Robert C. Holub. Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem

Friedrich Nietzsche spoke and wrote without fear of contradiction or criticism. Although Nietzsche never perceived himself as having a Jewish “problem,” his interpreters, from Nietzsche’s own lifetime until the present, certainly have thought he did. Nazi intellectuals, attracted to many elements of his philosophy, had to reckon with Nietzsche’s contempt for the antisemitic parties of his own era. Prominent figures such as Walter Kaufmann, who wished to rehabilitate Nietzsche for the Western tradition, and who comes in for special criticism in Robert C. Holub’s Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (26–28, 125–126), had to deal with Nietzsche’s legacy as ostensible philosopher of the master race. Holub, who has written extensively on Nietzsche, aims at penning the definitive assessment of what Nietzsche meant, judged against the context of Nietzsche’s own times, and unencumbered by subsequent interpreters. Holub largely succeeds in this task, and readers will find a handy seventeen-point summary of his judgments in the conclusion. Among the most common misrepresentations of Nietzsche that Holub puts to rest, one may include the ideas (1) that Richard Wagner seduced Nietzsche into an antisemitic stance; (2) that Nietzsche’s break with Wagner and his acolytes had nothing to do with Wagner’s antisemitism or the latter’s support of antisemitic movements, including the republication of Wagner’s infamous “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (1850, 1869); (3) that Nietzsche’s reputation as an antisemite can be blamed on his sister Elisabeth or her husband, Bernhard Förster (in fact, Elisabeth curated Nietzsche’s literary legacy but did not substantially change the nature of Nietzsche’s views); (4) that the contempt that Nietzsche expressed toward the antisemitic parties should not be confused with a positive reappraisal of Judaism (which Nietzsche actually continued to regard negatively, attempts to present Nietzsche as a late-developing philosemite, e.g., by Alfred Low and Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe, being simply wrong); and (5) that a well-known passage in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) expressed Nietzsche’s contempt for Germany’s inability to digest its Jews (in fact, late works such as The Genealogy of Morals [1887] and The Antichrist [1895] remained hostile toward Judaism—Nietzsche argued that Jews conceived and transmitted the slave morality that characterized Christianity and still infected contemporary Europe [204–207]). Holub’s thesis: disdain for Judaism and disdain for antisemites were perfectly compatible given the times.

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