As a young man the late Eric Gritsch was himself a member of the Hitler Youth (p. xiii) and presumably experienced at first hand National Socialist appropriation of Luther's works. A Lutheran church historian, he argues that Luther's radical and often violent polemic against the Jews was ‘against his better judgement’, sitting uneasily with other aspects of his theology. After an opening discussion of ‘The riddle of anti-semitism’, tracing Christian (or ‘Roman Catholic’, as Gritsch terms the Church from the time of Theodosius) attitudes towards Jews to around 1500, he turns to Luther's works, exploring Luther's view of the ‘Christian Old Testament’ and its implications for his views of Judaism; Luther's early (c. 1513–21) polemical views of the Jews, which Gritsch sees as rooted in medieval attitudes; Luther's ‘interlude of pastoral evangelism’, during which he focused on the conversion of Jews; the shift in Luther's thought in 1538, which saw him identify Jews, Turks and Unitarians as ‘Satan's fifth column’; and his final phase of ‘demonizing attacks’. Considering ‘after-effects’, Gritsch shows that these aspects of Luther's writings were largely ignored until the nineteenth century, and explores some of the conflicting interpretations of Luther's antisemitism offered by modern scholars. Gritsch's main thesis – that Luther's views on the Jews were ‘against his better judgement’ – is rather asserted than argued, and the context of Luther's polemics against the Jews is little considered: how do these texts fit with his equally strong polemic against Turks, Unitarians and also, and perhaps most significantly, Catholics? None the less, Gritsch offers a useful survey not only of Luther's writings on the Jews but also of the historiography.