Friedrich Nietzsche - On Jews and Judaism. lyrics

1. Human All Too Human 52: "In the Jewish ‘Old Testament,' the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. One stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly,and one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little outpushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the ‘Progress of Mankind.' ... To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, as the ‘Bible,' as ‘The Book in Itself,' is perhaps the greatest audacity and ‘sin against the Spirit' which literary Europe has upon its conscience." 2. ..truly, I am almost the eternal Wandering Jew, except that I am neither eternal nor a Jew.' 3. Beyond Good and Evil 263: a soul FEELS the nearness of what is worthiest of respect. The way in which, on the whole, the reverence for the BIBLE has hitherto been maintained in Europe, is perhaps the best example of discipline and refinement of manners which Europe owes to Christianity: books of such profoundness and supreme significance require for their protection an external tyranny of authority, in order to acquire the PERIOD of thousands of years which is necessary to exhaust and unriddle them. 4. Beyond Good and Evil 475 "Every nation, every man, possesses unpleasant, indeed dangerous qualities: it is cruel to demand that the Jew should constitute an exception. In him these qualities may even be dangerous and repellent to an exceptional degree; and perhaps the youthful stock-exchange Jew is the most repulsive invention of the entire human race. Nonetheless I should like to know how much must, in a total accounting, be forgiven a people who, not without us all being to blame, have had the most griefladen history of any people and whom we have to thank for the noblest human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and the most efficacious moral code in the world. Moreover: in the darkest periods of the Middle Ages, when the cloudbanks of Asia had settled low over Europe, it was the Jewish freethinkers, scholars and physicians who, under the harshest personal constraint, held firmly to the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence and defended Europe against Asia; it is thanks not least to their efforts that a more natural, rational and in any event unmythical elucidation of the world could at last again obtain victory and the ring of culture that now unites us with the enlightenment of Graeco-Roman antiquity remain unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the accident, Judaism has always played an essential part in occidentalizing it again: which in a certain sense means making of Europe's mission and history a continuation of the Greek 5. Gay Science 361 "...As for the Jews, the people who possess the art of adaptabil-ity par excellence. this train of thought suggests immediately that one might see them virtually as a world-historical arrange- ment for the production of actors, a veritable breeding ground for actors. And it really is high time to ask: What good actor today is not-a Jew? The Jew as a born Urnan of letters,uS2 as the true master of the European press, also exercises his power by virtue of his histrionic gifts; for the man of letters is essentially an actor: He plays the “expert," the specialist. 6. Gay Science 348 (this proceeds from 2 pages that are worth reading) "....The sons of Protestant ministers1U and school teachers may be recog- nized by their naive certainty when. as scholars, they consider their cause proved when they have merely stated it with vigor and warmth; they are thoroughly used to being believed, as that was part of their fathersJ job. A Jew. on the other hand, in keeping with the business circles and the past of his people, is least of all used to being believed. Consider Jewish scholars in this light: All of them have a high regard for logic. that is for compelling agreement by force of reasons; they know. with that they are bound to win even where they encounter race and cla** prejudices and where one does not like to believe them. For nothing is more democratic than logic; it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses. (Inci- dentally, Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making people think more logically and for establishing cleanlier intellectual habits-nobody more so than the Germans who are a lamentably deraisonnable race who to this day are still in need of having their "heads washed" first. Wherever Jews have won influence they have taught men to make finer distinctions, more rigorous inferences, and to write in a more luminous and cleanly fashion; their task was ever to bring a people Itto listen to raison."