The tremendous success of the “Holocaust” series on American television and the approach of the 1980 passion play at Oberammergau have again raised the spectre of Christian contributions to anti-Semitism (see August 18 issue, page 16). Remarkably, no one seems to remember that the major influences in the creation of modern anti-Semitism were the deistic Age of Reason (see Arthur Hertzberg’s French Enlightment and the Jews [1968]) and the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx (see E. Litvinoff, ed., Soviet Anti-Semitism: The Paris Trial [1974]). Rather, efforts are made, along the lines of William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to pin twentieth-century anti-Semitism on such Christian notables as Martin Luther.
Shirer’s claim that Luther was a “savage anti-Semite” is based largely upon the Reformer’s tract, Von den Juden and ihren Lügen (1542; W.A., 53), written four years before his death. Indeed a violent pamphlet, reflecting the irritability that age and disease had brought upon Luther, its intent and message nonetheless have generally been misunderstood. From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich one would conclude that Luther passionately hated the Jewish race and believed that physical persecution was the proper means of dealing with it. However, as Roland Bainton correctly emphasizes, Luther’s position, unlike that of Nazi Germany, “was entirely religious and in no respect racial.”
Luther—and here his naiveté is certainly in evidence—could not understand why the Jews did not return to Christ after the errors of the papacy had been revealed and the Gospel purified; and, along with virtually all Christians of his time, Catholic as well as Protestant, he regarded all unbelievers as a positive social menace. Indeed, Luther “drew his material from medieval Catholic anti-Semite writings” (Gordon Rupp). But Luther did not resort to unthinking advocacy of persecution, as Shirer implies by his Luther quotations—taken, unhappily, out of context. Luther spoke not of depriving Jews of their wealth per se but of removing from them the wealth that they had unjustly obtained through usurious practice. And the confiscated monies were to be held in trust to be used for the maintenance of converted Jews—especially the “old and infirm”—according to their needs. Moreover, in order that the Jews might not continue to carry on their “sinful” financial practices, Luther proposed their return to Palestine, in line with the accepted principle of territorialism, or, failing that, their resumption of the vocation of agriculture (i.e., resumption of the more secure position they had enjoyed in the early medieval period).
Shirer does not quote the prefatory statement to Luther’s proposals, which conveys the tone of his treatise: “We must indeed with prayer and the fear of God before our eyes exercise a keen compassion towards them and seek to save some of them from the flames. Avenge ourselves we dare not. Vengeance a thousand times more than we can wish them is theirs already.” As Rupp says: “It all falls very far short of the Nazi anti-Semitism with its doctrine of Race, with its mass extermination, with its atrocities and with its inter-marriage laws.” The basis of these horrifying practices was not the teachings of Luther; Jarman (The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany) has shown that the Nazi anti-Semitism actually “rested on the mystical feeling for German blood and soil and that the Jew polluted the blood”—a theory for which the philosopher Dühring and the composer Wagner were especially responsible.
Secularism, not Christian faith, is the real source of modern anti-Semitism, and evangelical believers should not hesitate to point this out. Unhappily, Christians today are too easily intimidated by the charge of anti-Semitism, and the temptation is very strong to back down even to the point of blunting the gospel witness to the Jew in order to avoid criticism. Recently, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was severely condemned by Rabbi A. James Rudin, a national director for interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, for using evangelistic materials prepared by Moishe Rosen, leader of Jews for Jesus. “By singling out Jews for intensive proselytizing,” declared Rudin, “the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has, in effect, branded Judaism as an inadequate religion. By undertaking this program, the Missouri Synod has sadly revived the medieval image of the Jews as a theologically deficient people.” The Executive Secretary of the Synod’s Board for Evangelism responded: “Through our meetings with Rabbi Rudin, we have come to see that this materia] is offensive.” But even if some of Moishe Rosen’s techniques could stand improvement and even if the Synod’s material was not as tactful as it might have been, the fact remains that Judaism is an “inadequate, incomplete, and theologically deficient” religion: like every other religion in the world lacking faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour, it desperately needs to be made complete through him (John 14:6).
Evangelicals preoccupied with biblical prophecy not infrequently lose sight of this fact. Israel looms so large in the scriptural plan of salvation that the unwary prophetic interpreter illogically sees only salvatory good in whatever the nation Israel does in today’s Mideast crisis. However, (1) contemporaneous prophetic interpretation is notoriously unreliable (I often gaze meditatively on my copy of J. Oswald Smith’s classic of the 1930s, Is Mussolini the Antichrist?), and (2) even if Israel’s activity in the Mideast today were apodictically tied to biblical prophecy, it would still be held to God’s eternal standards of justice, righteousness, and peace in its dealings with other nations. In April, by invitation of the Egyptian and Israeli governments, I was privileged to have personal meetings with President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin in conjunction with the Evangelical Fact-Finding Mission on the Mideast Crisis, and I was far more deeply impressed by Sadat’s concerns for a biblical standard of peace than by Begin’s monomaniacal conviction that it is Israel’s divine destiny to rule the eretz Israel (cf. “Begin: la Bible et le fusil,” Le Point, April 3, 1978, pp. 73–77).
Israel most definitely has a destiny and it deserves a national place in the sun no less than other nations. But the frightening thing about Zionism is that the nation Israel becomes a religion in its own right. Thus in Rabbi Ashlag’s mystical Entrance to the Zohar (ed. Philip S. Berg; Jerusalem, 1974), we read:
“When a Jew strengthens and values the aspect of his inner part—which is the aspect of Israel in him—more than his exterior part—which is the aspect of the nations of the world that is within him—that is to say when he expends the greater part of his effort and energy to develop and elevate the aspect of his inner part, that is within him for the benefit of his Soul (Nefesh), and only expends the minimal effort that is absolutely necessary for the survival of the aspect of the nations of the world that is within him—that is to say for his bodily needs—and thus comes to observe that which is written in the Mishnah (Avot, 1) ‘Make your Torah fixed and your work part-time,’ then through these actions of his, he will also be having an effect on the internal and external parts of the whole world so that the people of Israel will rise higher and higher in perfection, and the nations of the world—who are the exterior aspect of the world—will recognize and acknowledge the true worth of the people of Israel.”
To this the only answer is—and evangelical Christians have a holy responsibility to give it without fear or favor—that no nation possesses salvatory quality, that every people and each individual is judged by the very same divine standards of righteousness, and that the way of salvation differs in no way for Jew or Gentile: “The righteousness of God is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:22–24).
John Warwick Montgomery is professor at large, Melodyland Christian Center, Anaheim, California.
