The Nietzschean Response to Right-Wing Antisemitism

And why Nietzsche changed his mind about European Jews.

Friedrich Nietzsche was clearly antisemitic in his early years. This was in large part due to his two greatest influences at the time, Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer, both of whom were openly antisemitic. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche discussed how he was “infected” with the “disease” of antisemitism because of his proximity to Wagner (BGE 247).

As Nietzsche became disillusioned with Wagner and Schopenhauer, he also changed his attitude about the Jewish people. This is not because he changed his mind about Jews being physically weak priestly types (i.e., nerds) who invented and popularized slave morality in the West. That’s a decent summary of his claims about Jews in The Genealogy of Morality and he never changed his mind about that. Instead, Nietzsche came to believe that the type of antisemitism he exhibited in his youth was motivated by concealed weakness and resentment. As he matured, he came to see European Jews as a cunning, resourceful, and resilient people who should be admired rather than held in contempt. Understanding Nietzsche’s change in perspective might be useful for dissuading right-wing antisemites of their Jewish prejudice, if only because this type of online right-winger tends to admire Nietzsche’s ideas.

The type of person I have in mind mainly bases their Jewish prejudice on a few purported facts, all of which I think are true or at least plausible:

1. Ethnic Jews are massively over-represented in positions of power in almost every prestigious or influential career: finance, politics, entertainment, medicine, academia, journalism, etc. (this is obviously true and nobody can reasonably dispute it).

2. Ethnic Jews are more likely than average to be politically progressive or left-wing, and are over-represented among influential left-wing activists in academia, journalism, law, and elsewhere (this may be a byproduct of Jews being smarter than average, since smarter people tend to be left-wing or libertarian).

3. Ethnic Jews have a history of ethnocentrism, favoring other Jews in hiring/promotion, marriage, business, etc., a bias which may have contributed to Jewish success in Europe and America (though Nathan Cofnas disputes this claim here).

These three purported facts help to explain why a certain type of right-winger is likely to become antisemitic. To this type of antisemite, the typical Jewish person is perceived to be an upper middle class left-wing activist who criticizes white ethnocentrism while being overtly ethnocentric themselves. For example, the antisemitic psychologist Kevin Macdonald argued that Jews have evolved to be ethnocentric and left-wing due to their history of persecution.

I’m not going to make a detailed case for the above characterization of Jewish people. If you disagree with the three statements I’ve laid out above, it’s of no consequence for the point I want to make here. The point I want to make is that even if we grant that the three statements above are true, this provides no good reason to dislike Jewish people as a whole. To the contrary, the success of Jews in Europe and America despite two thousand years of persecution provides at least some cause for admiration and emulation. Furthermore, I will restate Nietzsche’s case that the kind of antisemitism exemplified by the online right is driven by precisely those motivations Nietzsche found to be most worthy of contempt, i.e., self-concealed envy and resentment towards the successful.

Jews in the Genealogy of Morality

Despite the fact that Nietzsche’s mature writings expressed clear disdain for antisemitism, he is still occasionally accused of being antisemitic himself. It’s not difficult to see why a casual reader of the Genealogy of Morality would come to this conclusion. In that book he characterizes Jews as an “impotent” and “priestly” people whose hateful, vengeful nature led them to upend “Knightly-Aristocratic” values in favor of priestly values. Knightly-Aristocratic values presupposed health and happiness, while priestly values venerate weakness and suffering. In the context of the Old Testament, Nietzsche took the side of the kings over the Jewish prophets. As Harrison Fluss put it, “[Nietzsche lamented the decline of the Jews after the Babylonian captivity in their transformation from a people of warriors to a people spreading the disease of slave morality through their prophets.” (Fluss, 2021)

For Nietzsche, the fact that slave morality, and therefore Jewish morality, won the battle for supremacy in the West provides no reason to condemn Jewish people as a whole. To the contrary, and despite his occasionally harsh descriptions of Jews in the Genealogy, Nietzsche sees their cultural victory as an indication of Jewish resilience and resourcefulness in the face of overwhelming odds. Prior to the birth of Christ, the Jewish people had been conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Romans. Their great act of revenge was not to wage physical war against their conquerors, but rather to engage in a kind of intellectual or spiritual warfare, in which their enemies’ values (of strength, power, honor, wealth, etc.) would end up being replaced by their opposites. The Jewish prophets claimed that the weak, the wretched, and the poor were blessed by God, and not the noble or powerful. This revaluation of values is described by Nietzsche in the Genealogy.

All that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the rulers,” fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. (GM I. 8)

Nietzsche wants us to recognize that the Jewish revaluation of values was a strategy to advance Jewish interests in the face of both domestic and foreign threats. While Nietzsche believes that the ultimate consequence of this revaluation was modern nihilism (for reasons that are outside the scope of this post), this unfortunate side effect is no reason to hold modern Jewish people in contempt.

It’s important to understand how Nietzsche can hold this view of Jews — that they are a physically weak, priestly (i.e., nerdy), vengeful people — while simultaneously holding them in high regard. There is no contradiction here. Nietzsche’s purpose in The Genealogy of Morality was not to say that Knightly-Aristocratic values (i.e., master morality) are good and that priestly values (i.e., slave morality) are bad. Nietzsche’s purpose is rather to expose the amoral origins of Western morality so that we can come to understand ourselves more clearly.

Nietzsche wants us to understand how our own Judeo-Christian heritage instilled certain values in us and that these values did not come from God or a noble quest for justice, but rather from the conflict between the strong and the weak (master and slave, conqueror and conquered, etc.) with each side advancing their own selfish interests. Nietzsche want us to recognize that our own supposedly selfless values (e.g., human rights, moral equality, utilitarianism) do not have selfless origins. Nietzsche’s genealogy is meant to expose the fact that the origin of morality is totally amoral. It is certainly not meant to lend support to antisemites.

Nietzsche’s Psychological Evaluation of Antisemitism

Elsewhere, Nietzsche diagnosed the underlying motivations of this kind of antisemitism. Nietzsche believes that the desire to hold Jews in contempt is motivated by ressentiment, i.e., the pent-up resentment of lifelong losers. On the surface, antisemites seem to be after justice. They will often list off the crimes of “the Jews” (as if an ethnic group can be collectively guilty of a crime) or demonstrate how Jews are over-represented in certain industries like media, finance, or government (which they most certainly are). The facts that Jews are more likely to be influential, successful, and left-wing is supposed to be reason enough to hold all Jews in contempt.

What the antisemite is really after, says Nietzsche, is more accurately characterized as revenge. They want revenge against Jews for being better than them at gaining cultural influence, and for using that influence to promote ideas they despise.

To the psychologists first of all, presuming they would like to study ressentiment close up for once, I would say: this plant blooms best today among anarchists and anti-Semites—where it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violet, though with a different odor. And as like must always produce like, it causes us no surprise to see a repetition in such circles of attempts often made before… to sanctify revenge under the name of justice—as if justice were at bottom merely a further development of the feeling of being aggrieved… (GM II. 11)

There’s nothing stopping somebody of non-Jewish European ancestry from becoming an influential financier, entertainer, scientist, journalist, or activist. Plenty of people from all backgrounds have been successful in these areas. Jews just do it better, and some people are salty about that. The fact that this very successful people also happen to be over-represented among left-wing activists is too much to bear for an aggrieved right-winger.

To be clear, the influence of left-wing Jewish people in academia, journalism, and politics has occasionally been pernicious. I have been extremely critical of the left-wing takeovers of academia, education, and journalism, and ethnic Jews played no small role in that process. Perhaps that would be some cause for alarm if it weren’t for the fact that some of the most influential and effective critics of wokeness, DEI, etc., are also Jewish. Jews are not a monolith, and any influential political or cultural movement is likely to have lots of Jewish people involved simply because Jewish people are so massively over-represented in positions of influence.

Why are Jews so over-represented in influential and prestigious occupations? It probably has to do with the ~112 average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, but it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact reasons for Jewish success. Even if we admit that the influence of left-wing Jews in academia and elsewhere can sometimes be pernicious, that fact is clearly overshadowed by the outsized amount of technical innovations and scientific discoveries produced by Ashkenazi Jews. This ethnic group makes up roughly 0.2% of the global population and has won about 22% of Nobel prizes. That’s reason enough to believe that Ashkenazi Jews are really good at producing smart, curious, high-achieving people. The intelligence, resilience, and creativity of Jews in Europe was apparent to Nietzsche. If you hate them for that, Nietzsche thinks you’re a resentful loser, and so do I.

Every Jew possesses in the history of his fathers and grandfathers a great fund of examples of the coldest self-possession and endurance in fearful situations, of the subtlest outwitting and exploitation of chance and misfortune… For two millennia an attempt was made to render them contemptible by treating them with contempt, and by barring to them the way to all honours and all that was honourable, and in exchange thrusting them all the deeper into the dirtier trades - and it is true that they did not grow cleaner in the process. But contemptible? They themselves have never ceased to believe themselves called to the highest things, and the virtues which pertain to all who suffer have likewise never ceased to adorn them. (Nietzsche, Daybreak 204)