Posts
Anti-Semitism, Joseph, and The Book of Mormon
Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton takes apart a Worldnetdaily opinion column that links Hitler with evolution. (In my view, worries that evolution means something for how we ought to act don't stand up to a few moment's scrutiny.) As part of his rebuttal, he cites the anti-Semitic sentiments of Christians--including Martin Luther. His point is that you can just as easily twist Christianity as evolution to serve as justification for terrible deeds.
I guess I had not realized that anti-Semistism had a pedigree that included Martin Luther. I then thought of Joseph Smith's comparatively favorable view of Jews--The Book of Mormon itself contains passages that scold Christianity for its treatment of the Jews and tells us not to make a mock of them.
Keith Norman deals with this a little bit in his Dialogue article, "The Use and Abuse of Anti-Semitism in the Scriptures" (Vol. 32 No. 4).
My question is how Joseph's views on Jews compare with the dominant view at the time? More specifically, for those who argue that the Book of Mormon reflects 19th century America, is there a plausible source or influence for Joseph's favorable treatment of Jews as early as the 1829?
1 comments:
Well, there were many Protestant groups that designated Jews as the Lord's chosen people. The Pietist movement comes to mind. There was also a lot of speculation about the lost tribes, a subject that continues to give fundamentalists pleasure to this day.
Throughout the nineteenth centuries there a number of racial superiority theories that were grounded in the myth that Britons were descended from Ephraim and hence entitled to rule the world
As for Martin Luther, he expected that Jews would come to accept Jesus as the Messiah if Christendom were only purified. When the Jews disappointed him, Luther became rabidly anti-Jewish.
He used similarly aggressive language about Jews that he had previously directed at the pope. The difference was, of course, that the pope was a power. When Luther attacked the Jews, he was picking on a vulnerable minority.
Post a Comment