Jews and Protestants Jews and Protestants From the Reformation to the Present Edited by Irene Aue-Ben-David, Aya Elyada, Moshe Sluhovsky and Christian Wiese Supported by the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 1798/12) ISBN 978-3-11-066108-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066471-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-066486-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955542 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: ulimi / DigitalVision Vectors / gettyimages.de Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements It is our great pleasure to thankall the institutions that contributed to the Refor- mationConference at the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem in February 2017,includ- ing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophyatthe Goethe University in Frankfurt,the Evangelical Church in Germany, the Center for the StudyofChristianityatthe Hebrew Uni- versity, the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg, the Stephen Roth Institute for the StudyofContemporary Antisemitism and Racism in Tel Aviv University,and the Minerva Institute for German History,Tel Aviv University. We are grateful to SaraTropperfor the professional copy-editing,toJoel Swanson for preparingthe index and to Alice Merozfrom De Gruyter Verlag for her help and cooperation in bringingthe volume to publication. Aspecial thanks is extended to Daat Hamakom – I-Core In The StudyofModern Jewish Culture at the Hebrew UniversityofJerusalem for generouslysupportingthe pub- licationofthe book.Weare also grateful to the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art funded research hub “Religious Positioning:Modalities and Constellations in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Contexts” at the Goethe University Frankfurtand the Justus-LiebigUniversity Gießen for their support. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664713-001 TableofContents Moshe Sluhovskyand Aya Elyada Introduction 1 Dean Phillip Bell The Impact of the Reformation on Early Modern German Jewry Politics, Community,and Religion 13 MarkétaKabůrková Edom versusEdom Echoes of the Lutheran Reformation in Early Modern Jewish Writings 31 Alexander van der Haven Eschatologyand Conversion in the Sperling Letters 49 Lars Fischer The Legacy of Anti-Judaism in Bach’sSacred Cantatas 71 Yaakov Ariel ANew Model of Christian Interaction with the Jews Pietist and Evangelical Missions to the Jews 89 Aya Elyada The Vernacular Bible between Jews and Protestants Translation and PolemicsinEarly Modern Germany 103 Ofri Ilany Christian Images of the Jewish State The Hebrew Republic as aPolitical Modelinthe German Protestant Enlightenment 119 Johannes Gleixner Standard-bearers of Hussitism or Agents of Germanization? Czech Jews and Protestants Competingand Cooperating for the Religion of the Future,1899–1918 137 VIII TableofContents Christian Wiese Luther’sShadow Jewish and Protestant Interpretations of the Reformer’sWritings on the Jews, 1917 –1933 161 Dirk Schuster Exclusive Space as aCriterion for Salvation in German Protestantism during the Third Reich 189 Kyle Jantzen Nazi Racism, American Anti-Semitism, and Christian Duty U.S. Mainline Protestant Responses to the Jewish Refugee Crisis of 1938 203 Ursula Rudnick Lutheran Churches and Luther’sAnti-Semitism Repression, Rejection, and Repudiation 229 Johannes Becke German Guilt and HebrewRedemption Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste and the Legacy of Left-Wing Protestant Philozionism 241 List of Contributors 257 Index 261 Moshe Sluhovskyand AyaElyada Introduction The year 2017 marked the five-hundredth anniversary of the eruption of the Prot- estant Reformation. Among the thousands of events commemoratingthe occa- sion was aconference that took place in Jerusalem, dedicated to 500 years of in- teractions between Protestants and Jews. The conference was organized by the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, together with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophyatthe Goethe Univer- sity in Frankfurt as well as the Frankfurt research hub “Religious Positioning: Modalities and Constellations in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Contexts,” the Evangelical Church in Germany,the Center for the StudyofChristianity at the He- brew University, the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg,the Stephen Roth Institute for the StudyofContemporary Antisemitism and Racism, TelAvivUniversity,and the Minerva Institute for German History,Tel Aviv Uni- versity. Some of the papers thatwerefirst presented at the conference comprise the coreofthis volume. Since 1996,discussions of Protestant-Jewish relations,the impact of the Reforma- tion on the history of Germany, Jews, and German-Jews, and, in fact,European history tout court,havebeen shaped by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’sbest-selling and controversial Hitler’sWilling Executioners:OrdinaryGermansand the Holo- caust.¹ While many,ifnot most,historians reject the book’smain thesis, that, in its own way, revivedthe Sonderweg explanation of German history,inpublic opinion and the media Goldhagen’sbook reaffirmed the alleged persistence, in German history,ofaneliminationist Germantype of antisemitism. Martin Luther stands at the beginning of this uniquelyGerman and German-Protestant trajec- tory,astraight historical path that led from Luther’scall to destroy the material presenceofJews in the HolyRoman Empire to Hitler’sactual destruction of the Jews in modern Germany.Intracking the spread of modern antisemitism in nine- teenth- and twentieth-centuryGermany, Goldhagen reminds his readers of the re- luctanceofsome segments of the Catholic Church under Nazism to adopt racist theories while positioning Protestant churches, the Protestant media, and espe- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’sWillingExecutioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Random House, 1996). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664713-002 2 Moshe Sluhovsky and Aya Elyada ciallythe Protestant Sonntagsblätter,the weeklySundaynewspapers,asactive agents in shaping antisemitic public opinion.² There is no denying Luther’sown antisemitism, nor the immense influence of his antisemitic writingsonProtestant theologyand theologians in laterperi- ods. Lutheran theologyconcerning Jews and Judaism was, in its turn, molded by the Pauline theologyofsupersession, and by Luther’sown trajectory from hop- ing to bring about amass conversion of the Jews following his purported purifi- cation of Christianity of foreign pagan elements, to the vicious and even extermi- natory theologyofhis later years. It is equallyself-evident that Luther’spersonal struggle with the Jewish refusal to accept his purified theologyhad an inestim- able impact on latergenerations of Lutherantheologians.This was true through- out the past half amillennium and even more so since 1945. In fact,asThomas Kaufmann rightlyobserves, “[Luther’s] attitude to the Jews has become asortof pivotal issue in understanding his character and theology.”³ Just as Luther’sown virulent antisemitismshould not be whitewashed,one ought never to dismiss or forgive the brutal, racist,and in manycases elimina- tionist antisemitism of large segments of the Protestant hierarchyinthe modern period. Nonetheless, the articles in this volume positthat there was no direct line leading from Luther to Hitler.And while some papers in the collection address Luther’santisemitism as well as the Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen,we have sought to broaden the scope of the investigation. Protestant-Jewish theolog- ical encounters shaped not onlyantisemitism but also the JewishReform move- ment and Protestant philosemitic post-Holocaust theology; interactions between Jews and Protestants took place not onlyinthe German-speaking sphere but also in the wider Protestant universe – in Poland,Bohemia,the Low Countries, Eng- land, and the United States;theologywas crucial for the articulation of attitudes towardJews, but music and philosophywereadditional spheres of creativity that enabled the process of thinkingthrough the relations between Judaism and Prot- estantism. Generallyspeaking,Luther and Lutheranism spelled trouble for the Jews, but there weretimes that they constituted an attractive model of ‘purified’ Christianitythat could potentiallylead to arapprochement between the faith communities.For afew generations of secularized Jews in Germany, conversion to Protestantism was ameans of acculturation into Deutschtum,Protestantism’s essence as abelief system brushed aside. Thus, rather than asingle history of Protestant-Jewishrelations and asingle history of the theological mis/under- Ibid., 106–10;284–5, amongother places. Thomas Kaufmann, Luther’sJews:AJourney intoAnti-Semitism (2014; Oxford: OxfordUniver- sity Press, 2017), 5. Introduction 3 standingsbetween the tworeligions, it is, in fact,multiple historiesand engage- ments that have helped to fashion boththe religions and their peoples over the past 500 years. The collection aims to disentangle some of the intricate percep- tions, interpretations, and emotions that have characterized contacts between Protestantism and Judaism, and between Jews and Protestants.Asthe presence of Dr.Martin Hauger,the Referent fürGlaube und Dialog of the Evangelical Church in Germany, at the conference in Jerusalem, and some