THE GENEALOGY OF JEWISH SLAVE MORALITY
Jewry occupies a central position in Nietzsche’s ruminations about the origins of our moral values, the topic of the first essay in The Genealogy of Morals (1887).
In the first six sections of the essay, however, there is no hint of Jews or Judaism. After some cursory remarks about English psychologists and their naive reflections on the history of moral sentiments, Nietzsche outlines the two moral systems that are captured in the title of the essay: “good and evil” and “good and bad.”
The latter system of values predates the former and is characterized by a notion of “good” that is posited by noble individuals and their actions: “The ‘good’ themselves—that is, the noble, the powerful, the superior, and the high minded—were the ones who felt themselves and their actions to be good that is, as of the first rank and posited them as such, in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common, and plebeian.”
The nobility of former times, distanced from the lower classes of society, is the creative source for an aristocratic or master morality.
These noble souls are credited with the ability to name, to designate, and to label, and it is they who then call their own actions “good.”
The label “bad” is the designation for actions of those who stand outside of their circles, those who are subjected to them, their vassals or slaves or serfs.
Thus Nietzsche clearly locates the origins of aristocratic morality in a defined social situation: “The pathos of nobility and distance, the enduring, dominating, and fundamental overall feeling of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to a ‘below’—that is the origin of the opposition between ‘good’ and ‘bad’” (GM, Erste Abhandlung 2, KSA 5.259).2 The aristocratic caste is also defined in vaguely racial terms as Aryan and fair-haired.
The reason for the demise of the value system based on good versus bad seems to proceed organically from the constellation of the quasi-historical characters Nietzsche presents.
Nietzsche introduces a new and central figure on the mythologized historical stage: the priest, who at first enforces a new dichotomy, pure and impure.
The priests appear to form a caste alongside but separate from the noble warriors, and in contrast to the aristocrats by blood, they advocate an antisensual metaphysics, a denial of pleasure and life that would seem to oppose the class out of which they arose.
They are ultimately responsible for the value system of good versus evil, but Nietzsche supplies no real explanation for how or why a ruling caste betrays its own peers. He notes only that we can readily understand “how easily the priestly mode of evaluation may diverge from the knightly-aristocratic mode and then develop into its opposite.”
But he leaves no doubt about his preference for the aristocrats, who exhibit “a powerful physicality, a rich, burgeoning, even overflowing health, as well as all those things which help to preserve it—war, adventure, hunting, dancing, competitive games, and everything that involves strong, free, high-spirited activity.”
The priests, by contrast, are portrayed as impotent and spiteful, as individuals whose “hatred grows to take on a monstrous and sinister shape” (GM, Erste Abhandlung 7, KSA 5.266–67). They do introduce intelligence into the human species, but the overwhelming impression is that they contribute to the destruction of something glorious and worthwhile.
Nietzsche shifts gears abruptly in section seven, and the Jews are suddenly thrust into this semihistorical narrative. They represent “the most important example” of the morals that overturn aristocratic values:
Nothing that anyone else has perpetrated against the “noble,” the “powerful,” the “masters,” the “rulers” merits discussion in comparison with the deeds of the Jews—the Jews, that priestly people who ultimately knew no other way of exacting satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors than through a radical transvaluation of their values, through an art of the most intelligent revenge. (GM, Erste Abhandlung 7, KSA 5.267)
In this initial mention of the Jews there are three features worth noting. First they are portrayed as aggressively opposing the value system that hasbsubjugated them; Jews are directly antithetical to “aristocratic” social orders that Nietzsche has previously identified with the “master race,” with “Aryans,” and with blond and fair-haired peoples. This juxtaposition, even if Nietzsche did not intend it to be read as a concession toward anti-Semitic doctrines, resembles the opposition between Jews and Germans that was so prominent in racist propaganda from Richard Wagner to Wilhelm Marr.
Second, the Jews are identified closely with intelligence; they extract revenge on their despised enemies through their mental prowess.
Here Nietzsche is employing one of the favorite stereotypes of Jews in the modern world as clever and conniving, as well as seeking to gain advantage over the unsuspecting Gentile population through manipulation rather than direct con- frontation.
Third, Nietzsche changes completely the dynamics that he had established before the introduction of the Jews.
While Nietzsche portrays
the priests as part of the noble order that takes on an independence from, and then an opposition to, the aristocratic “warriors,” the Jews are a people or race that is “priestly” and in which there is no differentiation among “Jewish aristocrats” or between priests and warriors.
We are not dealing here with “Jewish priests”; the phrase appears nowhere in the Genealogy, although it does gain prominence in discussions in 1888, especially in the posthumously published work The Antichrist (1895).
Nietzsche is rather referring to Jewry in its entirety or essence as priestly. He continues in this passage from section seven with uncomplimentary remarks about Jews and their reversal of noble values:
This was only as befitted a priestly people, the people of the most downtrodden priestly vindictiveness. It has been the Jews who have, with terrifying consistency, dared to undertake the reversal of the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) and have held on to it tenaciously by the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless).
It is they who have declared: “The miserable alone are the good; the poor, the powerless, the low alone are the good.
The suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly are the only pious ones, the only blessed, for them alone is there salvation.
You, on the other hand, the noble and the powerful, you are for all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lascivious, the insatiable, the godless ones. You will be without salva- tion, accursed and damned to all eternity.” (GM, Erste Abhandlung 7, KSA 5.267)
Nietzsche adds between ellipses: “There is no doubt as to who inherited this Jewish transvaluation,” and readers can easily discern the fundamental premises of Christian doctrine in the Jewish opposition to their masters.
Nietzsche’s obvious disdain for Christianity in his late writings has led many commentators to believe that his remarks are not infused with Judeophobia because his “real” target lies elsewhere.
See link for resource,
Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem https://drive.google.com/.../19iB.../view...
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