What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? First, their synagogues or churches should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered with earth and crushed so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.
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"The hair on my head is a fine work of art, but it is not necessary for salvation."
"The more we are afflicted in this world, the more we are conformed to Christ."
"If I could understand how a good Christian could be a usurer, I would eat him."
"The assembly of his greased and religious crew in praying was altogether like the croaking of frogs, which edified nothing at all."
"I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self."
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 calls for Christians to destroy Jewish places of worship by burning them down and burying the remains so thoroughly that no trace survives. He frames Jews as a cursed people deserving this violent erasure of their religious and communal life. The passage is an explicit incitement to arson, collective punishment, and the total obliteration of Jewish sacred spaces from Christian society.
Luther, the monk who ignited the Protestant Reformation in 1517, wrote this in his 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies. Earlier he had hoped Jews would convert once freed from papal corruption; when they did not, his rhetoric turned savagely hostile. The same theological certainty that fueled his break with Rome hardened into scapegoating, and his prescriptions later supplied rhetorical ammunition to German antisemites, including the Nazi regime four centuries on.
Early modern Germany seethed with religious upheaval: the Reformation had shattered Christendom, peasants had revolted, and apocalyptic anxiety ran high. Jews lived as a tolerated but despised minority, routinely blamed for plague, usury, and ritual murder, and expelled from city after city. Princes sought theological justification for restricting or banishing them. Luther's 1543 broadside gave that impulse the authority of Protestantism's founder, shaping Saxon policy and anti-Jewish sentiment across Lutheran territories for generations.
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