Page 24 - Why Israel?

rational, under this warped theology, that the Jewish people must be hated, put down, ignored, and shunned since God Himself has disowned them.
And so into this vacuum floods anti-Semitism, flowing straight out of the vile teachings articulated by numerous church fathers through the ages. Instead of loving the Jewish people deeply and fervently as God’s very own—the church, as a whole, learned to hate them.
Title page of On the Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther, 1543.
After Augustine’s teaching that the church had replaced the Jews as “spiritual Israel” seeped into common doctrine, prominent think- ers like Martin Luther took these ideas to the next level. Publishing a book titled, On the Jews and their Lies (1543), Luther advocated for the destruction of Jewish property and Jewish prayer books, and banned rabbis from teaching Torah calling them “venomous” and “possessed by all devils.”1
In the name of Christ, Christians have persecuted His family theologically, by attacking
18
WHY ISRAEL
1
their place in God’s heart; mentally, by accusing all of the Jews of killing a Man they never knew; and physically, by assaulting and expelling them from their homes, stripping them of dignity and eventually killing them.
Martin Luther, The Jews and Their Lies, from Luther’s Works, Volume 47: The Christian in Society IV, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 268-293.
(Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)