Frdm2: Jewish “prejudices against Christianity”, “Shemhamforash”; Luther vindicated

      This continues from Part 1 (Table of Contents in Part 1) presenting Pastor Nathaniel Friedmann's 1898 Der Lutheraner report of his mission work for the NYC Jewish population. — In this segment, one hears how difficult Friedmann’s work was as he labored against “prejudices against Christianity”. His recounting of the Jewish “Hanged man” fable of “Shemhamforash” is an abbreviated version of the same fable as in Martin Luther’s writing “Vom Shem Hamphoras”. — From Der Lutheraner, vol. 54 (1898), pp. 206 [EN]:

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Of our Mission to the Jews.

[by Pastor Nathaniel Friedmann, Part 2]

Oh, how much injustice is not done to the Jewish mission if one judges it only by the number of conversions and wants to show interest in this mission accordingly! Consider how difficult it is for a pastor to show conversions among those who were born and raised in the midst of Christianity. With the Jews, however, the prejudices against Christianity in which they were brought up must be added. For no sooner is a Jewish child able to understand the language than it is taught by its Jewish parents about the sacred birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the most shameful and disgraceful way, so that when it hears the name of Jesus, it is filled with such hatred that it spews out and blasphemes.   

After all, the Jews have the rabbinical tradition of the “Mase Tuli”, the story of the hanged man, in which they believe. From it the Jew learns that the Lord Jesus came into the Holy of Holies of the Temple and there stole the "Shemhamforash", a wonderful name of Jehovah, and sewed it into the thick flesh of the foot. It was only through this stolen "Shemhamforash" that Jesus was able to perform all the miracles. The Jew is brought up in this belief from childhood. Added to this is the hatred and hostility of the Jews towards such an Israelite who publicly confesses Christ as his Messiah and Savior. As a "Meshumed" (apostate), a Jew who converts to Christianity is mocked, ridiculed and bitterly persecuted by his brethren according to the flesh. The fanaticism of the Jews today is still the same as that described by the holy Apostle Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. And according to the teaching of the rabbis, a Jew who has converted from Judaism to Christianity is guilty of death. The fact that such a convert loses his position and thus his livelihood among his tribal neighbors hardly needs to be mentioned, but the Jewish mission cannot emphasize enough how difficult it is to find a Christian who is willing to take in such a Jew suffering for the sake of Christ or grant him employment in his business. Even our Jewish mission recently had the sad experience of a young man losing his job with an Orthodox Jew because it was discovered that he had attended the services in our mission, and despite all the efforts of the undersigned it was not possible to find him another job. All this makes it understandable that progress in the Jewish mission can only be slow and that in many respects it is a "seed of hope". 

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      Although World War II would come several decades later, one wonders that even today the stigma attached to the Nazi treatment of the Jews would not have hindered Friedmann from exposing this infamous Jewish fable. And he was a full-blooded Russian Jew according to the flesh! 

      In his “Vom Schem Hamphoras”, Martin Luther stated in the opening paragraph how the Jews “are as possible to convert as the devil”.  In that paragraph, Luther refers to those who “blaspheme with their Schem Hamphoras” as the “Jews”. Luther is evidently not referring to individual Jews, but particularly the Jewish teachers, the rabbis. Luther delineates this further when he refers to those under the rabbis as the “unfortunate captive Jews”. Luther would have rejoiced in the days of Landsmann and Friedmann who did indeed convert. The latter "rabbi", Pastor Friedmann, vindicates Luther's use of the “Shemhamforash” by using this same fable that Luther exposed to illustrate the hardness of the “Jews”. One suspects that Rabbi Friedmann himself, before he converted, had taught this same fable to the Jewish people in Russia. It was only by God’s surpassing grace that Friedmann was converted, and then sent by the Old Missouri Synod to the lost sheep of “Israel”. — In the next Part 3 …