Jane Wise is an Associate Director, International Center for Law and Religion Studies, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University

Throughout history, book burning has been a tool wielded by both secular and religious authorities in efforts to suppress minority views perceived as threatening to the prevailing order. The Old Testament recounts King Jehoiakim of Judah burning a scroll dictated by the prophet Jeremiah stating that Babylon would destroy the land. Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang burned books and buried scholars who he believed were subversive to his reign more than two thousand years ago. In 1244 in the streets of Paris, 24 carriage-loads of Jewish religious manuscripts were burned by French law officers, alleging they contained passages blasphemous to Christians. In encounters between Europeans and indigenous American civilizations, Mayan and Aztec books were destroyed in the 1500s. English Roman Catholic abbeys and monasteries were stripped of their manuscripts and books by citizens loyal to the Church of England in the 1600s and burned or destroyed. During the Nazi regime in Europe starting in 1933, the government decreed broad grounds for burning books that acted subversively or struck at the root of German thought, the German home, or the “driving forces” of German people. (more…)