The immensely important question of Nietzsche and the Jews requires more than one entry, and here is yet another one. As I said many times before (but such repetition is necessary), the tag of anti-Semite has been pinned on Nietzsche by the critics who use against him many insinuations, but he of course provides enough fuel for the bonfire to ignite the charge, with, say, the following unpleasant sentence from his Antichrist XXIV : “Anti-Semitism is the final consequence of Judaism.” On the surface, it may appear as if Nietzsche were making the Jews themselves, rather than the Jew-haters of the Gentile world, ultimately responsible for the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. But if we cared to restate this sentence, as, say, “without the Jews, anti-Semitism would never have existed,” it comes out as a logical truism, and the only thing we need to bother about is the reason why it is being said in the first place, and thus about the full context in which it appears. I shall provide the full context in the Appendix at the end of this entry, which will hopefully clear the air enough, without me or anyone else having to write a lengthy commentary on it.
But, returning to our principal question, which has been answered several times in the negative already, is it at all possible that Nietzsche could indeed be the virulent anti-Semite that he is habitually portrayed as?
It is rather hard to imagine a bigoted Jew-hater engaging in an amiable correspondence with an enthusiastic admirer of his, who happens to be openly and unmistakably Jewish. But such was his relationship with the Danish Jew Georg Brandes (Cohen), whose name, if the reader remembers, has already popped up before, along with Brandes’s remarkable praise for his iconoclastic idol.
I know that most people have a large respect for established authority; and whose opinion can elicit greater respect than that of Bertrand Russell, who insists that Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite? (See my earlier entry The Nietzsche Doctrine, where he is convincingly quoted on this subject.)
Of the same opinion is Nietzsche’s authoritative German-born Jewish-American philosopher, Nietzsche's translator and commentator, Professor Walter Kaufmann. It is of utmost interest what he says in his Footnote to Jenseits #248, in the American edition which uses his English translation and Commentary…
But first let us be reminded of what Nietzsche says there, to which Kaufmann reacts:
“There are two types of genius: one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth. Just so, there are among peoples of genius those to whom the woman’s problem of pregnancy and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting has been allotted--- the Greeks, for example, were a people of this type; also the French--and others who must fertilize and become the causes of new orders of life---like the Jews,* the Romans, and, asking this in all modesty, the Germans? Peoples, tormented and enchanted by unknown fevers and irresistibly pressed beyond themselves, in love and lusting after foreign races (after those who like “being fertilized”), and at the same time domineering like all that knows itself to be full of creative powers and hence “by the grace of God.” These two types of genius seek each other, like man and woman; but they also misunderstand each other--- like man and woman.” (Jenseits 248.)
And here is Kaufmann’s reaction:
*“Nietzsche inverts the anti-Semitic cliché that the Jews are uncreative parasites who excel, if at all, only as performers and interpreters… The image of the Jews “lusting after foreign races” was a cliché of German anti-Semitism, but it is entirely characteristic of Nietzsche’s style of thinking and writing that the phrase is “spiritualized” (to use his own term) and moreover used in a context which makes plain--- for those who read and do not merely browse--- that Nietzsche’s meaning is utterly opposed to that previously associated with the words. His famous “revaluation” begins with words that receive new values.
“Nietzsche’s conception of the Greeks and Romans also inverts the usual view. In his frequent insistence on the debt of the Greeks to earlier civilizations he was at least half a century ahead of his time.” (Footnote to #248.)
There is no point in continuing to quote other Nietzsche’s defenders against the charges of anti-Semitism. It is clear that he is being attacked by people who must know well that their accusation is without merit. They are doing it mainly for two reasons, in my opinion. In the first place, some do not wish to allow Nietzsche’s most controversially sounding statements to circulate with impunity, and it is infinitely safer to brand a source as "anti-Semitic" (or "anti-Christian," etc.) than to suffer its unwarranted popular interpretations without an explicit blanket condemnation. And, secondly, although it is well known that Nietzsche’s words had been habitually misused, even falsified by the propaganda machine of the Third Reich, the very fact of Nietzsche’s most oblique association with the Nazi regime has by itself made him unacceptable to those of his critics, for whom such association alone is enough to indict him, regardless of his own innocence or guilt in this matter.
The rest of this entry is an Appendix (followed by my short concluding statement), which includes the most significant Nietzschean passages representing his diverse opinions concerning the Jews. Here is some truly fascinating reading, indeed. From the very first of these excerpts, it becomes quite clear that those who are calling him an anti-Semite are promoting a false identification. This one is from Menschliches #475:
“Incidentally, the whole problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as their energy and higher intelligence, their capital of spirit and will that accumulated from generation to generation in the long school of their suffering must predominate to a degree that awakens envy and hatred; and so in the literature of nearly all present-day nations (and, in fact, in proportion to their renewed nationalistic behavior), there is an increase in literary misconduct, leading the Jews to the slaughterhouse, as scapegoats for every possible public and private misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible mixed European race, the Jew becomes as useful and desirable an ingredient, as any other national quantity. Every nation, every man has disagreeable and even dangerous characteristics; it is cruel to demand that the Jew should be an exception. Those characteristics may even be especially dangerous and frightful in him, and, perhaps, the youthful Jew of the stock exchange is the most repugnant invention of the whole human race. Nevertheless, I would like to know how much one must excuse in the overall accounting of a people which, not without guilt on all our parts, has had the most sorrowful history of all peoples and to whom we owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the mightiest Book, and the most effective moral code in the world. Furthermore, in darkest medieval times, when the Asiatic cloud had settled heavily over Europe, it was Jewish freethinkers, scholars, and doctors, who, under the harshest personal pressure, held fast to the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence, and who defended Europe against Asia; we owe to their efforts not least that a more natural, rational and at any rate unmythical explanation of the world could finally triumph again, and that the ring of culture which connects us to the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity, had remained unbroken. If Christianity did everything possible to orientalize the Occident, Judaism helped substantially to occidentalize it again and again, which in a certain sense is to say that it made Europe’s history and task into a continuation of the Greek.”
Here is another interesting and telling excerpt, this time from Genealogie I (7-8):
“One will have divined already how easily the priestly mode of valuation can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic, and then develop into the opposite. This is particularly likely when the priestly caste and the warrior caste are in jealous opposition, and are unwilling to come to terms. The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physicality, health and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity (war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games). The priestly-noble mode of valuation presupposes other things: it is disadvantageous when it comes to war... As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies, but why?--- Because they are the most impotent! It is because of their impotence that, in them, hatred grows to monstrous proportions… All that has been done on earth against the noble, the powerful, the masters, the rulers, fades in comparison with what the Jews have done against them, who, in opposing their enemies and conquerors, were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. It was the Jews who dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation: good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved of God, saying, The wretched alone are good. One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation. As I said in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, section 195, with the Jews begins the slave revolt in morality that has a history of two thousand years and that we no longer see because it has been victorious.
“From the trunk of that tree of Jewish hatred there grew something equally incomparable, a new love, the profoundest and sublimest kind of love… and from what other trunk could it have grown? That love grew out of it as its crown by the very same impulse which drove the roots of that hatred deeper into all that was profound and evil. Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners, was he not this seduction in the most irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those Jewish values and ideals? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that all the world, namely all opponents of Israel, could without a second thought swallow just this bait?”
Here now is the Antichrist #24 item, from which one sentence I was already quoting before:
"Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The first thing necessary to its solution is that Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it had sprung, it is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In the words of the Savior, “salvation is of the Jews...” The second thing to remember is that the psychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (that is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the Savior of mankind.
"The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world for when they were confronted with the question “to be or not to be,” they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be, at any price: this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer world. They put themselves against all those conditions, under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to live; out of themselves, they evolved an idea, which stood in direct opposition to natural conditions-- one by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology, until each had become a contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: The Christian Church, put beside the “people of God,” shows a complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their influence has falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter to such an extent that today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more than the final consequence of Judaism.
"In my Genealogy of Morals, I give the first psychological explanation of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a noble morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere product of the denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system belongs to the second division in every detail. In order to be able to say ‘Nay’ to everything representing an ascending evolution of life-- that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval-- the instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent an other world, in which the acceptance of life had appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily,-- and with a profound talent for self-preservation,-- the side of all those instincts, which make for decadence-- not as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power, by which “the world” could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have simply been forced into appearing in that guise, and with some degree of skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves at the head of all decadent movements, for example, the Christianity of Paul, and so make of them something stronger than any party, frankly saying Yes to Life… To the sort of people who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity,-- that is to say, to the priestly class,-- decadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it."
And now, to finish off this selection, here are excerpts from Jenseits #250 and #251:
“What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing that is both of the best and of the worst: the grand style in morality, the terribleness and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionabilities-- and hence precisely the most attractive, captious, and choicest part of those plays of color and seductions to life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is burning now--- perhaps burning itself out. We artists among the spectators and philosophers are--- grateful for this to the Jews.” (#250.)
“…I have not met a German yet who was well disposed toward the Jews; and however unconditionally all the cautious and politically-minded repudiated real anti-Semitism, even this caution and policy are not directed against the species of this feeling itself but only against its dangerous immoderation, especially against the insipid and shameful expression of this immoderate feeling--- about this one should not deceive oneself. That Germany has amply enough Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood has trouble (and will still have trouble for a long time) digesting even this quantum of “Jew”--- as the Italians, French, and English have done, having a stronger digestive system--- that is the clear testimony and language of a general instinct to which one must listen, in accordance with which one must act. “Admit no more new Jews! And especially close the doors to the East (also to Austria)!” thus commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indefinite, so it could easily be blurred or extinguished by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions (even better than under favorable conditions), by means of virtues that today one would like to mark as vices--- thanks above all to a resolute faith that need not be ashamed before “modern ideas”; they change, when they change, always only as the Russian Empire makes its conquests--- being an empire that has time and is not of yesterday--- namely, according to the principle: “as slowly as possible.”
“A thinker who has the development of Europe on his conscience will, in all his projects for this future, take into account the Jews as well as the Russians as the provisionally surest and most probable factors in the great play and fight of forces. What is called a “nation” in Europe today, and is really rather a res facta than a res nata (and occasionally can hardly be told from a res ficta et picta) is in any case something evolving, young, and easily changed, not yet a race, let alone such an aere perennius as the Jewish type: these “nations” really should carefully avoid every hotheaded rivalry and hostility! That the Jews, if they wanted it--- or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want--- could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.
“Meanwhile, they want and wish rather, to be absorbed and assimilated by Europe; they long to be fixed, permitted, respected somewhere at long last, putting an end to the nomads’ life, to the “Wandering Jew”; and this bent and impulse (which may even express an attenuation of the Jewish instincts) should be noted well and accommodated: to that end it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country…” (#251.)
Enough has been quoted already to establish the falsity of Nietzsche’s critics’ charges of anti-Semitism, and the last sentence in our selection is a particularly nice finishing touch. On the other hand, I am wondering how much Nietzsche’s view of the Jews would have changed had he lived today with the State of Israel on the map, and the might of the United States behind it?… "To be absorbed and assimilated" is naturally the last thing on the Jewish collective mind (some individual exceptions to this are quite insignificant), and Nietzsche was demonstrably mistaken about this, particularly, having altogether missed the phenomenon of Zionism that was already gathering momentum in his active lifetime.
But in one thing about the Jews he was not mistaken, but, we can say, was prophetic. That is his prediction that the Jews, as well as the Russians, are the provisionally surest and most probable factors in the great play and fight of forces for the future of human civilization.
But, returning to our principal question, which has been answered several times in the negative already, is it at all possible that Nietzsche could indeed be the virulent anti-Semite that he is habitually portrayed as?
It is rather hard to imagine a bigoted Jew-hater engaging in an amiable correspondence with an enthusiastic admirer of his, who happens to be openly and unmistakably Jewish. But such was his relationship with the Danish Jew Georg Brandes (Cohen), whose name, if the reader remembers, has already popped up before, along with Brandes’s remarkable praise for his iconoclastic idol.
I know that most people have a large respect for established authority; and whose opinion can elicit greater respect than that of Bertrand Russell, who insists that Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite? (See my earlier entry The Nietzsche Doctrine, where he is convincingly quoted on this subject.)
Of the same opinion is Nietzsche’s authoritative German-born Jewish-American philosopher, Nietzsche's translator and commentator, Professor Walter Kaufmann. It is of utmost interest what he says in his Footnote to Jenseits #248, in the American edition which uses his English translation and Commentary…
But first let us be reminded of what Nietzsche says there, to which Kaufmann reacts:
“There are two types of genius: one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth. Just so, there are among peoples of genius those to whom the woman’s problem of pregnancy and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting has been allotted--- the Greeks, for example, were a people of this type; also the French--and others who must fertilize and become the causes of new orders of life---like the Jews,* the Romans, and, asking this in all modesty, the Germans? Peoples, tormented and enchanted by unknown fevers and irresistibly pressed beyond themselves, in love and lusting after foreign races (after those who like “being fertilized”), and at the same time domineering like all that knows itself to be full of creative powers and hence “by the grace of God.” These two types of genius seek each other, like man and woman; but they also misunderstand each other--- like man and woman.” (Jenseits 248.)
And here is Kaufmann’s reaction:
*“Nietzsche inverts the anti-Semitic cliché that the Jews are uncreative parasites who excel, if at all, only as performers and interpreters… The image of the Jews “lusting after foreign races” was a cliché of German anti-Semitism, but it is entirely characteristic of Nietzsche’s style of thinking and writing that the phrase is “spiritualized” (to use his own term) and moreover used in a context which makes plain--- for those who read and do not merely browse--- that Nietzsche’s meaning is utterly opposed to that previously associated with the words. His famous “revaluation” begins with words that receive new values.
“Nietzsche’s conception of the Greeks and Romans also inverts the usual view. In his frequent insistence on the debt of the Greeks to earlier civilizations he was at least half a century ahead of his time.” (Footnote to #248.)
There is no point in continuing to quote other Nietzsche’s defenders against the charges of anti-Semitism. It is clear that he is being attacked by people who must know well that their accusation is without merit. They are doing it mainly for two reasons, in my opinion. In the first place, some do not wish to allow Nietzsche’s most controversially sounding statements to circulate with impunity, and it is infinitely safer to brand a source as "anti-Semitic" (or "anti-Christian," etc.) than to suffer its unwarranted popular interpretations without an explicit blanket condemnation. And, secondly, although it is well known that Nietzsche’s words had been habitually misused, even falsified by the propaganda machine of the Third Reich, the very fact of Nietzsche’s most oblique association with the Nazi regime has by itself made him unacceptable to those of his critics, for whom such association alone is enough to indict him, regardless of his own innocence or guilt in this matter.
The rest of this entry is an Appendix (followed by my short concluding statement), which includes the most significant Nietzschean passages representing his diverse opinions concerning the Jews. Here is some truly fascinating reading, indeed. From the very first of these excerpts, it becomes quite clear that those who are calling him an anti-Semite are promoting a false identification. This one is from Menschliches #475:
“Incidentally, the whole problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as their energy and higher intelligence, their capital of spirit and will that accumulated from generation to generation in the long school of their suffering must predominate to a degree that awakens envy and hatred; and so in the literature of nearly all present-day nations (and, in fact, in proportion to their renewed nationalistic behavior), there is an increase in literary misconduct, leading the Jews to the slaughterhouse, as scapegoats for every possible public and private misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible mixed European race, the Jew becomes as useful and desirable an ingredient, as any other national quantity. Every nation, every man has disagreeable and even dangerous characteristics; it is cruel to demand that the Jew should be an exception. Those characteristics may even be especially dangerous and frightful in him, and, perhaps, the youthful Jew of the stock exchange is the most repugnant invention of the whole human race. Nevertheless, I would like to know how much one must excuse in the overall accounting of a people which, not without guilt on all our parts, has had the most sorrowful history of all peoples and to whom we owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the mightiest Book, and the most effective moral code in the world. Furthermore, in darkest medieval times, when the Asiatic cloud had settled heavily over Europe, it was Jewish freethinkers, scholars, and doctors, who, under the harshest personal pressure, held fast to the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence, and who defended Europe against Asia; we owe to their efforts not least that a more natural, rational and at any rate unmythical explanation of the world could finally triumph again, and that the ring of culture which connects us to the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity, had remained unbroken. If Christianity did everything possible to orientalize the Occident, Judaism helped substantially to occidentalize it again and again, which in a certain sense is to say that it made Europe’s history and task into a continuation of the Greek.”
Here is another interesting and telling excerpt, this time from Genealogie I (7-8):
“One will have divined already how easily the priestly mode of valuation can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic, and then develop into the opposite. This is particularly likely when the priestly caste and the warrior caste are in jealous opposition, and are unwilling to come to terms. The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physicality, health and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity (war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games). The priestly-noble mode of valuation presupposes other things: it is disadvantageous when it comes to war... As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies, but why?--- Because they are the most impotent! It is because of their impotence that, in them, hatred grows to monstrous proportions… All that has been done on earth against the noble, the powerful, the masters, the rulers, fades in comparison with what the Jews have done against them, who, in opposing their enemies and conquerors, were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. It was the Jews who dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation: good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved of God, saying, The wretched alone are good. One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation. As I said in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, section 195, with the Jews begins the slave revolt in morality that has a history of two thousand years and that we no longer see because it has been victorious.
“From the trunk of that tree of Jewish hatred there grew something equally incomparable, a new love, the profoundest and sublimest kind of love… and from what other trunk could it have grown? That love grew out of it as its crown by the very same impulse which drove the roots of that hatred deeper into all that was profound and evil. Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners, was he not this seduction in the most irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those Jewish values and ideals? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that all the world, namely all opponents of Israel, could without a second thought swallow just this bait?”
Here now is the Antichrist #24 item, from which one sentence I was already quoting before:
"Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The first thing necessary to its solution is that Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it had sprung, it is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In the words of the Savior, “salvation is of the Jews...” The second thing to remember is that the psychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (that is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the Savior of mankind.
"The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world for when they were confronted with the question “to be or not to be,” they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be, at any price: this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer world. They put themselves against all those conditions, under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to live; out of themselves, they evolved an idea, which stood in direct opposition to natural conditions-- one by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology, until each had become a contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: The Christian Church, put beside the “people of God,” shows a complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their influence has falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter to such an extent that today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more than the final consequence of Judaism.
"In my Genealogy of Morals, I give the first psychological explanation of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a noble morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere product of the denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system belongs to the second division in every detail. In order to be able to say ‘Nay’ to everything representing an ascending evolution of life-- that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval-- the instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent an other world, in which the acceptance of life had appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily,-- and with a profound talent for self-preservation,-- the side of all those instincts, which make for decadence-- not as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power, by which “the world” could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have simply been forced into appearing in that guise, and with some degree of skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves at the head of all decadent movements, for example, the Christianity of Paul, and so make of them something stronger than any party, frankly saying Yes to Life… To the sort of people who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity,-- that is to say, to the priestly class,-- decadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it."
And now, to finish off this selection, here are excerpts from Jenseits #250 and #251:
“What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing that is both of the best and of the worst: the grand style in morality, the terribleness and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionabilities-- and hence precisely the most attractive, captious, and choicest part of those plays of color and seductions to life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is burning now--- perhaps burning itself out. We artists among the spectators and philosophers are--- grateful for this to the Jews.” (#250.)
“…I have not met a German yet who was well disposed toward the Jews; and however unconditionally all the cautious and politically-minded repudiated real anti-Semitism, even this caution and policy are not directed against the species of this feeling itself but only against its dangerous immoderation, especially against the insipid and shameful expression of this immoderate feeling--- about this one should not deceive oneself. That Germany has amply enough Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood has trouble (and will still have trouble for a long time) digesting even this quantum of “Jew”--- as the Italians, French, and English have done, having a stronger digestive system--- that is the clear testimony and language of a general instinct to which one must listen, in accordance with which one must act. “Admit no more new Jews! And especially close the doors to the East (also to Austria)!” thus commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indefinite, so it could easily be blurred or extinguished by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions (even better than under favorable conditions), by means of virtues that today one would like to mark as vices--- thanks above all to a resolute faith that need not be ashamed before “modern ideas”; they change, when they change, always only as the Russian Empire makes its conquests--- being an empire that has time and is not of yesterday--- namely, according to the principle: “as slowly as possible.”
“A thinker who has the development of Europe on his conscience will, in all his projects for this future, take into account the Jews as well as the Russians as the provisionally surest and most probable factors in the great play and fight of forces. What is called a “nation” in Europe today, and is really rather a res facta than a res nata (and occasionally can hardly be told from a res ficta et picta) is in any case something evolving, young, and easily changed, not yet a race, let alone such an aere perennius as the Jewish type: these “nations” really should carefully avoid every hotheaded rivalry and hostility! That the Jews, if they wanted it--- or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want--- could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.
“Meanwhile, they want and wish rather, to be absorbed and assimilated by Europe; they long to be fixed, permitted, respected somewhere at long last, putting an end to the nomads’ life, to the “Wandering Jew”; and this bent and impulse (which may even express an attenuation of the Jewish instincts) should be noted well and accommodated: to that end it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country…” (#251.)
Enough has been quoted already to establish the falsity of Nietzsche’s critics’ charges of anti-Semitism, and the last sentence in our selection is a particularly nice finishing touch. On the other hand, I am wondering how much Nietzsche’s view of the Jews would have changed had he lived today with the State of Israel on the map, and the might of the United States behind it?… "To be absorbed and assimilated" is naturally the last thing on the Jewish collective mind (some individual exceptions to this are quite insignificant), and Nietzsche was demonstrably mistaken about this, particularly, having altogether missed the phenomenon of Zionism that was already gathering momentum in his active lifetime.
But in one thing about the Jews he was not mistaken, but, we can say, was prophetic. That is his prediction that the Jews, as well as the Russians, are the provisionally surest and most probable factors in the great play and fight of forces for the future of human civilization.
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