I expect that it will be some time until I can do a full treatment on this, but I want to make my case in brief just so I can say I made it. The case I want to make is that Nietzsche was an antisemite. I feel it’s important to make this case because his concepts of master/slave moralities and ressentiment really hinge upon a particular view of the Jews as a nation. Without their example, I don’t think a concept like ressentiment carries much weight because it does not easily map onto any other group. The reason why it maps onto the Jews is not anything intrinsic, it is an outgrowth of their history: being oppressed yet remaining united by many other peoples, persevering as a minority. As Duffy & Mittelman’s “Nietzsche’s Attitudes Toward the Jews”1 points out, a look into Jewish history doesn’t really bear out Nietzsche’s assertions about morality or ressentiment. So when I say that these concepts map onto the Jews, what I really mean is that they map onto a particular perception of the Jews: the perception that Europeans had of them. The primarily negative, possibly paternalistic perception.
“Nietzsche’s Attitudes Towards the Jews” brings up a number of positive comments that Nietzsche makes about modern Jewish people but, as a Black man in America, they do all have the feeling of a patronizing white person trying not to sound too racist. “The Jews are so shrewd! They were so creative in instituting a slave rebellion in morals! (Keep in mind that Nietzsche is never in favor of ‘slave morality’.) Us Europeans just aren’t that smart without the Jews!” This isn’t the language of someone who has moved past their racist ideas, this is the language of someone who has put their racist ideas in the garage for the time being. The things which Jewish people were exploited for or maligned for are now the things he “praises”.
I am not suggesting that Nietzsche would have been a proud Nazi. I think he had contempt for the open antisemites of his time, just as his correspondence suggests, but I don’t think this was from a standpoint of essentially disagreeing. I believe that he had contempt for all the “little people”, the people who could not grasp his sort of morality, which included most Jews and most Germans. Above everything, Nietzsche appears to be an elitist. He believes Jewish people as individuals are capable of getting to his level but that they would naturally assimilate and leave behind Jewish culture, just as he expects any Germans or other Europeans to do in getting rid of Christianity.
By this it would be easy to conclude that Nietzsche also has a low view of Germans and thus might not view Jews as lesser. This is a deceptive bit of framing that I think, with the training of the modern nonsense media, might be easier for us now to decipher. By putting Germans down, Nietzsche is not seeking to say that they are worthless, he is casting them as the defeated party. Defeated by who? Judaism. This is the narrative he sets out. His goal is to say that Germans must rise up past this Jewishness that’s been put upon them. This is different from his attitude to the Jews because he does not ever characterize the position of the Germans as being one of ressentiment. In fact, even though Jewish ideas have (according to Nietzsche) come to the master position through Christianity, Christians never took up a master morality. Why is that? Nietzsche does not explain.
When people try to exonerate Nietzsche’s thought, they portray his master/slave moralities as being about social position. If this was true, and if Nietzsche was a rigorous philosopher, he would need to talk about cycles of ressentiment, about when and why master moralities change into slave moralities and back again, he would need any other examples of such moral shifts or oppositions, and so on. He doesn’t provide these. It’s not simply that a cycle of ressentiment would result, it’s that it is an obvious result, and it’s one that Nietzsche should have foreseen. I don’t believe his goal was an honest description, however. As I’ve said, his primary talent was the articulation of a certain perspective.
- Duffy, M. F., & Mittelman, W. (1988). Nietzsche’s Attitudes Toward the Jews. Journal of the History of Ideas, 49(2), 301–317. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709502 ↩︎
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