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
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
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw