Martin Luther's scathing antisemitic text

Luther, Martin. Von den Jüden und iren Lügen.

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Extremely rare first edition, first printing of Martin Luther's ruthlessly antisemitic pamphlet. There was another edition printed in 1543 that has a slightly different title-page and only 128 leaves, which is more commonly found. A Latin adaptation by Justus Jonas was published the following year.

Luther long believed he could convince Jewish people to reject their faith and convert to Christianity. As the years progressed with little success, he became increasingly incensed. "Medieval Christendom was so firmly convinced of the incontestable truth of its own tradition and teaching that it could conceive of no rival truth [...] According to this view, the Jews knew that the coming of Jesus was foretold in Scripture, even though they stubbornly denied this. To the Christian the conventional interpretation of Scripture was the only possible and sensible one; the Jewish interpretation could not therefore fail to seem the product either of wilful misunderstanding or falsification” (Trachtenberg, p. 15). Some Christians took this a step further and became convinced that, as Jewish people denied the teachings of the New Testament, they were in fact anti-Christian, or worshippers of Satan. Luther's book echoes the noted Spanish theologian Alfonso de Spina and his famous "Fortalitium fidei", published in 1494. De Spina argued that Jews "are the children of the devil" who worship at "the synagogue of Satan" (ibid., p. 42).

With such outlandish statements, it is little wonder that Jews in the 15th and 16th centuries were accused of the foulest crimes. As Luther approached the end of his life, his rantings against Jewish people came to a head in the publication of his present pamphlet on "the Jews and their Lies". Here he was completely comfortable in consigning Jews to the flames of hell, encouraging his readers to burn synagogues, drive Jews from their homes, and banish them from Christian society.