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PARTISAN REVIEW
Jews as "the strongest, toughest, purest race in Europe," endowed with
a remarkable moral genius, he was increasingly convinced that they
would provide that "aristocracy of the spirit" which a new post-Chris–
tian Europe desperately needed. In
Daybreak
(188
I)
he singled out their
"self-possession and endurance in fearful situations...their courage
beneath the cloak of miserable submissions, their heroism...[which]
surpassed the virtues of all the saints." They had survived as Christian–
ity's great "Other" in the harsh discipline of the Diaspora, and yet they
had still retained their liberality of soul and generosity of spirit.
Indeed, Nietzsche asserted in
Beyond Good and Evil
(1886) that "the
Jews, if they wanted it-or if they were forced into it, which seems to
be what the anti-Semites
want-could
and
now
have preponderance,
indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain." At the same
time, he made it clear that this was
not
what European Jewry sought–
on the contrary their only desire was to be absorbed and integrated into
society-to bring their long Diasporic wandering to an end . This was a
goal which Nietzsche unequivocally supported, in stark contrast to the
anti-Semites and even more to the Nazis who fifty years later aimed at
the eradication of the "Jewish spirit" and at a Europe emptied of its
Jews.
If
Nazism conceived of Jewry as an inferior race of "subhumans"
marked for physical annihilation, then Nietzsche's own writings show,
on the contrary, that the Jews represented for him a kind of spiritual
crystallization of what he understood by the
Ubermensch
of the future.
At first sight, this sharp antithesis might seem enough to settle the
question concerning Nietzsche's responsibility for Nazism in the nega–
tive. Certainly, a thinker who held such a high opinion of Jewish quali–
ties, who looked to them as a spearhead for his own free-thinking
Dionysian "revaluation of all values" and sought their full integration,
could hardly be an inspiration for the Nazi Holocaust. Moreover, Niet–
zsche's abhorrence of both Christian and racist anti-Semitism is well
documented. He was outraged by his sister's marriage to Bernhard
Forster, a leading German anti-Semite, and this led for a while to a
break in their relations. He loathed the misuse of his
Thus Spake
Zarathustra
(1882-1892) by the German racist propagandist Theodor
Fritsch. He despised the anti-Semitic demagogy of the Protestant court–
preacher Adolf Stoecker, head of the Christian-social party in Germany.
He heaped contempt on the nationalist historiography of Heinrich von
Treitschke (a Prussian anti-Semite) and mocked the vicious, mean-spir–
ited Judeophobia of his former hero, Richard Wagner. His contemptu–
ous remarks about Germany's most extreme anti-Semite in the 1880s,
Eugen Diihring, are almost unprintable. Anti-Semitism in Nietzsche's
