The questioning of certain church practices by German priest and scholar Martin Luther, a former Augustinian monk, in the form of the ninety five theses, had launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517, and by the mid 1540s a large part of northern Europe has left the Roman Catholic church for new Evangelical communities.
Luther has produced pamphlets first for, then against, the Jews between 1532 and 1544. He had initially persuaded himself that the Jews would readily accept his modified version of Christianity, and is infuriated to discover otherwise.
Concluding that their malevolent Jewish obstinacy makes them reluctant to convert, and not any deficiencies in his doctrine of practice, Luther attacks the Jews, urging that their synagogues and homes be destroyed and that they be driven from the country.
“Verily, a hopeless, wicked, venomous and devilish thing is the existence of these Jews...our pest, torment and misfortune.”
German Protestant reformer and theologian Matthias Flacius Illyricus, after studying at the universities of Basel and Tubingen, goes to Wittenberg, where Philipp Melanchthon and Luther influence him.
Appointed professor of Hebrew in 1544 when he is twenty-four, he becomes a strict Lutheran dogmatist.
