The Church and the Jews: Reformation Europe

The Reformation was one of the most dramatic upheavals in European history. For about a thousand years most of Europe was united by one church, the Latin or Roman Catholic Church, with its center in Rome. True, there was the eastern orthodox church in Greece and Russia; but the relationship between the western and eastern churches was worked out over time, and the spheres of influence of the two were distinct and separate. There were, of course, divisions and conflicts within the Latin church. But they had never led to a permanent rupture. The basic religious unity of Europe under Rome had an impact on every sphere of life - economic, political, and social as well as religious.

With the Reformation, this basic order collapsed. The turmoil touched everyone and everything. The Jews too were affected, although initially it was quite unclear how. There were short-term consequences and there were long-term consequences. We will try to look at both. First, let’s consider Luther's career and its significance for the Jews.

Martin Luther and the Jews

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, people everyone were clamoring for the reform of the Church. From clergy in high positions to the ordinary people who lived at the edge of hunger, people complained about corruption and graft, immorality and “idolatry” in the Church. The great humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam articulated these complaints in his Praise of Folly (1511). Erasmus himself never abandoned the Catholic Church, but, as a widespread saying of the sixteenth century put it, "Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it."


Desiderius Erasmus

In theory, the issues that brought about the Protestant revolt had nothing to do with the Jews (though there was one episode in the pre-Luther period that did involve Jews and Judaism rather directly: the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn controversy). The main issues had to do with the perception that the Church had corrupted the teachings of Christianity in doctrine and in practice. Luther set out to reform the existing Church, but was led inexorably to break with the Church.

For years the Vatican administration had been spending far beyond what it received as income. To meet its costs, it engaged in such practices as charging fees for the granting of dispensations (that is, the release from the provisions of a specific church law) and for indulgences (payments from the faithful seeking relief in advance from the pains of purgatory). The popular saying was, "The moment the money tinkles in the collection box, a soul flies out of purgatory."

Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor of Scripture at the University of Wittenberg, was deeply troubled over the practice of indulgences. On All Saints' Eve, Oct. 31, 1517, he fastened to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg a placard inscribed with "Ninety-Five Theses on Indulgences," which he said he was prepared to defend at a public disputation. For the "heresy" of questioning the absolute authority of the pope, he was denounced to the pope. But he had behind him his sovereign, the Elector of Saxony, and moreover anti-Rome feeling ran strong among the Germans. As the conflict escalated, Luther was driven to more and more radical theological positions. In 1520 a papal bull gave Luther two months to recant or be excommunicated. He responded by publicly burning, before a crowd, the books of canon law and the papal decretals and a copy of the papal bull. Within a month he was excommunicated.

At a Diet [“parliamentary” meeting of princes] in Speyer in 1529, the minority of princes who were favorable to the Reformation delivered a "Protest" against the emperor and the Catholic princes. The Protestant princes and cities joined in a league aligned against the Catholics. With this, Protestantism became a new power in Europe.

The guiding principle of Luther's reform was the doctrine of justification by faith – a radical return to the teaching of Paul that faith, not works, brings salvation. His teaching thus shifted the emphasis of Christian life from ritual and ceremonial to the internal spiritual life. Luther did not think he was founding a new church; he believed he was purifying the Catholic Church from abuses. But what soon occurred was a great schism, and the creation of a new church.


Martin Luther

At the start of Luther's reform work he held hopes that Jews would, with his reforms, see the pure truth of Christianity and convert. In this moderately pro-Jewish mood Luther published, in 1523, his work That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew. He argued that up to this time the Jews had been right to resist conversion. He wrote, "For our own fools, the popes, bishops, sophists, and monks - the gross asses' heads - have treated the Jews today in such a fashion that he who would become a good Christian might almost have to become a Jew. If I had been a Jew and had seen such fools and blockheads rule and teach the Christian faith, I should rather have turned into a swine than become a Christian." Likewise, he wrote in a letter to a convert: "I think the cause of the ill-repute [of earlier missionary efforts] is not so much the Jews' obstinacy and wickedness, as rather the absurd and asinine ignorance and the wicked and shameless life of the popes, priests, monks, and scholars, who neither through their teaching nor through Christian behavior have communicated to the Jews even a spark of light and warmth."

But despite Luther’s expectations, Jews continued to resist conversion, leading to frustration on Luther’s part. Luther's growing hostility to the Jews was reinforced by the Jews' traditional loyalty to the emperor, at a time when Luther was increasingly allied to princes seeking independence from the emperor. His increasing hostility is evident in his Table Talks of the 1530s, in which he attacked Jewish usury and blasphemy. It is likely that he collaborated with his protector, Elector John Frederick, in expelling the Jews of his native Saxony in 1536. His treatises continued to become more abusive in their remarks about the Jews. In 1543, he published three treatises that were nothing less than violent in their hostility against the Jews and Judaism: On the Jews and their Lies, On the Ineffable Name and on Christ's lineage, and On the Last Words of David.

Ironically enough, it became quite common in Luther’s camp to associate Jews with the abhorred Catholic Church, or what members of this camp called "popery." Jewish hairsplitting, they argued, was like Catholic scholasticism, with its emphasis on ritual and outward practice. Wrote Martin Bucer, the Protestant reformer in Strasbourg: "It should not surprise you that they [the Jews] are more inclined to the atrocities of the Papists than to our pure doctrines and the pure ritual of our churches. For, except that the Papists venerate icons and idols and set them up for worship, while gaining lip service to Christ...the faith and religious practices of Papists and Jews are really identical."

The Spread of Protestantism and the Response of the Jews

How did the Jews themselves respond to the Protestant Reformation? They did not convert en masse, as Luther hoped, but they did respond in other ways. In the early period, there was guarded hopefulness. The undisputed leader of German Jewry, Josel of Rosheim, actually went to hear sermons by Wolfgang Capito, a Reformer of Strasbourg, because of the latter's "great wisdom." He also engaged in disputations with Reformers regarding the interpretation of Scripture; in his words, he engaged in disputations “before many sages [in Frankfurt in 1539], the wisest among the gentiles, to prove to them from the words of our Holy Torah that the views of Luther, Bucer and their faction [towards Jews] were incorrect." He shared with other Jews what was no doubt an illusion parallel to that of Luther: that with the collapse of the old structures, the Reformers would find their way to the truth of Judaism.

Josel of Rosheim was forced to take stock, however, when, from 1543 onward, Luther began producing tracts that not only condemned but incited against the Jews. The first of these (On the Jews and their Lies) Josel termed "such a boorish and inhuman book, containing curses and vilification hurled at us hapless Jews, such as by the will of God can truly never be found in our beliefs and Judaism generally."

Moreover, Josel rightly stressed the ominous social and legal innovation implicit in Luther's abuse. "For never has it been contended by any scholar,” he wrote, “that we Jews ought to be treated with violence and much tyranny; that none was bound to honor any obligation toward us or keep the peace of the land where we were concerned, just because we decline to believe what Luther believes." He was also aware of the very real potential for incitement in Luther's writings. "For some declare to the mass of the people, with open boastfulness, that if they harmed the Jews in person or in their property they would be pardoned, since Doctor Martin Luther had expressed such a view in his printed book and had ordered his doctrine to be propagated." Josel sought a meeting with Martin Luther in 1537 to defuse the danger, but Luther refused to meet with him.

The consequences of Luther's teaching were not slow in materializing. If anything, violence against the Jews in Germany increased, with increased expulsions and assaults by the mob. A Jewish refugee from this violence who reached Palestine through Poland and Italy to settle in Safed, described his expulsion by the Lutherans from Brunswick in about 1547 thus: "We were all suddenly expelled...on the advice of this foul priest Martin Luther and that of the rest of the council of scoundrels who emanated from the stock and root of the arch-heretic and who were brought by the accursed rebels, for the multitude of our sins - this was the cause of our expulsion. And in consequence of this, the council of the town of Brunswick, may its name be blotted out, proceeded to bring false and malicious charges against us. So they disqualified us and tore up our privilege, which my ancestors had procured from them many years ago. Moreover, we have recently renewed these privileges at great cost...There was not even one among [the municipal officers] who spoke peace. For several years they were intent upon murder and destruction alone...And as they schemed, so they acted...and they almost put me to death; only with great difficulty did I escape...may the Lord avenge His people and my own person against these evil-doers; may they be crushed, cast down and vanquished!"

But of course the Reformation reached far outside the borders of Germany, and touched Jews living elsewhere as well. Echoes of the Lutheran revolt soon spread into Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain, Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, England, Scotland, and Scandinavia. New sects emerged, some of them differing widely from Luther in important aspects, and offering new possibilities for assessing Jews and Judaism.

After Luther, the most important figure to emerge was John Calvin (1509-64). By this time, a generation after Luther, the problem at this point was not the overthrow of the papacy, but the construction of new modes of power. It has been said of Calvin that men were not drawn to his teaching but to his discipline. In organizing the church in Geneva, he effectively transformed Geneva into a theocracy, with power in the hands of pastors and elders rather than the magistrate and princes.


John Calvin

As far as Jews were concerned, Calvin was far less extreme than Luther. He had few, if any, contacts with contemporary Jews. On the other hand, he had to respond to charges that he himself was "judaizing," which put him on the defensive. His antitrinitarian opponent Michael Servetus, whom Calvin for his part more justifiably accused of "judaizing," attacked Calvin's "Jewish legalism." Calling the Mosaic law an "irrational, impossible, tyrannical law," Servetus thundered, "And to that law you wish to make us adhere equally today." Confronted with such accusations, Calvin made a point of attacking not only the ancient Jews but also his Jewish contemporaries, especially for their persistent adherence to the traditional interpretation of the Bible. But in fact there was room for rapprochement between Jews and Calvinists in Calvin's teaching. Calvin in effect rejected the Pauline dichotomy between law (Judaism) and spirit (Christianity), in favor of a kind of Old Testament legalism. In his economic teachings too - which did not condemn the taking of interest, and certainly not commerce, and were a response to emerging economic conditions – there were signs of a new attitude to commerce and banking that would help make Jews welcome where they had once been unwelcome, in such places as the Netherlands and England.

The sweeping change in the religious composition of Europe had far-reaching consequences for the Jews. The failure of the Reformation to conquer all of western Christianity, and the failure of the Catholic Church to defeat the Reformation, meant the disappearance of the unity of western Christendom. It was now impossible for any single church to exert authority in the way the medieval church had. The long-term consequences of the Reformation for the Jews can be summarized in this way:

a) Jews ceased to be the only open non-conformists in Europe. True, all Christian churches agreed that the disbelief of Jews was worse than any Christian heresy; but the matter was now one of degree. Moreover, some small groups, like the extreme Puritan sects of England, the Anabaptist sects and antitrinitarians of Poland and Transylvania, remained outside major church frameworks. Sectarian divisiveness and expression of individualist opinions would in time undermine tendencies of coercion and religious intolerance.

b) There was an advantage to the Jews in that Protestant sects all turned to the Scriptures as the ultimate authority. The aim of building a better Christian society and state led to a re-examination of the Law of the Old Testament, and an interest in the historical narratives of Exodus, Judges and Kings. The Hebrew language became a focus of new interest. Some Protestants, as a result of the study of Bible and Hebrew, came to respect the Jews. They took an interest in their way of life, and appreciated their history. In Netherlands and England especially, this led to benefits for the Jews: In the 1660s the Jews were re-admitted to England for the first time since their expulsion in 1290; in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they enjoyed unprecedented freedoms.

c) But the popular character of certain Reformation leaders and trends worked to the disadvantage of the Jews, giving free expression to the anti-Jewish hatred of the masses. The great influence of the cities and burghers on the Reformation sects also militated against the Jews, given civic anti-Jewish traditions, especially among craftsmen. And traditional papal protection, even if it was not terribly effective, was no longer available at all in Protestant lands.

d) Though not intended to do so, the reliance on individual judgment in religious matters that accompanied the Reformation, along with the disruption of the medieval system, helped to liberate and consolidate secular trends. This produced the possibility of a comprehensive tolerance in principle that would include Jews.