On the Jews and Their Lies
Von den Juden und ihren Lügen · Martin Luther, 1543
We do not host this text
This 1543 treatise contains sustained antisemitic invective and calls for violence against Jewish people and property. It was cited by the Nazi regime centuries later in support of persecution. We catalogue it because a library that hides it cannot be trusted, and because pretending it doesn't exist has never once protected anyone. But we will not reproduce it here, and we are not the right distributor for it in any form.
Luther wrote this late in his life, after decades of failed hope that Jewish communities would convert to the reformed faith he preached. What resulted is not a theological argument. It is a call to burn synagogues, destroy Jewish homes and religious texts, and expel Jewish communities from German lands.
There is no reading of this text that redeems it. It sits alongside Luther's best work in the same library because honesty about a founder's worst failures is part of what it means to confess that the church itself is, in Lutheran teaching, at once holy and sinful. Concealing it would not undo it. It would only mean the next person who encountered it did so with no context at all.
The church's own repudiation
In April 1994, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Church Council adopted a formal Declaration to the Jewish Community, explicitly rejecting Luther's antisemitic writings and expressing profound regret for their consequences, including their use to justify the Holocaust. Other Lutheran bodies worldwide, including the Lutheran World Federation, have issued similar statements.
We consider that repudiation as essential a part of this record as the work itself.
For further reading
Serious historical and theological engagement with this text exists in published scholarship examining Luther's antisemitism, its late-medieval context, and its catastrophic later use. We are not the source for that scholarship; a university library or theological seminary is.
Where to find it
We list a library route only, deliberately. This is not devotional reading, and we will not sell it as such. We earn nothing from this link. Read it in a scholarly edition with its apparatus, alongside the ELCA's 1994 Declaration to the Jewish Community.
- Find it in a library Find Luther's Works vol. 47 in a library
We list a library route only. This text should be read in a scholarly edition with its apparatus, alongside the ELCA's 1994 Declaration to the Jewish Community, and not bought as devotional reading.