American Lutheran Church. My best friend's dad was a pastor in the LC-Missouri Synod. My mom and hers were both Sunday school teachers. Doesn't matter what *you* believe is true; I heard negative things from adults around us about the Jews. It was kind of ironic since at least three of our nearby neighbors were Jewish, and everyone liked them just fine. In my 20s I briefly attended a fundie (Pentacostal) church and heard plenty of negative stuff about Jews there, as well.
Luther initially believed that kindness toward Jews was the right path, if only for the purpose of enlightening them and opening their eyes to Christianity. As a professor of Old Testament, he believed that Jews could be taught the proper meaning of certain Hebrew Bible verses prophesying Jesus’ life, messianic mandate, and New Covenant, thereby leading to their conversion. This period in Luther’s early fame is represented by his essay “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew” (1523). Both the title and intermittent points of the tract foreshadowed some elements of 20th-century Christian outreach to and reconciliation with Jews. For example, Luther writes, “We gentiles are relatives by marriage and strangers, while they [the Jews] are of the same blood, cousins and brothers of our Lord” (I rely here as elsewhere on Thomas Kauf*mann’s Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism).
But this attitude did not last. Frustrated by Jewish steadfastness, and misinformed regarding Jewish practices, Luther in his later years undid his early openness toward the Jewish people and penned anti-Jewish rants. “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543) is a patently anti-Semitic document. He writes:
And so, dear Christian, beware of the Jews . . . you can see how God’s wrath has consigned them to the Devil, who has robbed them not only of a proper understanding of the Scriptures, but also of common human reason, modesty and sense. . . . Thus, when you see a real Jew you may with a good conscience cross yourself, and boldly say, “There goes the Devil incarnate.”
Worse than that, Luther’s rage and increasing religious and political power were accompanied by a program for protecting Christian society from Jewish influence and contamination by burning or razing synagogues, destroying Jewish homes, confiscating Jewish holy books, banning Jewish religious worship, expropriating Jewish money, and deporting Jews.
Luther’s anti-Judaism might have been forgotten and even understood as a product of his times. After all, Luther preached in a Wittenberg church where anti-Jewish art—the notorious Judensau depicting Jews nursing on the teats of swine—had been installed hundreds of years before he was born. But Luther’s prolific output, his mastery of the media revolution unleashed by Gutenberg, and his role as founder of a religious movement that would have many offshoots guaranteed that he would never be forgotten.
Never was that more painfully clear than with the rise of Nazism. Hitler was influenced by those who appropriated and reenergized Luther’s anti-Jewish polemics. Chillingly, in November 1938, just two weeks after Kristallnacht, Martin Sasse, bishop of the Evangelical Church of Thuringia, published a pamphlet titled Martin Luther and the Jews: Away with Them! Sasse wrote:
On 10 November, Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning. . . . At this moment, we must hear the voice of the prophet of the Germans from the sixteenth century, who out of ignorance began as a friend of the Jews but who, guided by his conscience, experience and reality became the greatest anti-Semite of his age, the one who warned his nation against the Jews.
That polemic, with a print run of 100,000 copies, connected the dots be*tween Luther’s aspiration for the burning of synagogues to its fulfillment by the Nazis.
In a similar vein, Julius Streicher, who founded the anti-Semitic paper Der Stürmer and was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, defended his actions by saying they were inspired by Luther himself. It was Luther, he suggested, not he, who should be on trial.
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/on-luther-and-lies
