NEH Grant Supports Faculty-Led Project on Luther’s Legacy in Biblical Studies

professors

Jacqueline Vayntrub and Volker Leppin 

Yale Divinity School professors Jacqueline Vayntrub (Project Director) and Volker Leppin (Co-Director) have been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to launch an international scholarly collaboration to examine a difficult legacy: how Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish writings helped shape modern academic approaches to interpreting the Bible. 

The project will convene an international working group with scholars from Israel, Europe, and the U.S. to produce the first comprehensive study of how Luther’s anti-Jewish hermeneutics—including supersessionist and explicitly Christological readings of the Old Testament—shaped the methods and institutions of modern biblical studies. 

By tracing this history and foregrounding Jewish scholarly critiques and alternatives, the project aims to support a more historically informed and ethically responsible practice of biblical studies.

Titled The Lasting Impact of Martin Luther’s Anti-Judaism on Biblical Studies, this project was one of seven collaborative research grants awarded by NEH across the U.S. Additional collaborating scholars will include René Bloch, University of Bern (Switzerland), Yael Fisch, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), Bernard Levinson, University of Minnesota (U.S.); and Gury Schneider-Ludorff, Augustana Divinity School (Germany). 

More details about the National Endowment for the Humanities award are available on the NEH news site.