Luther the Anti-Semite

A Contemporary Jewish Perspective

Alon Goshen-Gottstein

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781506445823
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506445830
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The problem of "Luther and the Jews" has received much attention since World War II. Many consider there to be a direct line leading from Martin Luther's later anti-Jewish recommendations to policies carried out in the Third Reich. This has led contemporary Lutheran Churches worldwide to issue apologies and to distance themselves from Luther's anti-Semitic teachings. It has also led Jews to distance themselves from Luther as a religious figure. The present work revisits Luther's anti-Semitism and seeks to understand the compound factors that informed it. Drawing on contemporary Luther scholarship, it develops a model, the "Luther Model," that brings together multiple factors that help account for what went wrong, as we see it from our contemporary perspective. With that model in place, it engages in an examination of whether these factors, abstracted from the particularity of their historical context, are not also present in contemporary Jewish attitudes to Christians, as well as in broader negative relations between faith communities. By constructing the "Luther Model," this work seeks to feature Luther as a teacher and a paradigm for how religion can turn violent and destructive to other religions and to draw the appropriate lessons for interreligious relations today.

6

Applying the “Luther Model” Within

Let us now work through each of the components of the “Luther model” and consider how it does, or how it might, find expression in some contemporary Jewish attitudes toward Christianity.

1. Lack of Contact and No Meaningful FirstHand Knowledge

This may be considered the foundation of inadequate and negative relations with the religious other. No knowledge means no friendship, no commitment to another person.^[1] The consequences of lack of personal acquaintance are more far-reaching than limited knowledge of real people and their real lived religion. Ultimately, it impacts the possibility of love as a foundation of the spiritual life and, in the case of the Christianity, as the greatest command. To love, one must have a real relationship. One cannot love some abstraction. How can Jews be loved if they are not part of society and if one does not have real Jewish friends? The big change that has occurred ever since emancipation of the Jews, particularly since World War II, is that Jews and Christians in most of the Western world have become friends. Friendship and coexistence provide the foundation for revisiting Jewish-Lutheran relations.^[2] Such friendship was unimaginable in Luther’s days.

Sadly, there are parts of the Jewish world, especially the Orthodox and especially in Israel, that share the fundamental “friendless” reality in relation to members of other faiths. Again, sadly, when it comes to Christianity, this reality of “friendlessness” is further compounded by other aspects of the model that we see operating in the case of Luther’s attitude to the Jews. One of the negative side effects of creating a Jewish, or Jewish-majority, society is that all too often there is no opportunity or motivation to encounter members of other religions. This allows ideas of yesteryear to continue informing the image of the religious other. The most extreme consequences of such a social reality result in acts of hostility and enmity, small (spitting) or significant (such as the arson described above, even if it is an exceptional expression of the same tendency).

To recognize that we as Jews can harbor similar attitudes born of similar social conditions as those that characterize Luther’s view of the Jews is sobering. Surely, there are significant differences. Jews in the Middle Ages lived on the fringes of society. Their reality, in many ways, was a shadow reality, analogous to today’s Roma people. But social estrangement does not require social marginalization. It only requires an ordering of society around centers of common interest, which creates de facto homogenic communities, self-imposed and ideologically organized “ghettos” of common concern and shared identity.

The problem is significantly complicated when otherness is both social and theological. When there is theological otherness due to differing faiths, social communion helps offset negativity that could be introduced from the theological realm. However, in the absence of real relationships and friendships on the ground, the image of the other is exclusively theological and conditioned by theological perspectives and categories. The more this is so, the more the other loses his reality as a person and becomes simply a manifestation of the principles projected upon him, representing theological difference. Common humanity gives way to the projections of theological alterity.

In the absence of real relationship, imagination and fear set in. One expression of this is the certainty that the other wishes you ill. We have noted Luther’s fear of Jews, a direct consequence of lack of real relationships. More broadly, Luther was certain that Jews wish Christians ill.

They wish us every kind of harm with curses, slanders and spitting beyond imagining. They wish that violence and wars, terror and every type of misery should overtake us accursed Goyim. They do this cursing every Saturday openly in their synagogues and daily in their own homes. They teach, encourage and accustom their children to do these things from their childhood onwards so that they will remain bitter, virulent and vicious enemies of Christians.^[3]

Naturally, “As in water the face is to face, So the heart of man to man.”^[4] One’s attitude to the other becomes the basis of the other’s response. Hate breeds hates and fear breeds fear. It is not the case that Jews loved Christians, who in turn hated them. Negativity may well have been reciprocal, even if uneven in its social expressions.^[5] Jewish negativity would have been further fueled by earlier manifestations of the same dynamic in relation to the other as it found expression in negative portrayals of non-Jews in the Talmud.^[6] Yet, such mutual vilification and the reciprocity of suspicion and hate are all the consequence of lack of relationship, the absence of friendship.

Perhaps the most extreme form of othering is Luther’s demonization of Jews and his claim that they are affiliated with the devil.^[7] While we may well point out the harmful historical consequences of dehumanization and demonization of the other, we must also be prepared to revisit our foundational literature in search of similar attitudes. A disempowered and persecuted minority may well find consolation—moreover, may well be considered justified—in portraying its enemies and all those who are other to it as cosmically and metaphysically associated with other sources of life and spiritual vitality. To claim that non-Jews draw their vitality from “the other side,” as some kabbalists would have it, is to project otherness onto the metaphysical realm.^[8] It is also a way of answering how Jews could suffer in the hands of others. Those others draw their force and power from forces of darkness, not from the Divine. Such a metaphysical claim is a way of affirming identity and separateness, thereby both justifying and possibly perpetuating a history of separateness that includes suffering and persecution as constituent elements. In the same way that we can understand how Luther got where he got to, we can understand how certain metaphysical associations accompany Jewish views of non-Jews or of other religions. But when we view the harmful consequences of dehumanization and demonization of another, whatever the reason or theoretical foundations for it may be, must we not also recognize some aspect of ourselves in such activities and projections? Luther allows us to view such negativity with a distance afforded by looking at an “enemy” of some historical distance and through the ability to recognize the multiplicity of forces that converge to create the entire relational model, which is fed by lack of real contact^[9] and culminates in demonization of the other.^[10] Once we recognize the model in its entirety, we are not free to ignore the possibility that it is also present within us.

If Jews served for Luther as internal mirrors, and if, as Friedlander invites us, Luther should serve a similar role for Jews, we are led to the next level of considering how otherness operates within our religious psyche and imagination, a possibility that is much enhanced by the other lacking concrete reality and the commanding presence of real relationships and friendships.

Because for Luther, the Jew was not a personal reality but a construct, a projection, a phantasm, the Jew could operate not only externally but also internally. Accordingly, the Jew becomes an aspect, a theoretical possibility of a way of being. If so, every person has a Jew within, and the Jew within must be confronted in the process of spiritual growth. The progression from Old to New Testament may further enhance the process of internal conversion and the quest for dealing with the Jew within.^[11] At its most extreme, this interiorization of the “Jew” actually has spiritual potential. Distance from the real person and sublimation of the negativity associated with the Jew to a spiritual aspect that everyone has within themselves could be a strategy for containing and limiting harmful attitudes. These are symbolized, internalized, and made part of oneself. Yet, this very move is not only conditioned on lack of relationship with the objective “Jew,” it also has the potential of returning to concrete reality and translating into social negativity.

Let us consider the mirror situation. The suggestion that there is a “non-Jew” within is not a far one in certain kinds of mystical literature. R. Abraham Joshua Heschel was a great Hasidic luminary of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.^[12] In his Torah commentary Ohev Yisrael, he discusses the biblical passages of Deuteronomy 25, where we are commanded to remember Israel’s historical and metaphysical archenemy, Amalek.^[13] He writes:

It is still incumbent upon us to break the force and power of the wicked Haman, who is of the seed of Amalek that is hidden within the heart of each and every person of Israel, individually as well as collectively. That is, that each one of us, the people of God, should annihilate and uproot the evil that is concealed within him.^[14]

Finding the “other” and the enemy within may be “cleaner” in terms of containing it within a spiritual context and limiting its impact to the world within. Yet, the containment of “the non-Jew within the Jew” cannot be considered foolproof. There is nothing inherent in the concept or somehow representative of Judaism as a religion that has inherent self-restraint in relation to the other. Rather, such restraint and the fact that negativity does not spill out to the real world are functions of power relations and concrete opportunities. These could always change. What we face today, as Jews, is the possibility that given shifts in power relations, some of the negative attitudes that have found expression in relation to us could be expressed by us toward others.

Despite some appeal of interiorizing otherness, the possibility of sublimating otherness as part of a spiritual worldview and praxis is contingent on lack of concrete and meaningful relationships. It is not possible for me to imagine myself transcending a part of myself, identified as negative, when that part is identified with someone to whom I feel close, whom I respect, and who represents positive spiritual values. At the end of the day, the only way forward in Jewish-Christian relations, and in the globalized world of encounters between faiths and communities, is to transform othering through real encounters with the other. This, and this alone, will undermine the foundations of hatred and negativity that affect in some way and at some point in time the relations between members of all faith communities.

There are two concluding thoughts I would like to offer on this component of the model. The problem of othering, based on lack of relationship, is nowadays a central component of intergroup relations. More than Jews and Christians, it concerns the image of the Muslim in today’s world. It matters little that there are negative expressions of Islam that feed this image. The fact is that this image flourishes on lack of contact, as well as upon partial and wrong information. The situation that applied to Luther’s relations to the Jews is actually an expression of a broader contemporary syndrome in global relations between faith communities. Recognizing the dynamic through the opportunities provided by the study of a great figure at significant historical distance, allows us to question our own contemporary attitudes.

A second expression of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Luther the Anti-Semite
• The Jews and Luther
• Luther in Historical Context
• Introducing the “Luther Model”
• Recognizing the Reciprocal Challenge
• Applying the “Luther Model” Within
• Conclusion