[af_vet_1981]

Weak history, Luther was dead for 72 years prior to that war. Here is more history:

Regarding the Jews, Luther made the same mistake Mohammed made. He was certain that the Jews would support him and even become Lutherans. He had shaken the Church to its core, withstood excommunication and stood up to the Holy Roman Emperor. He thought he was so special that the Jews would convert.

His early letters in the 1520s regarding the Jews are extremely positive. He said, for instance, that the Jews were the only ones who properly saw the ills of the Church. It’s no wonder that they rejected the Pope and never became Catholics.

However, he was not even rebuffed – he was ignored. The Jews in Germany were not interested in becoming Protestants or getting drawn into the vortex of forces warring in Europe. Furthermore, a much more radical element within Protestantism arose, the Anabaptists. They said the problem with Luther was that he was not Protestant enough!

This type of dynamic happens in all revolutions: the next generation is more radical, making the previous generation look moderate. Eventually, the revolution runs its course and the radicals are seen for what they are. The Anabaptists believed that one had to be baptized again as an adult. Some became absolute pacifists. It’s from them that the Amish, Mennonites, Quakers, Shakers and Puritans evolved. To them, Luther was little more than a wayward Catholic disguised as a Protestant.

Luther was not a man who took criticism very well – especially from people whom he felt he was owed a debt of gratitude. Consequently, he unleashed a particularly vituperative verbal assault against his Protestant enemies. In the blindness of his fury, he unleashed it on the Jews as well, saying things that made their way directly into anti-Semitic Nazi hate-literature. Some articles in Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer — the leading Nazi propaganda paper — were verbatim quotations from Luther.

In effect, he transferred a great deal of the anti-Semitism in the Roman Catholic Church into the Protestant Church. Originally, the latter attempted at least to say it would do away with the bigotry of the former. In one of Luther’s early writing he freed the Jews, so to speak, from the accusation of deicide, which in the 1500s was an enormous act, not matched by the Vatican until 1963. Nevertheless, by the end of his life he had reverted to terrible anti-Semitism – which he spared no opportunity to express and verbalize.

The Jews suffered terribly even though the Thirty Years War was a war ostensibly only between Catholics and Protestants. It led to chaos and anarchy. Armed bands marched around looting and killing without any force to stop them. By the end of the war, the Jews much preferred to be in areas under Roman Catholic control, which more or less protected them. In Protestant areas the Jews were left to the wrath of the mob.

[xone]

Never said or implied that AS wasn't in the general population of Europe. That said, we here of FR are always told of the age of the Catholic church. Well that 'age' was full of the incidents detailed. What Jews allegedly said during the Thirty Years War is really irrelevant to those Jews that suffered under the hands of the Ccatholic church for the millenium + before hand.

Special 'marks', expulsions, loss of property, burning of synagogues, book burnings, death; all common results between the exercise of Catholic secular power and the Nazis.

Some articles in Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer — the leading Nazi propaganda paper — were verbatim quotations from Luther.

For those not paying attention, Streicher, a CINO, was a Nazi propagandist. But according to some, just a stray. Pulling verbatim quotes from a condemned piece of literature takes no effort, in the 30s-40s, or today.