[Goswin_van_Eyck]

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 conclusion 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 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, 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 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 low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America that their
emancipation was an act of imprudence.
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If consequently, the principal 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, though they may have no real admixture of Jewish blood.24
24 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.
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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 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 hut 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 “Tannhauser,” 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
oblige to overcome the Jewishness within him before he found hi» special vocation;
and it is, as previously stated, perhaps its great significance in the world's history and
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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 itt
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 worldwide
distribution of the Jews. Citizenship is an lin-Jewish thing, and there has never
been and never will be a true Jewish State. The State involves the aggregati on 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
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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 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 a 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
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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 to prove her intrinsic morality.
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 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 role 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 Jewish girls, 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
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does it so often happen that 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 selfevident,
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. 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
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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, the true Jew knows nothing; for what Christ and Plato, Eckhard and Paul,
Goethe and Kant, the priests of the Vedas, and Fechner, and every Aryan have meant
by the 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 greatest 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 something to say 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,
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and to refuse to see all the secret and spiritual meanings of things. His view is nonphilosophical
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 to 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 ithe 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 Linnaeus, 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
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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 freewill
– 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 soul 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. Berkely, 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.
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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 of 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.
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The fact that no woman in the world represents the idea of the wife so completely
as the Jewish woman (and not only in the eyes of the 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 "nobility" 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.
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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 ill 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.
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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-andfor-
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
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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 the students’ corps
and he is equally ridiculous as a ‘philister.” Because he believes in nothing, he takes
refuge in materialism; from this 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 persona 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 the strongminded
Aryans, the 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; Caesar, 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
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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 Potidaea.
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
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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 Demivierge.
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.


Source:

Otto Weininger on the Internet
http://www.theabsolute.net/ottow/