Calvin's Antisemitism: "Their rotten and unbending stiff-neckedness deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without measure or end and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone.”

 Here's a hostile quote against the Jews from John Calvin circulating cyberspace:

John Calvin: (Speaking of the Jewish people) Their rotten and unbending stiff-neckedness deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without measure or end and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone.”

This John Calvin quote seems to be saying the "rotten" Jews should be actively oppressed to the point of death. While it's true that the sixteenth century (and all centuries!) have been hostile to the Jewish people, I was unfamiliar with strong antisemitic statements like this from the pen of John Calvin. We'll see with this quote, while John Calvin was not ecumenical towards the Jews (nor was he sympathetic to them), he was not advocating killing them. The quote appears to be a mistranslation of the original Latin source.   

Documentation

There are a number of websites using this quote without any documentation (I found one website misattributing the quote to Calvin's Commentary on Daniel). There are also a few Christian and Jewish apologetic sites that use the quote as part of a cumulative case argument demonstrating antisemitism by important personages of the Christian church. The quote made its way to the ever-popular disseminator of context-less factoids, Wikiquote. They correctly identify the quote as originating from Calvin's Response to questions and Objections of a Certain Jew (in its original Latin, Ad Questiones et Obiecta Iudaei cuisdam Responsio). They do not provide where this source can be found, nor a page number.

If the original written source is in Latin, who translated this quote into English? The earliest usage I could find of this English rendering comes from a book entitled, The Jew in Christian Theology, by Gerhard Falk (McFarland and Company, Inc., Jefferson, NC and London, 1992), p. 84 (some websites use this book for documentation without a page number and incorrectly date the book "1931" ...the year Falk was born). Falk, in essence, admits to not using the original source. He documents the quote coming from a secondary German source: Rudolf Pfisterer, Im Schatten des Kreuzes (Hamburg, Evangeliscer Verlag, 1966), p. 72. (At the time of writing this entry, I do not have a copy of this secondary source). Falk documents that while he took the quote from Pfisterer's book, Pfisterer was actually quoting Jacques Courvoisier's article, "Calvin et les Juifs"! That article is from an old scholarly periodical: Judaica Beitrage zum Verständnis des jüdischen. Schidcsals in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart 2 (1946): 203-8. That periodical can be found here. The Latin text this quote is based on is found on page 206:

Without having Pfisterer's book, it seems likely that Falk either translated Courvoisier's Latin Calvin quote into English, or perhaps Pfisterer translated Calvin's Latin into German, and then Falk translated the quote into English. Either way, it seems that it's likely Falk provided the English translation currently circulating in cyberspace. 

The Latin treatise the quote comes from is found in CR 37:653–74 (The Corpus Reformatorum ).  The popular English version this quote appears to be based on can be found in the last paragraph in the right hand column on page 674.  The text is a fictional dialog between a Jewish apologist and John Calvin. Calvin did not publish it (it was put out 11 years after he died). It is also incomplete (source). The treatise begins and ends abruptly.

To my knowledge, there are only two complete English translations of this treatise available, from two very different people. The most scholarly was done by Rabbi Susan Frank in M. Sweetland Laver, “Calvin, Jews, and Intra-Christian Polemics” (PhD diss, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1987), 220–61. Her complete translation is included as an appendix toward the end of this dissertation. Up until recently, this appears to be the only complete English translation in circulation. That translation is available here for purchase.   

The other translation is self-published and freely available on the Internet Archive. While this translation may be accurate, the author appears to be blatantly and approvingly antisemitic. How ironic: the previous translation was done by a scholarly Rabbi and is accessible for purchase, the other by an antisemite (seemingly without meaningful publishing credentials)... for free. What I found curious about this antisemitic translator was that he suspected Rabbi Frank's earlier translation would not be accurate because she was a Rabbi! He concluded though it was:

I must admit that the fact that a rabbi was responsible for this translation led me to suspect its accuracy. However, I have closely compared the Frank translation to my own, and while it differs in some very minor points, the Frank translation is on the whole quite accurate. 

I mention this antisemitic translator because he actually includes a section of his translation dedicated to the Calvin quote in question: 

There is a quote about the Jews attributed to Calvin that is found on several different websites (for an example, see the John Calvin page on Wikiquote). The quote is as follows: "Their [the Jews] rotten and unbending stiffneckedness deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without measure or end and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone." The Wikiquote page, as well as other online postings, claim that this quote comes from the Response. However, this exact quote is not found in the text. It seems to be a mistranslation of a sentence that appears in the twenty-third section of the work. Below is the original Latin and my translation of this sentence:

"Primo meretur eorum perdita obstinatio et indomabilis, ut immensa miseriarum congerie sine fine et modo oppressi omnes exhilarent suis malis, nemo autem eorum misereatur."

"First of all, their depraved and indomitable obstinacy merits that none of them be pitied, as they all delight in their evils while being oppressed by a great mass of miseries without end or measure."

In the popular online version, it sounds as if Calvin is saying that the Jews should be oppressed and that they deserve to die, while the actual text says that the Jews are foolish to persist in their rejection of the Messiah in the face of the oppression that they have experienced. The sentiment that the Jews should not be pitied certainly is found in Calvin's original words, and while the mistranslation does not in the least stray from the overall tenor of the Response, it is still desirable to correct an inaccurate rendering that has been repeated so many times.

 

Context

Conclusion

In context, the Jewish apologist asks Calvin, why are the Jews in exile because they killed Jesus when Jesus himself prayed that those killing him be forgiven, since they didn't know what they were doing? It is to this question Calvin claims the Jews have "indomitable obstinacy" delighting in evil, even while being subjected to years of misery in exile. It is to this Calvin claims the hardship of the Jews should not provoke pity. While he is not advocating murdering Jews (as the quote in question insinuates), it is nonetheless hostile to the Jews and promotes typical sixteenth century antisemitic views. 

It appears the popular English rendering of this quote includes elements of mistranslation. Note that Falk used the word, "rotten" for the Latin word "perdita." The meaning "rotten" appears to be a severe translating choice at best (or erroneous at worst) of the adjective "perditus" (Calvin did not use the word "putridum"). "Meretur" is a deponent verb that's passive but translated as active, so, while "deserves" is a proper English translation, it's meaning is not that people should actively oppress the Jews, but that what is happening to them is "deserved" because of past actions.  The part of Falk's translation that takes it a step a further is "that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone." I'm not entirely sure how he arrived at this from the Latin text, but taken as a whole, Falk's version has Calvin instructing his readers to oppress the Jews to the point of death.  Calvin is not saying this. 

In the same context of the Calvin quote Falk translated, he says, 

Calvin wrote very little about the Jews because he could not have ever met Jews in Geneva... It is true Calvin accepted common Christian teachings concerning the Jews as outsiders, enemies of God and Christ killers. But compared to the excesses of hatred which Luther spewed forth for years, Calvin's attitudes toward the only non-Christians permitted to live in Christian Europe seemed mild and ordinary (p. 83-84).

Whoever originally mined the Calvin quote out of this text appears to have missed these remarks from Falk.  In fact, there is debate as to exactly how one should interpret Calvin's attitude toward the Jews    ranging from those who say Calvin was not antisemitic, to typically antisemitic for his time period, to harshly antisemitic. Falk's analysis falls in the middle category (as does mine). True, Falk does present a mistranslated Calvin quote to make him seem worse than he was. Why did he do this? My take is he might have needed to do this for the overall argument of his book: Calvin may not have been bad enough, especially after Falk previously documented the things Luther had said about the Jews. There is also the question as to whether or not using an unfinished and unpublished work by Calvin himself is fair. Certainly the unpublished remarks Calvin made have meaning, but do they have precedent over his other published remarks?