Martin Luther

He posted the ninety-five theses at Wittenberg in 1517, and from them the split of Western Christianity followed. He wrote about the Jews twice, and oppositely. In 1523, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew: there he blames the papacy for the Jews' not accepting the gospel, and demands they be treated humanely. In 1543, On the Jews and Their Lies: there he demands that synagogues be burned, houses destroyed, books confiscated, teaching forbidden and the Jews expelled. It is one of the founding texts of German antisemitism, and the Nazi press reprinted it verbatim.

The cause of the change is neither discovery nor grievance but calculation: he expected the Jews to accept a Christianity purged of the papacy, and when in twenty years they did not, he turned on them the same fury he turned on the pope and on the peasants. "The late Luther" cannot be printed as a separate man: it is the same man and the same logic.