The year 2017 will mark a milestone in German and in Protestant Christian history. It will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation launched by a renegade Roman Catholic monk, theologian and academic named Martin Luther (1483-1546).

There can be no doubt that Luther’s letter to his Roman Catholic superiors ,written on October 31, 1517,began a religious schism and conflict that would forever change the face and shape of Christianity. In it he denounced the sale of so-called indulgences and included 95 theses that were to be the basis for a discussion on the topic,

What is less well known is the positive reaction of Germany’s Jewish community of the time to this event and to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. For at least a decade, beginning in 1513, Luther identified with the persecuted Jewish communities of Germany and declared that both he and the Jews suffered from Catholic bigotry. He used the sad plight of the Jewish community as a means to further attack the Church.

Not only did Luther not hold the Jews responsible for the Crucifixion, but he wrote an essay in 1523 entitled “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew” in which he called on his followers to show only Christian love for the Jewish people and to abolish the social and economic restrictions against them.

There was an ulterior motive to Luther’s actions. His aim was to use such calls to convince German Jewry to convert to his anti-Catholic Christian movement, thus fulfilling a goal that had been denied to the Church for over a thousand years.

But the Jewish “no” to his conversionary mission was as loud as it had been in denying the Roman Catholic call for conversion. By the 1530s, Luther began to write and preach only criticisms of Jews and Judaism culminating in a vicious essay entitled “Concerning the Jews and Their Lies” (1543). In it he suggested, among other actions, that the princely authorities should “set fire to their synagogues or schools.” Jewish houses should be “razed and destroyed,” and Jewish “prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, [should] be taken from them.” In addition, “their rabbis [should ] be forbidden to teach on pain of life and limb.” Shortly before his death in 1546, an ill and dying Luther began to repeat the worst anti-Jewish charges of medieval Roman Catholicism. “We are at fault for not slaying them,” he fumed shortly before his death.

Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish sermons and writings joined a long list of those by German philosophers, theologians and professional politicians who shaped centuries of anti-semitic attitudes in Germany and beyond.

In 1933, a part of the Lutheran Church in Germany sought to create a Protestant Christianity entirely free of Jewish influence, a movement known as the German Christians, that was violently anti-Semitic and devoted to National Socialism and its racial and political goals and to Martin Luther’s anti-Judaism.

As one member of the German Christian movement put it during a celebration of Luther Day, an annual event that took place throughout Germany:

“And if Martin Luther had met the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler… he would peer deeply into his eyes and clasp both his hands and say: ‘Thank you, German man. You are of my blood, kind of my kind. We both belong together.”

When the gates of Auschwitz and other death camps were opened, both Protestants and Roman Catholics asked the unaskable and thought the unthinkable: “Could our churches and their teachings have contributed to the destruction of 6 million Jewish lives?”

It took several decades for the Roman Catholic Church to ponder that awful question and to issue an historic statement in 1965 on its relationship to Judaism and the Jewish people and to reject centuries of anti-Jewish teaching.

Nearly three decades later, in 1994, one of the most important Protestant denominations in the United States, the 5 million-strong Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, joined their Catholic brothers and sisters in declaring to the Jewish community that:

“In the long history of Christianity, there exists no more tragic development than the treatment accorded the Jewish people on the part of Christian believers … Lutherans belonging to … the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America feel a special burden in this regard because of certain elements in the legacy of the reformer Martin Luther and the catastrophes, including the Holocaust of the twentieth century, suffered by Jews in places where the Lutheran churches were strongly represented.

In the spirit of truth-telling, we who bear his name and heritage must with pain acknowledge also Luther’s anti-Judaic diatribes and the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews … we reject this violent invective, and yet more do we express our deep and abiding sorrow over its tragic effects on subsequent generations ….

… we express our urgent desire to live out our faith in Jesus Christ with love and respect for the Jewish people … Finally, we pray for the continued blessing of the Blessed One upon the increasing cooperation and understanding between Lutheran Christians and Jews.”

As we enter the commemoration of 500 years of Protestant Christianity, one can only say amen and amen.

Abraham J. Peck is research professor of history at the University of Southern Maine. He is the co-author (with Gottfried Wagner) of “Unwanted Legacies: Sharing the Burden of Post-Genocide Generations” (2014).

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