The Jews of Wittenberg during the 16th Century and the Reformation: Why are They Absent from the Historical Narrative? (original) (raw)
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Extant historiography has created a historiographie ghetto, seldom considering Jewish sources as relevant to the larger narrative of European history. This has created two parallel, often disconnected areas of study, "European history" and "Jewish history." Archival materials show that Jews and Christians resided side by side and interacted daily in early modern Europe. Reformation Strasbourg and post-Reformation Poland, geographically and demographically diverse, offer new insights about the past by including sources about Jews. In Reformation Strasbourg, leaders of different Christian confessions jointly issued policies aimed at regulating daily interactions between Jews and Christians, despite simultaneously battling one another in the realm of faith and politics. In post-Reformation Poland, the physical presence of Jews recorded underscores their neighborly relations with Christians and further demonstrates the limits to the seemingly successful Counter-Reformation in Poland.
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By no means does sixteenth-century Jewish historiography present a homogeneous view of Luther or the early stages of the Lutheran Reformation. Before going into further detail, I would like to say a few words about the corpus of sources I intend to examine. These can be roughly divided into sources contemporary with the emergence of Luther and those dating to the latter part of the century; also, into sources of Germanic vs. non-Germanic origin, a distinction I hope to clarify in my concluding remarks. Although I build on the work of my worthy predecessors, my mentor the late Professor Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sasson 1 and the late Chava Frankel-Goldschmidt 2 , I intend to pursue new directions and to use additional Hebrew material that was not available to these scholars. As we would expect, the initial Jewish reaction to the Lutheran reformation was descriptive, an attempt to characterize the new face of Christianity. The very breakup of the monolithic Catholic framework gave Jews hope in a better future under the wings of the Church. Martin Luthers appearance and his unequivocal call to abandon traditional
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The topic of this paper is the complex and ambivalent relationship between the Reformed Churches and Judaism, moving from a kind of Philo-Semitism to Christian Zionism and support for the State of Israel on the one hand, to missionary movements among Jews to anti-Judaism, and the contribution to the horrors of the Holocaust on the other hand. In between the two extremes stands the respect for the Old Testament and the neglect of the Apocrypha and other early Jewish writings. The initial focus of this article will be on what Martin Luther and Jean Calvin wrote about Judaism at the beginning of the Reformation over 500 years ago. Secondly, the article will deal with the influence of mission activity toward Jews and the emergence of Liberal Judaism as both scholarship and theology in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Lastly, the article will address the question of how the Holocaust and subsequent Jewish-Christian dialogue have changed the course of this relatio...
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This article highlights the important initial tasks of excavating the pertinent contexts of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers and discerning what is at stake for them (i.e., "unearthing logic") in order to analyze their views of and teachings about Jews and Judaism. Pertinent contexts include the immediate contexts to which Luther and Calvin responded (e.g., Jewish "blasphemy" and/or Christian Hebraism), as well as attending to the significant theological frameworks in which they each operated. Equally important is activity of sifting through the discrepancies in the secondary literature's depictions of Luther and Calvin's place in the history of Christian-Jewish relations. The article highlights biblical interpretation-particularly the defense of Scripture's perspicuity-as the distinctive locus of the reformers' angst concerning Jews and Judaism. In conclusion, the author offers some lessons from church history for discerning what Christian faithfulness might look like in response to this troubling history.
In recent decades, research has pointed to an early modern period, in which great transformation took place. By focusing on local studies, scholars have recognized that Jews and Christians residing in Europe interacted with one another, sharing daily experiences as well as important cultural developments. The Jews living in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries experienced many changes, first and foremost among them demographic migrations. Developments such as the Renaissance, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Scientific Revolution, and the invention of moveable type altered life for Jews and Christians of Europe alike. Further research in this field should include social history, as well as the transregional connections between Jews living in different regions.