From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 23:39:14 -0500
Subject: The Jewish question: legitimate and illegitimate misinterpretations


DOING HARM TO STUPIDITY (7)

7- The Jewish question: legitimate and illegitimate misinterpretations

In the GM, Nietzsche wrote-

"As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies - but why?
Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence
that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the
most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred.  The truly great haters in
world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious
haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when
compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness. [. . .] All that has
been done on earth against 'the noble,' 'the powerful,' 'the masters,'
'the rulers,' fades into nothing when 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.  It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency,
dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation
(good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved of God) and to hang onto
this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred
(the hatred of impotence) [. . .]  One knows who inherited this Jewish
revaluation . . . In connection with this most fundamental of all
declarations of war, I recall the proposition I arrived at on a previous
occasion - that with the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality:
that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and
which we no longer see because it has been victorious.

Can or should one conclude from the above passage of GM that Nietzsche
was anti-Semitic and a medal for the paternity of Nazism should be
pinned on his chest?  Some are only to ready to rush to judgement: they
even talk of an anti-Semitic line, a party-line forming a continuum from
Nietzsche to the Nazis:

>the "line," for anyone who has read both Nietzsche and history, 
>is, it seems to me, quite obvious. (...) One doesn't have to look too far
>into the Third Reich to see that it was modeled on Neitzschean values; 
>nor does one have to scratch Nietzsche too very deeply, to
>see there the black of the Swastika.

They take a passage from GM (or somewhere else), fail to relate it to
the context, fail to relate it to Nietzsche's philosophy, fail to relate
it to other passages from Nietzsche, and in one fell swoop condemn the
man as a racist, as a fascist.  If they did not comprehend anything, as
is the case, the *least* they could do would be to show how Nietzsche
appears to display contradictory forces in his texts.  But no,
contradiction, difference, disparity, all that must be erased to prove
the point that Nietzsche was even more of an anti-Semite than Christians
are or ever were.  Thereby, in their only too one-sided and myopic ("one
does not have to look very far"...) exposé, all they expose is their own
ignorance and misunderstanding of Nietzsche.

Now that Thacker has made his poor case, let us look a little more
dispassionately at the matter.  

A.
First of all, Nietzsche is not decrying the Jewish people in the above
quoted passage from GM.  The thrust of his analysis is to understand the
genealogy of resentment and how such an emotion is cultivated and
managed by priethoods.  Specifically, Nietzsche analyzes the Jewish
priest and how he is already the one responsible for the *alteration* of
the nomadic ways of Semites, how he appropriates the tradition of the
Kings of Israel and the Old Testament to reverse values and give
resentment a form - the resentment of an oppressed people: 

"Originally, above all in the period of the Kingdom, Israel too stood in
a *correct*, that is to say natural relationship to all things.  (...)
The people retained as its supreme desideratum that vision of a king who
is a good soldier and an upright prophet: as did above all the typical
prophet (that is to say critic and satirist of the hour) Isaiah.  But
every hope remained unfulfilled.  The old God *could* no longer do what
he formerly could.  (...) What happened?  One altered the conception of
him: (...) The new conception of him becomes an instrument in the hands
of priestly agitators who henceforth interpret all good fortune as a
reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience of God, for 'sin'
(...) The concept of God falsified; the concept of morality falsified -
the Jewish priesthood did not stop there" (AC, 25-26).

It is only under this sign (sub hoc signo) that Israel, "with its
vengefulness and revaluation of all values has hitherto triumphed (...)
over all nobler ideals" (GM, I, 9)  Note then that even though Nietzsche
writes in these passages "the Jews", he means not the Semitic
pastorialists, or Semitic nomads, nor the slaves of Egypt, nor still the
Mosaic Hebrews - or even the post Mosaic Hebrews of the period of the
Kingdom - but the Jews as a *priestly people*, as a people subject to
the rule of a priesthood.

What matters then is whether or not Nietzsche's analysis is correct -
not whether one can only arrive at such an analysis because one is
anti-Semitic.  If that were the case, then, by the same gratuitous
logic, the notion of an Asiatic State would stem from an anti-Chinese
prejudice, an attack on Christianity would require hatred of Caucasians,
or, even better- rejection of Judaism by a Jew would necessarily turn
him into an anti-Semite!  Then, one can only guess that Spinoza and Marx
were anti-Semitic too, since the first was excommunicated by the Jewish
Notables for having written his "Apology to justify his leaving the
Synagogue" and the latter had the courage to write that "the social
emancipation of Jews consists in the emancipation of society from
Judaism" ("The Jewish Question")!...

B.
Secondly, there is that question, the Jewish Question, inherited from
the Hegelian school.   Nietzsche, like Marx on this matter, is
interested in how is a priesthood formed in the history of the Hebrews,
how "a priestly people" comes about.  From where we stand, undoubtedly
Nietzsche's analysis falls short of much (how the priesthood already
emerges in Asiatic societies, how Akhnaton represented an Asiatic
renaissance of Egypt, etc).  One could explain most of the limitations
by the actual paucity of archeological and ethnological material for
many of his investigations, at the time GM was written.  But what
matters is that, if we are to critically dissect the nihilist sickness
brought about by millennia of Greek-Judeo-Christian tradition, we must
look for the inception of the spirit of the priest amongst Jews - not
Greeks.  And that is precisely where Nietzsche went to find the first
inversion of values that projected the distorted image of the origin of
forces.  

In spite of Thacker and others like him who so easily and illegitimately
misinterpret texts, the fact remains that the Jewish priest utilized the
reactive forces to establish the conditions for their victory.  But he
is not to be confused with them.  He stands above them, making them
accomplices of his will to power, which is nihilism since its quality is
negative: "For the kind of man who desires to attain power through
Judaism and Christianity, the priestly kind, *decadence* is only a
*means*: this kind of man [notice, the *priest*] has a life-interest in
making mankind *sick* and in inverting the concepts 'good' and 'evil',
'true' and 'false' in a mortally dangerous and world-calumniating
sense." (AC, 24).  Just to prove to Hackers & Co that he was not an
anti-Semite, should Nietzsche have denied the origins of the
Judeo-Christian morality amongst the Jewish people?  Should he have
refused its analysis for fear of being deemed politically incorrect a
century later, or for fear of being misused, retroactively, by Nazis?

Moreover, Nietzsche conceives of the birth of religion as distinct from
the emergence of a priestly bureaucracy.  Religion was affirmative
before it became negative of life.  Religion as the product of a ruling
warrior caste should not be confused with organized religion as a
priestly means to inoculate and manage sickness.  And an affirmative
religion is no prerogative of the Aryan races; Semites too, in their
nomadic and Kingdom periods, had an affirmative religion.  Similarly, a
negative religion that denies life is not the  prerogative of Semitic
peoples:

"What an *affirmative* Aryan religion, the product of the *ruling*
class, looks like: the law-book of Manu. (...) What an affirmative
Semitic religion, the product of a *ruling* class, looks like: the
law-book of Mohammed, the older parts of the Old Testament. (...)  What
a *negative* Semitic religion, the product of an *oppressed* class,
looks like: the New Testament. (...)  What a *negative* Aryan religion
looks like, grown up among the *ruling* orders: Buddhism (...)" (WP, II,
145)

Clearly, there is nothing racial about the development of a *negative*
religion amongst the Jews, whereby they became a priestly people.  It is
all a matter of history and the psychology of the priest, of how it
cultivates sickness, how it makes life unworthy of being lived and us
sick of it.  "Jewish hatred, the profoundest and sublimest kind of
hatred", begins here, with the vengeful designs of a priesthood over an
oppressed people.  What constitutes the singularity in this respect is
the historical conditions that synchronized the development of such a
*negative* religion with the Jews having become a conquered people, so
that "with the Jews there begins *the slave revolt in morality*", "that
revolt which has a history of two thousand years" (GM, I, 8) and is
called Christianity.  

Lambda C


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