Naturaleza del proyecto

Cardinal Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain, appointed by Pope Sixtus IV; 132.

3

See Salo Baron, 380-399; Newman, 1-27, 435-630; Jerome Friedman, 24-26; Tractenberg, 175-187; Gerhard Falk, The Jew in Christian Theology: Martin Luther’s Anti-Jewish Vom Schem Hamporas (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 1992), 58-62; Paul Lawrence Rose, Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaizer (Geneva, 1980), 5-9.

4

Sebastian Muenster was the Hebrew translator, and the Professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg was Johann Boeschenstein. Newman, 618-619; Tractenberg, 186; Friedman 25-26.

5

and accursed” Jews lured and duped Christians into Jewish “wretchedness.” His purpose in publishing this book in 1543, as evidenced by opening statements in both Against the Jews and

Their Lies and Vom Schem Hamphoras, was to teach Germans “from historical evidence what a

Jew is so that we [Germans] can warn our Christians against them.” The need for Germans to be warned against Jews, he said, was as great as the need to be warned “against the devil himself,” for, while operating under the guise of religion, truth, and benevolence, Jews blasphemed Christ, called down hellfire on Christian heads, and trained “their children from infancy to be the bitter, virulent, and wrathful enemies of Christians." Indeed, Jewish hatred of non-Jews had so

“penetrated flesh and blood, marrow and bone,” he warned, that it had “become part and parcel of their nature and life.” The need to “be on guard” and to “govern yourself accordingly” was great, he warned, for “next to the devil you have no more bitter, venomous, and vehement enemy than a real Jew who earnestly seeks to be a Jew;” the lineage and circumcision of this “miserable and accursed” people “infect them all.”6

While these warnings are not unique to 1543, nor are they novel to Reformation teachings, they are significant in several ways. First, Luther has clearly transported to modern Germany the ancient Christian teaching of Jewish inherent hatred of Christians, as well as that of the Jew as the preeminent adversary and enemy of Christianity. Secondly, he has invoked these well-worn teachings with a notable shift in emphasis by speaking of the 'problem' of Jews dwelling among Germans rather than Jews dwelling among Christians. Third, he has made clear

6

Martin Luther, Against the Jews and Their Lies (1543) and Vom Schem Hamphoras (1543). Luther makes this statement in the context of discussing both treatises. See Volume 47, Luther’s Works, “So that our Germans might be informed,” 140, 265. Warnings about Jewish hatred included an alleged Jewish “commission” to murder and slay Christians, the poisoning of wells, the kidnapping and piercing of Christian children, of which, he says, Jews are perfectly capable of doing whether or not they have done so historically; for example, 137, 139, 156-58, 213-17, 257, 264. See also Gerhard Falk, The Jew in Christian Theology, including Martin Luther's Anti-Jewish Vom Schem Hamphoras, Previously Unpublished in English, and Other Milestones in Church Doctrine Concerning Judaism (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.,1992).

that these warnings against Jews apply equally to converted Jews who work as Judaizing Hebraists. Helping all of this along, no doubt, was his translation of the New Testament, which told in German words of the crucifying acts and stories that were said to exemplify Jewish hatred for God and Christianity. Indeed, his selective use of the term Judentum to speak of Jews and Judaism as a collective unit only appears in three places, all of which portray Jews and Judaism as either the persecutor of God's church or as the so-called 'Judaizing' party' that opposed God's truth.7

The other related and well-worn teaching, both explicit and implicit in Against the Jews

and Their Lies, is that of "Jewish misery and accursedness" - by which is meant divine Jewish

exile, loss of Jewish sovereignty, dependent existence under Christian domain, and all other adversity that had historically befallen Jews since their alleged crucifixion of Christ. That Christians should be warned and terrified by this ongoing divine act of judgment was one of Luther's oft-taught themes in lectures, sermons, and commentaries, appearing as early as some two to four years before he nailed his 95 theses to the door at Wittenberg in 1517. The continual public suffering of Jews “as an example...to all the nations,” he said, was the manifestation of God’s most righteous anger and a judgment far more awful than complete destruction of Jews.8

7

In Galatians 1.13-14 Luther uses Judenthum as a rendering for Ioudaismos, traditionally transliterated as ‘Judaism,’ to speak of his former life as a persecutor of the church of God. In Galatians 2.12 he uses Judenthum to speak of the ‘circumcised’ ( tous ek peritomes) who invoked fear in the apostle James. He uses Judenthum in non-biblical works 3 times between 1521 and 1527: Evangelium von der Zehn Aussaetzigen (1521, Vol. 8), Das Siebente Kapitel 5. Pauli zu den Corinthern ausgelegt (1523, Vol.12), Evangelion auff den Sontag nach Epiphanie. Luke 2 (ca.1525-1527). Search performed by Index Verborum: Martin Luther’s German Writings, Weimar Edition, 1516-1527 (http:// luther.b.c.edu/ inhalt1.html.)

8

Franklin Sherman, editor of Luther’s Works, Volume 47, 126-127, points out that Wilhelm Maurer has effectively shown that Luther’s earliest lectures on Psalms in 1513-1515 contain “the whole burden of his [future] charges against Jews.” As a refute to those who insist that Luther’s 1543 On the Jews and Their Lies is a radical change from his attitude toward Jews in his 1523 That Jesus Christ was a Jew, Mauer points to Luther’s lectures and sermons on Psalms to illustrate that the underlying theology remains the same both before and after conversion. Wilhelm Maurer, “Die Zeit der Reformation, Kirche und Synagogue, K.H.Rengstorf and S. von Kortzfleisch (Stuttgart, 1968. See Martin Luther, Psalm 59, First

Such longevity of misery is said to be God’s damning silence, and the silence is said to be both evidence that Jews “committed ...sins previously unheard of on earth,” and “proof” that they have been completely forsaken by God. This latter point, to which Luther returns in his 1538 treatise against the Judaizing sect of Sabbatarians, is part of a long and ranging argument on God’s judgment of Jews, one that opens, closes, and is shored up in-between by claims that God has now abandoned Jews for fourteen hundred years, that there is no end in sight to their “long and gruesome punishment,” that “not even a fly flicks a wing for their consolation.”9 His mind was unchanged three years before his death when he penned his 1543 treatises on "those miserable and accursed people” who have “failed to learn any lesson from the[ir] terrible distress." As in earlier writings, Luther insisted that such demonstration of God’s wrath was sufficient evidence that Jews are guilty, intractable, and wholly rejected by God. “Even a child can comprehend this,” he taught, for God would not punish Jews “so long, so terribly, so unmercifully” without just cause. 10

This doctrine of divinely ordained punishment of Jews flourished at the highest levels of Catholicism as well. Fifty-four days after Cardinal Gian Carafa11 was installed as Pope Paul IV

9

Ibid., Against the Sabbatarians, Volume 47, Luther’s Works, 59-98, in which there is hardly a page devoid of some aspect of this argument; quotations on 62-63, 67, 72, 97.

10

Ibid., Against the Jews and Their Lies, 137-39, 266-272: “What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people” who live among us and refuse to learn their lesson?" Luther's infamous solution answer - burn and bury Jewish synagogues and schools, raze and destroy Jewish homes, confiscate the Talmud and prayer books, forbid rabbis to teach, abolish safe conduct for Jews, prohibit usury, force Jews to “earn their bread in the sweat of their brow - was to be implemented so that “God might see that we are Christians and do not condone” Jewish distortions of truth. This “sharp mercy” was not to be seen as personal revenge but as a holy intolerance of blasphemy and defamation of Christianity. To not take this approach, he taught, would be equal to blaspheming and defaming Christ and Christianity, but doing so would “bring home to them the fact that they are not masters in our country, as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity.”

11

In 1542 Cardinal Carafa founded the Sanctum Officium Sanctissimae Inquisitionis, the guiding center of the Inquisition for all Catholic countries and producer of the first Index of Prohibited Books. He was said

on July 17, 1555, he issued the harshly restrictive bull Cum nimis absurdum, which began “it is utterly absurd and impermissible that Jews, whom God has condemned to eternal slavery because of their guilt ...repay our graciousness with base ingratitude...instead of being humbly

submissive.” Jews in Rome and other territories of the Papal States were then charged with “striving for power” and attempting to gain “dominion over [Christians]” through the insolent acts of moving into the “more noble” sections of towns, purchasing property, building houses in Christian areas, hiring Christian servants, and refusing to wear identifying clothing or badges. Fifteen paragraphs of harshly suppressive measures followed, requiring Jews to sell all “real [Jewish] property” to Christians, demolish and destroy all but one synagogue in any given ghetto, carry on no business other than “dealing in secondhand clothing,” and observe “all statutes that give advantage to Christians over Jews.”The statutes were intended, Pope Paul IV said, to help Jews “recognize through experience that they have been made slaves while Christians have been made free.”12

While the ghetto system created by Cum nimis was something new, 13 the papal theology informing it was not, nor was it any coincidence that the language of the bull was taken from