Looking forward to the great Reformation and Luther memorial events in Germany in 2017, the publication of these conference papers on the reception of Luther's late ‘Judenschriften’ over the last two centuries is timely. Today, Martin Luther's ‘Judenschriften’ are much better known than at any time since their first appearance in the sixteenth century. And almost everywhere nowadays there is great dismay at the reformer's shocking, aggressively anti-Jewish tone. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, who has been chairman of the Ratsvorsitzender (council) of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) since 2014, has repeatedly confessed his shame when reading such texts, written by the founder of the Protestant Churches in Germany. The debate continues on whether Luther was ‘only’ a religiously-motivated anti-Judaist, or whether he has also to be regarded as a ‘pre-modern antisemite’, at least in the light of some of his later statements. While official statements from the Churches continue to speak of anti-Judaism, research tends more and more to ascribe explicitly antisemitic attitudes to the Reformer. There has always been some dispute on the degree to which Luther's ‘Judenschriften’ were widely known to the public and how far they actually affected theology, Church and politics in practical terms. It is the important question of reception that is the focus of this volume with its thirteen contributions and two comments, based on a conference held in October 2014 at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Volker Leppin (Tübingen) presents a useful overview on the presence of the ‘Judenschriften’ in Luther's collected works. As he demonstrates – against the older thesis of Johannes Wallmann, who argued that the ‘Judenschriften’ have been largely absent from the Protestant mind since eighteenth-century Pietism – Luther's ‘Judenschriften’ were not as unavailable and unknown as has been supposed. Other contributions in this book also suggest that the Wallmann thesis is no longer tenable. Christian Wiese (Frankfurt am Main) explores Jewish interpretations of Luther during the Kaiserreich and Weimar Republic. Although there was, he argues, some criticism of the Reformer's antisemitic writings, Jewish authors tried to establish a positive image of Luther, against the growing nationalist (völkisch) use of him. However, these efforts have been almost completely ignored in contemporary Protestantism. According to Gury Schneider-Ludorff (Neuendettelsau) there was no explicit discussion of Luther's ‘Judenschriften’ in the theology of the 1920s. Siegfried Hermle (Köln) puts the question, to what extent the Confessing Church during the Third Reich dealt with Luther's antisemitic writings? No prominent figure in the church opposition, he concludes, published anything. As was to be expected, Oliver Arnhold (Detmold/Bielefeld) shows that the radical German Christians of Thuringia were very receptive to Luther's antisemitic writings. Dealing with their reception in post-war church historical research, Harry Oelke (Munich) identifies three phases: ‘difficult self finding’ (Selbstfindung) until 1960; a growing turn towards overdue issues from 1960 to 1985; historicisation and differentiation since 1985, including more critical analysis as shown by Peter von der Osten-Sacken and Thomas Kaufmann. Finally Wolfgang Kraus (Saarbrücken) provides a very useful overview of official church-political statements since 1945 on Luther's anti-Jewish texts.

Of the many valuable contributions in this book, that by Berndt Hamm (Erlangen) (pp. 315–22) has to be mentioned. Hamm leaves no room for doubt that – in addition to taking a strong anti-Judaist position – explicit antisemitic attitudes shaped Luther's late writings on the Jews. If the reception of Luther in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not deal very much with the Reformer's anti-Jewish late writings, this was mainly because writers preferred to keep quiet about them: these writings were embarrassing for many theologians and church historians and did not serve their interests. It has been no accident, Hamm argues, that it was Heiko A. Oberman, a Reformed church historian from the Netherlands, who first dealt with the issue in an appropriately historical and critical way; he was the first scholar who did not isolate the ‘strongly violent antisemitism’ of Luther's ‘Judenschriften’ from his major works and who did not minimise it as ‘only’ religious or Christian anti-Judaism. At the same time, Hamm stresses a considerable continuity in Luther's attitudes towards Judaism from his theological beginnings to the infamous late writings. Hamm goes on to state, correctly, that Luther's ‘Judenschriften’ did not create the modern racial-biological antisemitism of the early twentieth century. The Nazis with their persecution of the Jews could have managed perfectly well without any reference to Luther. However, it has to be assumed, argues Hamm, that Luther's anti-Jewish position influenced the historical fact that German Protestantism failed to demonstrate any significant opposition to Nazi antisemitic violence. The renewed reception of the ‘Judenschriften’ during the 1930s, especially its simplistic popularisation by völkisch theologians and German Christians, dampened opposition to Nazi atrocities.

Unfortunately, there are simple orthographic and factual mistakes in some of the articles that should not occur in a distinguished series such as the Arbeiten zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte. In 1983, for instance, the German Protestant public, celebrated, not the ‘400th birthday of Luther’, but his 500th (p. 224). In conclusion, and setting aside several similar shortcomings, this book is well worth reading and contributes greatly to the disputed question of the reception of Luther's late and strongly antisemitic ‘Judenschriften’. In particular it is Hamm's precise formulation of the argument that brings this disputed issue into focus.