Nietzsche was crucial in getting me to think from the perspective of rejecting dangerous fetters of Ressentiment regarding Jews. It's too bad he wasn't about to summon that Spirit for Christianity, but perhaps once is enough. It is crucial that we grapple with the complicated reality of why and how his views ended up as they did.
Always enjoy your writing on Nietzsche. And I agree Nietzsche was not about making moral judgements, although it can be hard to see at first given Nietzsche's heated rhetoric at times. Morality is a product of our forms of life, not of God or pure reason.
Hi Brett, Nietzsche's opinion about Jews seems to me to be pretty contradictory. You're right that he was pretty clearly philo-semitic in his later life, but this quote from his Genealogy seems hard to square with with it: “The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred…being at any price: the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer.…Considered psychologically, the Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest vital energy which…took the side of all décadence instincts…because it divined in them a power by means of which one can prevail against ‘the world.’ The Jews are the counterparts of décadents: they have been compelled to act as décadents to the point of illusion….[T]his kind of man has a life-interest in making mankind sick, and in inverting the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘true’ and ‘false’ in a mortally dangerous and world-maligning sense.”
In other words, Nietzsche seemed to greatly admire the Jewish will to power, which was/is the strongest in the world, even though the price to pay for it was "a life-interest in making mankind sick". How do you square these contradictory ideas?
Also, re: "Jews are not a monolith", per Kevin Macdonald: “Anti-restrictionist attitudes were held by the vast majority of the organized Jewish community—‘the entire body of religious opinion and lay opinion within the Jewish group, religiously speaking, from the extreme right and extreme left,’ in the words of Judge Simon Rifkind who testified in Congress representing a long list of national and local Jewish groups in 1948. Cofnas advocates the ‘default hypothesis’ that because of their intellectual prowess, Jews have always been highly overrepresented on both sides of various issues. This was certainly not true in the case of immigration during the critical period up to 1965 when the national origins provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws were overturned—and long thereafter. I have never found any Jewish organization or prominent Jews leading the forces favoring the 1924 and 1952 laws—or those opposed to the 1965 law at the time it was enacted. Joyce (2021) shows the continuing powerful role of Jews in pro-immigration activism in the contemporary U.S., and, as noted above, there is substantial Jewish consensus on immigration into the present.”
I would also point to the following analysis by Ron Unz (who is Jewish) regarding admission at Harvard, showing that non-Jewish whites are extremely discriminated against even after accounting for higher average Jewish verbal IQ, pointing to other things like Jewish tribalism as major issues: https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-racial-discrimination-at-harvard/
This isn't to say that all Jews think this way, of course - there's a famous expression, "two Jews, three opinions" - and I do think you're right that there's an element of ressentiment involved from their detractors, but people think in terms of generalizations when they create their models of the world and exceptions don't necessarily disprove the rule when there is broad-based consensus in the Jewish community regarding things like anti-restrictionist attitudes on immigration (while supporting closed borders in Israel).
Lastly, knowing what a giant fan of Nietzsche you are - are there any issues you disagree with him on? Writing about such disagreements would make, I think, an interesting post.
I found this an unusually clear, reasonable, and logical post. Congratulations to the author!
Nietzsche was crucial in getting me to think from the perspective of rejecting dangerous fetters of Ressentiment regarding Jews. It's too bad he wasn't about to summon that Spirit for Christianity, but perhaps once is enough. It is crucial that we grapple with the complicated reality of why and how his views ended up as they did.
Always enjoy your writing on Nietzsche. And I agree Nietzsche was not about making moral judgements, although it can be hard to see at first given Nietzsche's heated rhetoric at times. Morality is a product of our forms of life, not of God or pure reason.
Hi Brett, Nietzsche's opinion about Jews seems to me to be pretty contradictory. You're right that he was pretty clearly philo-semitic in his later life, but this quote from his Genealogy seems hard to square with with it: “The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred…being at any price: the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer.…Considered psychologically, the Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest vital energy which…took the side of all décadence instincts…because it divined in them a power by means of which one can prevail against ‘the world.’ The Jews are the counterparts of décadents: they have been compelled to act as décadents to the point of illusion….[T]his kind of man has a life-interest in making mankind sick, and in inverting the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘true’ and ‘false’ in a mortally dangerous and world-maligning sense.”
In other words, Nietzsche seemed to greatly admire the Jewish will to power, which was/is the strongest in the world, even though the price to pay for it was "a life-interest in making mankind sick". How do you square these contradictory ideas?
Also, re: "Jews are not a monolith", per Kevin Macdonald: “Anti-restrictionist attitudes were held by the vast majority of the organized Jewish community—‘the entire body of religious opinion and lay opinion within the Jewish group, religiously speaking, from the extreme right and extreme left,’ in the words of Judge Simon Rifkind who testified in Congress representing a long list of national and local Jewish groups in 1948. Cofnas advocates the ‘default hypothesis’ that because of their intellectual prowess, Jews have always been highly overrepresented on both sides of various issues. This was certainly not true in the case of immigration during the critical period up to 1965 when the national origins provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws were overturned—and long thereafter. I have never found any Jewish organization or prominent Jews leading the forces favoring the 1924 and 1952 laws—or those opposed to the 1965 law at the time it was enacted. Joyce (2021) shows the continuing powerful role of Jews in pro-immigration activism in the contemporary U.S., and, as noted above, there is substantial Jewish consensus on immigration into the present.”
I would also point to the following analysis by Ron Unz (who is Jewish) regarding admission at Harvard, showing that non-Jewish whites are extremely discriminated against even after accounting for higher average Jewish verbal IQ, pointing to other things like Jewish tribalism as major issues: https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-racial-discrimination-at-harvard/
This isn't to say that all Jews think this way, of course - there's a famous expression, "two Jews, three opinions" - and I do think you're right that there's an element of ressentiment involved from their detractors, but people think in terms of generalizations when they create their models of the world and exceptions don't necessarily disprove the rule when there is broad-based consensus in the Jewish community regarding things like anti-restrictionist attitudes on immigration (while supporting closed borders in Israel).
Lastly, knowing what a giant fan of Nietzsche you are - are there any issues you disagree with him on? Writing about such disagreements would make, I think, an interesting post.