From the Shem of Hamphoras

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Wittenberg " Judensau "

Vom Schem Hamphoras (full title: Vom Schem Hamphoras and the family of Christ ) is a book that the German reformer Martin Luther wrote in 1543, in which he equated the Jews with the devil and defamed them in obscene language.

Shem Hamphoras ( Hebrew שם המפורש) is the Hebrew rabbinical name for the ineffable name of God, the Tetragrammaton YHWH (יהוה). Jews must perceive Luther's use of this term as mockery and insult. He followed on from a passage from the Victoria adversus impios hebraeos ("Victory over the unbelieving Jews") by the Carthusian Porchetus Salvaticus (written before 1315, printed in 1520), which claims to reproduce a Jewish story about Jesus of Nazareth and the Shem Hamphoras which Luther placed at the beginning of his writing in a German translation.

He wrote this treatise a few months after he published On the Jews and Irish Lies .

Luther claimed that the Jews were no longer the chosen people , but "the devil's people". Let their hearts be made of wood, stone and iron and they are doomed to burn in hell. If someone thinks he is too harsh, one can, according to Luther, never be sufficiently clear to the Lord of the Jews, namely the devil.

The verdict of the Lutheran theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Lomler is remarkable , who published a selection of Luther's writings on the anniversary of the Reformation in 1817 as a “Memorial of the Gratitude of the German People”. About Vom Schem Hamphoras he writes: "A script in which you come across the most disgusting places that you should never have reprinted".

Historians point out that Luther's writings contributed to anti-Semitism in the German provinces during their time . In general, they believe that the NSDAP used his writings in the 1930s and 1940s to build anti-Semitism under their rule. According to the prevailing view among historians, his anti-Jewish rhetoric contributed significantly to the emergence of anti-Semitism in Germany and in the 1930s and 1940s represented an “ideal underpinning” for the attacks by the National Socialists on the Jews.

See also

Title page and back of the popular edition of Luther's Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Sex Christi , published in 1931 by the Dresden Regional Association for Inner Mission . The subtitle has been added on the inside: communicated in the excerpt by Georg Buchwald .

• Judensau
• Luther and the Jews

Individual evidence

1. ^ Digitized version of the Latin text from Chapter 11 of Victoria
2. ^ Digitized version of Luther's German version in Vom Schem Hamphoras
3. ↑ Weimar Edition Vol. 53, p. 600ff; Original print of Luther's “Schem Hamphoras”, full text
4. ^ Gerhard Falk: The Jew in Christian Theology: Martin Luther's Anti-Jewish Vom Schem Hamphoras ; Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992; ISBN 0899507166
5. ↑ Trond Berg Eriksen, Håkon Harket, Einhart Lorenz: Judenhass. The history of anti-Semitism from antiquity to the present. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2019, p. 108
6. ↑ title page
7. ↑ Dr. Martin Luther's writings partly complete, partly in excerpts. Volume 3, Gotha 1817, p. 254 , note f
8. ↑ Ronald Berger: fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Approach problem ; New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 2002; P. 28. Paul Johnson: A History of the Jews ; New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987; P. 242. William Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.
9. ^ Richard Grunberger: The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi German 1933-1945 ; NP: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971; P. 465.