Sex and Character

Chapter XIII. 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 realize 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 nonetheless certain: whoever detests the Jewish disposition detests it first of all in himself; that he should persecute it in others is merely his endeavor to separate himself in this way from Jewishness; he strives to shake it off and to localize 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 [German Enlightenment leader] Frederick Nicolai of the eighteenth century) nor those of moderate greatness (here Frederick Schiller can scarcely be omitted), nor will I analyze 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.