ROBERT S. WISTRICH
211
had produced Christianity, had thereby accomplished "a miracle of fal–
sification" and a devastating deformation of all natural instincts.
It
is not difficult to see in Nietzsche's onslaught on Judeo-Christian–
itya struggle with his own inner demons (a reckoning with the ghost of
his own Lutheran pastor-father?), an expression of his tormented path
to self-knowledge and visceral revulsion against the supernatural termi–
nology on which he had been reared. It was no accident that he extolled
pagan antiquity as "a world without a concept or sense of sin" or
declared (as a disciple of Dionysus) that he much preferred to be a satyr
than a saint. No doubt, he unconsciously blamed his own deeply inhib–
ited sexuality on black-frocked pietistic oppressors, something which
could only heighten his appreciation of the uninhibited voluptuousness
in Dionysian intoxication. Much of his early infatuation with Wagner as
an artist and prophet might be traced to these contradictory personal
drives and his own desperate search for an alternative mode of redemp–
tion without the burden of sin. This period in his life (which he only
overcame in his mid-thirties) was the one in which Nietzsche came clos–
est to succumbing to anti-Semitism and to a politicized advocacy of the
renewal of German culture. Indeed, had Nietzsche remained under
Wagner's spell, he might well have degenerated into the philosopher of
National Socialism
avant La Lettre
that so many critics have claimed him
to be. However, any close reading of Nietzsche's writings after
1878
must surely lead to the conclusion that he had radically moved away
from Wagner's prejudices-including anti-Semitism, the cult of "Aryan"
superiority, and the romantic fusion of Germanism with Christianity.
This was not achieved without some regressions, confusing diversions,
and polemical exaggeration. This is also true, though to a lesser degree,
of his observations about Jews and Judaism, to which he attributed con–
siderable significance.
In his
Human, All
Too
Human
(1878)
Nietzsche admiringly observed
extraordinary accumulation of capital, spirit, and will by European
Jews-an acquisition "so huge that it had to incur the envy and hate–
filled measures in the form of literary indecencies in almost all our
nations...making Jews scapegoats for all conceivable public and private
misfortunes and leading them to the slaughterhouse." In
The
Gay
Sci–
ence
(1882),
he praised Jews for their sharp analytical qualities, the pre–
cision of their writing, and their rationalism. In his autobiographical
Ecce Homo,
he even claimed that "Jews among Germans are always the
higher race-more refined, spiritual, kind." Their long history of suf–
fering had made them more adaptable, intelligent, shrewd, witty, and
tough than most Gentiles. Not only did Nietzsche come to regard the
