. Yet a harsh anti-Jewish measure in 1543 mentioned Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies.
Both Luther’s friends and his foes criticized him for proposing these measures. His best friends begged him to stop his anti-Jewish raving, but Luther continued his attacks in other treatises. He repeated as true the worst anti-Semitic charges from medieval literature. Jews killed Christian babies; they murdered Christ over and over again by stabbing Eucharistic hosts; they poisoned wells.
Luther now thought what he had accused Catholics of thinking in 1523: Jews were dogs. “We are at fault for not slaying them,” he fumed shortly before his death.
Violating His Own Method
As a biblical theologian, Martin Luther struggled with the relationship between Jewish (Old Testament) and Christian (New Testament) Scriptures—a struggle not yet resolved. But when Luther concluded that God had rejected the people of Israel, he violated his own theological method.
The Wittenberg professor had taught his students that one cannot and should not speculate about the will of the hidden God, for what God has not revealed cannot be known. A student once asked Luther, “What did God do before he created the world?” Luther responded, “He created hell for people who ask this question.” Yet when the question was “Why do Jews refuse to convert to Christianity?” Luther’s response was, “Because God hardened their hearts and deserted them because of their stubbornness.”
Luther was not an anti-Semite in the racist sense. His arguments against Jews were theological, not biological. Not until a French cultural anthropologist in the nineteenth century held that humankind consisted of “Semites” and “Aryans,” were Semites considered inferior.
Alfonse de Gobineau’s views were quickly adopted by European intellectuals and politicians, and Jews became the scapegoats of a snobbish colonialist society in England, France, and Germany. The rest is history—including the Jewish holocaust perpetrated by Adolf Hitler and his regime. National Socialists used Luther to support their racist anti-Semitism, calling him a genuine German who had hated non-Nordic races.
Luther was but a frustrated biblical scholar who fell victim to what his friend Philipp Melanchthon called the “rabies of theologians”: drawing conclusions based on speculations about the hidden will of God. Luther erred because he presumed to know God’s will.
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
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