Friedrich Nietzsche, who had famously declared that god is dead, had a peculiar view on Judaism. Nietzsche's philosophy of the Jewish question was anti anti-Semitic, and he even suggested that it would be "useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country.” His hatred of the anti-Semitic movement, however, did not exonerate Nietzsche entirely of anti-Semitism.
Admiration for European Jews
In his writings, Nietzsche frequently spoke admiringly of Jewish history and culture in Europe. “The Jews... are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe,” he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil. While admiring Jewish accomplishments, he made care to stress that the Jews were an asset, not a liability, for Europe. “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, this is certain,” wrote Nietzsche, before issuing an important caveat: “That they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.” He instead prescribes accepting and assimilating the Jews into the mainstream as a cure to the Jewish problem.
In an 1886 letter addressed to his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (who had recently married notorious anti-semitic activist Bernhard Förster), Nietzsche chillingly alluded to the possibility that the anti-Semites would one day try to purge Europe of Jews; while praising his English-language translator, a Jewish woman from England, he speculates that her Jewish origins were more to thank for her talents than her Englishness. “May heaven have mercy on the European intellect if one wanted to subtract the Jewish intellect from it!” he proclaimed.
Anti-Semitism
Nietzsche’s most prominent condemnation of anti-Semitism came from his treatment of Richard Wagner in the 1888 essay Nietzsche contra Wagner. Although he had once idolized Wagner for his music, the essay (published six years after Wagner’s death) served as a posthumous renouncement of his former friend. “[Wagner] had condescended step by step to everything that I despise—even to anti-Semitism,” wrote Nietzsche.
With his many renunciations of anti-Semitism and praises of Jewry, it seems that Nietzsche intentionally left an exonerating trail of evidence to one day distance himself from the anti-Semites who would champion his name. In his 1887 Christmas letter to his sister, he chided Elisabeth for her marriage to Förster and expressed melancholic awareness that anti-Semites were already appropriating his philosophy: "Above all it arouses mistrust against my character, as if I publicly condemned something which I favored secretly–and that I am unable to do anything against it, that in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence sheet the name Zarathustra is used has already made me almost sick several times.”
The Jewish Religion
Nietzsche at times expressed praise for the Jewish religion, which contrasted greatly with his constant polemics against Christianity. He tended to favor the Old Testament over the New Testament, considering the former to be an excellent collection of tragedy. “All honor to the Old Testament!" he wrote in The Genealogy of Morals. "I find in it great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest quality in the world, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart; what is more, I find a people." In contrast, he attacked the New Testament for its pious meekness. "In the New one... I find nothing but petty sectarianism, mere rococo of the soul, mere involutions, nooks, queer things, the air of conventicle, not to forget an occasional whiff of bucolic mawkishness that belongs to the epoch (and to the Roman province) and is not so much Jewish as Hellenistic.”
However, as an ardent despiser of Christianity, he certainly could not avoid attacking the Jewish faith at times, which he considered the source of the "slave revolt in morality" that ultimately led to the Christian morality he greatly despised. In The Genealogy of Morals, for instance, he claims that out of "Jewish hatred, the profoundest and sublimest, capable of creating ideals and reversing values, the like of which has never existed on earth before– there grew something equally incomparable, a new love, the profoundest and sublimest kind of love– and from what other trunk could it have grown?"
Indeed, Nietzsche’s treatment of social groups (including ones he was a member of) was often harsh and polemical, and the Jews were no exception. His criticisms of Judaism stemmed from his passionate polemics against the European bourgeoisie, whose Christianity he considered a cultural legacy of the Ancient Israelites.
Conclusions
It is hard to ignore some of Nietzsche's problematic implications when he discussed the Jews, and one could even argue that Nietzsche sometimes engaged in the anti-Semitism that he claimed to despise. Even if Nietzsche ultimately came to the conclusion that Jews were a positive influence on the societies they lived in, he nonetheless believed that the Jews were an exceptional race, which is a line of thinking that has always been a common ingredient amongst anti-Semitic ideologies. Whether or not Nietzsche's philosophy was clear of anti-Semitism is debatable, but it is evident from his writings that he did loathe the German anti-Semitic movement of his day that ultimately led to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.
Sources:
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond good & evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Vintage Books. 1989.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the genealogy of morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, NY: Vintage Books. 1989.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche contra wagner. In The portable nietzsche., 661-683. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Penguin Books. 1968.
Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche : Philosopher, psychologist, anti-christ. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1974.
Bennett Murray - Bennett Murray wrote for his first publication in 2006, and has been writing ever since. Murray most recently worked for the Phnom Penh ...
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