Antisemitic? Anti-Judaic? Luther, Bonhoeffer, and the Jews

What Does It Mean for Christians to Love Our Jewish Neighbours?

Did Dietrich Bonhoeffer help Jews or hate them? This apparently absurd, even offensive, question surfaces in the scholarly literature about Bonhoeffer. And it arose as well in the decision in 2003 by Yad Vashem not to recognize Bonhoeffer among the “righteous among the nations.”

Bonhoeffer can provide for us a way into the vexed relationship of Christians and Jews—and a way forward toward better relations.

Antisemitic vs. Anti-Judaic

Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian in the Lutheran tradition. Martin Luther himself is sometimes excoriated as antisemitic because of the harsh things he wrote late in his life against the Jews.

Antisemitism, however, is a racial category. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance tells us the following about this term:

“The neologism ‘antisemitism,’ coined by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to designate anti-Jewish campaigns, was spread through use by anti-Jewish political movements and the general public. The modern term gained popularity in Germany and Europe incorporating traditional Christian anti-Judaism, political, social and economic anti-Jewish manifestations that arose during the Enlightenment in Europe, and a pseudo-scientific racial theory that culminated in Nazi ideology in the twentieth century.”

Luther and Bonhoeffer were not racists. Their trouble with Jews had to do with Judaism (the religion) not Jewishness (the ethnicity).

In fact, in Luther’s most notorious writing about Jews (more about that below), he makes an anti-racist point against Jewish presumption of racial superiority. Luther argues that we are all descended from Noah and Adam—and we are all born into sin (Psalm 51:5).

The test from the Christian point of view is simple, versus (to put things starkly) the Nazi point of view: Is a Jewish person who converts to Christianity now seen as a Christian?

Christians say yes, even as Christians right back to Acts 15, Romans 9–11, and Galatians 2:7–9 recognize cultural differences between Jewish believers and Christian believers. Nazis, however, say no: still a Jew, and still subject to sanctions as a Jew. Race matters, not belief.

Anti-Judaism

You will have noticed this term in the paragraph quoted above. “Anti-Judaism” among Christians has involved several elements over the centuries, and these elements show up in the Lutheran tradition down to Bonhoeffer himself.

Anti-Judaism as Violence

Here Martin Luther can be faulted as Dietrich Bonhoeffer cannot. But let’s take a careful look at Luther’s infamous screed against Jews.

Luther in the early days of the Reformation seems to have been hopeful that the Jews would massively convert to Christianity now that he and others had rescued the gospel from Roman Catholic distortions. As the decades passed, however, this mass conversion didn’t happen. Luther became bitter about the Jews’ obstinacy.

In 1543, Luther published “On the Jews and Their Lies.” In this tract, Luther launches a 60,000-word broadside on the Jews. He disputes at length their main arguments on their own behalf and against the Christians. He then details the pernicious effect of the Jews on contemporary European society, and especially their baleful hold on the economy.

Luther begins by attacking what he considered the Jews’ “false boasts,” mainly their unique lineage and the Biblical covenant of circumcision. Luther argues instead that all human beings are one race—and, for what it’s worth, lots of non-Jews are circumcised as well, with the Jews’ own prophets repeatedly warning them that what matters before God are “circumcised” (that is, dedicated) hearts.

In the second part, Luther argues with the Jews in detail about Old Testament passages (from Jacob, David, Haggai, and Daniel) pointing to Jesus as Messiah. The later liberal theological tradition in Germany (starting with Schleiermacher) would deprecate the Old Testament as nothing more than “Jewish backgrounds” to the actual Scripture of the New. But Martin Luther argues toe-to-toe with the rabbis on the basis of the Old Testament as, indeed, God’s inspired Word.

In the third part, Luther briefly mentions medieval superstitions concerning the Jews. But this is a few sentences out of over 60,000 words. And it’s not obvious that Luther credits these tales with veracity. If he really believed that synagogues were staging grounds for assassins, his advice to the German princes would have been much more, shall we say, direct.

What Luther does credit are reports from contemporary Jewish converts that Jews routinely, even liturgically, utter curses on Christians and, even worse, on Jesus and his mother each Sabbath, reducing Jesus to a sorcerer borne by a slut. Luther also credits the Talmud with allowing a Jew to lie to, or even kill, a Gentile. The Jews in their synagogues hate us, Luther believes, and that’s a major social problem—especially when they hold so much of our money.

The fourth, and final, part includes recommendations for actions concerning the Jews, including state repression. Not surprisingly, the Nazis quoted Luther most often from this section:

Burn down Jewish synagogues and schools and warn Christian people away from them.

Refuse to let Jews own houses among Christians, but provide instead mere shelters (as for gypsies, Luther says).

Take away Jewish religious writings and forbid rabbis from preaching, so as to impede the perpetuation of this dead and deadly religion.

Forbid even public speech about God, since Jews, Luther thinks, blaspheme in their unbelief—rejecting the most important teaching there is about God: that he was in Christ reconciling the world.

Offer no protection to Jews on highways: they should stay home and work, not go traveling as merchants and bankers, making money off poor, hard-working Christians.

And give young, strong Jews “flail, axe, spade, and spindle” to let them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow—essentially, as serfs.

Ironic was Luther’s chief recommendation: to prohibit usury. Lending money at interest was forbidden for Christians in the Middle Ages, since it seemed to defy Old Testament commands. There are complex reasons for this prohibition, including the fact that in an agrarian economy with slow growth, if any, interest on a debt could quickly become unpayable. It wasn’t until the early modern period that theologians realized that interest-bearing loans could, in fact, be mutually helpful and not exploitative in the emerging capitalist economy of Europe.

Their not being Christians, however, Jews had been allowed to play the crucial role of bankers. As such, many had grown rich, holding loans of everyone from farmers to monarchs (who often borrowed to pay for wars). Luther said that all this silver and gold held by people who hated Christianity, Christians, and Christ should be confiscated.

He did not, however, advocate that that wealth just be plundered and spread around to everyone else. Instead, Luther advised, it should be put in escrow and given in donations to Jews who truly converted to help them and their families make a new start.

Luther clearly held a grudge against these people who made money merely by manipulating money. Usury is mentioned frequently in this tract. One can’t help but note the implicit parallel to his hatred of the Roman Catholic Church for fleecing his fellow Saxons and sending all that wealth over the Alps to make Rome more magnificent while his neighbours struggled.

Indeed, this parallel is extensive. Luther sees medieval Judaism as dynamically similar to medieval Catholicism: an empty husk of outward lore and observance, devoid of God’s truth and inner light—and a true impediment to salvation. More than once in this writing Luther lists together his religious opponents: “Jews, Turks, papists, radicals [that is, eccentric Protestants] abound everywhere.”

Since I first studied the Reformation as a graduate student more than 40 years ago, I have heard of this tract. Only today, however, did I finally read it. And I noticed something striking about its reportedly violent prose.

It turns out to be relatively mild for a sixteenth-century polemic. Luther wrote much stronger, nastier stuff against the pope and the Roman church, as did Calvin, Knox, and other Protestant worthies. And they were similarly slandered in return by their Catholic counterparts.

More telling, however, is that Luther never says anything more graphic or pungent than what one finds in the Old Testament prophets themselves as they denounce Israel. Those prophets—whom Professor Luther knew well—speak of Israel as a whore, as a disgraceful son, as greedy and selfish and stupid and stubborn.

Jesus himself, furthermore, says even worse things about the Jewish religious authorities of his day than Luther does: “whitewashed tombs,” “offspring of vipers,” and “sons of Satan.” (Could one say anything worse?)

Those Biblical voices, moreover, lambaste the Jews for exactly what Luther does: betraying the covenant, wrapping themselves in undeserved sanctimony, committing injustice, getting rich off the vulnerable, and abandoning their God.

What, then, about Luther’s recommendations toward the Jews of his day? First, Luther tells his fellow Christians, “We must practice great mercy with prayer and godliness that we might rescue a few from the flame and violent heat. We are not permitted to take revenge.”

Second, he tells Christian preachers to advise parishioners to leave Jews alone: “not that they should curse them and inflict personal harm! . . . Let the government deal with them.”

These moderate remarks seem never to be acknowledged. Still, third, Luther does advocate the measures listed above. He advises abrogating Jewish religious rights, ownership of property, and safe conduct. He recommends taking from them their wealth and even their religious resources. Ghettoes, poverty, and servitude are not far off, and Luther deserves appropriate criticism for suggesting these heavy measures.

One last qualification, however. Luther lived in sixteenth-century Europe. The Italian Dominican Savonarola had been executed as a rabble rouser when Luther was a child. In Luther’s own day, King Henry VIII of England was imprisoning, torturing, and murdering people to get himself a wife to bear him a male heir. Anabaptist radicals had been killing people in Münster and were being killed in due course. Wars had broken out in the name of religion and many more would follow all over Europe.

Social order in these days hangs by a thread. Those in authority are usually both swift and harsh in dealing with any prospect of sedition. Luther’s recommendations shock us today, and they should. He does not transcend his time. But they are well within the norms of his culture in dealing with an identifiable threat to social peace and prosperity. We can bemoan Luther’s attack. But we should first understand it.

All historical revision and qualification notwithstanding, however, it remains that Dietrich Bonhoeffer himself had nothing to do with such views. Instead, Bonhoeffer stands out as an exception to a culture in which such views were returning into the mainstream of German thought.

Anti-Judaism as Curse

Bonhoeffer apparently did share, however, another traditional Lutheran view—indeed, a view shared by most Christians for at least the first 1500 years of the Church. The Jews, by calling for Jesus’ crucifixion and willingly taking on themselves the consequences, remained cursed by God:

"When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’

“All the people answered, ‘His blood is on us and on our children!’” (Matthew 27:24–25).

Jules Isaac, a prominent French historian, published The Teaching of Contempt (1962; Eng. 1964). This book summarized the historic Christian view that the Jews had committed the sin of “deicide”: literally “killing God,” but usually termed “Christ-killing.” They thus were doomed to suffer the Roman destruction of their state in AD 70, followed by wandering and persecution. Their ordeal would end only with their wholesale conversion to Christianity.

Isaac, a Jew prominent in advancing good relations with Christians, helped influence the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that repudiated this teaching for Catholics. In Bonhoeffer’s day of the 1930s, however, this view was common enough across the Christian denominational spectrum.

Bonhoeffer himself held to it in his student days. He clearly seems to have jettisoned it as a young professor, however, as he spoke out clearly against mistreatment of Jews as early as the 1933 initiatives of the Nazis—and continued his defense of the Jews, to the cost of his career and eventually of his life, for another decade.

Anti-Judaism as Evangelism

Dr. Victoria Barnett is among the leading scholarly voices in our day who have criticized Bonhoeffer as anti-Judaic. Now retired from a post at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she has accused Bonhoeffer of holding theological views at odds with his later service to Jews in offering them public support and secret assistance.

As it turns out, Bonhoeffer is being criticized chiefly for holding to the idea that Christians are obliged to bear witness to Jews of the Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth and to do all they can to help Jewish neighbours repent and believe the gospel.

This view has been problematic to liberal Christians since at least the time of Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923). Troeltsch influentially argued that each major religion was an expression of the generic human impulse to religion, an expression authentic to that particular culture. Confucianism and Daoism grow out of the Chinese civilization; Hinduism and Buddhism out of the Indian; Islam out of the Arabian.

Even as he believed Christianity was superior, just as he shared the common European view of his day that European culture was itself superior, Troeltsch nonetheless undercut the motive for evangelism. Let everyone worship God in the way appropriate to his or her society. Evangelism was unnecessary and, indeed, disrespectful.

This view became more popular particularly in reference to the Jews after the horrors of the Shoah, the Holocaust. Surely trying to convert Jews to a different religion—let alone to the religion that at least ostensibly framed the worldview of their mortal enemies—was to commit a fresh crime against these endangered people. (Nowadays in Canada some would surely refer to such initiative as an attempted “cultural genocide.”)

For this view, which Bonhoeffer held as have most Christians since—well, since Jesus, he has been accused of anti-Judaism. The charge has been maintained even by those who otherwise admire Bonhoeffer’s service to the Jews—such as those in charge of Yad Vashem.

What, however, is the Biblically authentic way to love our Jewish neighbours?

Pro-Israel?

Since the days of the writing of the New Testament, Christians have argued over the place and function of the Jews in this new chapter of God’s great redemption story. Having served as object lesson to the nations; having generated and passed on the Old Testament as Scripture to the Church; having played their role along with the Romans in the events of Passion Week; and having birthed the Apostles and the Messiah himself, what is left for the Jews in God’s plan?

The first point to make here is to distinguish between the Jewish people as a people, on the one hand, and the modern state of Israel, founded in 1948, on the other. The Jews are indeed a distinct ethnic group, marked out by the typical national lines of lineage, history, religion, customs, language, and more. The state of Israel is a particular country, founded by Jews and populated largely by Jews, but not run as a Jewish state. Israel is a secular society, and to be Jewish in modern Israeli terms is to belong to a particular ethnic group, not to practice a particular religion. And many Israeli Jews do not, in fact, practice Judaism.

Many Christians nowadays are deeply confused on this point. They refer to Bible verses regarding Israel as if they apply immediately to the modern state of Israel, when many clearly are referring to the worldwide ethnic group and sometimes to only those who follow the religion of Judaism. Evangelical Christians in particular feel obliged to show support for the state of Israel as if it were a divine command to do so, but it isn’t.

Indeed, Jews themselves are divided as to the religious significance of the state of Israel. as they have been since Zionism arose in the late nineteenth century. The prospect of a new Jewish homeland met with proposals to found a Jewish state in, depending on the scheme, Argentina, Kenya, Cyprus, Iraq, Australia, or Russia—even Madagascar. 

Many conservative Jews, moreover, consider the modern state of Israel to be a secular travesty of the Jewish nation, not at all the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy. Many others, especially toward the liberal end of Judaism, think that the hope of any actual homeland is an unhelpfully literalistic reading of scripture: Jews should flourish wherever they can.

There is therefore no Scriptural mandate for Christians to pray for Israel as a modern state the way we ought to pray for the Jews as a people. There certainly is no Biblical ground for Christians to support whatever happen to be the policies of whatever happens to be the current Israeli government—especially at the expense of our Christian brothers and sisters among the Palestinian people.

The second point to make we must make briefly, since whole books have been devoted to sorting out what Paul means in Romans 9­–11 or what the anonymous author implies in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Has the Church has simply replaced the Jews in God’s salvation order (known as “supercessionism”)? Will the world see a major influx of Jewish converts as a harbinger of the Second Coming? For now, then, just this:

There is no gift given to the world greater than God’s inexpressible gift of Jesus Messiah (II Corinthians 9:15). There is therefore no greater gift we can give to our Jewish neighbours than the gospel.

Two wrongs surely don’t make a right. Feeling badly, as we should, about how western nations generally abandoned or even shut out Jewish refugees in the 1930s, let alone how some of our nations murdered them, should not mean that we daren’t risk offending them with our witness to the Christ, their Christ.

Yes, we must learn appropriate sensitivity in any approach we make—just as any mission-minded Christian would learn how we Christians might appear to a Hindu or Sikh neighbour recently arrived from south Asia or an Islamic neighbour from Syria or Indonesia.

Yes, we must put first things first: love our neighbours as we love ourselves, doing good to them simply as we can, in God’s loving name, not merely as targets for proselytizing.

And, yes, we must get training in how best to understand contemporary Judaism—we must not make the ignorant mistake of thinking that nothing has happened in that religion since Jesus’ day!—and therefore how to speak intelligibly and cogently about both their religion and ours.

(Pop quiz: What is the main difference among Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Hasidic forms of Judaism? Not knowing that is like thinking United, Mennonite, Roman Catholic, and Pentecostal Christians are all the same.)

What we must not do, however, is withhold out of misplaced guilt the gift God has given us to give the world, including to God’s original chosen people. To do so would not be to honour, but to mistreat, our Jewish neighbours once again, and in the worst way.

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For more instruction on sharing your faith carefully and kindly, take ThinkBetter Media’s course: Apologetics 101.

Or read Dr. Stackhouse’s popular guide, Humble Apologetics.

Coming soon, a new book: Christian Nationalism: A Christian Guide to Loyalty, Idolatry, and Priority.

“Christian Nationalism: A Christian Guide is a primer on how to think about the relationship between our loyalty to one’s nation and our primary loyalty to Christ. Christian nationalism can become toxic when Christianity is used primarily to justify national or political self-interest.

By contrast, if one’s Christianity is used primarily to bring Christian ethical principles to bear in shaping and critiquing one’s proper national loyalties, then Christian nationalism is a good thing. Ethicist John Stackhouse offers wise and comprehensive reflections on these themes.”

—George M. Marsden, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame