ABSTRACT
Literally to the end, Luther maintained the virulence of thought and expression against the Jews that he had poured out in his writings of 1543. In those late years, his literary output continued unabated, despite, or perhaps because of, his expectation of imminent death, and his lectures at the university went on until he finished a series of commentaries on the Book of Genesis, in the month of his 62nd birthday, November 1545. In December he travelled to Mansfeld near his birthplace Eisleben, where the local counts, two brothers, had begun a quarrel over property rights which they asked Luther to arbitrate. The same dispute required further attention from him in the January of the new year, 1546, when, late in the month, Luther set off in the direction of Eisleben. Going into February, he was making progress towards a settlement: as he reported, ‘the counts of Mansfeld show wonderful good-will to each other’. The final irony in the career of this man wedded to paradox was that his self-destructive work as a peacemaker was twinned with those rooted animosities which continued to burst through the crust of a declining life. There was, for example, his old aversion to lawyers, one of whom he believed was obstructing a settlement between the counts: ‘A little learning makes lawyers mad. Almost all these men seem to be ignorant of the real use of the law, base and venal pettifoggers caring not at all for peace, the state of religion about which we care now as always’. However, to the fore was still his aggression against the Jewish people. In poor health in that ill-advised winter journey, he wrote on 1 February to his wife, jocularly complaining of a weakness that came upon him in travelling through a village near Eisleben
that housed a Jewish community. The ailment was ‘the fault of the Jews or of their God. For we had to pass through a village hard by Eisleben where many Jews live; perhaps they blew on me too hard’. Much more grimly, though, he announced what he planned as a further instalment of his anti-Jewish crusade, once the counts’ business was settled: ‘I must devote myself to driving out the Jews’.1
