Vom Schem Hamphoras

"Vom Schem Hamphoras", full title: "Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi" ("Of the Unknowable Name and the Generations of Christ"), was a book written by German Reformation leader Martin Luther in 1543, in which he equated Jews with the Devil.

Schem Hamphoras is the Hebrew rabbinic name for the ineffable name of God, the tetragrammaton. The use of the term is in itself a taunt and insult to Jewish sensitivities. It was written several months after Luther published "On the Jews and Their Lies".

In the book he wrote:

:Here in Wittenburg, in our parish church, there is a sow carved into the stone under which lie young pigs and Jews who are sucking; behind the sow stands a rabbi who is lifting up the right leg of the sow, raises behind the sow, bows down and looks with great effort into the Talmud under the sow, as if he wanted to read and see something most difficult and exceptional; no doubt they gained their Shem Hamphoras from that place...

When Judas hanged himself and his bowels gushed forth, and, as happens in such cases, his bladder also burst, the Jews were ready to catch the Judas-water and the other precious things, and then they gorged and swilled on the merd among themselves, and were thereby endowed with such a keenness of sight that they can perceive glosses in the Scriptures such as neither Matthew nor Isaiah himself . . .would be able to detect; or perhaps they looked into the loin of their God "Shed," and found these things written in that smokehole ...

The Devil has eased himself and emptied his belly again — that is a real halidom for Jews and would-be Jews, to kiss, batten on, swill and adore; and then the Devil in his turn also devours and swills what these good pupils spue and eject from above and below ...

The Devil, with his angelic snout, devours what exudes from the oral and anal apertures of the Jews; this is indeed his favorite dish, on which he battens like a sow behind the hedge ... [ [http://www.flholocaustmuseum.org/history_wing/antisemitism/reformation.cfm "Reformation"] , Florida Holocaust Museum. The English translation of Vom Schem Hamphoras is contained in "The Jew in Christian Theology", by Gerhard Falk (McFarland & Co., 1992).]

A translation of "Vom Schem Hamphoras" was published as part of "The Jew In Christian Theology" by Gerhard Falk in 1992. [Falk, Gerhard, "The Jew in Christian Theology: Martin Luther's Anti-Jewish" Vom Schem Hamphoras", Previously Unpublished in English, and Other Milestones in Church Doctrine Concerning Judaism", McFarland: Jefferson, NC, 1992. ISBN 0899507166.]

ee also

*Judensau - the image of Jews in obscene contact with a large sow (female pig) which first appeared in the thirteenth century.
*Luther and antisemitism

References