When it became clear to Luther that the Jews were not convinced, he turned on these ‘poisonous envenomed worms’ in his viciously anti-Semitic work, ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’, written in 1543.
‘We are at fault in not slaying them,’ he wrote. ‘[They are] full of the devil’s faeces… which they wallow in like swine.’
Luther urged Christians to set fire to synagogues and Jewish schools, destroy their houses, confiscate their holy books, forbid rabbis to teach, abolish safe conduct for Jews on the highways since they had no business to be in the countryside, deprive them of all their gold and silver and prohibit usury or expel them from the country.
All this was ‘to be done in honour of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians’.
Four hundred years later the Nazi party displayed Luther’s pamphlet ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ during Nuremberg rallies. Hitler called Luther a great warrior, true statesman, and reformer. Himmler was also an admirer.
Selina O’Grady
Taken from: Mano Chil
On a rocky promontory above the southwestern shore of Lake Sevan, at an elevation of…
Among the most arresting objects to survive from the Early Iron Age Near East are…
How a promise made to genocide survivors was traded away for peace with Ankara —…
A Fragment That Traveled Across Continents The gilt-silver medallion shown above — two richly dressed…
Few episodes in ancient Armenian history capture the imagination quite like the tradition that Hannibal…
Five angles of one small bronze figure — and what emerges is not an abstract…