On the Jews and Their Lies

On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen) is a long German treatise Martin Luther published in Wittenberg in January 1543, three years before his death. Twenty years earlier, in That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, he had rebuked the church for treating Jews "as if they were dogs" and urged Christians to deal gently with them in the hope that the recovered gospel would win them over. That hope did not materialize. In the intervening years Luther had refused to intercede with the Elector of Saxony on behalf of Josel of Rosheim after the 1536 expulsion mandate, had heard reports of Christians in Bohemia and Moravia adopting Sabbath observance, and, as he says at the opening of this work, had received a pamphlet in which a Jew disputes with a Christian. He wrote, he claims, not to convert Jews, whom he now regarded as beyond conversion, but to arm Christians against their arguments.

The treatise moves in three stages. It first attacks what Luther calls Jewish boasting: descent from Abraham, circumcision, possession of the Law, and the land and temple, each of which he argues confers nothing before God. It then mounts an extended exegesis of Genesis 49, 2 Samuel 23, Haggai 2 and Daniel 9 to prove that the Messiah has already come and that the seventy weeks have run out; this is the portion that most resembles his other biblical commentary. The third stage abandons argument for denunciation. Drawing on medieval convert literature and the Toledot Yeshu, Luther repeats slanders against Jesus and Mary as proof of Jewish blasphemy, recycles accusations of usury, well-poisoning and ritual murder, and then issues his counsel to princes and pastors: burn the synagogues, raze Jewish houses, confiscate prayer books and the Talmud, forbid rabbis to teach on pain of death, revoke safe conduct, seize money and property, and compel Jews to manual labor, with expulsion as the alternative. He calls this "sharp mercy."

The work mattered immediately and has mattered since. The city of Strasbourg banned its sale in 1543 at Josel of Rosheim's petition; Saxony and Hesse renewed restrictions on Jews in its wake; Heinrich Bullinger and Andreas Osiander condemned it. In the twentieth century it was reprinted and displayed by the Nazi regime, and Julius Streicher invoked it in his defense at Nuremberg. The Lutheran World Federation in 1984 and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1994 formally repudiated it. It stands as the most consequential statement of Christian anti-Judaism by a major Protestant theologian, and as evidence that fluency in Scripture is no safeguard against hatred.

Who should read this: historians, students of the Reformation and of Christian antisemitism, and pastors or teachers who need to confront what Luther actually wrote rather than what is said about it. It is not a text for devotional reading or spiritual formation, and anyone approaching it for guidance in the Christian life should turn elsewhere; it is included here as a record to be reckoned with, not a voice to be followed.