Jewishness as an Explanation for Rejection of the Word Caspar Guttel's Reception of Martin Luther's Anti-Judaism

The present essay challenges prior accounts of the "literary echo" to Martin Luther's 1523 treatise, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, which called for "friendly" theological instruction of Jews. Focusing on a dialogue between a Christian and a Jew written by Caspar Guttel, I demonstrate that Giittel was not concerned with the persuasion of Jews. Rather, writing in 1527, Giittel deployed his knowledge of the ineffectiveness of Luther's missionary overture as part of a larger strategy casting intra-Christian resistance to the Word as "Jewish." Moreover, the primary influence on Giittel was not That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, but Luther's Christmas Postils. From the latter, Giittel received and propagated an image of Jews as "blind with seeing eyes"-as unable to deny truth yet paradoxically unreceptive to it. Gutters case underlines the necessity of looking beyond Luther's "Jewish writings" to locate the transmission and reception of the reformer's anti-Judaism.