Few early Protestant reformers have as curious a reputation as Andreas Osiander (1498-1552). An important early Protestant theologian and Christian Hebraist, Osiander was instrumental in solidifying and spreading Luther's message in and around Nuremberg. His treatise defending the Jews against accusations of blood libel, one of the first of its kind, brought him great renown and a reputation as a friend of the Jews. Yet Osiander was also embroiled in disputes about the doctrine of justification and did not always agree with Melanchthon, Luther, Flacius, and other pioneering Lutheran theologians. His deeply apocalyptic worldview seeped into many of his writings, not all of which were appreciated by his contemporaries. More than anything, though, it was the work that he did for the Nuremberg printer Johannes Petreius that resonated most strongly after his death: in the anonymous preface that he appended to Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which Petreius printed in 1543, Osiander downplayed the illustrious astronomer's groundbreaking findings, reducing them to a matter of mere mathematics.
Andrew Thomas's lucid and detailed book aims to develop the portrait we have of Osiander by connecting the reformer's writing on the Jews to his thinking on the Turks. Six thematically organized chapters describe how early Protestant thought was shaped by Christian ideas about the Jewish and Turkish peoples and how Lutheran theology, in turn, shaped Christian attitudes to the religious Other. Osiander's apocalyptic thought was influenced, according to Thomas, “by the relationship between the revival of late medieval Christian prophecies, Islamic prophecies, and the Kabbalah” (10). In examining these strands of religious thought, the book looks to foreground the “interconnectivity between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the early modern world” and to provide “a valuable mirror to reflect on the historical antecedents to modern antisemitism and Islamophobia” (10).
In the first three chapters, Thomas covers Osiander's study of Hebrew and Jewish thought. Much of this will be familiar to specialists on Christian Hebraism. We read how the Kabbalah became a powerful tool in the hands of theologians like Osiander for understanding the nature of salvation; we learn how Osiander pursued the study of Hebrew and the Mosaic Law to further the Reformation and the conversion of Jews; we are told how the idea of a new Israel helped Osiander and others fashion a Lutheran identity as God's chosen people; we are shown how Jews and exempla from the Hebrew Bible were deployed to challenge the expansionism of the Papacy and Charles V; and thus we can see how studying Hebrew and Jewish learning offered Christian Hebraists like Osiander an instrument to shape their religious lives. That is the reason why, as Thomas stresses, we can best understand Osiander's engagement with the thought and language of the Jewish people as a form of “allosemitism,” a concept to describe individuals “who embraced both positive and negative attitudes toward Jews” (14).
The next two chapters explore the place of the Ottoman Turks in Osiander's thought. Chapter 4 situates Osiander in a cultural climate consumed by Last World Emperor prophecies, which posited that an Emperor named Friedrich (“peaceful ruler”) would “defeat the Antichrist and usher in the Millennium” (115). Thomas claims that we can best understand Osiander's views on the Ottoman Turks and his changing attitudes towards the Habsburg dynasty through such eschatological literature. Though interesting in its own way, the chapter is unbalanced in its focus, as Osiander's views on the Ottoman Turks are snowed under by Thomas's much more extensive treatment of Osiander's thoughts on the Habsburgs. Chapter 5, however, brings us back to more familiar ground. It describes how many early Lutherans, including Osiander, viewed the Ottoman Sultan as a scourge of God unleashed because of their sins, a barbaric tyrant bent on the destruction of the Christian way of life. In his 1542 sermons Instruction and Warning: how one should pray and resist the Turks, for instance, Osiander used the Ottoman conquests of Hungary and the Balkans “as a mirror reflecting on the future fate of Nuremberg and the Holy Roman Empire if they did not reform” (161). Thomas's careful treatment thus shows us once again just how deeply the Germanic lands of the Holy Roman Empire were impacted by notions of a Türkengefahr.
Osiander's defence of the Jews against blood libel and its context are the subject of the final chapter. Here Thomas's arguments about Osiander's allosemitic tendencies really shine through. Connecting the treatise, which was published in 1540, to Osiander's other writings uncovers how the reformer's position on the Jews was ultimately ambivalent. A firm believer in supersessionism – the conviction that Jews were replaced by Christians as God's chosen people – Osiander could easily support expulsion of the Jews from Nuremberg and criticize Jews for practicing usury and neglecting the study of Scripture. Yet such views did not prevent him from passionately defending the Jews against accusations of blood libel – a position that in the tense eschatological climate of early Lutheranism, as Thomas rightly reminds us, could easily produce allegations of judaizing. Though the English translation of the treatise that is appended to the book will surely serve scholars working in a number of fields, the chapter's overall attempt to prove that “Osiander was still far more tolerant toward the Jews than the majority of sixteenth-century Christians” (183) will be too apologetic for some readers.
On the whole, this is a fine study that offers a set of useful descriptions of how the Jewish people and the Ottoman Turks served as mirrors in which Osiander and his fellow Lutherans could reflect on their own beliefs. Not all arguments are new, and sometimes the author could have further integrated the vibrant recent historiography on Christian Hebraism and European engagements with the Ottomans to flesh out some of the complexities of the material. A more sustained analysis of how Osiander's thinking on Jews and Turks intersected also would have added further depth and coherence to the story that unfolds across the chapters. Yet most readers of this journal will find in this book much valuable information about Osiander and the place of the religious Other in the making of early Lutheranism. The Apocalypse in Reformation Nuremberg is thus a welcome contribution to the intellectual history of the Reformation and Central European history more broadly.
