Judaism discovered

Martin Luther

Meanwhile, the often intemperate Martin Luther had, in his anti-papist rage, impulsively backed Reuchlin because he believed that Recuhlin was opposed by the Pope. For this reason, the 'Catholic' Kabblalists, desirous of fashioning a rabbinic Trojan horse within Christianity, for a time threw their support behind the nascent Lutheran movement.⁷⁵⁸ But Luther was not a Kabbalist himself and it appears that once he determined that his movement

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was being used by rabbis and their agents (as per the disastrous Reuchlin affair, one of Luther's most egregious blunders), his attachment to the notion that Lutheranism would convert Judaics to Christ where Catholicism had failed to do so (a thesis contradicted, as we noted earlier, by the evangelization of Judaics by Vincent Ferrer decades before Luther's birth), he returned to a reaffirmation of the medieval Catholic doctrines on Judaism, culminating toward the end of his life in his 1543 treatise, Von den Jiiden vndjren Lugen ("Of the Jews and their Lies"), which, with the exception of its vituperation against the papacy, reads as though it had been issued by the Fourth Lateran Council. Some Catholics will surely argue that due to his support for Reuchlin, Luther was actually part of the occult conspiracy behind Reuchlin. The problem with that claim is two-fold: first, all the evidence points to Luther as the raging bull in the Vatican's china shop. Because he believed Reuchlin was being persecuted by Rome, this led to imprudent, knee-jerk support for Reuchlin; the same Reuchlin who would go on to dedicate his Kabbalah book (De Arte Cabbalistica^75d) to Luther's nemesis, Leo X. Whether in the case of Mirandola or Reuchlin, at this stage in his career, the comparatively youthful Luther was in over his head. "The early Luther had been largely ignorant of contemporary Judaism, but by the time of his later writings Luther had met with and debated leaders of the Jewish community..." ⁷⁶⁰

Luther's adoption of a rose and a cross decades before the "Rosy/Cross" assumed the symbolic burden of representing the female and male genitalia in the heavily allegorized sex magic system of Rosicrucianism, does not signify, in the absence of corroborating evidence, that Luther understood these as representing anything other than the meaning he assigned to them: the Cross of Jesus and the white rose of Christian peace and joy. Moreover, in lands where Lutheranism predominated, Luther's doctrine, as expounded in Von den Jilden vndjren Liigen, acted, for a certain, albeit limited period of time, as a bulwark against Judaism, just as Catholicism managed to transmit intact to successive generations — rather anomalously, in light of the occult sympathies and double-dealing of some of its popes, prelates and intelligentsia — the medieval teaching on Judaism.

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Luther's program as outlined in Von den Jiiden vndjren Lugen:

"(1) Jewish synagogues should be set afire, since Moses (Deut. 13: 13fT.) wrote that a city which practices idolatry should be destroyed by fire. (2) Houses of the Jews should be razed, since the Jews practice idolatry in them just as in their schools. (3) Their 'prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught,' should be confiscated. (4) 'On pain of loss of life and limb' their rabbis should be forbidden to teach any longer; they have forfeited their office, due to their false doctrine. (5) Safe conduct should be denied them, 'for they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let them stay at home.' (6) Their usury should be prohibited, all cash and treasure of silver and gold taken from them and 'put aside for safe keeping,' since they have gained their riches through usury. (7) They should be given tools to become craftsmen and earn their pay in the sweat of their brow."⁷⁶¹

For expounding this teaching (which we most certainly do not endorse for reasons we have already expressed concerning gospel love for one's enemies and the blowback that comes from persecuting Talmudists — or anyone, for that matter), Luther has been the target of perennial cursing, the most recent ritual malediction coming from Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz: "It is shocking that Luther's ignoble name is still honored rather than forever cursed by mainstream Protestant churches." ⁷⁶² Invidious analogies between Hitler and Luther are still made in spite of the fact that Luther taught from and honored the Old Testament books that Hitler detested. Luther also gladly accepted converts from Judaism to Christianity without regard to any of the racial criteria and taboos observed by the Nazis. Luther's rejection of the followers of Judaism was predicated on their allegiance to the ancient Antichrist ideology of the Pharisees, not their ethnicity; he also scorned German nationalism and jingoism.

Through the centuries, rank and file Catholics were also wary of Judaism and its adherents, and associated them with plutocrats and sybaritic churchmen and rulers. The classic medieval allegory, Piers the Ploughman by William Langland (c.1330 - c.1387), himself a Catholic cleric,

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gives voice to the grievances of the Catholic laity against lecherous cardinals who pursue the wives and daughters of the people, and against simony. There is another grievance to which Langland gave voice: "It was a bad day for the country when cardinals first came here. Wherever they stay for long, the place stinks of lechery. For my part, I would to God no cardinal ever came among the common folk. Why can't their holinesses stay quietly at Avignon with their friends the Jews...?" ⁷⁶³

Secondly, if some Catholics insist on consigning Luther to the ranks of the Cryptocracy on the basis of his early sympathy for Reuchlin, are they also willing to do the same to St. John Fisher, the Catholic bishop of Rochester, England under Henry VIII? "Fisher's openness to new intellectual currents went beyond the study of Greek...Early in 1515 he wrote to Erasmus about Reuchlin in terms of the highest praise...he soon established direct contact with Reuchlin, sending him a brief note of support against the Dominicans some time in 1515. By 1516 he was able to tell Erasmus of what was already a flourishing correspondence. Fisher's admiration for Reuchlin survived even the papal condemnation of some of his ideas in 1520." ⁷⁶⁴

Through Erasmus, Reuchlin personally sent Bishop John Fisher a presentation copy of De Arte Cabbalistica, which Fisher gratefully received in June, 1517. ⁷⁶⁵ Fisher was equally beguiled by Pico della Mirandola: "In England, John Fisher is the earliest figure we can associate with the fashion for the Cabala. In a letter to Erasmus he made the revealing comment, 'his (Reuchlin's) scholarship delights me so hugely that in my reckoning no man alive comes closer to Pico' ("mihi valde placet hominis (Reuchlin) eruditio, ut, qui vicinius ad Joannem Picum accesserit, alium extare neminem credam"). Pico, it seems, was the standard against whom even a Reuchlin was to be measured. Fisher was certainly acquainted with Pico's De Dignitate Hominis, which spoke with considerable enthusiasm of the Cabbala..." ⁷⁶⁶

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Fisher relied upon rabbinic exegetes and the "Catholic" Kabbalah of Petrus Galatinus' 1518 De Arcanis Catholicae Fidei in his own Sacri Sacerdotii Defensio. "...the notion of the Cabala as a form of traditional wisdom makes regular...appearances in his (Fisher's) theological writings."⁷⁶⁷ Renaissance humanism was immersed in Kabbalistic philosophy partly out of naive faith in the claptrap that claimed that in Reuchlin's De Verbo Mirifico could be found the holy source for the Kabbalistic etymology of the sacred name of Jesus.⁷⁶⁸ So extensive was this subversive Kabbalah network that as a youth, Fisher had the misfortune to be schooled by a professor, Robert Wakefield, who "spoke highly of Pico and of the Cabbala." It should be noted that in spite of his deplorable judgment concerning these dreadful texts, in the end God gave John Fisher the grace of sufficient discernment and courage to support, at the risk of his own life, the sanctity of Christian marriage against King Henry's monarchial absolutism; a cause for which he was martyred at a time when almost all his brother bishops in England were accommodating the tyrant.

In various times leading rabbis and Zionists have singled out either Catholic priests, Islam's Muhammad or Martin Luther as "the worst enemy Judaism ever had." The estimation of Muhammad reflects the hysterical characteristics of the genre in which professional antisemite-hunters operate. Hyperbole aside, Luther's legacy consists in the literature he produced about Judaism. Both Von den Juden vnd jren Lugen and his treatise against the Kabbalah, Vom Schem Hamphoras ("Of the Unknowable Name")⁷⁶⁹ served as obstacles to rabbinic infiltration. Historically, Lutheran nations did not generally adopt the harsh measures he recommended. They were, however, alerted and educated by his insights into Judaism as it actually is.

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Consider for example the testimony of Lutherans against the petition to Landgrave Philip of Hesse on behalf of Judaics who wished to conduct business in the Landgravate. "The propositions called for the Jews to practice peddling and mercantile trade in those communities not yet provided with guilds. A political control over contracts was outlined, and Jews were to be required to attend periodic sermons and avoid religious disputations. Taken as a whole the petition described a charter for Jewish residence which was moderately tolerant in the context of the time."⁷⁷⁰

What was the response of Lutherans to the petition? "...he (Philip) passed the petitions to a commission of preachers sitting at Kassel which included the Strasbourg theologian Martin Bucer...Bucer and the other members of the commission did not agree with the petition, and in fact they went on to question the basic premises of Jewish residency in any Christian community. They reached back to Roman civil law and (Catholic) canon law to rediscover the limits of tolerating Jews. Christian governments were obliged by God to keep the best possible polity since the well-being of all residents would be on their conscience. This well-being entailed maintaining the one true religion...some princes and bishops had allowed Jews to live among Christians so long as they built no new synagogues and restricted themselves to the law of Moses, a position which implied that the rabbinical tradition was an illegitimate tangent from Biblical orthodoxy." ⁷⁷¹

This distinction between the law of Moses and the rabbinic traditions reveals a high degree of discernment not found among most churchmen even in our supposedly "advanced" twenty-first century. These Lutheran theologians were affirming the practice of the early church of distinguishing between those who rejected Christianity due to a misreading of the Pentateuch (e.g. the Karaites), and the agents of diabolic forces who opposed Christianity based on the Talmudic "traditions of men" (Mark 7: 7-9). The Lutheran polity held that, "Those who tarry among the Christians must be made to swear an oath not to insult Christ and to keep only to the religion of Moses, eschewing Godless Talmudic doggerel."⁷⁷²

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In summary, Bucer and his fellow Lutherans stated that restrictive regulations on the practices of followers of the Talmud was merely a palliative. Their recommendation was to keep them out of a Christian community: "The commission was unable to concede that new regulations would be as good a solution to the Jewish problem as expulsion. Regulation served no purpose when it could so easily be perverted or circumvented by bribes. In the last analysis Jewish residency benefited no one and harmed everyone...In passing to specific objections, Bucer argued that Jews could not be allowed to practice any craft which relied on a shared trust (freien glaubent) and the practice of the money trades by Jews placed in their hands a power over others precisely because they refused to accept a community of love with Christian neighbors. Even if Jews were a noble race, Philip could not mean this to mean that they should be treated as lords..." ⁷⁷³

Concerning Luther's Von den Jiiden vndjren Lilgen, the historian Jacob Rader Marcus states, "There are no more bitterly anti-Jewish statements in all Christian literature..." Marcus continues: "Josel of Rosheim, the Jewish advocate (shetadlan), protested vigorously against this bitter attack of Luther which, it seems, confirmed the exclusion of the Jews from Electoral Saxony and brought about a deterioration of their position in Hesse...It was the duty of the shetadlan to intercede with the authorities to remove disabling laws or to avert impending ills...Josel of Rosheim...worked for the Jews throughout the Germanic lands, using his influence with the Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V to protect Jewry." ⁷⁷⁴

According to Marcus, Josel also stated: "In the years 1536-1537 the Elector John Frederick of Saxony was about to outlaw us and not allow the Jewish people even to set foot in his country. This was due to the priest whose name was Martin Luther —may his body and soul be bound up in hell! —who wrote and issued many heretical books in which he said that whoever would help the Jews was doomed to perdition...Through his many tales Luther stirred up so much trouble between the rulers and their peoples that the Jews could hardly maintain themselves." Marcus notes that "Josel in politics was pro-Catholic and looked upon Luther as a heretic."

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The poisonous effects of the hermetic, Neoplatonic lobby inside the Roman Catholic Church would bear bitter fruit for centuries, even unto our own day, since for the modern popes, the Catholic-humanist Kabbalists are exemplars of the "evolving" Christian "synthesis." Throughout the Renaissance no Catholic theologian of which we are aware issued any sustained critique of Judaism comparable in scope or power to Luther's Von den Jilden vnd jren Lilgen, a book which encouraged a candid Christian scrutiny of Judaism on the part of generations of learned Lutheran Hebraists, most notably the University of Heidelberg linguist, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, who issued his nonpareil two-volume scholarly study of Judaism on the eve of the Enlightenment. ⁷⁷⁵

"In terms of its effect upon the status of the Jews, both in its time and in the emancipation debate, the most important work on Judaism was Johann Andreas Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judenthum...Eisenmenger claimed that the Talmud taught the Jew that he could cheat Christians, that he could freely break solemn promises to Christians and that oaths before Christian magistrates were not binding...Eisenmenger...became the authority for later writers...At the end of the eighteenth century, the foremost Old Testament scholar, Johann David Michaelis of Gbttingen, could assert that 'The oath of a Jew is one of the trickiest things in the world. It is not one of Eisenmenger's unjust charges that one can seriously doubt whether that which we consider to be an oath is so regarded by the Jews.'...Well into the 1830s Eisenmenger remained the basis for works opposing equal rights for the Jews. In 1833, Christian Friedrich Koch, associate judge of the superior court of appeals and director of the city and county court of Kulm, wrote a history of the Jews in Prussia...Citing Eisenmenger, Koch claimed that the Talmud permitted Jews to give false testimony and to deceive non-Jews...Another typical follower of

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Eisenmenger was Anton Theodor Hartmann, professor of Old Testament studies and Protestant theology at Rostock..." ⁷⁷⁶

Immanuel Kant Out of the milieu formed by Luther, Eisenmenger and Michaelis came Immanuel Kant who, while not orthodox in his Christian convictions, nevertheless possessed penetrating philosophical insight into another error that is current in the twenty-first century, the notion that Christianity springs from Judaism. "A second major Protestant position regarding the Jews emerged in the Enlightenment. It is widely supposed that the tolerant Enlightenment developed a much more favorable picture of the Jews. However...the Enlightenment produced new attacks on the Jews...the central figure of the German Enlightenment, Kant, left an even more anti-Jewish heritage to post-Enlightenment Protestantism. In Germany, the attitude of enlightened Protestants...rarely took the atheistic, skeptical or anticlerical turns of the French movement. The German Protestant thinkers, rather than wishing to 'crush the infamy' tried to reconcile Christianity with essential, pure...religion. And it was in this context that thinkers like...Kant discussed Judaism...On the whole, he (Kant) tended to regard the Jews as a 'nation of swindlers.'..Kant...denied that there was any conceptual unity between Judaism and Christianity such that the latter might be regarded as a modification or development of the former. In fact, Kant stated, 'Judaism is not really a religion at all but merely a union of a number of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves into a commonwealth...' It was from this position—that Judaism was not a religion, but a political system—that Kant viewed the question of the civil status of contemporary Jews...since Jesus' teaching coincides with the ethical basis of all (true) religion, the ethical and social future of the Jews lies in their acceptance of these teachings...Kant called the suggestion that the Jews publicly accept the religion of Jesus and its vehicle, the Gospels, 'not only a happy idea but the only proposal whose execution would make this people a learned and upright people, qualified for civil society..."⁷⁷⁷

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"The apparent survival of Judaism, Kant observes, 'strikes many as so remarkable' that they have attempted to explain it as 'an extraordinary dispensation for a special divine purpose.' Against this tendency, Kant ...points out...that...some have interpreted it as...'an example of punitive justice (visited upon it) because it stiff-neckedly sought to create a political and not a moral concept of the Messiah'...Nor can it be proved, he asserts, that the Jews had some special role in the preservation of the Hebrew Bible. According to his reading of Jewish history, the Jews 'in their wanderings' at times completely lost 'the skill in reading these books, and so the desire to possess them,' and they have in fact Christians to thank...'the Jews could ever and again seek out their old documents among the Christians.'

"Kant's point in all of this is clear: there simply is no good reason for the continued existence of Judaism. In Conflict of the Faculties (1798), he continues this line of argument...The Jews 'have long had garments without a man in them,' Kant maintains, voicing an assumption shared by many enlightened scholars...The remains of Judaism, according to Kant, 'must disappear' so that there will be 'only one shepherd and one flock."^77S

Let us recall that this hoped for "disappearance" was not, in Kant's view, to be brought about by force. But rather in the context of the times, Kant's viewpoint was considered a defense against the imposition of Talmudic fraud and coercion. As one German Christian writer proclaimed in 1841, "Here are the alternatives: in Christian lands either the Christians rule or the Jews."

What was meant by Christian rule? Colonialism, imperialism, subjugation? In Enlightenment Germany "For the (Kantian) liberals...the superiority of Christianity meant that the Christian religion was a more adequate expression of human religious capacities than Judaism. There was, for the liberals, simply no need for the continued existence of this lower form of religious consciousness." ⁷⁷⁹

When this truth about Judaism is expressed with compassion, rather than contempt, we have an antidote to the current political correctness that sees an inherent, defining relationship between being a progressive, humanitarian, loving person and having reverence for Judaism. Why is it necessary for contemporary liberals and progressives to live this lie, when in

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Christ there is life and in Judaism a "whited sepulcher filled with dead men's bones"? (Matthew 23:27).

The most effective way to keep Christians from bearing witness to those who are captive within Judaism is to claim that "Luther paved the way for Hitler and The Holocaust." This is the cosmic trump card that is supposed to end all rational consideration — the linkage between Luther and Hitler and the invocation of the reverential language of Holocaustianity, after which our investigation into Judaism is supposed to end precipitously, at least if we wish to be considered decent or respectable people. These linkages make some sort of sense if we believe that any criticism of rabbinic tradition leads to a "Holocaust." In that case Christ is guilty.

If we reject the extreme concept that all criticism of Judaism is illegitimate, however measured or documented such criticism may be, then we can begin to study what Luther believed and what Hitler believed and learn that there was a vast gulf between the two. Hitler was possessed of a rabbinic mentality housed in a deceptively clean-shaven outer frame complete with "Aryan" jackboots and swastika. Hitler exalted the alleged race superiority of the German people, something which nauseates any true Christian, as it would have nauseated Luther who was a severe critic of the German people.

"Consider in this connection, Luther's comments on John 19:11, where he says that 'the Jews' are more guilty than Pilate and the Roman soldiers, and on John 18:38-40, where he says, after condemning Jews and papists, 'but because we (Protestant Christians) now (once again, truly) have Christ to preach (and fail to do so), there have come on earth no more wicked people to be remembered than we." ⁷⁸⁰

It is important for rabbinic forces to lie and claim that Luther had a racial agenda and a racial esteem for the Germans and this lie has been retailed about Luther repeatedly by Talmudists and academics, on no evidence. In Of the Jews and their Lies, writing of Judaic people and gentiles, Luther states, "We both partake of one birth, one flesh and blood, from the very first, best, and holiest ancestors. Neither one can reproach or upbraid the other about some peculiarity without implicating himself at the same time." This is Christian doctrine, which needless to say, Hitler neither

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believed nor practiced. In attacking Judaics as racially inferior Hitler implicated himself, as all such racists do. Luther understood that Jesus Christ had come to overturn the sin of race-based pride, which had driven the Pharisees away from God, and this mission remains the duty of every Christian. "I suppose Hitler never read a page of Martin Luther. The fact that he and other Nazis claimed Luther on their side proves no more than the fact that they also numbered Almighty God among their supporters." ⁷⁸¹

As we have shown elsewhere in these pages, certain elite rabbis have indicated that in the eyes of esoteric Judaism, Hitler was a divine instrument. The full implications of this rabbinic belief about Hitler have yet to be investigated. To what extent was Hitler a rabbinic agent wiping out giants of Christian evangelism whose mission it was to convert Judaics to Christ while simultaneously exposing Judaism? Such persons would have seen through Hitler. Any spirit-filled Christian could discern that Hitler's racism was rabbinic in its nature and intensity. Hitler's racism defeated any claim he had to opposing the spirit of the rabbinate in the world, since he himself was spreading that spirit, under a mask.

Second, any literate Christian could discern that Hitler, as the leader of a one-party state, had it within his power to republish and distribute throughout the German-speaking world, Eisenmenger's heavily documented and irrefutable Entdecktes Judenthum. But like the Judaics who first suppressed it in 1700, he kept it safely out of print, while touting in its place the disputed Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion which contained no documentation and whose provenance was suspect.

It should also be noted that under the Third Reich, the complete Babylonian Talmud was freely published for general use (in a handsome, hardcover edition) up to 1936, and distributed without interdiction as late as 1937, four years after Hitler had assumed the Chancellorship of Germany. Meanwhile, in the same time period, volumes of Entdecktes Judenthum were rare and difficult to find.

E. Gordon Rupp, Martin Luther: Hitler's Cause — Or Cure? (Lutterworth, 1945).

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