Luther and the Jews

Solpersteine in Lutherstadt Eisleben.

Luther, as I said yesterday, was very much one who worked with others, who bounced things off others,who collaborated.   

But he could also be as stubborn as could be, and when he was stubborn, we sometimes could see how incredibly wrong he was.  

This came up with the debate with Zwingli.   Their differences of opinion about communion, and differences of opinion about baptism with the anabaptists essentially sentenced Protestantism to a state of being splintered that we are still seeing every time a new church decides that they can’t agree to disagree and creates a new independent entity.   The prayer of Jesus in John’s Gospel, that they may all be one, is left behind in the fallout that really hinges from Luther’s inability to let other people follow their conscience if it was different from Luther’s.

But where Luther really did damage to all of human history was in his treatment of the Jews.   The Askenazi Jewish people, those who settle in Central Europe, already knew decades of persecution when the fifteenth century dawned.  I highly recommend the Jewish museum in Berlin for an overall look at what the story of the Jews in Germany is, both the places and times when they thrived, and when their culture was, if not celebrated, at least respected, and we have a wonderful record, and the times, represented in this sabbatical by my visit to the Synogogue in Erfurt, when Jews were not only oppressed, but often murdered.  

Of course, this all came to its peak with the Holocaust, and the Solperstein, like those above all over Germany, are a stark reminder of that truth.  We like to think that this was all on Hitler and the Nazis, but places like that Old Synogogue, and the places that commemorate Luther’s life, are careful to remind us of a different story. 

Luther was mad at the Jews for not converting to Christianity. This became such a focus for him at the end of his life that we wrote devastatingly about the Jewish people, urging their destruction if they did not come to Jesus. 

And it was these writings that allowed twentieth century Christians to buy into the Final Solution of the Third Reich.  It was these writings that made it possible for the Christian Church in Germany to become complicit in the actions of the Nazis.  Luther, revered by them, had said destroying Jews was OK.  It was this point of view that made the Confessing church a community of outlaws.   There is no question that the threads of history that allowed hate to cause the murder of six million Jews in twentieth century Germany has its roots in these writings by this esteemed Christian leader. 

While I no longer believe that making a mistake, even a big mistake, destroys the life work of a person, I am glad that we as Protestant Christians can question and deeply regret these words.   I am very glad that every Luther house, every discussion of his life and his thought here in Germany brings these things to life.  I am glad that every church with anti-Jewish iconography (except one) addresses that iconography. 

The Stadtkirche in Wittenberg once had a brass plaque on its side that had two knights fighting.  The prevailing knight, on a horse, was wearing the sign of the cross, but the losing night was wearing a cap that was associate with Jewish people, and in a deeply troubling and offensive vision, riding a pig. 

That plaque is no longer there (I may have a photo of it from 2005, by there is not one in this year’s photos, because it has clearly been taken down.).  But, it is not forgotten.   In front of it, in the front, is a brass plate, like a flat square on the ground, broken in four quarters, and from underneath you can see something bubbling up.  It looks ugly an dark, and like the four squares above are trying to keep the ugliness out of sight, but failing. 

It’s message to me is that we cannot hide the ugliness of the past, whether it is the hate of others, or the writings of those we consider our own.   We need to own it, we need to reject it, but we need to seek reconciliation.   Hundreds of years of hatred of the Jews was in part fueled by these hateful writings of Luther’s.  We need to keep remembering that.