JUDAISM
It would not be surprising if to many it should seem from the foregoing
arguments that “men” have come out of them too well, and, as a
collective body, have been placed on an exaggeratedly lofty pedestal.
The conclusions drawn from these arguments, however surprised every
Philistine and young simpleton would be to learn that in himself he
comprises the whole world, cannot be opposed and confuted by cheap
reasoning; yet the treatment of the male sex must not simply be
considered too indulgent, or due to a direct tendency to omit all the
repulsive and small side of manhood in order to favourably represent its
best points.
The accusation would be unjustified. It does not enter the author’s mind
to idealise man in order more easily to lower the estimation of woman.
So much narrowness and so much coarseness often thrive beneath the
empirical representation of manhood that it is a question of the better
possibilities lying in every man, neglected by him or perceived either
with painful clearness or dull animosity; possibilities which as such in
woman neither actually nor meditatively ever come to any account. And
here the author cannot in any wise really rely on the dissimilarities
between men, however little he may impugn their importance. It is,
therefore, a question of establishing what woman is not, and truly in
her there is infinitely much wanting which is never quite missing even
in the most mediocre and plebeian of men. That which is the positive
attribute of the woman, in so far as a positive can be spoken of in
regard to such a being, will constantly be found also in many men.
There are, as has already often been demonstrated, men who have become
women or have remained women; but there is no woman who has surpassed
certain circumscribed, not particularly elevated moral and intellectual
limits. And, therefore, I must again assert that the woman of the
highest standard is immeasurably beneath the man of lowest standard.
These objections may go even further and touch a point where the
ignoring of theory must assuredly become reprehensible. There are, to
wit, nations and races whose men, though they can in no wise be regarded
as intermediate forms of the sexes, are found to approach so slightly
and so rarely to the ideal of manhood as set forth in my argument, that
the principles, indeed the entire foundation on which this work rests,
would seem to be severely shaken by their existence. What shall we make,
for example, out of the Chinese, with their feminine freedom from
internal cravings and their incapacity for every effort? One might feel
tempted to believe in the complete effeminacy of the whole race. It can
at least be no mere whim of the entire nation that the Chinaman
habitually wears a pigtail, and that the growth of his beard is of the
very thinnest. But how does the matter stand with the negroes? A genius
has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard
of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to
be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of
imprudence.
If, consequently, the principle of the intermediate forms of the sexes
may perhaps enjoy a prospect of becoming of importance to racial
anthropology (since in some peoples a greater share of womanishness
would seem to be generally disseminated), it must yet be conceded that
the foregoing deductions refer above all to Aryan men and Aryan women.
In how far, in the other great races of mankind, uniformity with the
standard of the Aryan race may reign, or what has prevented and hindered
this; to arrive more nearly at such knowledge would require in the first
instance the most intense research into racial characteristics.
The Jewish race, which has been chosen by me as a subject of discussion,
because, as will be shown, it presents the gravest and most formidable
difficulties for my views, appears to possess a certain anthropological
relationship with both negroes and Mongolians. The readily curling hair
points to the negro; admixture of Mongolian blood is suggested by the
perfectly Chinese or Malay formation of face and skull which is so often
to be met with amongst the Jews and which is associated with a yellowish
complexion. This is nothing more than the result of everyday experience,
and these remarks must not be otherwise understood; the anthropological
question of the origin of the Jewish race is apparently insoluble, and
even such an interesting answer to it as that given by H. S. Chamberlain
has recently met with much opposition. The author does not possess the
knowledge necessary to treat of this; what will be here briefly, but as
far as possible profoundly analysed, is the psychical peculiarity of the
Jewish race.
This is an obligatory task imposed by psychological observation and
analysis. It is undertaken independently of past history, the details of
which must be uncertain. The Jewish race offers a problem of the deepest
significance for the study of all races, and in itself it is intimately
bound up with many of the most troublesome problems of the day.
I must, however, make clear what I mean by Judaism; I mean neither a
race nor a people nor a recognised creed. I think of it as a tendency of
the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all
mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion
only amongst the Jews. Antisemitism itself will confirm my point of
view.
The purest Aryans by descent and disposition are seldom Antisemites,
although they are often unpleasantly moved by some of the peculiar
Jewish traits; they cannot in the least understand the Antisemite
movement, and are, in consequence of their defence of the Jews, often
called Philosemites; and yet these persons writing on the subject of
the hatred of Jews, have been guilty of the most profound
misunderstanding of the Jewish character. The aggressive Antisemites, on
the other hand, nearly always display certain Jewish characters,
sometimes apparent in their faces, although they may have no real
admixture of Jewish blood.[25]
[25] Zola was a typical case of a person absolutely without trace of
the Jewish qualities, and, therefore, a philosemite. The greatest
geniuses, on the other hand, have nearly always been antisemites
(Tacitus, Pascal, Voltaire, Herder, Goethe, Kant, Jean Paul,
Schopenhauer, Grillparzer, Wagner); this comes about from the fact as
geniuses they have something of everything in their natures, and so
can understand Judaism.
The explanation is simple. People love in others the qualities they
would like to have but do not actually have in any great degree; so also
we hate in others only what we do not wish to be, and what
notwithstanding we are partly. We hate only qualities to which we
approximate, but which we realise first in other persons.
Thus the fact is explained that the bitterest Antisemites are to be
found amongst the Jews themselves. For only the quite Jewish Jews, like
the completely Aryan Aryans, are not at all Antisemitically disposed;
among the remainder only the commoner natures are actively Antisemitic
and pass sentence on others without having once sat in judgment on
themselves in these matters; and very few exercise their Antisemitism
first on themselves. This one thing, however, remains none the less
certain: whoever detests the Jewish disposition detests it first of all
in himself; that he should persecute it in others is merely his
endeavour to separate himself in this way from Jewishness; he strives to
shake it off and to localise it in his fellow-creatures, and so for a
moment to dream himself free of it. Hatred, like love, is a projected
phenomenon; that person alone is hated who reminds one unpleasantly of
oneself.
The Antisemitism of the Jews bears testimony to the fact that no one who
has had experience of them considers them loveable--not even the Jew
himself; the Antisemitism of the Aryans grants us an insight no less
full of significance: it is that the Jew and the Jewish race must not
be confounded. There are Aryans who are more Jewish than Jews, and real
Jews who are more Aryan than certain Aryans. I need not enumerate those
non-semites who had much Jewishness in them, the lesser (like the
well-known Frederick Nicolai of the eighteenth century) nor those of
moderate greatness (here Frederick Schiller can scarcely be omitted),
nor will I analyse their Jewishness. Above all Richard Wagner--the
bitterest Antisemite--cannot be held free from an accretion of
Jewishness even in his art, however little one be misled by the feeling
which sees in him the greatest artist enshrined in historical humanity;
and this, though indubitably his Siegfried is the most un-Jewish type
imaginable. As Wagner’s aversion to grand opera and the stage really led
to the strongest attraction, an attraction of which he was himself
conscious, so his music, which, in the unique simplicity of its motifs,
is the most powerful in the world, cannot be declared free from
obtrusiveness, loudness, and lack of distinction; from some
consciousness of this Wagner tried to gain coherence by the extreme
instrumentation of his works. It cannot be denied (there can be no
mistake about it) that Wagner’s music produces the deepest impression
not only on Jewish Antisemites, who have never completely shaken off
Jewishness, but also on Indo-Germanic Antisemites. From the music of
“Parsifal,” which to genuine Jews will ever remain as unapproachable as
its poetry, from the Pilgrim’s march and the procession to Rome in
“Tannhäuser,” and assuredly from many another part, they turn away.
Doubtless, also, none but a German could make so clearly manifest the
very essence of the German race as Wagner has succeeded in doing in the
“Meistersingers of Nurnberg.” In Wagner one thinks constantly of that
side of his character which leans towards Feuerbach, instead of towards
Schopenhauer. Here no narrow psychological depreciation of this great
man is intended. Judaism was to him the greatest help in reaching a
clearer understanding and assertion of the extremes within him in his
struggle to reach “Siegfried” and “Parsifal,” and in giving to German
nature the highest means of expression which has probably ever been
found in the pages of history. Yet a greater than Wagner was obliged to
overcome the Jewishness within him before he found his special vocation;
and it is, as previously stated, perhaps its great significance in the
world’s history and the immense merit of Judaism that it and nothing
else, leads the Aryan to a knowledge of himself and warns him against
himself. For this the Aryan has to thank the Jew that, through him, he
knows to guard against Judaism as a possibility within himself. This
example will sufficiently illustrate what, in my estimation, is to be
understood by Judaism.
I do not refer to a nation or to a race, to a creed or to a scripture.
When I speak of the Jew I mean neither an individual nor the whole body,
but mankind in general, in so far as it has a share in the platonic idea
of Judaism. My purpose is to analyse this idea.
That these researches should be included in a work devoted to the
characterology of the sexes may seem an undue extension of my subject.
But some reflection will lead to the surprising result that Judaism is
saturated with femininity, with precisely those qualities the essence of
which I have shown to be in the strongest opposition to the male nature.
It would not be difficult to make a case for the view that the Jew is
more saturated with femininity than the Aryan, to such an extent that
the most manly Jew is more feminine than the least manly Aryan.
This interpretation would be erroneous. It is most important to lay
stress on the agreements and differences simply because so many points
that become obvious in dissecting woman reappear in the Jew.
Let me begin with the analogies. It is notable that the Jews, even now
when at least a relative security of tenure is possible, prefer moveable
property, and, in spite of their acquisitiveness, have little real sense
of personal property, especially in its most characteristic form, landed
property. Property is indissolubly connected with the self, with
individuality. It is in harmony with the foregoing that the Jew is so
readily disposed to communism. Communism must be distinguished clearly
from socialism, the former being based on a community of goods, an
absence of individual property, the latter meaning, in the first place a
co-operation of individual with individual, of worker with worker, and a
recognition of human individuality in every one. Socialism is Aryan
(Owen, Carlyle, Ruskin, Fichte). Communism is Jewish (Marx). Modern
social democracy has moved far apart from the earlier socialism,
precisely because Jews have taken so large a share in developing it. In
spite of the associative element in it, the Marxian doctrine does not
lead in any way towards the State as a union of all the separate
individual aims, as the higher unit combining the purposes of the lower
units. Such a conception is as foreign to the Jew as it is to the woman.
For these reasons Zionism must remain an impracticable ideal,
notwithstanding the fashion in which it has brought together some of the
noblest qualities of the Jews. Zionism is the negation of Judaism, for
the conception of Judaism involves a world-wide distribution of the
Jews. Citizenship is an un-Jewish thing, and there has never been and
never will be a true Jewish State. The State involves the aggregation of
individual aims, the formation of and obedience to self-imposed laws;
and the symbol of the State, if nothing more, is its head chosen by free
election. The opposite conception is that of anarchy, with which
present-day communism is closely allied. The ideal State has never been
historically realised, but in every case there is at least a minimum of
this higher unit, this conception of an ideal power which distinguishes
the State from the mere collection of human beings in barracks.
Rousseau’s much-despised theory of the conscious co-operation of
individuals to form a State deserves more attention than it now
receives. Some ethical notion of free combination must always be
included.
The true conception of the State is foreign to the Jew, because he, like
the woman, is wanting in personality; his failure to grasp the idea of
true society is due to his lack of a free intelligible ego. Like women,
Jews tend to adhere together, but they do not associate as free
independent individuals mutually respecting each other’s individuality.
As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant by the word
“gentleman” does not exist amongst the Jews. The genuine Jew fails in
this innate good breeding by which alone individuals honour their own
individuality and respect that of others. There is no Jewish nobility,
and this is the more surprising as Jewish pedigrees can be traced back
for thousands of years.
The familiar Jewish arrogance has a similar explanation; it springs from
want of true knowledge of himself and the consequent overpowering need
he feels to enhance his own personality by depreciating that of his
fellow-creatures. And so, although his descent is incomparably longer
than that of the members of Aryan aristocracies, he has an inordinate
love for titles. The Aryan respect for his ancestors is rooted in the
conception that they were _his_ ancestors; it depends on his valuation
of his own personality, and, in spite of the communistic strength and
antiquity of the Jewish traditions, this individual sense of ancestry is
lacking.
The faults of the Jewish race have often been attributed to the
repression of that race by Aryans, and many Christians are still
disposed to blame themselves in this respect. But the self-reproach is
not justified. Outward circumstances do not mould a race in one
direction, unless there is in the race the innate tendency to respond to
the moulding forces; the total result comes at least as much from the
natural disposition as from the modifying circumstances. We know now
that the proof of the inheritance of acquired characters has broken
down, and, in the human race still more than the lower forms of life, it
is certain that individual and racial characters persist in spite of all
adaptive moulding. When men change, it is from within, outwards, unless
the change, as in the case of women, is a mere superficial imitation of
real change, and is not rooted in their natures. And how can we
reconcile the idea that the Jewish character is a modern modification
with the history of the foundation of the race, given in the Old
Testament without any disapprobation of how the patriarch Jacob deceived
his dying father, cheated his brother Esau and over-reached his
father-in-law, Laban?
The defenders of the Jew have rightly acquitted him of any tendency to
heinous crimes, and the legal statistics of different countries confirm
this. The Jew is not really anti-moral. But, none the less, he does not
represent the highest ethical type. He is rather non-moral, neither very
good nor very bad, with nothing in him of either the angel or the devil.
Notwithstanding the Book of Job and the story of Eden, it is plain that
the conceptions of a Supreme Good and a Supreme Evil are not truly
Jewish; I have no wish to enter upon the lengthy and controversial
topics of Biblical criticism, but at the least I shall be on sure ground
when I say that these conceptions play the least significant part in
modern Jewish life. Orthodox or unorthodox, the modern Jew does not
concern himself with God and the Devil, with Heaven and Hell. If he does
not reach the heights of the Aryan, he is also less inclined to commit
murder or other crimes of violence.
So also in the case of the woman; it is easier for her defenders to
point to the infrequency of her commission of serious crimes than to
prove her intrinsic morality. The homology of Jew and woman becomes
closer the further examination goes. There is no female devil, and no
female angel; only love, with its blind aversion from actuality, sees in
woman a heavenly nature, and only hate sees in her a prodigy of
wickedness. Greatness is absent from the nature of the woman and the
Jew, the greatness of morality, or the greatness of evil. In the Aryan
man, the good and bad principles of Kant’s religious philosophy are ever
present, ever in strife. In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not
distinct from one another.
Jews, then, do not live as free, self-governing individuals, choosing
between virtue and vice in the Aryan fashion. They are a mere collection
of similar individuals each cast in the same mould, the whole forming
as it were a continuous plasmodium. The Antisemite has often thought of
this as a defensive and aggressive union, and has formulated the
conception of a Jewish “solidarity.” There is a deep confusion here.
When some accusation is made against some unknown member of the Jewish
race, all Jews secretly take the part of the accused, and wish, hope
for, and seek to establish his innocence. But it must not be thought
that they are interesting themselves more in the fate of the individual
Jew than they would do in the case of an individual Christian. It is the
menace to Judaism in general, the fear that the shameful shadow may do
harm to Judaism as a whole, which is the origin of the apparent feeling
of sympathy. In the same way, women are delighted when a member of their
sex is depreciated, and will themselves assist, until the proceeding
seems to throw a disadvantageous light over the sex in general, so
frightening men from marriage. The race or sex alone is defended, not
the individual.
It would be easy to understand why the family (in its biological not its
legal sense) plays a larger _rôle_ amongst the Jews than amongst any
other people; the English, who in certain ways are akin to the Jews,
coming next. The family, in this biological sense, is feminine and
maternal in its origin, and has no relation to the State or to society.
The fusion, the continuity of the members of the family, reaches its
highest point amongst the Jews. In the Indo-Germanic races, especially
in the case of the more gifted, but also in quite ordinary individuals,
there is never complete harmony between father and son; consciously, or
unconsciously, there is always in the mind of the son a certain feeling
of impatience against the man who, unasked, brought him into the world,
gave him a name, and determined his limitations in this earthly life. It
is only amongst the Jews that the son feels deeply rooted in the family
and is fully at one with his father. It scarcely ever happens amongst
Christians that father and son are really friends. Amongst Christians
even the daughters stand a little further apart from the family circle
than happens with Jewesses, and more frequently take up some calling
which isolates them and gives them independent interests.
We reach at this point a fact in relation to the argument of the last
chapter. I showed there that the essential element in the pairing
instinct was an indistinct sense of individuality and of the limits
between individuals. Men who are match-makers have always a Jewish
element in them. The Jew is always more absorbed by sexual matters than
the Aryan, although he is notably less potent sexually and less liable
to be enmeshed in a great passion. The Jews are habitual match-makers,
and in no race does it so often happen that marriages are arranged by
men. This kind of activity is certainly peculiarly necessary in their
case, for, as I have already stated, there is no people amongst which
marriages for love are so rare. The organic disposition of the Jews
towards match-making is associated with their racial failure to
comprehend asceticism. It is interesting to note that the Jewish Rabbis
have always been addicted to speculations as to the begetting of
children and have a rich tradition on the subject, a natural result in
the case of the people who invented the phrase as to the duty of
“multiplying and replenishing the earth.”
The pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between
individuals; and the Jew, _par excellence_, is the breaker down of such
limits. He is at the opposite pole from aristocrats, with whom the
preservation of the limits between individuals is the leading idea. The
Jew is an inborn communist. The Jew’s careless manners in society and
his want of social tact turn on this quality, for the reserves of social
intercourse are simply barriers to protect individuality.
I desire at this point again to lay stress on the fact, although it
should be self-evident, that, in spite of my low estimate of the Jew,
nothing could be further from my intention than to lend the faintest
support to any practical or theoretical persecution of Jews. I am
dealing with Judaism, in the platonic sense, as an idea. There is no
more an absolute Jew than an absolute Christian. I am not speaking
against the individual, whom, indeed, if that had been so, I should have
wounded grossly and unnecessarily. Watchwords, such as “Buy only from
Christians,” have in reality a Jewish taint; they have a meaning only
for those who regard the race and not the individual, and what is to be
compared with them is the Jewish use of the word “Goy,” which is now
almost obsolete. I have no wish to boycott the Jew, or by any such
immoral means to attempt to solve the Jewish question. Nor will Zionism
solve that question; as H. S. Chamberlain has pointed out, since the
destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, Judaism has ceased to be
national, and has become a spreading parasite, straggling all over the
earth and finding true root nowhere. Before Zionism is possible, the Jew
must first conquer Judaism.
To defeat Judaism, the Jew must first understand himself, and war
against himself. So far, the Jew has reached no further than to make and
enjoy jokes against his own peculiarities. Unconsciously he respects the
Aryan more than himself. Only steady resolution, united to the highest
self-respect, can free the Jew from Jewishness. This resolution, be it
ever so strong, ever so honourable, can only be understood and carried
out by the individual, not by the group. Therefore the Jewish question
can only be solved individually; every single Jew must try to solve it
in his proper person.
There is no other solution to the question and can be no other; Zionism
will never succeed in answering it.
The Jew, indeed, who has overcome, the Jew who has become a Christian,
has the fullest right to be regarded by the Aryan in his individual
capacity, and no longer be condemned as belonging to a race above which
his moral efforts have raised him. He may rest assured that no one will
dispute his well-founded claim. The Aryan of good social standing always
feels the need to respect the Jew; his Antisemitism being no joy, no
amusement to him. Therefore he is displeased when Jews make revelations
about Jews, and he who does so may expect as few thanks from that
quarter as from over-sensitive Judaism itself. Above all, the Aryan
desires that the Jew should justify Antisemitism by being baptized. But
the danger of this outward acknowledgment of his inward struggles need
not trouble the Jew who wishes for liberty within him. He will long to
reach the holy baptism of the Spirit, of which that of the body is but
the outward symbol.
To reach so important and useful a result as what Jewishness and Judaism
really are, would be to solve one of the most difficult problems;
Judaism is a much deeper riddle than the many Antisemites believe, and
in very truth a certain darkness will always enshroud it. Even the
parallel with woman will soon fail us, though now and then it may help
us further.
In Christians pride and humility, in Jews haughtiness and cringing, are
ever at strife; in the former self-consciousness and contrition, in the
latter arrogance and bigotry. In the total lack of humility of the Jew
lies his failure to grasp the idea of grace. From his slavish
disposition springs his heteronomous code of ethics, the “Decalogue,”
the most immoral book of laws in the universe, which enjoins on obedient
followers, submission to the powerful will of an exterior influence,
with the reward of earthly well-being and the conquest of the world. His
relations with Jehovah, the abstract Deity, whom he slavishly fears,
whose name he never dares to pronounce, characterise the Jew; he, like
the woman, requires the rule of an exterior authority. According to the
definition of Schopenhauer, the word ‘God’ indicates a man who made the
world. This certainly is a true likeness of the God of the Jew. Of the
divine in man, of “the God who in my bosom dwells,” the true Jew knows
nothing; for what Christ and Plato, Eckhard and Paul, Goethe and Kant,
the priests of the Vedas, Fechner, and every Aryan have meant by divine,
for what the saying, “I am with you always even to the end of the
world”--for the meaning of all these the Jew remains without
understanding. For the God in man is the human soul, and the absolute
Jew is devoid of a soul.
It is inevitable, then, that we should find no trace of belief in
immortality in the Old Testament. Those who have no soul can have no
craving for immortality, and so it is with the woman and the Jew; “Anima
naturaliter Christiana,” said Tertullian.
The absence from the Jew of true mysticism--Chamberlain has remarked on
this--has a similar origin. They have nothing but the grossest
superstition and the system of divinatory magic known as the “Kabbala.”
Jewish monotheism has no relation to a true belief in God; it is not a
religion of reason, but a belief of old women founded on fear.
Why is it that the Jewish slave of Jehovah should become so readily a
materialist or a freethinker? It is merely the alternative phase to
slavery; arrogance about what is not understood is the other side of the
slavish intelligence. When it is fully recognised that Judaism is to be
regarded rather as an idea in which other races have a share, than as
the absolute property of a particular race, then the Judaic element in
modern materialistic science will be better understood. Wagner has given
expression to Judaism in music; there remains to say something about
Judaism in modern science.
Judaism in science, in the widest interpretation of it, is the endeavour
to remove all transcendentalism. The Aryan feels that the effort to
grasp everything, and to refer everything to some system of deductions,
really robs things of their true meaning; for him, what cannot be
discovered is what gives the world its significance. The Jew has no fear
of these hidden and secret elements, for he has no consciousness of
their presence. He tries to take a view of the world as flat and
commonplace as possible, and to refuse to see all the secret and
spiritual meanings of things. His view is non-philosophical rather than
anti-philosophical.
Because fear of God in the Jew has no relation with real religion, the
Jew is of all persons the least perturbed by mechanical, materialistic
theories of the world; he is readily beguiled by Darwinism and the
ridiculous notion that men are derived from monkeys; and now he is
disposed to accept the view that the soul of man is an evolution that
has taken place within the human race; formerly, he was a mad devotee of
Buchner, now he is ready to follow Ostwald.
It is due to a real disposition that the Jews should be so prominent in
the study of chemistry; they cling naturally to matter, and expect to
find the solution of everything in its properties. And yet one who was
the greatest German investigator of all times, Kepler himself, wrote the
following hexameter on chemistry:
“O curas Chymicorum! O quantum in pulvere inane!”
The present turn of medical science is largely due to the influence of
the Jews, who in such numbers have embraced the medical profession. From
the earliest times, until the dominance of the Jews, medicine was
closely allied with religion. But now they would make it a matter of
drugs, a mere administration of chemicals. But it can never be that the
organic will be explained by the inorganic. Fechner and Preyer were
right when they said that death came from life, not life from death. We
see this taking place daily in individuals (in human beings, for
instance, old age prepares for death by a calcification of the tissues).
And as yet no one has seen the organic arise from the inorganic. From
the time of Schwammerdam to that of Pasteur it has become more and more
certain that living things never arise from what is not alive. Surely
this ontogenetic observation should be applied to phylogeny, and we
should be equally certain that, in the past, the dead arose from the
living. The chemical interpretation of organisms sets these on a level
with their own dead ashes. We should return from this Judaistic science
to the nobler conceptions of Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and Euler,
Newton and Linnæus, Lamarck and Faraday, Sprengel and Cuvier. The
freethinkers of to-day, soulless and not believing in the soul, are
incapable of filling the places of these great men and of reverently
realising the presence of intrinsic secrets in nature.
It is this want of depth which explains the absence of truly great Jews;
like women, they are without any trace of genius. The philosopher
Spinoza, about whose purely Jewish descent there can be no doubt, is
incomparably the greatest Jew of the last nine hundred years, much
greater than the poet Heine (who, indeed, was almost destitute of any
quality of true greatness) or than that original, if shallow painter,
Israels. The extraordinary fashion in which Spinoza has been
over-estimated is less due to his intrinsic merit than to the fortuitous
circumstance that he was the only thinker to whom Goethe gave his
attention.
For Spinoza himself there was no deep problem in nature (and in this he
showed his Jewish character), as, otherwise, he would not have
elaborated his mathematical method, a method according to which the
explanation of things was to be found in themselves. This system formed
a refuge into which Spinoza could escape from himself, and it is not
unnatural that it should have been attractive to Goethe, who was the
most introspective of men, as it might have seemed to offer to him
tranquillity and rest.
Spinoza showed his Jewishness and the limits that always confine the
Jewish spirit in a still plainer fashion; I am not thinking of his
failure to comprehend the State or of his adhesion to the Hobbesian
doctrine of universal warfare as the primitive condition of mankind. The
matter goes deeper. I have in mind his complete rejection of
free-will--the Jew is always a slave and a determinist--and his view
that individuals were mere accidents into which the universal substance
had fallen. The Jew is never a believer in monads. And so there is no
wider philosophical gulf than that between Spinoza and his much more
eminent contemporary, Leibnitz, the protagonist of the monad theory, or
its still greater creator, Bruno, whose superficial likeness with
Spinoza has been exaggerated in the most grotesque fashion.
Just as Jews and women are without extreme good and extreme evil, so
they never show either genius or the depth of stupidity of which mankind
is capable. The specific kind of intelligence for which Jews and women
alike are notorious is due simply to the alertness of an exaggerated
egotism; it is due, moreover, to the boundless capacity shown by both
for pursuing any object with equal zeal, because they have no intrinsic
standard of value--nothing in their own souls by which to judge of the
worthiness of any particular object. And so they have unhampered natural
instincts, such as are not present to help the Aryan man when his
transcendental standard fails him.
I may now touch upon the likeness of the English to the Jews, a topic
discussed at length by Wagner. It cannot be doubted that of the Germanic
races the English are in closest relationship with the Jews. Their
orthodoxy and their devotion to the Sabbath afford a direct indication.
The religion of the Englishman is always tinged with hypocrisy, and his
asceticism is largely prudery. The English, like women, have been most
unproductive in religion and in music; there may be irreligious poets,
although not great artists, but there is no irreligious musician. So,
also, the English have produced no great architects or philosophers.
Berkeley, like Swift and Sterne, were Irish; Carlyle, Hamilton, and
Burns were Scotch. Shakespeare and Shelley, the two greatest Englishmen,
stand far from the pinnacle of humanity; they do not reach so far as
Angelo and Beethoven. If we consider English philosophers we shall see
that there has been a great degeneration since the Middle Ages. It began
with William of Ockham and Duns Scotus; it proceeded through Roger Bacon
and his namesake, the Chancellor; through Hobbes, who, mentally, was so
near akin to Spinoza; through the superficial Locke to Hartley,
Priestley, Bentham, the two Mills, Lewes, Huxley, and Spencer. These are
the greatest names in the history of English philosophy, for Adam Smith
and David Hume were Scotchmen. It must always be remembered against
England, that from her there came the soulless psychology. The
Englishman has impressed himself on the German as a rigorous empiricist
and as a practical politician, but these two sides exhaust his
importance in philosophy. There has never yet been a true philosopher
who made empiricism his basis, and no Englishman has got beyond
empiricism without external help.
None the less, the Englishman must not be confused with the Jew. There
is more of the transcendental element in him, and his mind is directed
rather from the transcendental to the practical, than from the practical
towards the transcendental. Otherwise he would not be so readily
disposed to humour, unlike the Jew, who is ready to be witty only at his
own expense or on sexual things.
I am well aware how difficult are the problems of laughter and
humour--just as difficult as any problems that are peculiar to man and
not shared by him with the beasts; so difficult that neither
Schopenhauer nor Jean Paul himself were able to elucidate them. Humour
has many aspects; in some men it seems to be an expression of pity for
themselves or for others, but this element is not sufficient to
distinguish it.
The essence of humour appears to me to consist in a laying of stress on
empirical things, in order that their unreality may become more obvious.
Everything that is realised is laughable, and in this way humour seems
to be the antithesis of eroticism. The latter welds men and the world
together, and unites them in a great purpose; the former loses the bonds
of synthesis and shows the world as a silly affair. The two stand
somewhat in the relation of polarised and unpolarised light.
When the great erotic wishes to pass from the limited to the illimited,
humour pounces down on him, pushes him in front of the stage, and laughs
at him from the wings. The humourist has not the craving to transcend
space; he is content with small things; his dominion is neither the sea
nor the mountains, but the flat level plain. He shuns the idyllic, and
plunges deeply into the commonplace, only, however, to show its
unreality. He turns from the immanence of things and will not hear the
transcendental even spoken of. Wit seeks out contradictions in the
sphere of experience; humour goes deeper and shows that experience is a
blind and closed system; both compromise the phenomenal world by showing
that everything is possible in it. Tragedy, on the other hand, shows
what must for all eternity be impossible in the phenomenal world; and
thus tragedy and comedy alike, each in their own way, are negations of
the empiric.
The Jew who does not set out, like the humourist, from the
transcendental, and does not move towards it, like the erotic, has no
interest in depreciating what is called the actual world, and that never
becomes for him the paraphernalia of a juggler or the nightmare of a
mad-house. Humour, because it recognises the transcendental, if only by
the mode of resolutely concealing it, is essentially tolerant; satire,
on the other hand, is essentially intolerant, and is congruous with the
disposition of the Jew and the woman. Jews and women are devoid of
humour, but addicted to mockery. In Rome there was even a woman
(Sulpicia) who wrote satires. Satire, because of its intolerance, is
impossible to men in society. The humourist, who knows how to keep the
trifles and littlenesses of phenomena from troubling himself or others,
is a welcome guest. Humour, like love, moves away obstacles from our
path; it makes possible a way of regarding the world. The Jew,
therefore, is least addicted to society, and the Englishman most adapted
for it.
The comparison of the Jew with the Englishman fades out much more
quickly than that with the woman. Both comparisons first arose in the
heat of the conflict as to the worth and the nature of Jews. I may again
refer to Wagner, who not only interested himself deeply in the problem
of Judaism, but rediscovered the Jew in the Englishman, and threw the
shadow of Ahasuerus over his Kundry, probably the most perfect
representation of woman in art.
The fact that no woman in the world represents the idea of the wife so
completely as the Jewess (and not only in the eyes of Jews) still
further supports the comparison between Jews and women. In the case of
the Aryans, the metaphysical qualities of the male are part of his
sexual attraction for the woman, and so, in a fashion, she puts on an
appearance of these. The Jew, on the other hand, has no transcendental
quality, and in the shaping and moulding of the wife leaves the natural
tendencies of the female nature a more unhampered sphere; and the Jewish
woman, accordingly, plays the part required of her, as house-mother or
odalisque, as Cybele or Cyprian, in the fullest way.
The congruity between Jews and women further reveals itself in the
extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great talent for journalism,
the “mobility” of their minds, their lack of deeply-rooted and original
ideas, in fact the mode in which, like women, because they are nothing
in themselves, they can become everything. The Jew is an individual, not
an individuality; he is in constant close relation with the lower life,
and has no share in the higher metaphysical life.
At this point the comparison between the Jew and the woman breaks down;
the being-nothing and becoming-all-things differs in the two. The woman
is material which passively assumes any form impressed upon it. In the
Jew there is a definite aggressiveness; it is not because of the great
impression that others make on him that he is receptive; he is no more
subject to suggestion than the Aryan man, but he adapts himself to every
circumstance and every race, becoming, like the parasite, a new creature
in every different host, although remaining essentially the same. He
assimilates himself to everything, and assimilates everything; he is not
dominated by others, but submits himself to them. The Jew is gifted, the
woman is not gifted, and the giftedness of the Jew reveals itself in
many forms of activity, as, for instance, in jurisprudence; but these
activities are always relative and never seated in the creative freedom
of the will.
The Jew is as persistent as the woman, but his persistence is not that
of the individual but of the race. He is not unconditioned like the
Aryan, but his limitations differ from those of the woman.
The true peculiarity of the Jew reveals itself best in his essentially
irreligious nature. I cannot here enter on a discussion as to the idea
of religion; but it is enough to say that it is associated essentially
with an acceptance of the higher and eternal in man as different in
kind, and in no sense to be derived from the phenomenal life. The Jew is
eminently the unbeliever. Faith is that act of man by which he enters
into relation with being, and religious faith is directed towards
absolute, eternal being, the “life everlasting” of the religious phrase.
The Jew is really nothing because he believes in nothing.
Belief is everything. It does not matter if a man does not believe in
God; let him believe in atheism. But the Jew believes nothing; he does
not believe his own belief; he doubts as to his own doubt. He is never
absorbed by his own joy, or engrossed by his own sorrow. He never takes
himself in earnest, and so never takes any one else in earnest. He is
content to be a Jew, and accepts any disadvantages that come from the
fact.
We have now reached the fundamental difference between the Jew and the
woman. Neither believe in themselves; but the woman believes in others,
in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself; she has a
centre of gravity, although it is outside her own being. The Jew
believes in nothing, within him or without him. His want of desire for
permanent landed property and his attachment to movable goods are more
than symbolical.
The woman believes in the man, in the man outside her, or in the man
from whom she takes her inspiration, and in this fashion can take
herself in earnest. The Jew takes nothing seriously; he is frivolous,
and jests about anything, about the Christian’s Christianity, the Jew’s
baptism. He is neither a true realist nor a true empiricist. Here I must
state certain limitations to my agreement with Chamberlain’s
conclusions. The Jew is not really a convinced empiricist in the fashion
of the English philosophers. The empiricist believes in the possibility
of reaching a complete system of knowledge on an empirical basis; he
hopes for the perfection of science. The Jew does not really believe in
knowledge, nor is he a sceptic, for he doubts his own scepticism. On the
other hand, a brooding care hovers over the non-metaphysical system of
Avenarius, and even in Ernst Mach’s adherence to relativity there are
signs of a deeply reverent attitude. The empiricists must not be accused
of Judaism because they are shallow.
The Jew is the impious man in the widest sense. Piety is not something
near things nor outside things; it is the groundwork of everything. The
Jew has been incorrectly called vulgar, simply because he does not
concern himself with metaphysics. All true culture that comes from
within, all that a man believes to be true and that so is true for him,
depend on reverence. Reverence is not limited to the mystic or the
religious man; all science and all scepticism, everything that a man
truly believes, have reverence as the fundamental quality. Naturally it
displays itself in different ways, in high seriousness and sanctity, in
earnestness and enthusiasm. The Jew is never either enthusiastic or
indifferent, he is neither ecstatic nor cold. He reaches neither the
heights nor the depths. His restraint becomes meagreness, his
copiousness becomes bombast. Should he venture into the boundless realms
of inspired thought, he seldom reaches beyond pathos. And although he
cannot embrace the whole world, he is for ever covetous of it.
Discrimination and generalisation, strength and love, science and
poetry, every real and deep emotion of the human heart, have reverence
as their essential basis. It is not necessary that faith, as in men of
genius, should be in relation only to metaphysical entity; it can extend
also to the empirical world and appear fully there, and yet none the
less be faith in oneself, in worth, in truth, in the absolute, in God.
As the comprehensive view of religion and piety that I have given may
lead to misconstruction, I propose to elucidate it further. True piety
is not merely the possession of piety, but also the struggle to possess
it; it is found equally in the convinced believer in God (Handel or
Fechner), and also in the doubting seeker (Lenau and Dürer); it need
not be made obvious to the world (as in the case of Bach), it may
display itself only in a reverent attitude (Mozart). Nor is piety
necessarily connected with the appearance of a Founder; the ancient
Greeks were the most reverent people that have lived, and hence their
culture was highest; but their religion had no personal Founder.
Religion is the creation of the all; and all that humanity can be is
only through religion. So far from the Jew being religious, as has been
assumed, he is profoundly irreligious.
Were there need to elaborate my verdict on the Jews I might point out
that the Jews, alone of peoples, do not try to make converts to their
faith, and that when converts are made they serve as objects of puzzled
ridicule to them. Need I refer to the meaningless formality and the
repetitions of Jewish prayer? Need I remind readers that the Jewish
religion is a mere historical tradition, a memorial of such incidents as
the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, with the consequent thanks of
cowards to their Saviour; and that it is no guide to the meaning and
conduct of life? The Jew is truly irreligious and furthest of mankind
from faith. There is no relation between the Jew himself and the
universe; he has none of the heroism of faith, just as he has none of
the disaster of absolute unbelief.
It is not, then, mysticism that the Jew is without, as Chamberlain
maintains, but reverence. If he were only an honest-minded materialist
or a frank evolutionist! He is not a critic, but only critical; he is
not a sceptic in the Cartesian sense, not a doubter who sets out from
doubt towards truth, but an ironist; as, for instance, to take a
conspicuous example, Heine.
What, then, is the Jew if he is nothing that a man can be? What goes on
within him if he is utterly without finality, if there is no ground in
him which the plumb line of psychology may reach?
The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always double or
multiple. There are always before him two or many possibilities, where
the Aryan, although he sees as widely, feels himself limited in his
choice. I think that the idea of Judaism consists in this want of
reality, this absence of any fundamental relation to the
thing-in-and-for-itself. He stands, so to speak, outside reality,
without ever entering it. He can never make himself one with
anything--never enter into real relationships. He is a zealot without
zeal; he has no share in the unlimited, the unconditioned. He is without
simplicity of faith, and so is always turning to each new
interpretation, so seeming more alert than the Aryan. Internal
multiplicity is the essence of Judaism, internal simplicity that of the
Aryan.
It might be urged that the Jewish double-mindedness is modern, and is
the result of new knowledge struggling with the old orthodoxy. The
education of the Jew, however, only accentuates his natural qualities,
and the doubting Jew turns with a renewed zeal to money-making, in which
only he can find his standard of value. A curious proof of the absence
of simplicity in the mind of the Jew is that he seldom sings, not from
bashfulness, but because he does not believe in his own singing. Just as
the acuteness of Jews has nothing to do with true power of
differentiating, so his shyness about singing or even about speaking in
clear positive tones has nothing to do with real reserve. It is a kind
of inverted pride; having no true sense of his own worth, he fears being
made ridiculous by his singing or speech. The embarrassment of the Jew
extends to things which have nothing to do with the real ego.
It has been seen how difficult it is to define the Jew. He has neither
severity nor tenderness. He is both tenacious and weak. He is neither
king nor leader, slave nor vassal. He has no share in enthusiasm, and
yet he has little equanimity. Nothing is self-evident to him, and yet he
is astonished at nothing. He has no trace of Lohengrin in him, and none
of Telramund. He is ridiculous as a member of a students’ corps and he
is equally ridiculous as a “philister.” Because he believes in nothing,
he takes refuge in materialism; from this arises his avarice, which is
simply an attempt to convince himself that something has a permanent
value. And yet he is no real tradesman; what is unreal, insecure in
German commerce, is the result of the Jewish speculative interest.
The erotics of the Jew are sentimentalism, and their humour is satire.
Perhaps examples may help to explain my interpretation of the Jewish
character, and I point readily to Ibsen’s King Hakon in the
“Pretenders,” and to his Dr. Stockmann in “The Enemy of the People.”
These may make clear what is for ever absent in the Jew. Judaism and
Christianity form the greatest possible contrasts; the former is bereft
of all true faith and of inner identity, the latter is the highest
expression of the highest faith. Christianity is heroism at its highest
point; Judaism is the extreme of cowardliness.
Chamberlain has said much that is true and striking as to the fearful
awe-struck want of understanding that the Jew displays with regard to
the person and teaching of Christ, for the combination of warrior and
sufferer in Him, for His life and death. None the less, it would be
wrong to state that the Jew is an enemy of Christ, that he represents
the anti-Christ; it is only that he feels no relation with Him. It is
strong-minded Aryans, malefactors, who hate Jesus. The Jew does not get
beyond being bewildered and disturbed by Him, as something that passes
his wit to understand.
And yet it has stood the Jew in good stead that the New Testament seemed
the outcome and fine flower of the Old, the fulfilment of its Messianic
prophecies. The polar opposition between Judaism and Christianity makes
the origin of the latter from the former a deep riddle; it is the riddle
of the psychology of the founder of religions.
What is the difference between the genius who founds a religion and
other kinds of genius? What is it that has led him to found the
religion?
The main difference is no other than that he did not always believe in
the God he worships. Tradition relates of Buddha, as of Christ, that
they were subject to greater temptations than other men. Two others,
Mahomet and Luther, were epileptic. Epilepsy is the disease of the
criminal; Cæsar, Narses, Napoleon, the greatest of the criminals, were
epileptics.
The founder of a religion is the man who has lived without God and yet
has struggled towards the greatest faith. How is it possible for a bad
man to transform himself? As Kant, although he was compelled to admit
the fact, asked in his “Philosophy of Religion,” how can an evil tree
bring forth good fruit? The inconceivable mystery of the transformation
into a good man of one who has lived evilly all the days and years of
his life has actually realised itself in the case of some six or seven
historical personages. These have been the founders of religions.
Other men of genius are good from their birth; the religious founder
acquires goodness. The old existence ceases utterly and is replaced by
the new. The greater the man, the more must perish in him at the
regeneration. I am inclined to think that Socrates, alone amongst the
Greeks, approached closely to the founders of religion; perhaps he made
the decisive struggle with evil in the four-and-twenty hours during
which he stood alone at Potidæa.
The founder of a religion is the man for whom no problem has been solved
from his birth. He is the man with the least possible sureness of
conviction, for whom everything is doubtful and uncertain, and who has
to conquer everything for himself in this life. One has to struggle
against illness and physical weakness, another trembles on the brink of
the crimes which are possible for him, yet another has been in the bonds
of sin from his birth. It is only a formal statement to say that
original sin is the same in all persons; it differs materially for each
person. Here one, there another, each as he was born, has chosen what is
senseless and worthless, has preferred instinct to his will, or pleasure
to love; only the founder of a religion has had original sin in its
absolute form; in him everything is doubtful, everything is in question.
He has to meet every problem and free himself from all guilt. He has to
reach firm ground from the deepest abyss; he has to surmount the
nothingness in him and bind himself to the utmost reality. And so it
may be said of him that he frees himself of original sin, that in him
God becomes man, but also that the man becomes God; in him was all error
and all guilt; in him there comes to be all expiation and redemption.
Thus the founder of a religion is the greatest of the geniuses, for he
has vanquished the most. He is the man who has accomplished victoriously
what the deepest thinkers of mankind have thought of only timorously as
a possibility, the complete regeneration of a man, the reversal of his
will. Other great men of genius have, indeed, to fight against evil, but
the bent of their souls is towards the good. The founder of a religion
has so much in him of evil, of the perverse, of earthly passion, that he
must fight with the enemy within him for forty days in the wilderness,
without food or sleep. It was only thus that he can conquer and overcome
the death within him and free himself for the highest life. Were it
otherwise there would be no impulse to found a faith. The founder of a
religion is thus the very antipodes of the emperor; emperor and Galilean
are at the two poles of thought. In Napoleon’s life, also, there was a
moment when a conversion took place; but this was not a turning away
from earthly life, but the deliberate decision for the treasure and
power and splendour of the earthly life. Napoleon was great in the
colossal intensity with which he flung from him all the ideal, all
relation to the absolute, in the magnitude of his guilt. The founder of
religion, on the other hand, cannot and will not bring to man anything
except that which was most difficult for himself to attain, the
reconciliation with God. He knows that he himself was the man most laden
with guilt, and he atones for the guilt by his death on the cross.
There were two possibilities in Judaism. Before the birth of Christ,
these two, negation and affirmation, were together awaiting choice.
Christ was the man who conquered in Himself Judaism, the greatest
negation, and created Christianity, the strongest affirmation and the
most direct opposite of Judaism. Now the choice has been made; the old
Israel has divided into Jews and Christians, and Judaism has lost the
possibility of producing greatness. The new Judaism has been unable to
produce men like Samson and Joshua, the least Jewish of the old Jews. In
the history of the world, Christendom and Jewry represent negation and
affirmation. In old Israel there was the highest possibility of mankind,
the possibility of Christ. The other possibility is the Jew.
I must guard against misconception; I do not mean that there was any
approach to Christianity in Judaism; the one is the absolute negation of
the other; the relation between the two is only that which exists
between all pairs of direct opposites. Even more than in the case of
piety and Judaism, Judaism and Christianity can best be contrasted by
what each respectively excludes. Nothing is easier than to be Jewish,
nothing so difficult as to be Christian. Judaism is the abyss over which
Christianity is erected, and for that reason the Aryan dreads nothing so
deeply as the Jew.
I am not disposed to believe, with Chamberlain, that the birth of the
Saviour in Palestine was an accident. Christ was a Jew, precisely that
He might overcome the Judaism within Him, for he who triumphs over the
deepest doubt reaches the highest faith; he who has raised himself above
the most desolate negation is most sure in his position of affirmation.
Judaism was the peculiar, original sin of Christ; it was His victory
over Judaism that made Him greater than Buddha or Confucius. Christ was
the greatest man because He conquered the greatest enemy. Perhaps He
was, and will remain, the only Jew to conquer Judaism. The first of the
Jews to become wholly the Christ was also the last who made the
transition. It may be, however, that there still lies in Judaism the
possibility of producing a Christ, and that the founder of the next
religion will pass through Jewry.
On no other supposition can we account for the long persistence of the
Jewish race which has outlived so many other peoples. Without at least
some vague hope, the Jews could not have survived, and the hope is that
there must be something in Judaism for Judaism; it is the idea of a
Messiah, of one who shall save them from Judaism. Every other race has
had some special watchword, and, on realising their watchword, they have
perished. The Jews have failed to realise their watchword, and so their
vitality persists. The Jewish nature has no other metaphysical meaning
than to be the spring from which the founders of religion will come.
Their tradition to increase and multiply is connected with this vague
hope, that out of them shall come the Messiah. The possibility of
begetting Christs is the meaning of Judaism.
As in the Jew there are the greatest possibilities, so also in him are
the meanest actualities; he is adapted to most things and realises
fewest.
Judaism, at the present day, has reached its highest point since the
time of Herod. Judaism is the spirit of modern life. Sexuality is
accepted, and contemporary ethics sing the praises of pairing. Unhappy
Nietzsche must not be made responsible for the shameful doctrines of
Wilhelm Bölsche. Nietzsche himself understood asceticism, and perhaps it
was only as a revulsion from the evils of his own asceticism that he
attached value to the opposite conception. It is the Jew and the woman
who are the apostles of pairing to bring guilt on humanity.
Our age is not only the most Jewish but the most feminine. It is a time
when art is content with daubs and seeks its inspiration in the sports
of animals; the time of a superficial anarchy, with no feeling for
Justice and the State; a time of communistic ethics, of the most foolish
of historical views, the materialistic interpretation of history; a time
of capitalism and of Marxism; a time when history, life, and science are
no more than political economy and technical instruction; a time when
genius is supposed to be a form of madness; a time with no great artists
and no great philosophers; a time without originality and yet with the
most foolish craving for originality; a time when the cult of the Virgin
has been replaced by that of the Demi-vierge. It is the time when
pairing has not only been approved but has been enjoined as a duty.
But from the new Judaism the new Christianity may be pressing forth;
mankind waits for the new founder of religion, and, as in the year one,
the age presses for a decision. The decision must be made between
Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and
female, between the race and the individual, between unworthiness and
worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and the
God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and
there is no middle way.