October: This Month in the History of Christianity. Luther posts his 95 theses and lives (thus making possible his substantial contribution to German anti-semitism).

Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Don't be fooled by those
gentle bovine eyes

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses and sparked the Protestant Reformation.  The immediate cause of his discontent was the mercantile activity of a certain Johann Tetzel, a man whose intellectual heirs today manage the American banking system.  Tetzel was hawking Indulgences to raise some desperately needed cash for the Church -- Renaissance popes were into home improvement in a very big way, transforming St. Peter’s into a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and fashionable designers like Bramante, Raphael, and, later, Michelangelo demanded a very high price.  Fortunately, Indulgences were an especially effective form of pious alchemy by which the Catholic Church turned sin into gold.  And there was never any shortage of sin.


Luther, however, cared little for fine art.  What concerned him most was his own tortured soul and he was plagued by a profound sense of guilt brought upon by trying to please an abusive father.  He could not abide the notion that the faithful could escape their punishment in purgatory by simply purchasing a certificate that they could present at the gates of heaven upon their death.  Driven by despair and righteous anger, Luther developed a personal theology that promised salvation on the basis of faith alone, but which by any Catholic standards was clearly heretical.

Luther was ready to die for his beliefs, and indeed barely escaped the fiery death of heretics before him.  By the grace of God and politics, however, he survived and over his long career demonstrated time and again that, just as he was prepared to die for his own beliefs, he was prepared that others should be killed for theirs.  He certainly had no tears to shed for Ulrich Zwingli, a rival Protestant fanatic killed on the battlefield in 1531.  Luther and Zwingli had engaged in a lengthy theological feud, described by Luther as a “war to the knife,” over whether the consumption of the Eucharist was real or merely symbolic cannibalism (Luther argued that the meat was real).  And when Zwingli died, Luther noted:

If his error had prevailed, we would have perished, and our church with us.  It was a judgment of God.

When the German peasants turned to the gospels to justify their struggle against an oppressive nobility and to guide their efforts to create a more equitable social order on this side of paradise, Luther responded to their misguided theology with a tract entitled: Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (1525).  The peasants, he said, had “sworn to be true and faithful, submissive and obedient, to their rulers” but now they had “deliberately and violently [broken] this oath … [and were] starting a rebellion” for which “they have doubly deserved death in body and soul.”  He wrote:

let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel …. For baptism does not make men free in body and property, but in soul …

To encourage the authorities, he added: “anyone who is killed fighting on the side of the rulers may be a true martyr in the eyes of God.”  (We hear similar sentiments today from Islamic zealots who strap bombs to teenagers and buy them bus tickets.)  The conflict known as the Peasants’ War of 1524-1525, during which the peasants were defeated and brutally punished, resulted in an estimated 100 000 deaths.

On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543

Luther was irritated, too, by the Jews, who refused to accept the wisdom and truth of his Christian teachings.  Angered by their recalcitrance, he wrote On Jews and Their Lies,  (1543) in which he outlined plans to eradicate the Jewish faith in Germany by a combination of conversion, expulsion, and murder.  Posing for himself the question: “What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews,” Luther offered his “sincere advice” – set fire to their synagogues and schools, raze and destroy their homes, take away their Talmudic writings and prayer books, forbid their rabbis to teach on pain of loss of life and limb, abolish safe-conduct for Jews on the highways, prohibit usury and take their cash, silver and gold for “safe-keeping,” engage them in forced labor, eject them forever from the country as they’ve done in Spain, Bohemia and France.  He wrote:

[The Jews are a] base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth. … [They are] full of the devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine ….

We are even at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the blood of the children they have shed since then (which still shines forth from their eyes and their skin). We are at fault in not slaying them.

Luther graces a Nazi postcard;
he is 'searching for
the health and happiness
of all of Germany.'

This publication, written a few years before his death, secured Luther’s immortality in the pantheon of Nazi heroes – it was cited in virtually every Nazi anti-Semitic tract, praised by Heinrich Himmler, publicly displayed at the Nuremberg Rallies, and a first edition was presented by the city of Nuremberg to Julius Streicher, a leading Nazi propagandist who was executed after the war for crimes against humanity.

Luther died in 1546.  One of his final sermons addressed the urgency of expelling the Jews as quickly as possible.

Apparently coming a little late to the conclusion that persecuting Jews counts as bad behavior, Lutheran Churches didn’t begin officially repudiating Luther’s anti-semitism until the 1980s.