Jews and the Reformation

The Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries convulsed European Christianity, leading disparate individuals and communities to revisit key, timeless questions: what did it mean to be a good Christian, how should a Christian community behave, and what were the central ideas and practices of Christianity? Jews and Judaism played important, if varying, roles in the answers to each of those questions. As regards the former, Christians reconsidered the place of Jews as a people. Traditionally, Christians, under the influence of St. Augustine, had tolerated Jews in their midst on the grounds that they played a critical role in divine history: they had once been God’s chosen people (as Christians now believed themselves to be), they had protected the Scriptures, and their current status—wretched, dispersed, and subjected to Christian rule—served as a reminder to Christians of what might happen if they failed to follow God’s commandments. But the growing awareness that the Jews they encountered were different from those in the Old Testament increasingly became a concern, while Jews’ refusal to accept what Christians held to be the self-evident truth of Christianity encouraged accusations of stubbornness and greater animosity. The conflicting pressures to tolerate or persecute were further complicated by the widely held belief that the Jews also had a critical role to play in the future: their widespread conversion to Christianity would be one of the signs of the Last Days. Meanwhile, the relationship with Judaism had been fundamental to the emergence and early development of Christianity and had remained a touchstone during the Middle Ages. It was not surprising, therefore, that Christians should look again to this relationship in the Reformation era. In particular, the Reformation encouraged a new and much wider engagement with Jewish materials and the Hebrew language, in order to combat the counter-claims of Jews, but also as a means of better understanding the Bible (especially the Hebrew of the Old Testament) and the context from which it had emerged, and hence the foundations of Christianity itself. In this respect this knowledge was weaponized, and became fundamental to the conflicts between the competing religions groups.