When Karl Lueger, founder in 1893 of the antisemitic Christian Social Party of Austria, was taken to task by a colleague for including Jews among his personal friends, he famously replied: “I decide who is a Jew.“ A quote repeated by Hermann Göring when taunted that his co-founder of the Luftwaffe, Erhard Milch, was the son of a Jewish pharmacist.

[Luther] was personally affronted when a Jew he had converted to Lutheranism relapsed and returned to Torah and Talmud. Saying that the next time he baptized a Jew, he would take him to the river Elbe, hang a stone round his neck and drop him in with the words: “I baptize you in the name of Abraham.”