Hello everyone, welcome back to Onscript. I'm Matt Lynch. I am co-host of OnScript with Matt Bates, Andrew Johnson.

I'm located in the UK at Westminster Theological Center, where I've been for four years.

We have a very distinguished guest today, Professor Susanna Heschel, who is a scholar of Judaism in the 19th and 20th centuries,

including Jewish Christian and Jewish Muslim relations.

And we'll get into that in a moment, but before we get into the interview, I want to set the context for what we discussed,

since I didn't have a long time to dive into the details as much as I normally would have wanted. Professor Heschelde

is a very busy life, and she graciously gave up some of her time for me to talk with OnScript.

So she wrote, she's written several books, but she wrote the one we're talking about, it's called

the Aryan Jesus, and it's published by Princeton

University Press in 2008. And I came across this book when I was writing a blog post on Old Testament

scholar Gerhard von Rod, who was professor of Old Testament at the University of Yenna in Germany

in the 1930s and 40s. And I was intrigued by how a professor of Old Testament survived and

functioned at a university that was not only operational during the Nazi era but also

was the epicenter of anti-Semitic scholarship, or so-called scholarship, in the Nazi era.

So I was curious about how Von Rade functioned there, and that's not our focus today, but Yenna does come into play, because Professor Heschel investigated an institute called the Center for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life.

And that was headed up by a man named Walter Grundman, who was a professor at the University of Vienna,

and a number of the professors there were also involved in this institute.

And Professor Heschel was the first to really crack open the story on that institute,

which was previously seen to be a minor episode in the life of academia during the Nazi era. Well, it turns out that the Institute had over 120 members

from a number of seminaries and universities throughout the Reich during the Nazi era. So it's a, there's an important story being told by Professor

Heschel and she did all the firsthand research going to Germany, digging into the archives,

uncovering the dark history of this era. It's really fascinating. It's a real honor to speak with her.

...