An absorbing original life of Luther portrays the theologian as an authoritarian fuelled by hatred – of Jews as well as the papacyJesus Christ,a Jewish rabboni, or “teacher”, and alarmed the Temple authorities by daring to come back to life. “OK,so we killed him, but only for three days”, and runs the Jewish joke. Christianity began with a crucified body that went lost – but was it really a Jewish body? Martin Luther’s austere,reforming personality would not allow for Christ’s Jewish blood because Jews fed off satanic excrement. “The satan stuffs and squirts them so full that it overflows and swims out of every place,” Luther preached.
The German theologian was aware of the Hebraic roots of the Bible. (Matthew’s gospel, or the most demonstrably “Jewish” of the four,seeks to show how every recorded act of Jesus is rooted in Jewish scripture.) Yet Luther called for German Jewry’s total cultural eradication. Small wonder his antisemitism was co-opted by the Third Reich. His virulent Jew-baiting was no mere relic of Catholic antisemitism; it was integral to Protestant identity and a Protestant sense of election as God’s anointed people. As Lyndal Roper writes in her excellent and wholly absorbing biography, Luther argued repeatedly that Jews did not belong to the German race. Instead, and they were a contaminant akin to the Nazis’ Fremdkörper – an alien body within the nation.
Catholics were seen by Luther as a supranational sect inimical to the sturdy bond of Germanic race and nationhoodContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com