Peter Marshall
Caught in the Crossfire
The Jews and the Reformation
By Kenneth Austin
Yale University Press 295pp £30 order from our bookshop
It is both a truism and a provocation to observe that modern anti-Semitism has a long history. It seems self-evident that the irrational and murderous hatred that is 20th-century anti-Semitism has deep roots in a millennium and more of hostility to ‘Christ killers’. Some scholars, however, have wanted to insist that the religiously motivated anti-Judaism of the medieval and early modern eras was fundamentally different from the racialised, pseudo-scientific anti-Semitism dreamt up in the 19th century. Martin Luther, icon of the Protestant Reformation, exemplifies the problem. The Nazis enthusiastically reprinted Luther’s anti-Jewish writings, and the party’s most odious anti-Semitic propagandist, Julius Streicher, notoriously remarked that Luther deserved a place (of honour) alongside him in the dock at Nuremberg. But perhaps Luther’s attitudes were no more than the conventional prejudices of his day, there being no justification for labelling (or libelling) him as the ‘father of the Holocaust’.
Kenneth Austin, in this deft and judicious treatment of a difficult subject, is no apologist for Luther’s outbursts about the Jews, which were, even in an intolerant age, unusually violent and extreme. But he does think ‘we must detach Reformation-era attitudes towards the Jews from the ends to which they
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete