...Nietzsche's
often-quoted phrase from The Antichrist, XXIV, “Anti-Semitism
is the final consequence of Judaism,” has been so grotesquely
misinterpreted, that he was quite right, in Ecce Homo, to demand “Hear me! I am such and such person, do not mistake me
for someone else.”
Fresh
from the Marxian experience, our natural question should be, what exactly is
Judaism according to Friedrich Nietzsche? Does he, like Marx, distinguish
between the Sabbath Jew and the everyday Jew, and, with this in
mind, must we address his “virulently anti-Semitic” dictum.
But
Nietzsche is no anti-Semite. Anyone promoting such vicious lies can be easily
countered by citing just one passage from Menschliches (475), which
follows:
“…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, which 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 [this is obviously
very consistent with Nietzsche’s view of Jesus Christ, as opposed to what would
later become the Christian doctrine]), the purest philosopher (Spinoza [Nietzsche’s view
of Spinoza is complicated, but on the balance very high]), the mightiest book (the Bible), and the most effective moral code in the
world. Furthermore, in the darkest medieval times, when the Asiatic cloud had
settled heavily over Europe, it was the Jewish [sic!] free
thinkers, scholars, and doctors, who, under the harshest personal pressure,
held fast to the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence, and
defended Europe against Asia [sic!]; we owe to their efforts not least, that a
more natural, rational, and in any event unmythical explanation of the world
could finally triumph again and that the ring of culture now linking us to the
enlightenment of Graeco-Roman antiquity, 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.”
From
this necessarily lengthy, but extremely instructive passage we hear an echo of
the Marxian critique of Judaism as Capitalism, but only an echo, as
Nietzsche makes himself clear that, in his mind, Judaism can be also equated to
the Renaissance, and I am sure that in that equation it is not
that kind of Judaism that can be conceivably perceived as a causa ultima
of anti-Semitism.
But,
incidentally, here is his previous comment on anti-Semitism, now in full
context:
“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, of all reality, of the inner world, as well as of the outer. 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 so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this
matter that today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing
that it is no more than the final consequence of Judaism.”
Perhaps
Nietzsche wishes to say that Christianity itself is also the final consequence
of Judaism?! For this would be very much in line with Schopenhauer’s claim that
Christianity is a “Jewish religion…”
Cutting
through these complications, at least one thing stands out quite clear. It was
not Sabbath Judaism, which Marx was attacking. It was not Renaissance
Judaism, which Nietzsche was attacking. Here, finally, are my own chicken
coming home to roost. In professing my personal admiration for Judaism, it was
the mystical-religious Sabbath Judaism of the ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the aesthetic Renaissance
Judaism of the Haskala, today’s Reform Jews, that I was, and still am
admiring; but the totally different even if related type of stock market
Judaism, with its trickle-down morality of greed and money-making frenzy
and the Judaism of “to be at any price,” I can only deplore.
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