RadixJournal - May 20, 2026


Martin Luther： On the Jews and Their Lies (1543)


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

123.69

Word count

1,007

Sentence count

27

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Anti-Semitism of Martin Luther. Why did he write it? How does it relate to antisemitism in Nazi Germany and why did it matter to the Nazi regime What is the link between Martin Luther and Adolf Hitler?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 His advice wasn't exactly heeded by the German princes that he was writing to.
00:00:08.960 And I don't think this was a, let's just say, like, tangibly, palpably influential essay.
00:00:19.540 It does have a history, though.
00:00:22.020 It was revived by National Socialists.
00:00:25.480 And, you know, there are pogroms, Russia, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe for quite some time. There's a tradition of it, blood libel and so on. We can discuss that as well.
00:00:37.520 um but the the national socialist you know were a modern and you could even say modernist
00:00:47.660 political movement they wanted to advance technology they had you know every leftist
00:00:57.360 will tell you hitler was not a socialist he never nationalized a single corporation in germany and
00:01:03.700 And while all of that is true, I think it's also overlooking the genuinely progressive socialist quality of national socialism that resembled fascism, of course, and resembled, to be frank, the New Deal in the United States.
00:01:21.280 in terms of public institutions kind of creating a sort of quasi-socialized middle class
00:01:29.640 allowing people to go on vacations maybe for their first time promoting the production of
00:01:38.320 high quality low cost consumer goods the volkswagen being iconic in this regard all i'm
00:01:47.620 saying is that it is a modernist uh political party with a political agenda and here you sort
00:01:56.760 of see them you know retreating 500 years into the past in the in the sense that i you know
00:02:05.160 jewish persecution under the nazis it's deeper than just this essay or something but you can
00:02:12.860 see a lot of things about from this essay being enacted burning down synagogues taking away
00:02:20.900 passports etc you see certainly you know echoes of that in national socialism i don't think that
00:02:26.880 should be disregarded at all there was a lutheran quality to national socialism that also shouldn't
00:02:36.000 be over inflated but shouldn't be dismissed either i think all these things are real
00:02:43.780 um so i i think what we're trying to get at because uh you know anyone who reads or studies
00:02:51.360 this will probably say something like you know they're echoes of martin luther and hitler and
00:02:55.960 i don't and i basically agree with that but i i think anyone could say that but um i i think
00:03:04.040 what we're going to try to get to is the
00:03:06.920 hypocrisy, you could say, almost schizoid 0.78
00:03:11.720 ambivalence that 0.99
00:03:15.520 is at the heart of every Christian anti-Semite, 0.84
00:03:20.200 particularly someone like Luther who really
00:03:23.820 read Paul, translated Paul,
00:03:28.040 in fact, and really knows the Bible
00:03:32.040 And the sort of, again, quasi schizophrenic, not literally, of course, figuratively schizophrenic quality of the Christian anti-Semite. And I think that is what we will focus on. 0.62
00:03:47.500 but do you have anything to say on this uh mark i know i mean just a very kind of simple uh maybe
00:03:54.500 obvious remark is that i guess it seems surprising to us that a figure like luther made such a shift
00:04:01.040 on this topic in his life but i mean if we look at um political figures now um some of whom were
00:04:09.680 strongly philo-semitic as recently as five years ago but have become israel critics and sort of
00:04:16.600 implicitly influential people in the society,
00:04:38.080 and to some extent, the secular equivalent of priests,
00:04:43.840 if they're media personalities.
00:04:46.460 And we've seen them shift pretty radically.
00:04:51.380 So I don't think it's something that we should find very
00:04:54.740 surprising in the case of Luther.
00:04:57.320 It's much more dramatic in the case of Luther,
00:04:59.380 because Luther is legitimately a world historical figure.
00:05:03.120 And he is changing Christianity in a sort of fundamental way,
00:05:07.540 or he represents a fundamental shift in Christianity.
00:05:13.840 um so that's different of course and so he becomes more archetypal
00:05:20.500 um but i think that we can say that we see people in our own time who are undergoing a kind of
00:05:27.900 metamorphosis that is in some ways similar to the metamorphosis that um luther went through
00:05:33.580 yeah you know megan kelly is a sort of modern day martin luther don't you think yeah well yeah but
00:05:40.060 So I think you understand my point, though, that he becomes kind of archetypal.
00:05:43.920 I'm only half joking when I say that.
00:05:45.760 It's obviously ridiculous to compare the two on some level, but they're both sort of doing the thing.
00:05:52.380 Yeah, and it also points to sort of the humanness of Luther, I would say, as well.
00:05:57.500 Right?
00:05:57.760 I mean, he's basically pissed that the Jews are not as excited about conversion as he had hoped they would be.
00:06:07.180 right yeah um so it shows the um a kind of it reveals a human quality to him i would say as
00:06:14.780 well but um it is you know some of his rhetoric here though is is very much kind of anti-paul
00:06:23.580 in the sense that paul tells us i think there's there's a passage worth uh
00:06:29.260 citing here, but in which we've read, Romans 11, 25, Paul writes,
00:06:38.460 a hardening has come upon part of Israel until the full number of Gentiles has come in,
00:06:44.120 and so all Israel will be saved. So the idea there is, this is a kind of implicit prophecy 0.99
00:06:52.900 in Paul that once all the Gentiles 0.99
00:06:56.320 convert to Christianity, which is a lot of Gentiles
00:07:00.220 especially at the time of Paul
00:07:02.760 when they were relatively small in number
00:07:07.840 and the Roman world was still pagan 0.81
00:07:11.000 once all the Gentiles are converted 0.96
00:07:14.580 then the Jews will also convert 0.98
00:07:16.920 at that time the Jews will also convert 0.62
00:07:19.580 Um, and that's something that you hear Christians talking about today is that, um, it's, it's inevitable that the Jews will convert. And that's in Catholicism. That's why they are, they are condoned as this, um, witness people, right. 0.52
00:07:41.460 that's allowed to sort of abide
00:07:44.480 within the body of Christendom 0.96
00:07:46.080 because eventually they'll all convert
00:07:49.520 and all will become Christians themselves.
00:07:53.680 In any case, but he doesn't,
00:07:56.000 it seems like he's got radical cynicism
00:07:58.040 that doesn't, that goes away from this idea
00:08:00.700 and doesn't believe ultimately in Paul's prophecy.
00:08:07.860 Yes.