Imagine using 'Deuteronomy' as a social guide to the moral life! YIKES! And we saw where that led...
"Scholars have drawn parallels between Luther's recommendations to the Christian authorities and Mosaic recommendations for dealing with pagans and apostates in Deuteronomy 13, and it is believed that the principles outlined in Deuteronomy 13 informed Martin Luther's approach to the "problem" of Jewry (see Deuteronomy 13: vs. 5,9,10; note especially Vs. 15 & 16).
Luther's writings were directly responsible for violently murderous uprisings against the German Jews during his life and after his death in the sixteenth century. His Anti-Semitic works were widely distributed and read. They were used in pulpit sermons inciting people to rise up against Jews, kill and expel them. So influential and inciting were Luther's Anti-Semitic works that Josel Rosheim, a spokesman of the Jewish community in Saxony, petitioned the city of Strasbourg to withdraw Luther's Anti-Semitic works from distribution. The authorities refused till a Lutheran pastor in Hochfelden referred to Luther's writing in a sermon urging his parishioners to rise up murder and expel Jews."
goddiscussion.com
(Note: This is the concluding part of a 3-Part series. See Part 2: Martin Luther's Anti-Semitic writings)
"Historians now consider that Martin Luther's works contributed significantly to fueling anti-Semitic feelings in German culture, and remained a very influential work among anti-Semitic groups in Germany till as late as the period of the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. Luther's works, On the Jews and their Lies, and On the Holy name and the Genealogy of Christ were widely referenced by anti-Semitic writers of the Third Reich, and Heinrich Himmler, the notorious Nazi SS chief, is said to have particularly admired the book On the Jews and their Lies.
Luther's books were widely reviewed by German Nazi popular press and quoted by Nazi anti-Semitic propagandists. On the Jews and their lies was described by the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer as the most radically anti-Semitic book ever written.
On the grounds of Luther's denunciation of Jewry, seven Protestant regional Church confederations in Germany issued a statement approving the policy of requiring Jews to wear the yellow badge in public, and referred to the fact that Luther, the leader of the German Reformation, had recommended the expulsion of Jews from Germany.
The notorious protestant leader Bishop Martin Sasse who had published a compendium of Luther's writing, justified the Nazi regime's burning of Jewish homes and synagogues on Kristallnacht (9 November, 1938) and noted as auspicious the fact that the day on which he was writing in support of government action against German Jews coincided with the birth of Martin Luther ( 10 November) whom he described as the "greatest anti-Semite of his time, and warner of Germans against the Jews."
" Luther set the precedent in German cultural history for extreme anti-Semitic rhetoric and it could not be coincidence that the Nazis enjoyed greater support in Protestant regions of Germany than in Catholic ones. Protestant support for Nazism can only be explained as arising from the justification of Nazi antisemitism by reference to Luther's works. And even if one argues that Nazi antisemitism was not historically continuous with Luther's antisemitism the fact still remains that it lent itself conveniently to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and facilitated the mobilization of Protestant support for the Nazi regime. The Nazis could legitimize their anti-Semitic ideology in the eyes of Protestants by affecting a reverence for Luther's works. Luther's On the Jews and their Lies, for instance, was displayed reverently in a glass case at Nazi Nuremberg rallies and Protestant leaders could be readily co-opted into the Nazi regime's anti-Semitic propaganda machine by reference to the irrefutable fact that the leader of the German Protestant Reformation himself had been rabidly anti-Semitic."
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