Nietzsche and the Jews

“Nothing which anyone else ahs perpetrated against the ‘noble,’ the ‘powerful,’ the ‘masters,’ the rulers merits discussion in comparison with the deeds of the Jews — the Jews, that priestly people who ultimately knew no other way of exacting satisfaction from its enemies and conquerors than through a radical transvaluation of their values, through an art of the most intelligent revenge. This was only as befitted a priestly people, the people of the most downtrodden priestly vindictiveness. It has been the Jews who have, with terrifying consistency, dared to undertake the reversal of the aristocratic value equations… and have held on to it tenaciously by the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless). … There is no doubt as to who inherited this Jewish transvaluation[12]…. with the Jews the slave revolt in morals begins…” — (emphasis original. On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Douglas Smith)

Smith’s footnote 12 reads,

“i.e. Christ and Christianity. It is important to realize the extent to which Nietzsche indiscriminately identifies Platonism, Judaism, and Christianity as transcendentalizing doctrines which depreciate the actual life. Nietzsche is not anti-Semitic, but anti-idealist, anti-transcendentalist.”

It’s interesting to note that this operates with an extremely narrow sense of “anti-Semitism” that is found to be no longer acceptable today. It’s hard to see how anyone could accept the broader definition of racism and deny that Nietzsche was a racist. In fact, for anyone who agrees with Gorsuch’s Bostock decision, Nietzsche is still guilty discriminating on the basis of race.

Even on the old, narrower sense of racism the defense of Nietzsche looks unconvincing, for being an anti-idealist would not necessarily exculpate Nietzsche from anti-Semitism and it overlooks the way in which Nietzsche explains the genealogy of this “slave morality.” It’s not as though Nietzsche believed idealism/transcendentalism fell from Plato’s heaven. He explains it through the sickly constitution and customs of a class of people (priestly aristocracy) and he turns to the Jews because they, as a people, embody that: “that priestly people.”