Nietzsche and the Jews: Exaltation and Denigration (review)

166 SHOFAR Fall 2000 Vol. 19, No.1 literature concerning the Frankist movement, however, provide a significant resource both for scholars and for lay readers. They provide a valuable overview ofthe state of the field to date, and for that reason the book merits a place on the library shelves. Elisheva Carlebach Department of History Queens College, CUNY Nietzsche and the Jews: Exaltation and Denigration, by Siegfried Mandel. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998. 329 pp. $49.95. Contemporary discussions ofthe influential nineteenth-century German philosopher's attitudes toward Jews and Judaism focus on several related issues. These include how consistently and for what reasons Nietzsche distinguished between Jews of various historical periods, to what extent Nietzsche himselfeither was or sounded antisemitic, how his complex attitudes toward Jews shaped and were shaped by other important ideas in his philosophical and psychological thought, and how these attitudes were influenced by other people and events in his life. While the analyses Mandel provides in his book have implications for the study ofall of these issues, most of his attention is focused on the second and the last. In a 1998 article ("Nietzsche's Attitudes Toward the Jews," Journal ofthe History ofIdeas, Vol. 49, No.2, pp. 301-317), Will Mittelman and I argued that "Nietzsche draws a threefold distinction between (i) the Judaism of the older, pre-prophetic parts of the Old Testament, (ii) the prophetic Judaism out of which Christianity arose, and (iii) modern Judaism," and that it is the middle category which receives Nietzsche's negative critique. One excellent recent book, Weaver Santaniello's Nietzsche. God. and the Jews: His Critique ofJudeo-Christianity in Relation to the Nazi Myth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), while correcting some of the details of our analysis, assumes this general threefold distinction and builds upon it. Mandel does not begin with this distinction, though much of what he says would support it, but starts fresh and takes the reader for a detailed chronological journey from the beginning of Nietzsche's life and his earliest writing to his fmal days. Most commentators today recognize that Nietzsche was consistently, even courageously, opposed to the antisemitism he encountered in the words and actions of so many ofhis contemporaries. His comment in a letter to his sister in 1887 that "It is a matter ofhonor to me to be absolutely clean andunequivocalregarding anti-Semitism, namely opposed, as I am in all my writings" (cited in Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist. Antichrist [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974], p. 45) is Nietzsche at his clearest. At the same time, to pick just one of Mandel's many examples, "neither the anti-Semite nor the Jew can take any comfort" when Nietzsche writes (in a note for Ecce Homo) "Actually, what is it that distinguishes a Jew from an Book Reviews 167 anti-Semite: The Jew knows when he lies, the anti-Semite does not realize that he always lies" (pp. 246-7). Mandel agrees with other recent commentators in arguing that "we fmd in [Nietzsche's] thought higher praise and lesser depreciation of Jews than in most anti-Jewish and even Jewish camps ofthought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (p. 13), but he argues that Nietzsche's attitudes are more ambivalent than some others have suggested. One will not find in Mandel's book much extended discussion ofthe broader social and political context in which Nietzsche's thought must be considered, nor will one find much new analysis of the relationship between Nietzsche's attitudes toward the Jews and his various philosophical ideas. For discussion ofthese matters, one would do well to turn to a book such as Santaniello's. What one does find in Mandel are wonderful character studies; he excels in tracing and analyzing the primary relationships in Nietzsche's life. One prominent example is the book's extended discussion ofRichard Wagner. Mandel sees Wagner as the figure whose presence in and eventual absence from Nietzsche's life most influenced Nietzsche's attitudes on Jews and Judaism. As he writes early in the book, "Biographically, a discussion ofNietzsche and the Jews can be divided justifiably into periods 'before and after Wagner'" (p. 13). It...