Also, to call Luther an outright anti-semite is to not understand the full story. For example in 1523, Luther accused Catholics of being unfair to Jews and treating them “as if they were dogs,” thus making it difficult for Jews to convert. “I would request and advise that one deal gently with them [the Jews],” he wrote. “ … If we really want to help them, we must be guided in our dealings with them not by papal law but by the law of Christian love. We must receive them cordially, and permit them to trade and work with us, hear our Christian teaching, and witness our Christian life. If some of them should prove stiff-necked, what of it? After all, we ourselves are not all good Christians either.”
Fifteen years later, however, rumors of Jewish efforts to convert Christians upset him, and he wrote a treatise venting his frustration. In it, Luther concluded that converting Jews had become hopeless.
Was he wrong (EXTREMELY WRONG) in this treatise? Very much so. Luther did not, however, hold Jews responsible for the death of Christ. As he wrote in a hymn, “We dare not blame … the band of Jews; ours is the shame.” And he felt that at least a few Jews might be won for Christ.
Luther was not an anti-Semite in the racist sense. His arguments against Jews were theological, not biological. Not until a French cultural anthropologist in the nineteenth century held that humankind consisted of “Semites” and “Aryans,” were Semites considered inferior.
Luther was but a frustrated biblical scholar who fell victim to what his friend Philipp Melanchthon called the “rabies of theologians”: drawing conclusions based on speculations about the hidden will of God. Luther erred because he presumed to know God’s will.