On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen, 1543)
⚠️ Content warning
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~56,800 words · 270 passages
Cite this work
- APAMartin Luther. (n.d.). On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen, 1543). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/martin-luther/on-the-jews-and-their-lies-von-den-juden-und-ihren-lugen-1543
- MLAMartin Luther. "On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen, 1543)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/martin-luther/on-the-jews-and-their-lies-von-den-juden-und-ihren-lugen-1543.
- ChicagoMartin Luther. On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen, 1543). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/martin-luther/on-the-jews-and-their-lies-von-den-juden-und-ihren-lugen-1543.
What it is about
On the Jews and Their Lies (1543): an antisemitic text by Luther.
Context and history
**Warning: this text calls for the burning of synagogues and Jewish homes, the confiscation of their books and their expulsion.** This is not a tendentious reading: it is written there. It is in the catalogue because the rule of the house is that **no work is removed for its content**, and because hiding it would be pretending it does not exist. Luther wrote it at sixty, after decades of expecting Jews to convert; the Nazis reprinted and displayed it, and the Lutheran churches of Germany and the United States have formally repudiated it. Anyone who wants to understand Luther has to know it. Anyone who cites it must cite it knowing what it is.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
At the beginning of his career it is often said that Luther was apparently sympathetic to Jewish resistance to the Catholic Church. He wrote, early in his career: The Jews are blood-relations of our Lord; if it were proper to boast of flesh and blood, the Jews belong more to Christ than we. I beg, therefore, my dear Papist, if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew. However, sometime before 1517, in his Letters to Spalatin, we can already see that Luther's hatred of Jews, best seen in tis 1543 letter, was not some affectation of old age, but was present very early on. Luther expected Jews to convert to his purified Christianity. When they did not, he turned violently against them. It is impossible for modern people to read the horrible passages below and not to think of the burning of synagogues in November 1938 on Krystalnacht. Nor would one wish to excuse Luther for this text. A number of points must, however, be made. The most important concerns the language used. Luther used violent and vulgar language throughout his career: he was not a man to say "manure" when he meant "shit". We do not expect religious figures to use this sort of language in the modern world, but it was not uncommon in the early 16th century. Second, although Luther's comments seem to be proto-Nazi, they are better seen as part of tradition of Medieval Christian anti-semitism. While there is little doubt that Christian anti-Semitism laid the social and cultural basis for modern anti-Semitism, modern anti-Semitism does differ in being based on pseudscientific notions of race. The Nazis imprisoned and killed Jews who had converted to Christianity: Luther would have welcomed them. None of this justifies what follows, but it may help to comprehend what is being written here. A selection of excerpts is also ava