Reading Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror” about the 1300’s. It seems that despite the Black Death devastating the Jewish community by about 1/3 to 1/2; the same as just about every other community in Europe - the charge of Jews “poisoning wells” to cause the Black Death was formulated in Germany, where it also led to the most widespread mass hysteria and further devestation of the Jewish population.
So it wasn’t just Luther.
Barbara Tuchman was a big leftist, but “A Distant Mirror” is an excellent book. The Black Death had a greater impact on Europe than most people know. It created the middle class and this paved the way for mercantilism. Modern civilization can be traced from society’s reaction to the devastation.
To be fair, Europe was rabidly anti-Semitic from about the 11th Century until very recently (it took the Holocaust to open the eyes of many Europeans) and the anti-Semitism was worst in the areas where Jews lived (ALL Jews were expelled from England in the late 13th Century and most were expelled from France about a hundred years later). The largest centers of Judaism in Europe were in Germany and Eastern Europe, so anti-Semitism was strongest there.
NONE of this excuses Luther’s attitudes toward Jews, but it does put it in some perspective. Certainly what he said was horrible, but it was far milder than what many Germans said. The difference is that because Luther wrote it down, it is remembered. The reason the Nazis used it was not because of the content, but because it had Luther’s name attached to it.