No serious thinker has done more harm to the Jewish people than Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings were an important inspiration for Adolph Hitler and Nazism. Yet far from being an antisemite, Nietzsche was one of the most pro-Jewish German writers of his time. How can this paradox be explained and does it have any lessons for the present day?
Nietzsche was friendly to the Jews but when he got caught up in his theories he said things which because of the way they were expressed inspired antisemitism, something Nietzsche never expected to happen. Like Voltaire he criticized the Jews for creating Christianity but made it sound as if they were a cabal responsible for everything evil in the world over which they were supposedly trying to seek control.
Nietzsche was the son and grandson of Protestant ministers. He became an academic expert on ancient Greece yet his poor health forced him to resign his professorship at a young age. He spent most of the rest of his life on a pension, traveling from spa to resort town trying to avoid the extremes of weather that gave him such physical discomfort.
A massively productive and self-consciously iconoclastic writer, Nietzsche never attained a large readership in his lifetime though his fame did grow. His life and works are too complex to summarize here but one constant feature of his worldview was his friendliness, even admiration, toward Jews.
The growing antisemitism in Germany during the 1870s and 1880s disgusted him. He derided the hatred of Jews by his friend, the composer Richard Wagner, with whom he eventually broke; ridiculed it on the part of his publisher; and tried to block his sister’s marriage to an antisemitic agitator. Nietzsche had several Jewish friends including one of his greatest admirers, the famous Danish literary critic George Brandes. After a stimulating conversation with another Jewish friend, Helen Zimmern, he noted, “It is fantastic to what extent this race now has the `intellectuality’ of Europe in its hands.”
His biographer Curtis Cate, accurately calls Nietzche an "anti-antisemite."
Moreover, though he is mainly remembered for his concept of the “superman” and the “blond beast,” Nietzsche was an anti-militarist. He hated the German monarchy and loved France (at that time Germany’s main enemy), Switzerland, and Italy, where he spent most of his adult life. Far from believing in the superiority of the “Aryans,” he liked to imagine he had Polish ancestry.
To give a sense of Nietzsche’s world view--though these extreme expressions came from 1888 as he began to descend into madness--Nietzsche urged all of the other countries in Europe to unite against Germany, called on Jews to help him in his campaign against Christianity, and said he would like to kill all the German antisemites.
There is no doubt that if he had lived to see Nazism he would have been appalled and been outspoken in his enmity, though his sister became an enthusiastic Nazi, whose funeral in 1934 was attended by Hitler himself. Nietzsche's works became official Nazi doctrine and the dictator ordered that a monument be built to him.
How then did this pro-Jewish philosopher become an inspiration for the murderers of 86 percent of Europe's Jews?
The immediate answer is his hatred of Christianity and belief that a post-Christian, secular morality must be developed. In this regard, he was part of the post-Darwin reaction to the cracking of religious certainty. As a believer in what Brandes called “aristocratic radicalism” and having a horror of democracy, Nietzsche, in the words of Cate, contrasted “the positive `breeding’ of aristocracies to the negative `taming,’ `castration,’ and emasculation of the strong by insidious `underdogs.’” Or in Nietzsche’s own words:
“Christianity, growing from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a product of this soil, represents a reaction against the morality of breeding, of race, of privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence.”
There is no doubt that if he had lived to see Nazism he would have been appalled and been outspoken in his enmity, though his sister became an enthusiastic Nazi, whose funeral in 1934 was attended by Hitler himself. Nietzsche's works became official Nazi doctrine and the dictator ordered that a monument be built to him.
How then did this pro-Jewish philosopher become an inspiration for the murderers of 86 percent of Europe's Jews?
The immediate answer is his hatred of Christianity and belief that a post-Christian, secular morality must be developed. In this regard, he was part of the post-Darwin reaction to the cracking of religious certainty. As a believer in what Brandes called “aristocratic radicalism” and having a horror of democracy, Nietzsche, in the words of Cate, contrasted “the positive `breeding’ of aristocracies to the negative `taming,’ `castration,’ and emasculation of the strong by insidious `underdogs.’” Or in Nietzsche’s own words:
“Christianity, growing from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a product of this soil, represents a reaction against the morality of breeding, of race, of privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence.”
In his book, Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche penned what became the core of Nazi philosophy and the death knell for European Jewry:
“All that has been done on earth against `the nobles,’ the `mighty, the `overlords,’…is as nothing compared to what the Jews did against them: the Jews, that priestly people who were only able to obtain satisfaction against their enemies and conquerors through a radical revaluation of the latter’s values, that is, by an act of the most spiritual revenge….It was the Jews who…dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation…saying `the wretched alone are the good ones, the poor, the helpless, the lowly….You who are powerful and noble are to all eternity the evil ones….”
This was however, in contrast to what the Nazis made out of it later and the Islamists do today. He didn't accuse the Jews of doing anything on their own--no conspiracy of the elders of Zion-- but merely the “invention” of Christianity. What should be stressed here is that his diatribe against Jews was a small, isolated part of his writing that did not carry over into his life or thinking otherwise.
He dissociated the existing Jews from the harm he perceived arising from those of them—especially Paul—who had created Christianity two millennia earlier. Nietzsche used these terms interchangeably when he said the “Western world was now suffering from `blood poisoning’” through being Jewified, Christianized, or “mobified.”
But earlier, he had written admiringly in explaining his opposition to antisemitism, “The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe.” Indeed, they fit his aristocratic prescription since they survived “thanks above all to a resolute faith that does not need to feel ashamed in the presence of `modern ideas.’” Germany, he continued, would do better to deport the antisemites than the Jews who would provide many good qualities.
So how did Nietzsche become, in effect, the unintentional intellectual executioner of European Jewry and in what ways do all too many modern intellectuals resemble him? There are three interrelated answers.
The first is that he dragged the Jews into his broader program of tearing down Christianity, making them props for his current agenda. In Nietzsche’s time, most antisemites hated Jews as symbols of modernity, socialism, and opposition to nationalism.
Today, Western leftist professors, intellectuals, and journalists have simply turned this process on its head: same attack but for the exact opposite reasons. Now they attack the Jews—not necessarily all Jews but those who do not accept the doffing of their identity as a people or strong religious belief--and their main contemporary product, Israel as symbols of all the things they supposedly part of their campaign against Western civilization, traditional viewpoints, nationalism, and capitalism.
They are prepared, too, to admire Jews, on condition that they become--in the phrase of Isaac Deutscher--"non-Jewish Jews" who put the cause of revolution first and their own people's interests last. On the previous occasion this happened, it led young Jewish Bolsheviks to work enthusiastically to destroy the Jewish religion, culture, and identity in the USSR, until the dictatorship they built up dispensed with them as well.
Like Nietzsche they play with the issue of Jewishness without realizing how they are laying the foundation for far more violent and vicious assaults, notably—but not exclusively—that of the genocide-oriented Islamists. Unlike Nietzsche, however, they make things even worse by denying or minimizing the threat of the Islamists, the really dangerous anti-Jewish forces of our era,
Second, like Nietzsche, they don’t realize how their “sophisticated” arguments can affect the unsophisticated. These journalists and professors rationalize their lectures, theatrical plays, and newspaper articles while refusing to recognize how their nuances become sledgehammers in the hands of militant activists.
Third, they play with ideas and ideological systems without comprehending how these intellectual, career-promoting, attention-getting games have poisonous consequences. Already the small remnant of Jews in Europe is feeling the pressure from Islamists, leftist ideologues, and more traditional right-wing haters. The departure of many or most of them from that continent is a real possibility.
Yet Nietzsche was superior to these modern counterparts and it is possible to feel far more sympathy for him than for them. After all, he consciously and explicitly decried totalitarian politics and upheld free thought against the currently hegemonic dogma.
Thus, our modern Nietzsches, some “Jewish” themselves, are repeating this sad history which might—though we hope not—also end in rivers of blood. Already, the small remnant of Jews in Europe is feeling the pressure and the departure of that remnant which survived the Nazis is no longer beyond possibility.
Thus, our modern Nietzsches, some “Jewish” themselves, are repeating this sad history which might—though we hope not—also end in rivers of blood. Already, the small remnant of Jews in Europe is feeling the pressure and the departure of that remnant which survived the Nazis is no longer beyond possibility.
We should all remember the terrible irony that the man who wrote, “Heaven have mercy on European understanding, if ever one wanted to remove from it Jewish intelligence,” was the philosophical architect of that very deed.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are Lebanon: Liberation, Conflict, and Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan), Conflict and Insurgency in the Contemporary Middle Eastand editor of the (seventh edition) (Viking-Penguin), The Israel-Arab Reader the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria(Palgrave-Macmillan), A Chronological History of Terrorism (Sharpe), and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).
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