First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians.
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"Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying."
"The Christian's life is not a bed of roses, but a cross."
"The greatest gift of God is a pious, cheerful, God-fearing, home-loving wife, to whom you can entrust your property, and your children, and your all."
"The world is a great book, of which they who never stir from home read only one page."
"Let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave."
German theologian whose 95 Theses (1517) launched the Protestant Reformation and broke the Catholic Church's monopoly on Western Christianity. Closely associated with Philipp Melanchthon (Lutheran systematizer) and John Calvin (later Reformer who built on Luther's break). For an intellectual contrast, see Pope Leo X, Renaissance pope (1513-1521) — Leo X's indulgence sales triggered Luther's break and Leo excommunicated him in 1521 — Luther's entire Reformation is structured as a direct answer to the indulgence-funded Vatican Leo represented.
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Luther is calling for the destruction of Jewish places of worship and study, urging that synagogues and schools be burned and their remains buried so nothing visible remains. He frames this violent erasure as a religious duty, claiming Christians must act this way to prove their faith to God and avoid appearing to tolerate what he considers blasphemy against Jesus. It is an explicit incitement to religious persecution dressed as piety.
This comes from Luther's 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies, written late in his life after Jews refused to convert to his reformed Christianity. Earlier he had written sympathetically of Jews, but bitterness, failing health, and apocalyptic urgency hardened him. The passage shows the darker side of the reformer who challenged papal authority: the same uncompromising certainty that fueled the Reformation also produced virulent antisemitism later weaponized by Nazi propagandists.
Early modern Europe treated religious dissent as a civic threat. Jews lived precariously under expulsion orders, ghettoization, and blood libels across German lands. Luther wrote amid the Reformation's violent fragmentation, peasant wars, and Ottoman pressure, when rulers fused confessional identity with political legitimacy. Calls to destroy synagogues fit a broader pattern where princes enforced theological conformity by force. Luther's pamphlet circulated widely via the printing press, shaping policy in Saxony and influencing centuries of Christian hostility toward Jewish communities.
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