Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  “It is thus that the wicked, scoundrelly foe mocks at his captive Jews; he makes them say ‘Schem Hamphoras’ and believe and expect great things from it; he, however, means ‘Scham Hamperes,’ i.e. ‘hither filth,’ not that which lies in the gutters, but that which forthcomes from the belly.... The devil has taken the Jews captive so that they must do his will (as St. Paul says) and deceive, lie, blaspheme as also curse God and everything that is God’s. In return for this he makes a mock of them with his ‘Scham Hamperes,’ and leads them to believe that this and all their other lying and tomfoolery is something precious.”

  The blinded presumption of the Jews is nevertheless so great that they fancy themselves far superior to the Christians. “Do you think a Jew is so badly off? God in heaven and all the angels must laugh and dance when they hear a Jew ructate, that you, accursed ‘Goi,’ may know for the future how fine a thing it is to be a Jew.” And yet they lie and use bad language if a man ventures to hold up to public obloquy, as an “arch prostitute,” one of his pious cousins.— “Have I not told you above, what a grand and precious gem a Jew is; he has but to break wind, for God to dance and all His angels, and even were he to do something even grosser, it would still be looked upon as a golden Talmud; what such a man voids, whether from above or from below, that the accursed ‘Goiim’ are forsooth to regard as a holy thing.”

  “Nay, were a Rabbi to ease himself into a vessel under your nose, both thick and thin, and to say: ‘Here you have a delicious conserve, you would have to say you had never tasted a better dish in your life. Risk your neck and say differently! For if a man has the power to say [like the Rabbis] that right is left and left right, regardless of God and all His creatures, he can just as well say that his anus is his mouth, that his belly is a pudding-dish and that a pudding-dish is his belly.”

  In exoneration of Luther it has been said that, in this case, in making use of such “shocking comparisons,” he was not merely following his natural bent, on the contrary, “in his angry zeal he deliberately sought for them.” It is perfectly true that neither his angry zeal nor his deliberate intention can be denied any more than his desire to “stir up the world against what was in itself shameful and disgusting,” and his longing to do something towards its removal. But surely there was another kind of language and a different tone with the help of which he might have effected more, such, for instance, as had been used by great and pious men in the past whose inspired and glowing words contrast glaringly with Luther’s hideous obscenities.

  The results achieved by Luther with these two writings were but of trifling importance.

  We hear practically nothing of any conversions of Jews or apostate Christians being due to them. Luther had been wise himself to declare that he did not expect any conversions to result from them. In the Saxon Electorate, however, the unjust enactment of 1536 was, on May 6, 1543, revived against the Jews by a public mandate abrogating that mitigation of it which Josel Rosheim had been successful in obtaining. “Official reports go to prove that the cruel persecution of the Jews [in the Saxon Electorate] was no mere paper measure; only after Luther’s death did things settle down.” In Hesse a severe decree against the Jews, issued in 1543, seems to have owed its origin “to the writings of the Reformer. This being so the rebuff with which Luther met in the Electorate of Brandenburg must have been all the more annoying.”

  One of the lasting effects of these two screeds was, that, in the subsequent anti-Jewish risings the charges there contained, and couched in language so fervid and eloquent, were constantly appealed to in vindication of the measures used. No distinction was made between what was true and what was false, or between the horrible exaggerations and the actual fact, though the unreliability of many of the statements is often quite palpable.

  Even in the few passages we had room to quote the reader may have seen how Luther’s charges against the Jews amount to calumnies; the Jews, he alleges, were in the habit of cursing and blaspheming God and all that is God’s; “regardless of God” they made out right to be left and left right. His love of exaggeration leads him to say that all Jews curse the Christians every Sabbath, and are ever desirous of stabbing them and their wives and children. Theft and robbery he makes into crimes common to every Jew; all of them he accuses indiscriminately of murder; “all their most heartfelt sighing, hopes and longings are set on this, viz. to be able to treat us heathen as they treated the heathen in Persia in the days of Esther ... for they fancy they are the chosen people in order that they may murder and slay the heathen ... just as they had made this plain to the world by the way they had treated us Christians in the beginning, and would still gladly do even now were they able, yea, have often done so.”

  It is true he refuses credulously to believe all the crimes with which rumour charged them, for instance, their poisoning of the wells. The calumnies he made his own were, nevertheless, so great, that, after the magistrates of Strasburg had been repeatedly approached by Josel von Rosheim with the proposal to forbid the circulation of the two writings, they finally decided to prohibit their being printed in the city. The councillors were of opinion that the very enormity of the assertions would prove the best refutation. They wrote, that it was better to keep silence and to leave the calumnies to sink into oblivion; to this the petitioner agreed.

  Josel von Rosheim, the zealous spokesman of the Jews, achieved a brilliant success with the Emperor Charles V. Certain extensive privileges were guaranteed him on April 3, 1544, and were made public in 1546, whereby all the rights and liberties of the Jews were confirmed.

  Nor was there any lack of condemnation of these two writings of Luther at the hands of the Protestants themselves.

  On Dec. 8, 1543, Bullinger of Zürich made to Bucer his complaint already referred to, concerning the “lewd and houndish eloquence” of the Wittenberger; he adds that such effusions were unseemly in a theologian already advanced in years; no one could tolerate a work so obscenely (“impurissime”) written, as “Vom Schem Hamphoras”; Reuchlin, were he still alive, would declare, that, in Luther, all the old foes of the Jews — Tungern, Hoogstraaten and Pfefferkorn — had come to life again [though their language fell short of Luther’s]: he was sorry for Luther’s murderous hatred of the Hebrew commentators and for the undue stress he laid on his own German translation, which was far from being devoid of prejudice. Bullinger expressed himself much more strongly, in 1545, when the split between Zürich and Wittenberg had been accentuated by Luther’s “Kurtz Bekentnis”: No one writing on questions of faith and matters of grave importance had ever expressed himself in a way so utterly at variance with propriety and modesty as Luther, etc.

  The Nuremberg preacher, Andreas Osiander, at that time one of the greatest authorities on Hebrew and on Rabbinic writings, wrote so strong a letter about the untruth of certain of Luther’s anti-Jewish strictures that no one ventured to bring it under the Reformer’s notice. Cruciger relates that Osiander afterwards withdrew some of the strongest things he had said in the letter, but that he still maintained that Luther had not in the least understood what the Shem Hammephorash meant to educated Jews.

  The Shem Hammephorash or “peculiar name” was, according to Luther, a cabalistic formula of the Jews, supposed to be endowed with the most marvellous magic power; it was made up of seventy-two three-lettered names of angels, themselves formed from a rearrangement of the letters of the Scripture text, Ex. xiv. 19-21, concerning the pillar of cloud that went before the Jews on their departure from Egypt. To each of these angelic names was appended a verse from the Psalter with the “great name of God, Jehovah, also called the Tetragrammaton.” So great was the power of this magic formula that it could strike blind or dumb all Christians everywhere in the world, could drive them mad, nay, kill them outright, if only the words were rightly uttered and in a mood pious enough. Even the superstitious use of the Tetragrammaton alone, was, according to Luther, responsible, in the case “of the devil and the Jews,” for “much sorcery and all kinds of abuse and
idolatry.” They call it the Tetragrammaton because they are chary of pronouncing the four consonants of the all-too-sacred name of Jehovah, but, “in their heart they abuse and blaspheme God.” They do not see that they are “using the Holy Name in the shameful abuse they practise with their ‘Scham Hamperes.’”

  The cause of the mad aberrations of the Jews is, however, in Luther’s eyes, due to the “Word of God not enlightening them and showing them the way.” Now, however, God’s Word has risen and shines brightly; it even casts its beam into those parts where the Papacy reigns ... for there “thick darkness, lies and abominations were worshipped with Masses, Purgatory, Invocation of Saints, monkery and one’s own works.” It was a great and godly work that he had undertaken in unmasking not only these but also the many Jewish abominations.

  As to the sources whence Luther derived his information, he uncritically took his material mainly from anti-Jewish writings. The book “Victoria adversus impios Hebrœos” of the Carthusian, Porchetus de Salvaticis, dating from the beginning of the 14th century, provided him with the Jewish blasphemies against Christ, and in particular with the supposed mysteries of the Shem Hammephorash; Antonius Margaritha supplied him with more recent material in his work “Der gantz jüdisch Glaub” of 1530. It is probable that he also made use of the “Dialogus” against the Jews by Paul of Burgos (1350-1435), which he quotes in his lectures on Genesis. He also mentions incidentally as his authorities Jerome, Eusebius, and Sebastian Münster.

  Comparison with an earlier Jewish writing of Luther’s

  A more accurate insight into the psychological and historical significance of the two screeds against Judaism is obtained by comparing them with an earlier writing of Luther’s, dating from 1523, which is perfectly fair to the Jews. The comparison will lead the reader to ask what was the real reason for his extraordinary change of attitude.

  Filled as yet with great and unrealisable hopes of that conversion of the whole Jewish race which he fancied he saw coming, Luther had, in 1523, published a booklet entitled “Das Jhesus Christus eyn geborner Jude sey.”

  In it he points out that the Jews were blood-relations, cousins and kinsmen of the Saviour. No other people, so he warmly declared, had been so marked out by God, hence they must be dealt with amicably and soberly instructed out of Holy Scripture and not be scared away by pride and contempt, as had hitherto been the wont; the fools, Popes, bishops, sophists and monks, the great dunderheads, had hitherto indeed behaved in such a way that any good Christian would have preferred to become a Jew. Hence he exerts himself in this work, in a calm and friendly way, to prove to the Jews from the Bible, that their Messias had already come. At the same time he indignantly scourges “the lying tales” and false charges brought against them, as for instance, that, “to repress their stench they must have the blood of Christians.” The main thing was to treat them according to Christian, not Popish, charity.

  So far was he disposed to go the better to win over the Jews, that he was even desirous that Christ should not at the outset be put before them as the God-man, but merely as the Messias. He also declared in a sermon shortly after, that, when instructing a Jew on Christ, the catechumen was only to be told that Christ was a man like other men, sent by God to do good to mankind; only when the heart had been stirred to love of Him was mention to be made of His Godhead.

  “The Jews merely interest him,” says Reinhold Lewin, speaking of this book, “as subjects for conversion; this is the standpoint from which he regards the whole Jewish question.” “Should the new method not succeed and kindness prove of no avail ... then it will not be worth while any longer to make use of it; harsher measures will then serve the purpose better.” The same writer also quotes the preface to the Latin translation by Justus Jonas as expressive of the wish of the Wittenbergers: “May the Jewish business speed its way as rapidly as the outspreading of the Word of God which has wrought so marvellous a change and so sublime a work of God.”

  It is perfectly true that, had the optimistic expectations of Luther and his friends been realised, it would have been of incalculable advantage to their cause, for they would have succeeded where the ancient Church had failed. “The conversion of the Jews,” says Lewin, “an idea which can be read between Luther’s lines without any danger of forcing them — is to be the coping-stone of the grand edifice he had erected; the Papacy [in Luther’s view] had failed, not merely because it had recourse to wrong methods but above all because its foundations rested on forgery and falsehood.”

  The fact is, however, that no increase in the number of conversions took place. This disappointing experience, the sight of the growing insolence of the Jews, their pride and usury, not to speak of personal motives, such as certain attempts he suspected them to have made on his life at the instigation of the Papists, brought about a complete change in Luther’s opinions in the course of a few years. As early as 1531 or 1532, when a Hebrew baptised at Wittenberg had brought discredit upon him by relapsing into Judaism, he gave vent to the angry threat, that, should he find another pious Jew to baptise he would take him to the bridge over the Elbe, hang a stone round his neck and push him over with the words: I baptise thee in the name of Abraham; for “those scoundrels,” so he adds, “scoff at us all and at our religion.”

  From that time he begins to put the Jews in the same category with the Turks and the Papists.

  The more he studies the text of the Old Testament, and the Old Jewish commentators, the more indignant he grows at the misrepresentations and trivialities to be met with in the works of the Rabbis. According to him, they are oxen and donkeys; they are as bad as the monks; with their droppings they make of Holy Scripture, as it were, a sink into which to empty their obscenity and stupid imaginings. He is also aghast to discover that they led astray even great churchmen like St. Jerome, and Nicholas of Lyra of whom he was particularly fond. What was even worse, they were ensnaring learned contemporaries who were familiar with Hebrew, particularly those who fancied they could improve upon Luther’s translation of the Old Testament thanks to their closer acquaintance with the original text, men, for instance, of the type of Sebastian Münster of Basle (the pupil of the Jewish grammarian Elia Levita). Münster, according to Luther, was a regular “Judaiser,” seeing that he paid heed neither to the faith, nor to the words, nor to their setting; albeit hostile to the Jews, he, too, was undermining the New Testament. Much of Luther’s anger in his writings against the Jews was intended for their Judaising pupils. Hence on the publication of the work “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen” we hear him declaring: “We have been at great pains with the Bible and been careful that the sense should agree with the grammar. This has not pleased Münster. Oh, those Hebrews — including even our own — are great Judaisers; hence I had them also in mind when I wrote my booklet against the Jews.”

  Some special motives for his Polemics against the Jews

  The real cause of Luther’s deadly hostility, voiced in his later writings against the Jews, was the blasphemous infidelity displayed in their treatment of Scripture and in their life as a whole.

  “The Jews with their exegesis,” he says, “are like swine that break into the Scripture”; the end and object of their life and intercourse with us, is, as the movement started in Moravia proves, to make us all Jews; “they never cease trying to entice Christians over.” They are quite at liberty to prefer, as indeed they do, the law of Moses to the Papal decretals and their mad articles, but they have no right to prefer it to the pure Evangel. Sooner than this let us have a struggle to the death! — Such were the thoughts uppermost in his mind when he sat down to pen those two writings which constitute a phenomenon in the history of literature.

  On the other hand, Luther’s most recent biographer is wrong when he explains the whole controversy by saying: “There can be no doubt that the radical change in his attitude on the Jewish question was an outcome of his increasing depression.” That, on the contrary, it was Luther’s religious excitement which was the prime psychologic
al mover is plain from many of the effusions contained in both these writings. That, however, his state of depression had some share in it is perfectly true.

  “The wrath of God has come upon them,” he writes in one such passage, “of which I do not like to think, nor has this book been a cheerful one for me to write, for I have been forced to avert my eyes from the terrible picture, sometimes in anger, sometimes in scorn; and it is painful to me to have to speak of their horrible blasphemies against our Lord and His dear Mother, to which we Christians are loath indeed to listen; I can well understand what St. Paul means in Romans x. 1, when he says that his heart was sore when he thought of them; such is the case with every Christian who earnestly dwells, not on the temporal misery and misfortune of which the Jews complain, but on their addiction to blasphemy, to cursing, to spitting at God Himself and all that is God’s, even to their eternal damnation, and who yet refuse to listen or lend an ear but will have it that all they do is done out of zeal for God. O God, our Heavenly Father, turn aside Thy wrath and let there be an end of it for the sake of Thy dear Son. Amen.”

  “O my God,” he groans elsewhere, “my beloved Creator and Father, do Thou graciously take into account my unwillingness to have to speak so shamefully of Thine accursed enemies, the devil and the Jews. Thou knowest I do so out of the ardour of my faith and to the glory of Thy Divine Majesty, for it pierces me to the very quick.”

  If, however, we look more closely into the matter we shall see that the “ardour of his faith” was also fed from other sources. There was, for instance, the reaction of his own protracted struggle in defence of the new doctrines and against the Papacy, a struggle which left deep marks on all his labours and on all his writings.