Von den Jüden und iren Lügen
On the Jews and Their Liesby Martin Luther

This edition reproduces Martin Luther's complete first edition of Von den Jüden und iren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies), printed by Hans Lufft in Wittenberg in 1543. The publication article places it in January 1543.¹

The work contains sustained dehumanization, collective accusations and proposals for coercive anti-Jewish action. TJD preserves it as evidence of Jew-hatred, not as endorsement.

The controlling witness is the complete first-edition facsimile, which remains outside the runtime package.

The runtime record contains the collated German transcription and page apparatus. It contains no facsimile, provider OCR, raw transcript, English translation or private comparison text.

• The German layer has been collated across all 288 work images of the 1543 first edition. Original spelling remains preserved, while copy marks and unresolved readings remain documented separately.
• Collation reconciled specialized Fraktur OCR and provider ALTO text with WA 53. The first-edition facsimile remained controlling.
• The English work remains incomplete. Twenty-five pages have direct bilingual review, while 263 pages remain working and cannot enter the runtime package.

The 1543 work is public domain. e-rara applies the Public Domain Mark and requests attribution to Universitätsbibliothek Basel. TJD publishes only its collated German transcription and authored apparatus. The e-rara facsimile, provider OCR, incomplete English working translation and copyrighted 1971 comparison translation remain excluded.

Complete coverage is not the same as verified accuracy. A substantially abridged 1948 English text can check only the passages it preserves. The complete 1971 scholarly translation is useful as a private comparison witness but is copyrighted and is not reproduced or used as a replacement for translating the German. The remaining 263 pages therefore still require direct line-by-line review against the collated German. Until that work is complete, the English file remains `working` and the article body remains `candidate`.

The annotations keep four things separate: Luther’s numbered recommendations, the accusations he uses to motivate them, the biblical arguments by which he claims authority and the passages most often detached for quotation. The complete research tables are `recommended-measures.tsv`, `accusation-map.tsv`, `biblical-argument-map.tsv` and `frequently-excerpted-passages.tsv`.

What are the seven measures?

| No. | Facsimile images | Measure | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | 221–222 | Burn synagogues and schools and bury what remains. | | 2 | 222 | Destroy houses and confine their inhabitants in degraded accommodation. | | 3 | 223 | Confiscate prayer books and Talmudic writings. | | 4 | 223 | Forbid rabbis to teach on pain of bodily punishment or death. | | 5 | 223–224 | Withdraw safe-conduct and road access and require Jews to remain at home. | | 6 | 224–227 | Ban interest-taking and seize cash and precious objects. | | 7 | 227 | Compel young Jewish men and women to agricultural and domestic labor. |

Image 228 then gives expulsion as the fallback, ending with Drumb jmer weg mit inen. It is the program’s culmination but is not numbered as an eighth measure. Luther introduces the sequence as ſcharffe barmhertzigkeit, “sharp mercy,” while saying Christians should not take private revenge. That disclaimer does not soften the program: the measures ask rulers to destroy, confiscate, prohibit, confine, coerce and expel.

What arguments drive the program?

The accusation map follows the book’s progression from theological displacement to coercive policy: election by ancestry (images 7–23), circumcision (23–51), possession of Torah (51–73), alleged falsification of messianic texts (74–199), blasphemy and collective guilt (199–220), and accusations of curses, violence and usury (214–237). Dehumanizing images of a devil’s nest, basilisk, snakes, worms, swine and mad dogs bridge those claims to the policy sequence.

The biblical map shows the same architecture in scriptural terms: Hosea and exile (4–6); Abraham, ancestry and inward circumcision (7–51); Torah (51–73); Genesis 49 (74–97); the Davidic covenant (97–125); Haggai 2 (126–158); Daniel 9 (158–199); and Deuteronomy’s anti-idolatry laws applied to contemporary synagogues, homes, books and teachers (221–223). The map records Luther’s use of the passages; it does not treat his Christological conclusions or collective accusations as uncontested exegesis.

Which passages need special care when excerpted?

The excerpt map identifies the opening warning (image 2), the “devil’s nest” and basilisk passage (65), the assertion that Christians are at fault for not killing Jews (219–220), every item in the seven-part program (221–228), the plague and pestilence formulation (233), poisoned-well and stolen-child allegations (236–237), the sulfur-and-pitch restatement (250), the “mad dogs” passage (261–262), and the closing claim of demonic possession (286). Its warnings prevent a quotation from hiding whether a criminal claim is an allegation, whether a later restatement intensifies an earlier measure or whether a phrase belongs to Luther rather than TJD’s narration.