Gerhard Kittel (23 September 1888 – 11 July 1948) was a German Lutheran[1] theologian and lexicographer of biblical languages.

[citation needed] The son of Old Testament scholar Rudolf Kittel,[8] he married Hanna Untermeier in 1914, but there were no children from the union.

[7] He had had no previous involvement in politics but called the party "a völkisch renewal movement on a Christian, moral foundation".

[11] He attempted to distinguish his work from the "vulgar antisemitism of Nazi propaganda" like Der Stürmer and Alfred Rosenberg,[11] who was known for his anti-Christian rhetoric, völkisch arguments and emphasis on Lebensraum.

[16] A Professor of Evangelical Theology and New Testament at the University of Tübingen, he published studies depicting the Jewish people as the historical enemy of Germany, Christianity, and European culture in general.

In a lecture of June 1933 Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question), that soon appeared in print, he spoke for the stripping of citizenship from German Jews, their removal from medicine, law, teaching, and journalism, and to forbid marriage or sexual relations with non-Jews – thus anticipating by two years the Nazi government, which introduced its Nuremberg Racial Laws and took away Jewish rights of German citizenship in 1935.

(See Otto Michel, Anpassung oder Widerstand: eine Autobiographie, Wuppertal & Zurich, Brockhaus Verlag, 1989, pp.