Stephen Burnett: “I Don’t Think That Luther Hated Jews his Entire Life”

By Manfred Sing

Stephen Burnett from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is a Jewish historian specializing in early modern Europe. From May to June 2025, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz where he wrote and researched his new book on Luther and the Jews. He has been familiar with the institute since 2012, when he was a member of the IEG expert committee that accompanied the successful application for the inclusion of Luther documents in the UNESCO “Memory of the World” International Register. In the same year, he also attended a conference on the Reformation in Mainz together his wife Amy Nelson Burnett, a specialist for the early Reformed tradition. We spoke with him about his current book project and how it relates to his career path and research interests.

When you introduced yourself in the Research Colloquium at the IEG, you said that you are struggling with Martin Luther and his views on the Jews. Can you explain the nature of your struggle a bit more?

It’s an intellectual struggle and an interest of mine for a long time. I have always been curious about Luther since the time when I was student of Bob Kingdon’s in the 1980s.¹ We discussed Oberman’s book on the roots of Antisemitism² in his Reformation history seminar. I was also intrigued by the 1983 controversy surrounding the 500th anniversary of Luther’s birth in the GDR.³ Later, in my classes, I regularly taught the history of Antisemitism and spoke about Luther’s attitude towards the Jews.

“I don’t want to simply describe Luther’s hatred of Jews, but rather to explain the change that occured.”

The basic question is why did Luther suddenly change his mind in the years between 1539 and 1542 and write three terrible anti-Jewish polemics in 1543, among them “On the Jews and their Lies” which everybody knows and cites today and in which he calls for synagogues to be burned down. What are the motivations, the sources, the contexts?

I don’t want to simply describe Luther’s hatred of Jews, as many others have done, but rather to explain the change that occurred. In 1523, Luther wrote affirmatively that “Jesus Christ was born a Jew.” So, I don’t think that Luther hated Jews his entire life, as one German scholar recently claimed. He was wary of Jews and distrustful, but he did not vehemently hate them through most of his life as he did during his final years.

Since the Shoah, there has been much debate and research on Luther’s attitude towards Jews. What is your special contribution to the debate?

I start from the premise that Luther was rational. The reasons that he gave in 1543 for expelling Jews from Germany were compelling to him, even if they were not persuasive to others. Secondary factors like his deteriorating health do not by themselves explain Luther’s vehement tone in these books. To find out why Luther changed his views, I think that you must find a connection to what Luther argued in the 1543 texts. This is what most explanations fail to do. A common explanation is that Luther lost his patience with “the Jews” when they failed to convert. Another explanation is that he had had unpleasant experiences with Jews, a view at first put forward by Reinhold Lewin in 1911.⁴ Another explanation is that Luther believed the world would end soon, as Oberman maintained in 1983, or that he simply had an irrational hatred of the Jews and didn’t need any reason to write against them. All these explanations fail to explain why Luther changed his publicly stated position on “the Jews”. I think there are several blank spots in the story and that there are more things to consider than historians have said so far. I take a closer look at Luther’s life, context, and thought.

What did you find there that has been overlooked?

I am very much interested in the books that Luther was reading and the news he received from outside Wittenberg. I am hunting for his sources to find out who specifically he is attacking or whether he is shadow boxing. Was he fighting enemies that were not really there?

“Luther had read the entire Hebrew Bible several times, and he knew that there were expressions that Jewish grammarians couldn’t explain.”

I don’t think so. When he is talking about “Judaizers” among Christians, I don’t think that this is merely a figment of his imagination. In the contrary, I think he had certain groups in mind, for example Andreas Karlstadt’s⁵ congregation in Orlamünde in Saxony in the 1520s, that Luther condemned and that later became a hotbed of Anabaptism. The Moravian Sabbatarians were another example of “Judaizers” whom he attacked. Luther also engaged very much with Humanist and Hebraist Sebastian Münster who was a mediator of Jewish thought. Luther used and quoted Münster’s Bible edition in Hebrew with Latin translation.⁶ However, he was worried that Münster and people like him were on the slippery slope to anti-Trinitarian thought or to Judaizing Christianity. Most of the time, Luther criticized Münster when he accepted a Jewish interpretation too readily. For Luther, Münster was too focused on grammar. By the 1540s, Luther had read the entire Hebrew Bible several times, and he knew that there were words and expressions that Jewish grammarians couldn’t explain. For him, Münster was too trusting in Jewish Hebrew language expertise.

But Luther’s hostility toward Jews certainly cannot be explained solely by individual antagonism; there must also have been structural elements involved, right?

My goal is to highlight three elements of Luther’s anti-Judaism that scholarship has missed in my opinion. In the time when his polemics were written, Luther believed, first, in the real danger of conversion to Judaism since radical reformers, as in Orlamünde, taught that Christians were obliged to obey Old Testament Law, emulating Jewish practices. Second, he thought that humanists placed too much weight to Jewish interpretations of the Bible, as in the case of Sebastian Münster. Third, Luther believed that Jews hated Christians and sought to harm them financially, and even bodily. He referred to transmitted anti-Jewish stories about ritual murder and well poisoning. For anti-Jewish narratives, he quoted from Alfonso de Espina’s “Fortress of Faith” (1458), for example.

“Luther’s texts can be considered hate speech.”

Luther’s texts can be considered hate speech that aimed to motivate Christians to preach and act against “the Jews.” In 1543, a village pastor near Strasbourg preached, citing Luther, that Jews deserved to die. Luther held his position against the Jews until his final days and urged princes to act against them.

Luther and the Jews is a much-discussed topic. How did you find the subject, or did the subject find you?

As I said, this question has been on my mind for a very long time. I taught Jewish history, but I focused my research on Christian Hebraism, the study of Hebrew by biblical scholars, theologians, and Latin schoolteachers who sought new ideas to meet Christian cultural and religious needs during the 16th and 17th centuries. This was basically philological research with a focus on Hebrew and Latin and with scholarship in various European languages. I have written two books on Christian Hebraism and its relation to the reformation and to the development of Jewish studies.⁷ The research questions I tackled there were: Who were the Christian printers that printed Hebrew books? Who produced them, wrote them, bought them? To what degree were Jews involved? I looked at booksellers and printers, especially in the centers of humanism – like Rome, Paris, Leiden, and Wittenberg. Over the years, I created a database where I tried to list every book containing Hebrew type published between 1500 and 1660. It contains the booksellers, the converts, and rare copies of books, for example. I discovered that this was a very intercultural milieu which also produced the polyglot Bibles, like Münster’s Bible that I just mentioned. I ended my research in the 1660s, when I found that printers and booksellers began to rebrand old material – like modern pop groups – and re-released their “greatest hits”. In this context, I was always curious about Luther. However, being interested is one thing, and being able to do research is another.

“There was never a time since the Reformation that Luther was an unimportant or uninteresting figure.”

So, your research has shown that there was an intercultural milieu in the centers of humanism in the 16th and 17th centuries. How does Luther’s anti-Judaism fit in here? Especially, if one considers that the Catholic humanist Johannes Reuchlin defended Hebrew scriptures before an Inquisition court in 1513, when Johannes Pfefferkorn, another German Catholic theologian and convert from Judaism, led an anti-Jewish campaign to burn all Jewish books except the Bible.

Jew-hatred was and is a widespread phenomenon. When Luther wrote his polemics, he used already existing stereotypes and prejudices to stir people up against Jews. His 1543 anti-Jewish polemics were then reprinted in his collected works, and they would be used in the 19th century and by the Nazis to legitimize Antisemitism. Actually, I work here on the easiest problem.

What do you mean by that?

By this I mean that my task is simpler than that of a scholar dealing with the reception of Luther’s Judenschriften. Think about their reception from the late 16th century to the present, including Lutheran Orthodoxy, Pietism, Lutheran theology during the Enlightenment, the currents of the 19th century (Philosemitic and Anti-Semitic), the 20th century before Hitler, the Nazi appropriation of Luther’s anti-Semitism, and the struggles of theologians and church historians since the Shoah. As Thomas Kaufmann has stated in several of his works, there was never a time since the Reformation that Luther was an unimportant or uninteresting figure. It would be possible for a doctoral student to pick one topic from the long list that I have just given and there would be enough material for a doctoral dissertation. Johannes Brosseder’s “Luthers Stellung zu den Juden” (1972)⁸ provides an overview. By contrast, I only have Luther to study, and he left ample source material behind for me to study, even if he did not always clearly answer the questions that I want to answer. Thus, my task is simpler and more focused.

“How can we understand today that Luther advocated Jew-hatred? How can we explain it after 1945?”

Looking at Luther’s legacy in the 19th and 20th centuries raises many painful questions. How can we understand today that Luther advocated Jew-hatred? How can we explain it after 1945? These are much more difficult and painful questions, especially for Protestant believers. Theological investigations often try to explain this away by saying “This is not our Luther.” However, this is not an historical explanation. My problem is much more focused by comparison. I simply need to explain why Luther’s attitude changed, leading to his polemics in 1543.

In his book “Anti-Judaism,”⁹ David Nirenberg stated that Jew-hatred is an integral part of Western culture. Can this approach help us to understand Luther’s Jew-hatred better, as an example of a broader structure?

Yes and no. Most of the advice Luther gave to the princes had already been put into practice or at least discussed in print or during meetings of the Imperial German Diet before 1543. In this sense, his texts were dangerous, but not all that original. However, Nirenberg also does not explain Luther’s Jew-hatred. He describes it, but he doesn’t explain why Luther began to write against “the Jews”. Luther’s engagement with Judaism was at first purely theoretical; he did not preach incitement prior to 1543. In his 1543 polemics, he demonized the Jews and called them “children of the devil.” While Luther branded papists, Sacramentarians, and Turks as servants of the devil, and even at times “children of the devil,” it was far more dangerous for Jews when he sought to incite Christians using such language against them. In “That These Words of Christ, ‘This is My Body’, Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics” (1527), Luther mentioned the devil 77 times, repeatedly branding Bucer, Oecolampadius, and Zwingli as the devil’s henchmen. However, until 1543, he seldom demonized the Jews as he did his Catholic and Protestant opponents. Certainly, Jews were blinded or deceived by Satan in Luther’s earlier works, but he did not constantly demonize them as he did his other foes.

When can we read your new book?

Soon, I hope. I have about two-thirds of the book written in draft form and I hope to complete the manuscript by next summer.

Stephen, thank you very much for the interview. We hope to see you again soon. Good luck with finishing the book!

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Manfred Sing is research coordinator at the IEG.

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Appendix

1. On him see Wandel, Lee P.: Robert McCune Kingdon (1927–2010). Influential Scholar of the Reformation, in: Perspectives on History (01.03.2011), URL: https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/robert-mccune-kingdon-1927-2010-march-2011/ [2025-08-25]. ↩︎
2. Oberman, Heiko A.: The Roots of Anti-Semitism: In the Age of Renaissance and Reformation. Translated by James Porter from the German, Philadelphia 1983. ↩︎
3. The GDR leadership discovered the reformer as a figurehead for themselves although he had until then been regarded as a “peasant slayer” and “princes’ servant.” The state published over 100 books and illustrated volumes, recorded LPs, minted a coin collection, helped produce a five-part film and broadcasted the festive service on state TV. Although Luther became a vehicle for state propaganda, the state did not succeed in co-opting the church. See for example the relevant articles in Lehmann, Hartmut: Luthergedächtnis 1817 bis 2017, Göttingen 2012. ↩︎
4. Lewin, Reinhold: Luthers Stellung zu den Juden. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland während des Reformationszeitalters, Berlin 1911. ↩︎
5. Karlstadt was an early follower of Luther, but soon turned to the Reformed camp and became a representative of the so-called “radical reformation.” Luther saw him as a supporter of Thomas Müntzer and campaigned for his expulsion from Saxony in 1524. When Luther ended his visit to Orlamünde, he denigrated its inhabitants as “swarm spirits,” while they in turn saw him as a traitor to the Gospel. See Schilling, Heinz: Martin Luther. Rebel in Zeiten des Umbruchs, München 2012, p. 288. ↩︎
6. Münster’s was the first Christian Hebrew Bible edition with facing Latin translation. ↩︎
7. Burnett, Stephen G.: From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century, Leiden etc. 1996; idem: Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning, Leiden 2012. ↩︎
8. Brosseder, Johannes: Luthers Stellung zu den Juden im Spiegel seiner Interpreten: Interpretation und Rezeption von Luthers Schriften und Äußerungen zum Judentum im 19. u. 20. Jahrhundert vor allem im deutschsprachigen Raum, München 1972. ↩︎
9. Nirenberg, David: Anti-Judaism. The Western Tradition, New York 2013. ↩︎

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