Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism by Robert C. Holub (review)

Robert C. Holub’s Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism is a remarkably researched, deeply informed work, brimming with insights and steeped in the contemporary historical contexts and discourses; only thus, Holub insists, can Nietzsche’s œuvre be properly understood. In his quest to grasp Nietz-sche’s—actual rather than attributed—complex attitudes and relations to Jews and Judaism, and to contemporary political anti-Semitism, Holub has relentlessly combed not only Nietzsche’s works, but his unpublished notes, the Nachlass, and his extensive correspondence, as well as evidence from virtually all of Nietzsche’s family, friends and acquaintances (business and personal). Special importance is, quite naturally, paid to the philosopher’s interaction with Richard and Cosima Wagner and his sister Elisabeth where, surprisingly, Holub turns the table on the conventional wisdom and argues that it was Nietzsche who influenced Elisabeth’s anti-Jewish attitudes rather than, as is often thought, the other way round. Indeed, through his scrupulous (some would say unfashionably positivist) investigations, Holub claims to have overturned many misunderstandings and scholarly distortions with regard to Nietzsche’s “Jewish Problem.” He very conveniently summarizes his findings in point form at the end of the work (and in a short review of this kind I cannot do justice to all of them).

Among them we find that Elisabeth’s manipulations of Nietzsche’s writings did not include anti-Jewish themes; indeed, she consistently maintained that Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite. Nietzsche, we are told, knew virtually nothing—negative or positive—about Jews and Judaism in his early years; it was only when he attended the University of Leipzig in 1865 that, influenced by his fellow philology students, he began to express negative stereotypical attitudes. For Holub this is important, for it renders invalid notions that it was Richard Wagner and his circle which infected the philosopher thus. Their role was not to create but rather validate and intensify Nietzsche’s already grounded anti-Jewish views, reinforcing the notion that Jews represented a single unified entity, possessed immense cultural power, and could fatally harm their enemies. Because of the belief that Jews were almost omnipotent, Holub argues, Nietzsche toned down his explicitly anti-Jewish comments and resorted to a kind of “cultural code” in which Jews were clearly intended but not explicitly mentioned. In yet another surprising finding, we learn that Nietzsche’s famous break with Wagner had nothing to do with the latter’s attitude toward the Jews.

Rather surprisingly, despite Nietzsche’s friendship with Jewish admirers—notably Paul Ree, Siegfried Lipiner, and Joseph Paneth—this did not entail, according to Holub, any change in Nietzsche’s anti-Jewish stereotypes and his belief in their inordinate cultural influence and power. Indeed, Holub insists, even in his aphoristic period when Nietzsche’s many written statements about Jews became admiring and positive, the anti-Jewish bias remained and amounted “to a validation of existing stereotypes with a positive reevaluation of something formerly considered negative” (206). Moreover, and this is central to Holub’s thesis, Nietzsche’s stereotypical view of Jews and Judaism remained intact despite his explicit (and at times extreme) hostility to the crudity and ineffectiveness of political anti-Semitism as an organized movement. In the post-Holocaust era we do not distinguish between the two; in Nietzsche’s time this, Holub argues, was a clear possibility. His opposition to political anti-Semitism notwithstanding, Nietzsche recognized the seriousness of the Jewish Question, especially towards the end of his productive life, evidenced by the radically negative, indeed epoch-making qualities Nietzsche endowed the Jews with in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Anti-Christ (1895).

Under Holub’s microscope much of Nietzsche’s mythical aura—the philosopher who regarded himself as explosively “untimely”—is handily removed, brought back, if not reduced, to his own time. “We should be wary of trusting a thinker,” Holub tells us...