Quote:
Originally Posted by Asta Kask
Not really. Here's Martin Luther's recommendations on how to treat the Jews: - for Jewish synagogues and schools to be burned to the ground, and the remnants buried out of sight;
- for houses owned by Jews to be likewise razed, and the owners made to live in agricultural outbuildings;
- for their religious writings to be taken away;
- for rabbis to be forbidden to preach, and to be executed if they do;
- for safe conduct on the roads to be abolished for Jews;
- for usury to be prohibited, and for all silver and gold to be removed and "put aside for safekeeping"; and
- for the Jewish population to be put to work as agricultural slave labor.
That's pretty bad. And he was in no way unique.
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Martin Luther, kind of, you know, lived several centuries earlier. Hitler was unique for the political climate of Western Europe in the early twentieth century. It is hard to think of any political circumstance at the time other then Hitler coming to power that would have ended in an anti-Jewish genocide sponsored by a Western European state.
For the matter of that, anti-jewish genocides on that scale never took place in Martin Luther's time. Displacements did and local pograms did. But Jews were considered valueable by various princes and Catholics, Protestants, and Moslems were really more interested in exterminating each other then in exterminating Jews.