The Structure of an Ambivalenceo
This chapter is based on a study1 that examines the image of Judaism as offered by the two most important philosophers of the nineteenth century, Hegel and Nietzsche. One was active in the first half and the other in the second half of the century; one was a major philosopher of reason and the other one of its severest critics. I confine myself to treating both of them as philosophers, which means concentrating on their own philosophical ideas rather than on their various users and abusers, and understanding their image of the Jews in its relation to each philosopher’s ideas and overall philosophical project.
Hegel’s philosophical project was a vast and ambitious one. It included the attempt to reach a philosophical understanding of the modern world, its essence and genesis, and thereby to shape modernity still further and lead to its climax. Hegel saw European culture as the core of world history, and as being essentially a Christian culture—which the philosopher must translate and elevate into concepts; Judaism was a necessary background for understanding the Christian revolution and era.
According to the Hegelian dialectic, every cultural form makes some genuine contribution to world history (and the world Spirit), after which it is sublated (aufgehoben ) and disappears from the historical scene. Yet the Jews continued to survive long after their raison d’être had disappeared—indeed, after they no longer had a genuine history in Hegel’s sense, but merely existed as the dead corpse of their extinguished essence. Now, with the French Revolution, the Jews were entering the modern world and claiming their rights and place within it. Hegel, despite his anti-Jewish bias, was perfectly disposed to grant these rights, but did not know what to do with the Jews in modernity as Jews, nor how to explain their survival in terms of his system.
Nietzsche too had an ambitious philosophical project, in many ways opposing Hegel’s. A radical cultural revolutionary, his goal was not to bring the process of modernity to culmination but rather to subvert and reverse it or, more precisely, to divert it into a totally different course. The process that had started with Socrates, Moses, and Jesus, and that Hegel saw as creating truth, civilization, spirit, and even God himself (the Absolute) was to Nietzsche a story of decadence and degeneration. Nietzsche attributed this decadence to two main sources—rauonatistic metaphysics and Christianity: the first stemming from the Greeks, the second from the ancient Jews. He therefore needed an interpretation of Judaism (and also of Socratism, as offered in The Birth of Tragedy) in order to expose and upset the decadent culture of the present. Given these projects, Hegel had seen the merit of ancient Judaism in its discovery—which led to Christianity—that God was spirit and that spirit is higher than nature; whereas for Nietzsche this was the great falsification that the ancient Jewish priests had brought about. However, as my analysis shows, Nietzsche did not recognize a single, permanent Jewish essence. He distinguished three different modes or phases in Judaism, and expressed admiration for two of them: for biblical Judaism, and for the Jews of the latter Diaspora.2 His harsh critique pours exclusively on the middle phase, the second-temple “priestly” Judaism (as he calls it), which had started the “slave revolution” in morality—namely, Christianity. Nietzsche’s true target is Christianity: so much so that often he reads the ideas and even the phrases of the New Testament directly into what he derogates under the name of Judaism.
On the emotional level, Hegel, especially in maturity, had lost interest in the Jewish theme, whereas Nietzsche’s interest in it was increasingly passionate and burning. And this links into another aspect of my study: to what extent did each philosopher overcome the anti-Jewish feelings imbued in his upbringing and milieu? Those feelings were of a different kind in each case. Nietzsche came to maturity in the second half of the nineteenth century amid a wave of nationalistic and racist anti-Semitism raging in Germany, which had already a distinct secular feature. For a short time, Nietzsche says, he too “had resided in the zone of the disease” (meaning his association with Wagner), but later he performed a powerful overcoming of that “disease” and became opposed to the anti-Semites with particular energy and passion.
It has become a commonplace to say Nietzsche was “ambivalent” about the Jews. Yet the word “ambivalent” itself is ambiguous and often creates an impression of depth where there is but confusion. My aim is to analyze the precise structure of Nietzsche’s ambivalence about the Jews and bring to light its ingredients in their mutual relations. On the one hand Nietzsche sees ancient Judaism as one of the main sources of European decadence, and on the other he assigns modern Jews, whom he admires, a leading role in creating the nondecadent, de-Christianized Europe he wishes for the future. As for modern anti-Semitism, Nietzsche repudiates it with the same passion he reserves for the proto-Christian Jewish “priests”—and for similar reasons. These two human types, apparently so opposed to each other—the anti-Semite and the Jewish priest—are actually genealogical cousins: they share the same deep-psychological pattern of ressentiment that Nietzsche’s philosophy diagnoses at the basis of human meanness and degeneration.
The following are the main methodological elements of this study: (1) I examine Nietzsche’s views of the Jews in relation to his actual philosophy, not as casual reflections that any intellectual, artist, or scientist may have about the Jews. (2) Taking an immanent approach, I deal with Nietzsche’s own thought and not—despite their interest for the historian or socio!ogist—with its many popular and politically motivated usages, or with what is vaguely called “Nietzscheanism.” (3) In addition to their philosophical meaning, I try also to listen to Nietzsche’s words in their rhetorical context. (4) To a limited extent I have taken his psychological career into account—both his struggle with close anti-Semitic intimates, and his last twilight letters before he went mad, which carry a special hermeneutic value. (5) Above all, I am looking for the underlying structure of Nietzsche’s complex position as indicated above.
This search has led me to distinguish, first, between Nietzsche’s attitude toward anti-Semitism and toward Judaism. Second, within Judaism I had to further distinguish between three periods or modalities: (1) biblical Judaism; (2) second-temple “priestly” Judaism; (c) Diaspora and contemporary Jews.
When Nietzsche attacks the anti-Semites or defends the Jews, he aims at real people: the actual community of the Jews, and anti-Semitism as a contemporary movement. By contrast, when dealing with ancient priestly Judaism Nietzsche treats it as a psy-chocultural category that is latent in the current (Christian) culture and that Nietzsche, as the “genealogist” of this culture, has to expose. Contrary to many antiSemites—and also to many Jewish apotogetics—Nietzsche does not project his view of ancient Judaism into a political attitude toward the Jews of today. This break allowed him to be at the same time—and with the same intense passion—both an anti-anti-Semite and a critique of ancient priestly Judaism—the fountain of Christianity.
A selection of four kinds of texts allows us to recognize the fact of Nietzsche’s fierce and univocal opposition to contemporary anti-Semitism. These texts are drawn from (1) his published writings; (2) his intimate letters (to his sister, his mother, his close friends); (3) his “twilight letters” written on the verge of madness; (4) “The Fritsch Affair”—a correspondence with an anti-Semitic agitator who tried to recruit Nietzsche—and “Zarathustra” too, as Nietzsche says with disgust4—into his camp.
Here are a few illustrations. In the Genealogy Nietzsche says of the anti-Semites:
This hoarse, indignanr barking of sick dogs, this rabid mendaciousness and rage of “noble” pharisees, penetrates even the hallowed halls of science. (I again remind readers who have ears for such things of that Berlin apostle of revenge, Eugen Dühring, who employs moral mumbo-jumbo more indecently and repulsively than anyone else in Germany today: Diihring, the foremost moral bigmouth today—unexceued even among his own ilk, the anti-Semites.) (GM III:14)
“This is our conviction: we confess it before all the world, we live and die for it. Respect for all who have convictions!” I have heard that sort of thing even out of the mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite certainly is not any more decent because he lies as a matter of principle. (A 55)
Meanwhile they [the Jews] want and wish rather, even with some importunity, 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” ... to that end it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country. (BGE 251)
Since Wagner had moved to Germany, he had condescended step by step to everything I despise—even to anti-Semitism. (NCW“How I Broke Away From Wagner: 1)
To Overbeck:
This accursed anti-Semitism ... is the reason for the great rift between myself and my sister. (KGB III, 503)
And to his sister:
You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy.... It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets.5 My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible ... and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times. (Christmas 1887, PN, 456–57)
The intimate texts carry special weight, because they prove that Nietzsche’s opposition to anti-Semitism was not merely external and “political” (or “politically correct”), as with many liberals, but penetrated into the deep recesses of his mind. That result might have been reinforced by Nietzsche’s intense relations with anti-Semites such as his sister, Wagner, Cosima, and perhaps also Jacob Burckhardt.6 These depth-psychological relations could have served as a lever in providing the energy for overcoming his own early anti-Semitism in the intense way he did, that is, not as liberal rationalist but with all the passion of his being—that is, in a “Nietzschean” way.
Even without considering psychology, there are sufficient philosophical grounds for Nietzsche’s active anti-anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitic movement contains and heightens most of the decadent elements in modern culture that Nietzsche’s philosophy had set out to combat:
Here are a few more quotes, illustrating his opposition to nationalism and the cult of politics and the state:
Is there any idea at all behind this bovine nationalism? What value can there be now, when everything points to wider and more common interests, in encouraging this boorish self-conceit? And this in a state of affairs in which spiritual dependency and disna-tionalization meet the eye and in which the value and meaning of contemporary culture lie in mutual blending and fertilization! (WP 748)
The whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore—in direct proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistically—the literary obscenity is spreading of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jews are just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant. (HH 475)
Culture and the state—one should not deceive oneself about this—are antagonists.... All great ages of cuhure are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even antipolitical. (TI “Germans” 4)
On the New Idol
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” That is a lie!
... every people speaks its tongue of good and evil ... but the state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil....
Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and bites easily. Even its entrails are false.
“On earth there is nothing greater than I : the ordering finger of God and I”—thus roars the monster. And it is not only the long-eared and shortsighted who sink to their knees.
Escape from the bad smell! Escape from the idolatry of the superfluous.... Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune. (Z:I “On the New Idol”)
Combined, Nietzsche’s four negations—of nationalism, of racism, of anti-Semitism, and of the cult of the state—also explain why his philosophy is inherently opposed to fascism and Nazism, although these ideologies have abused Nietzsche for their purposes.
Nietzsche’s attack on ancient (“priestly”) Judaism is as fierce and uncompromising as his assault on anti-Semitism. The Jewish priests have spread the spurious ideas of a “moral world order,” sin, guilt, punishment, repentance, pity, and the love of the neighbor. Thereby they falsified all natural values. The meek and the weak are the good who deserve salvation; all men are equal in their duties toward a transcendent God and the values of love and mercy He demands. (Nietzsche thus attributes to the Jewish priests a direct Christian content, and often describes them as Christian from the start.) Yet beneath his doctrine of mercy, the priest’s soul was full of malice and ressentiment, the rancor of the mentally weak whose will-to-power turns into hostility and revenge against the other, which is his only way to affirm himself. Thereby the Jewish priests—pictured as early Christians—have created the “slave morality,” which official Christianity then propagated through the world. Whereas the anti-Semites accuse the Jews of having killed Jesus, Nietzsche accuses them of having begotten Jesus.
The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentimerrt itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. (GM 1:10)
Priestly morality is the morality of the existentially impotent, in whom ressentiment against the powerful and the self-assured has become a value-creating force. The existential “slaves” take vengeance on their “masters” on an ideal plane, in that they succeed in imposing their own values on the masters, and even cause them to interiorize those new values, and thereby subjugate them. Henceforth the powerful person sees himself/herself as sinner not only in the other’s eyes but in his/her self-perception as well, which is the ultimate form of subordination and also corruption.
Nietzsche thereby places the critique of ancient Judaism at a crucial junction of his philosophy. It is grounded in ressentiment, a key Nietzschean category, and is responsible for the corruption of Europe through Christianity. However, his critique does not serve Nietzsche in fighting against contemporary Jews, but against contemporary Christianity and the “modern Ideas” he sees as its secular offshoots (liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and the like). For modern Jews, after they go out of the ghetto and become secularized, Nietzsche has far-reaching prospects, whereas the modern anti-Semite is analyzed as the genealogical cousin of the ancient Jewish priest, whose properties the anti-Semite has inherited, but on a lower level still, since he lacks the value-creating power that the Jewish priests have demonstrated, and since, in order to feel that he is somebody, he requires the fake security of mass culture and the “togetherness” of a political movement.
Nietzsche’s analysis, like Socrates’s dialectic, ends in an ironic reversal. While the anti-Semite is the ancient Jewish priests’ relative, the modern Jew is their complete opposite (or “antipode”). As such, modern Jews are candidates for helping to create a new Dionysian culture and redeem Europe from the decadence instilled by their forefathers.
Rhetorically, too, the anti-Semite learns that, at bottom he has the same psychology as his worst enemies in their worst period, and this is supposed to shock the anti-Semite into disgust—perhaps at himself. However, by using anti-Semitic images ostensibly against themselves Nietzsche is playing with fire.
It follows that Nietzsche holds two rather univocal positions: against modern anti-Semitism and against ancient priestly Judaism, which are linked by the same genealogical root, ressentiment. Nietzsche’s ambivalence derives from the combination of these two positions, which look contradictory but are not so in effect. From a logical or systematic point of view there is no contradiction between rejecting both anti-Semitism and the moral message of ancient Judaism, yet this combination creates a strong psychological tension that ordinary people find hard to sustain. Hence the need to transcend ordinary psychology and cultivate an uncommon, noble character capable of holding on to both positions despite the tension they create. In other words, what is needed in order to maintain the two tense positions is not only a common link between them (the opposition to ressentiment) but a special personality whose mental power allows it to maintain a stance of “nevertheless” and insist on the distinction it involves.
This is nothing new. Almost every important matter in Nietzsche calls for an uncommon psychology. This is true, above all, of amor fati, which draws creative power from hard truths, and affirms life despite the demise of all “metaphysical consolations.” In Nietzsche one needs anyway to go beyond the limits of ordinary humanity and human psychology, toward a goal that his rhetoric dramatizes under the name of Übermensch. Nietzsche’s position on Judaism and anti-Semitism is no exception.
In a word, Nietzsche’s noncontradictory ambivalence requires holding two (or more) differentiated positions that are logically compatible yet psychologically competitive and hard to maintain together for the ordinary person. This analysis can also help explain why Nietzsche’s position has so widely been abused; for the mental revolution that he sought did not take place, while his ideas were generalized, vulgarized, and delivered to a public in which the old psychology prevailed.
At the same time, we noticed on several occasions that Nietzsche himself exploits anti-Semitic feelings and images that exist in other people (or whose traces persist in his own mind) and manipulates them in a dialectical technique, as a rhetoric device to insult the anti-Semites or hurt Christianity. For example:
Consider to whom one bows down in Rome itself today, as if they were the epitome of all the highest values—and not only in Rome but over almost half the earth ... three Jews, as is known, and one Jewess (Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the rug weaver Paul, and the mother of the aforementioned Jesus named Mary). (GM 1:16)
As I said before, Nietzsche in this and similar cases is playing a dangerous game; his meaning can be twisted against his intention, his irony misunderstood, and his words may enhance that which he actually opposes. The irony of speaking ironically to the vulgar is that the speaker himself may end up the victim of an ironic reversal, by which his intent is undermined and his discourse is taken at face value. Nietzsche, as a master of the art, should have anticipated the ironic fate of ironizers.
We have also seen that Nietzsche does not attribute to Judaism a constant essence or genealogical pattern, but distinguished three periods or phases within it.
(1) In biblical times (the Old Testament) Nietzsche perceives Dionysian greatness and natural sublimity that arouses his reverence. He does not accept the content of the biblical figures’ religious belief, but admires their attitude to life and religion because it was vital, natural, this-worldly and was built on self-affirmation rather than self-recrimination.
In the Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that the Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it. With terror and reverence one stands before these tremendous remnants of what man once was. (BGE 52)
At the time of the kings, Israel also stood in the right, that is, the natural relationship to all things. Its Yahweh was the expression of a consciousness of power, of joy in oneself, of hope for oneself: through him victory and welfare were expected; through him nature was trusted to give what the people needed above all, rain. Yahweh is the god of Israel and therefore the god of justice: the logic of every people that is in power and has a good conscience. (A 25)
(2) The second temple and its priests are the object of Nietzsche’s harsh and merciless attack. Here the “slave morality” revolution was performed, the major denaturation and reversal of values that led to Christianity, as analyzed before.
To have glued this New Testament to make one book, as the “Bible,” as “the book par exce)tence”—that is perhaps the greatest audacity and “sin against the spirit” that literary Europe has on its conscience. (BGE 52)
The concept of God falsified, the concept of morality falsified: the Jewish priesthood did not stop there. The whole of the history of Israel could not be used: away with it! These priests accomplished a miracle of falsification.... With matchless scorn for every tradition, for every historical reality, they translated the past of their own people into religious terms, that is, they turned it into a stupid salvation mechanism of guilt before Yahweh, and punishment. (A 26)
On such utterly false soil, where everything natural, every natural value, every reality was opposed by the most profound instincts of the ruling class, Christianity grew up—a form of mortal enmity against reality that has never yet been surpassed. (A 27)
(3) Diaspora Jews again arouse Nietzsche’s admiration, because they have demonstrated the power of affirming life in the face of suffering and drawn force from it. Moreover, Diaspora Jews have the merit of having rejected Christ and served as a constant critic and counterbalance to Christianity.
In the darkest times of the Middle Ages ... it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more natural, more rational, and certainly unmythical explanation of the world was eventually able to triumph again. (HH 475)
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 of “modern ideas.” (BGE 25)
As a result of their hard and long schooling and invigorating experience, the Jews reached the modern era as the strongest and most stable people in Europe, and could have dominated it, though they did not wish to do so. However, once they decided to mingle with the other European nations, then because of their greater existential power they would naturally, without intending to, reach a dominant position, in the sense of determining the norms and the new values in Europe. If however, the Jews continued their seclusion, Nietzsche grimly predicted they would “lose Europe” (that is, emigrate or be expelled) as their ancestors had left or been driven from Egypt. Nietzsche advocates the first alternative. The Jews must pour their gifts and power into a new Europe that will be free of the Christian heritage: the forebears of Christ must work today in the service of the modern anti-Christ (i.e., Nietzsche-Dionysus), and thereby pay their debt to Europe for what their priestly ancestors had done to it.7
For this to happen, European society must open up to the Jews and welcome them, and the Jews must end their voluntary seclusion and involve themselves with all European matters as their own: in this way they will, inevitably, attain excellence and end up determining new norms and values for Europe. Nietzsche welcomes this prospect with enthusiasm, because he sees the Jews as allies and levers in the transition to a higher human psychology and culture. If the Nazis considered the Jews as Untermenschen, to Nietzsche they were a possible catalyst of the Übermensch.
Nietzsche thus assigns a major role to the Jews as Jews within his new Europe. He opposes a nationalist (or Zionist) solution, because he wants the Jews to mix with the other European peoples. At the same time he also opposes the usual, passive and imitative, Jewish assimilation. His solution is creative assimilation, in which the Jews are secularized, excel in all European matters and serve as catalysts in a new revolution of values—this time a curative, Dionysian revolution—that will overcome the Christian culture and the “modern ideas” born of it the (Enlightenment, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and the like, and, if living to see it, fascism as well). The Jews’ role is thereby a transitory one, for it will abolish itself when successful.
It should be noted that Nietzsche’s admiration for Diaspora Jews is not aimed at them as bearers of a religious culture, but as displaying the human, existential element that he needs for his revolution. Nietzsche, of course, is as opposed to the Jewish religious message as he is to any other transcendent religion. The Jews’ role is certainly not to “Judaize” Europe in a religious sense. But Nietzsche seems to believe that their existential qualities can be extracted regardless of the content of their belief. Nietzsche would rather expect them to secularize and practice creative assimilation in the framework of an atheistic Europe.
I must also emphasize that Nietzsche’s pro-Jewish attitude does not derive from liberalism. Just as his attack on nationalism and racism is coming, so to speak, “from the right,”8 so his defense of the Jews derives from Nietzsche’s own (Dionysian and anti-liberal) sources. Also, the Jews are supposed to enhance that same Nietzschean philosophy of life—a task that many Jews, who were and are liberals, can hardly welcome.
Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the vocation of modern Jews is not merely theoretical; it derives also from a classic problem confronting any revolutionary: where is the lever within the existing system by which to revolutionize it? Who are the forces uncontaminated by the system? The existence, in the form of the Jews, of a human group he considers more powerful than the others and free of Christian culture is a practical asset that Nietzsche badly needs in order to make his revolution look less utopian in his and in others’ eyes.
In any case, my study shows that the Jewish issue was far more central to Nietzsche’s thought and project than is usually recognized. The former corrupters of European culture and its designated redeemers, the Jews are placed by Nietzsche at two of the critical junctures in his philosophy. It is thus noteworthy that he always attributes some decisive historical role to the Jews, whether negative or positive, corrupting or redeeming. In this ironic sense he continues to regard them as a kind of “chosen people”—or the secular, heretical Nietzschean version of this concept!
This closes the circle of our analysis. Nietzsche as anti-anti-Semite (and the “Dionysian” admirer of modern Jews) complements Nietzsche as critic of ancient Judaism, within the same basic conception and a single philosophical project. Using these distinctions, we have delineated the structure of Nietzsche’s ambivalence and the relation between its ingredients. The analysis found a fairly consistent thought behind it. Beyond the contradictions, flashes of brilliancy, dubious historical exam-pies, and arbitrary statements that Nietzsche’s pen often ejects, we discovered at bottom a uniform way of thinking, applied to a central philosophical theme.
Here the question must arise: why was Nietzsche abused more than other philoso-pliers? What was it that attracted his abusers? There seem to be at least four reasons for this: (1) his special mode of writing; (2) the nonordinary psychology required by his position; (3) the “right-wing” origin of his sensibilities; and (4) his political impotence.
Yovel utilizes the following translations: Kaufmann’s A, BGE, NCW, PN, TI, and Z; Kauf mann and Hollingdale’s GM and WP; and Hollingdale’s D and HH.
Hegel and Nietzsche on Judalsm (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1996. [Ed. Note—Originally published in Hebrew. Published in English as Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press and Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1998).]
In a paper published in 1988 (M. Duffy and W. Mittelman, “Nietzsche’s attitude toward the Jews,” Jotrrnal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 301–17) the authors attribute to Nietzsche a threefold division very much like mine, which they say they couldn’t find in any former publication. Had they looked more attentively they would have seen a short paper of mine, “Perspectives nouvelles sur Nietzsche et le judaisme,” Revue des etudes juives 88 (1979): 483–85, which suggests almost exactly the same division. That paper was a summary of public lectures given first at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and later at the Paris Societé des Etudes Juives (materials from that summary are included in the present chapter). This oversight also has a reassuring side, because if others have independently reached the same thesis, then there must be something in the material that strongly calls for it. The threefold division suggested in my REJ paper is recognized and debated in another French paper by D. Bechtel, “Nietzsche et la dialectique de I’liistoire juive,” in D. Bourel and J. le Rider, De Sils-Maria à Jérusalem (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 67–69.
This section and the next are drastically shortened summaries. For a more complete discussion, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Nietzsche, the Jews, and ressentiment,” in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 214–36.
This indicates, by the way, that Nietzsche was aware of already being abused in his lifetime, hence his protests and indignation.
Nietzsche seems to refer to the Fritsch affair mentioned above.
There is no doubt Nietzsche considered Burckhardt an anti-Semite (though he was perhaps less extreme than the others).
This analysis is chiefly based on D 205, which Nietzsche considered most representative of his views about Diaspora Jews (he referred others, like the anti-Semitic Fritsch, to it). Its length does not allow quoting it in this summary.
From an aristocratic ethics of virtue and excellence and a Dionysian ethics of power.
This makes no sense, because Nietzsche does not tolerate all forms of life—some he would have abolished completely—and because there is no principle of right behind his allegedly “pluralistic” position (indeed no principle at all), which is incompatible with the left-wing politics.
I think he did, but was unable to cope with it—except by indignant protests, as in the Fritsch affair.