“They are our open enemies; they do not cease
to blaspheme our dear Lord Christ; they call the Virgin Mary a whore and
Christ, the child of a whore. Us they
call changelings and abortions, and if they could kill us all, they would
gladly do so.”
Martin Luther (1546) An
Admonition Against the Jews
We’ve Moved
Past it …?
My fellow students,
spread across western Minnesota are small communities mostly populated with
white Christians who have close ties to agriculture and religion. If there are
any Jewish people in these communities, they are few in number. Donnelly is a
small, rural farming community in the center of western Minnesota with a
population of about 250 people. Spending the majority of my younger years in
this conservative German Lutheran town, I attended school in the nearby town of
Morris. Because of the University of Minnesota Morris, the town had a little
more diversity than the average Minnesotan town of around the same size
(~5,000). However, this diversity did not readily include those of Jewish
ancestry or culture. My knowledge of the Jewish people and culture came from
watching Mel Brooks’ movies and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
After starting this study about
Luther and his thoughts about the Jewish people, my professor tasked me to
inquire with the ELCA pastors who are important in my life about their thoughts
and feelings on Luther’s writings. All of their responses were of disgust for
the writings, but with the same conclusion: The ELCA wrote an apology in 1994
and we work together with our Jewish brethren for the common good, so therefore
we’ve moved past these writings. The website of the ELCA (elca.org) shows
nothing regarding the writings. The 1994 apology is there, and there are some
passing references to “On the Jews and their Lies” in some articles, but there
is no explicit mention of Luther’s anti-Jewish sentiments. So, according to my
pastors and the ELCA, we’ve moved past it. Or have we? This paper will examine
that question, and what I will do with this knowledge in the future, if
anything.
Growing up in
the ELCA, I was told of Martin Luther’s 95 theses and the fact that he gave the
people the Bible in the common tongue. I was taught in confirmation that he was
a runaway monk who married a runaway nun and started the Protestant Reformation.
As I grew older, I understood more about my faith’s namesake, including his
responses to the Apostle’s Creed in his Small Catechism. In my high school
years, my mother informed me that he wrote terrible things about Jews in his later
life when he was dying of uremic poisoning, but I was never shown what he
wrote. It wasn’t until I took classes at Saint Cloud State University from my
Religious Studies professor, Dr. Joseph Edelheit (who happens to be a rabbi),
that I was shown these terrible writings, and I was in disbelief at the
extremely horrific details Luther was so specific about. Using Schramm and
Stjerna’s Martin Luther, The Bible, and
the Jewish People: A Reader in my class, I learned that Martin Luther did
write terrible things in his later life, partially due to his health, but that his
anti-Jewish sentiments were prevalent throughout his teaching and writing
career, even before hanging the 95 Theses on the door of the church in 1517.
“For
their recta stick out, that is, the
innermost feelings of their heart and their desires in opposition to Christ
they display to the present. Through these they have poured out their
excrement. Therefore, the recta
sticking out means that their will to harm and do evil appears, since they are
not able to vomit the feces of evils against Him.” (Martin Luther, First Psalm Lectures (1513-1515))
Part of my difficulty with Luther’s
anti-Jewish texts is that at the same time Dietrich Bonheoffer, a Lutheran
theologian and pastor, was writing against the Nazi’s eradication of Jews and
saving them from their persecution, Adolf Hitler was using Martin Luther’s “On
the Jews and Their Lies” as proof of Jewish evils. Is this a case of “Do not let your left hand
know what your right hand is doing”? If Bonheoffer had known that Hitler was
using Luther’s writings as justification, would he have remained Lutheran?
While Bonheoffer was using Luther’s words of love and social justice, Hitler
was using the most difficult anti-Jewish passages of Luther’s writings:
“First to set fire
to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will
not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is
to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that
we are Christians….
Second, I advise
that their houses also be razed and destroyed.
Third, I advise
that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies,
cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them…. We must not consider the
mouth of the Jews as worthy of uttering the name of God within our hearing. He
who hears this name from a Jew must inform and chase him away. And may no one
be merciful and kind in this regard.
Fourth, I advise
that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and
limb…
Fifth, I advise
that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews…. Sixth,
I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of
silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping ….
Seventh, I commend
putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands
of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the
sweat of their brow… For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed
Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away
their time behind the stove, feasting and farting…” (Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies (1543))
Luther’s call to action to Christians
of his day is not found in Schramm and Stjerna’s Reader; I had to find it
elsewhere. The above section of “On the Jews and their Lies” was not placed in
the Reader because it was “infamous” (Schramm and Stjerna p.146) and was able
to be found elsewhere, and perhaps it is too horrific and embarrassing for
entry into the Reader. I’ve found it to be the prime example of Luther’s
writings at his worst and most horrific. It’s tragic that Adolf Hitler embraced
and acted upon “On Jews and Their Lies,” beginning with what is known as
Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). On the nights of November 8 and 9, 1938,
Nazi storm troopers smashed windows out of synagogues and Jewish-owned shops
and buildings (thus Kristallnacht), killing at least 91 Jews, and sending at
least 30,000 Jews to concentration camps. The Nazis destroyed 267 synagogues
across Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland. One cannot blame these atrocities
solely on Luther, but his above writings may have had some influence.
In the middle of his ministry,
Martin Luther wrote, “That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew,” in which he, perhaps
uncharacteristically, wrote words of supposed kindness towards the Jewish
people. In the calm before the hellfire
hailstorm of anti-Jewish writings that were to follow, we can recognize that at
one point he attempted to write some kind words.
“If
we really want to help them, we must be guided in our dealings with them not by
papal law but by the law of Christian love. We must receive them cordially, and
permit them to trade and work with us, that they may have occasion and
opportunity to associate with us, hear our Christian teaching, and witness our
Christian life. If some of them should prove stiff-necked, what of it? After
all, we ourselves are not good Christians either.” (Martin Luther, That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523))
Luther’s writing above was in
response to the Crusaders’ murderous treatment of Jews, and as we’ve seen, not
his general sentiment before or after 1523.
Conversion of the Jews was the ultimate goal, and as Phyllis Goldstein
writes, “He, too, viewed ‘toleration’ as little more than enduring the presence
of Jews until they became Christians.” (Goldstein, 2011) As it became clear to Luther than conversion
wasn’t happening as he’d hoped, his writings became more and more hate-filled.
Luther’s views are in a long line
of Christian thinkers who express an anti-Jewish polemic, including Saint
Augustine. The Crusades, The Inquisition, and the implementation of Jewish
ghettos across Europe all happened before Luther. It took well over 1900 years
from Jesus’ trial until 1965 for the Catholic Church to approve Nostra Aetate at Vatican II, renouncing
church teaching that Jews were/are responsible for Christ’s death:
“True,
the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death
of Christ; (13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against
all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.
Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented
as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.
All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of
the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth
of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.” – Nostra
Aetate (1965)
The
Catholics did indeed take over 1900 years to denounce the ‘Christ-Killer’
rhetoric, but it also took the Catholic church a long time to denounce many of their
other outdated teachings, including the location of the Earth in relation to
the universe, the shape of the Earth, burning of heretics, and the like. To be
fair, the American Lutheran Church, one of the precursors to the ELCA, adopted
a very long document laying out how the ALC held relations with the Jewish
community. The document clearly
confesses, “In America, Lutherans have been late and lethargic in the struggle
for minority rights in the face of inherited patterns of prejudice. We have
also been characterized by an inadequate level of ethical sensitivity and
action in social and political areas.” (ALC)
The Church
Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on April 18, 1994,
adopted the following document as a statement on Lutheran/Jewish relations:
In the long
history of Christianity there exists no more tragic development than the
treatment accorded the Jewish people on the part of Christian believers. Very
few Christian communities of faith were able to escape the contagion of anti-Judaism
and its modern successor, anti-Semitism. Lutherans belonging to the Lutheran
World Federation and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America feel a special
burden in this regard because of certain elements in the legacy of the reformer
Martin Luther and the catastrophes, including the Holocaust of the twentieth
century, suffered by Jews in places where the Lutheran churches were strongly
represented.
The Lutheran
communion of faith is linked by name and heritage to the memory of Martin
Luther, teacher and reformer. Honoring his name in our own, we recall his bold
stand for truth, his earthy and sublime words of wisdom, and above all his
witness to God's saving Word. Luther proclaimed a gospel for people as we
really are, bidding us to trust a grace sufficient to reach our deepest shames
and address the most tragic truths.
In the spirit of
that truth-telling, we who bear his name and heritage must with pain
acknowledge also Luther's anti-Judaic diatribes and the violent recommendations
of his later writings against the Jews. As did many of Luther's own companions
in the sixteenth century, we reject this violent invective, and yet more do we
express our deep and abiding sorrow over its tragic effects on subsequent
generations. In concert with the Lutheran World Federation, we particularly
deplore the appropriation of Luther's words by modern anti-Semites for the
teaching of hatred toward Judaism or toward the Jewish people in our day.
Grieving the
complicity of our own tradition within this history of hatred, moreover, we
express our urgent desire to live out our faith in Jesus Christ with love and
respect for the Jewish people. We recognize in anti-Semitism a contradiction
and an affront to the Gospel, a violation of our hope and calling, and we pledge
this church to oppose the deadly working of such bigotry, both within our own
circles and in the society around us. Finally, we pray for the continued
blessing of the Blessed One upon the increasing cooperation and understanding
between Lutheran Christians and the Jewish community. (Declaration)
I found
this apology after I had read through Schramm and Stjerna’s Reader because it
was, thankfully, at the end of the book. One could find the document on the
ELCA website if he or she actively searched for it. This apology was made six
years after the formation of the ELCA. It is very delicately written and I’m
thankful the ELCA adopted it, but did the ELCA need to wait six years? I do
like the phrase “must with pain acknowledge …” Perhaps it took six years to figure out how to
phrase it so delicately. The apology acknowledges plenty of guilt, but is it
enough? Does the apology mean that we’re over this; that we’ve moved past it?
The ending calls for prayer, but there is no call for action. Yes, we are
called to oppose such bigotry, but is that enough? Should we as the ELCA initiate
more opportunities for open discourse with the Jewish community and our
congregations about Luther’s prejudice? The role of the ELCA should not only be
an apologetic one, but one of action; more so a stance that “We’re sorry, so
this is what we’re going to do about it.” The role should not be left in the
negative. With a call to action, the ELCA’s role can be moved to the positive.
Perhaps the ELCA could provide an Internet link to Luther’s writings underneath
the apology on the website, thus showing what the ELCA is apologizing for.
After all, I would have never
learned about Martin Luther’s writings in this detail if certain events had not
transpired. The accusations of anti-Semitism are what brought my professor to
SCSU in the first place. In the early 2000s, the Dean of the Social Sciences Department
was accused of anti-Semitic acts. These accusations resulted in the Dean
stepping down from his position and the start of a Jewish Studies program. Dr. Joseph
Edelheit, who had served as a rabbi for over 40 years, was selected to head the
Jewish Studies program and help heal the wound on the campus of Saint Cloud
State University. A unique aspect of this story is that the Dean is my uncle,
and 10 years after these events occurred, I took an anti-Semitism class from
Professor Edelheit who pointed me to Martin Luther’s horrific writings.
Had it not
been for my public education at SCSU, I would have touched on these writings in
seminary, but probably not in this amount of detail. I am making the argument
that this lack of scholarship needs to change. These writings are our ‘cross to
bear.’ What we do with them is our challenge. The ELCA did apologize for the
writings in 1994, six years after the formation of our denomination. We work
towards building relationships with the Jewish community in our communities and
form bonds of friendship, but is that enough?
Have we
really moved past it? Should we move past it? We need to do more than just move
past it. We must act upon what has come before us and create a new call to
action to rival the anti-Jewish call issued by the father of our faith. We must
work together with the Jewish community to create an open dialogue with our
congregations, and to be more open about what has come before us so that we may
fix what lay ahead of us. For if it is truly our charge to be ministers of both
word and sacrament, and to call ourselves Lutheran, we must bear both the cross
of Jesus and Luther’s writings. We must put forth a pathway to healing so that
we can finally move past it and know that we’ve left a larger, more positive
impact on our world.
Perhaps on the 75th
Anniversary of Kristallnacht, (November 8&9, 2013) ELCA pastors across the
country could read these passages in their congregations and together discern
the meanings. We could remember the 6
million Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust, and pray for healing and
renewal.
Also, the ELCA should take Luther’s horrific
call to action against Jews and replace it with a more dynamic call to action
to engage congregations with the Jewish community in open discourse to re-open
this wound and fix this infection from within; to finally allow this wound to
heal. Until we, the ELCA, actively engage this issue, it will fester in the
hidden depths of seminaries and universities, and grow cancerous on the
internet.
If it is my calling to be a
Lutheran pastor and eventually confess to understanding Luther’s theology and
teachings, then these writings are my burden to carry along with every other
Lutheran pastor. All Protestant leaders have a church to lead because of
Luther, but it is our special burden as Lutheran pastors to acknowledge, discern,
and struggle with these writings. What we do with them is in our care.
Amen.
References
The American Lutheran Church and the Jewish
Community. (2013, May 01).
Retrieved from
http://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/protestant-churches/na/lutheran/678-elca1974
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
(n.d.). Declaration of ELCA to Jewish Community. Retrieved April 30,
2013, from
http://www.elca.org/Who-We-Are/Our-Three-Expressions/Churchwide-Organization/Office-of-the-Presiding-Bishop/Ecumenical-and-Inter-Religious-Relations/Inter-Religious-Relations/Christian-Jewish-Relations/Declaration-of-ELCA-to-Jewish-Community.aspx
Goldstein, P., & Evans, H. (2012). A
Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (Kindle ed.). Brookline,
MA, United States of America: Facing History and Ourselves National
Foundation.
Kristallnacht: A Nationwide Pogrom, November 9-1,
1938. (n.d.). Retrieved May 03,
2013, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM):
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005201
Michael, R. (2006). Holy Hatred: Christianity,
Antisemitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave McMillan.
Schramm, B., & Stjerna, K. I. (2012). Martin
Luther, the Bible, and the Jewish People: A Reader. Minneapolis:
Fortress.
The Vatican. (1965, October 28). Declaration on
the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions - Nostra Aetate.
Retrieved April 30, 2013, from
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html
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