One point which well illustrates his anti-Semitism is the Talmud-Bible
he invents as best suited to them: “That Bible only should you
explore which lies concealed beneath the sow’s tail; the letters
that drop from it you are free to eat and drink; that is the best
Bible for prophets who trample under foot and rend in so swinish a
manner the Word of the Divine Majesty which ought to be listened to
with all respect, with trembling and with joy.” “Do they fancy that
we are clods and wooden blocks like themselves, the rude, ignorant
donkeys?... Hence, gentle Christian, beware of the Jews, for this
book will show you that God’s anger has delivered them over to the
devil.”[940]
The figure of the sow’s tail pleased him so well that he again used it
later in the same year in his “Vom Schem Hamphoras.” There he alludes
to the piece of sculpture which had originally supplied him with the
idea: “Here, at Wittenberg, outside our parish church there is a sow
chiselled in the stone; under her are piglets and little Jews all
sucking; behind the sow stands a Rabbi, who lifts, with his right hand
the sow’s hind leg and with his left her tail, and is intently engaged
poring over the Talmud under the sow’s tail, as though he wished to
read and bring to light something especially clever. That is a real
image of Schem Hamphoras.... For of the sham wise man we Germans say:
Where did he read that? To speak coarsely, in the rear parts of a
sow.”[941]
The “devil” also is drawn into the fray the better to enable Luther to
vent his ire against the Jews. At the end of the passage just quoted
he says: “For the devil has entered into the Jews and holds them
captive so that perforce they do his will, as St. Paul says, mocking,
defaming, abusing and cursing God and everything that is His....
The devil plays with them to their eternal damnation.”[942]--And
elsewhere: “Verily a hopeless, wicked, venomous and devilish thing
is the existence of these Jews, who for fourteen hundred years have
been, and still are, our pest, torment and misfortune. In fine, they
are just devils and nothing more, with no feeling of humanity for us
heathen. This they learn from their Rabbis in those devils’ aeries
which are their schools.”[943]--“They are a brood of vipers and the
children of the devil, and are as kindly disposed to us as is the
devil their father.”[944]--“The Turk and the other heathen do not
suffer from them what we Christians do from these malignant snakes
and imps.... Whoever would like to cherish such adders and puny
devils--who are the worst enemies of Christ and of us all--to befriend
them and do them honour simply in order to be cheated, plundered,
robbed, disgraced and forced to howl and curse and suffer every kind
of evil, to him I would commend these Jews. And if this be not enough
let him tell the Jew to use his mouth as a privy, or else crawl
into the Jew’s hind parts and there worship the holy thing, so as
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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