As a teenager, I had a great admiration for Martin Luther, and I was keen to find out what the founder of Protestant Christianity had to say about Jews. A mail-order catalogue of books on the Jewish question at the Citizen's Council office listed a translation of a book by Martin Luther with the abrasive title The Jews and Their Lies.¹ The great Martin Luther was a biblical scholar who read Hebrew. He had thoroughly researched the books of the Talmud in their original language, and he had reacted to them with revulsion. Going on to read compilations of Luther's sermons and writings, I was astonished at their passionate anti-Jewish tone.

They have been taught so much deadly hatred against the Gentiles by their parents and Rabbis since their earliest youth and continue to feed their hate during all the years of their lives, and this hatred has saturated their very blood and flesh, fills the very marrow of their bones and has become inseparable from their whole being. (Weimar 53, pgs. 482-483)

Their Talmud and their Rabbis teach them that a murder shall not be regarded as a sin whenever a Jew kills a Gentile, but only if a Jew murders a brother in Israel. Neither is it a sin to break an oath sworn to a Gentile. . .The Jews of our days still keep to these doctrines and follow the example of their fathers, taking every opportunity to practice their deliberately false interpretation of the Lord's Word, their avariciousness, their usury, their thefts, their murders, and teaching their children to do likewise. (W. 53, 489-490-91)

Maybe mild-hearted and gentle Christians will believe I am too rigorous and drastic against the poor, afflicted Jews, believing that I ridicule them and treat them with such sarcasm. By my word, I am far too weak to be able to ridicule such a Satanic breed. (W. 32, pg. 286)

You should know that the Jews blaspheme and violate the name of our Savior day for day…they are our public enemies and incessantly blaspheme our Lord Jesus Christ, they call our Blessed Virgin Mary a harlot and her Holy Son a bastard and to us they give the epithet of Changelings and abortions. If they could kill us all they would gladly do so, in fact, many murder Christians. . . (Luther's last sermon, a few days before his death in February 1546) (Erlanger 62, pg. 189)

There were many tribes, nationalities and conflicting religious sects that migrated to the great cities of the Roman Empire. Yet, of all these groups, only the Jewish tribe elicited such relentless hostility throughout the centuries. Only the Jewish tribe never assimilated into the Roman population. Could their own Talmudic practices and their disdain for non-Jews have had something to do with the enmity they generated? It seemed logical to me that these things contributed to anti-Jewish sentiments in the West.