Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 137 Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, edited by Jacob Golomb. New York: Routledge, 1997. 282 pp. $18.95. Nietzsche's relationship to Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture has been a disputed topic for more than a century. Especially since the Nazis proclaimed him as one oftheir own, the main debate has focused on whether he was a propagator ofan ideology that led to the Holocaust, or whether the association of Nietzsche with the racist policies of the Third Reich was the result ofdistortion and falsification. Although some commentators have advocated a total condemnation or exoneration, most sober observers, including just about every contributor to Jacob Golomb's volume, take a differentiated view of this matter. It is commonplace, for example, to distinguish Nietzsche's views of the ancient Jews from his attitude toward the "Jewish priests" responsible for the morality of ressentiment, or from his relationship to actual Jews and to antisemitism in his own lifetime. One can also distinguish periods in which Nietzsche adopted different opinions. Although he never partakes ofthe rabid anti-Jewish thought that many ofhis contemporaries embraced, in his early years he more frequently employs derogatory cliches when he refers to Jews; but these remarks decrease with time, and he adopts a markedly and almost defiantly pro-Jewish attitude in much ofhis published writing in the l880s. Finally, one should note that antisemites have had widely divergent evaluations of Nietzsche's importance. In his own time Nietzsche was occasionally recruited for anti-Jewish thought, but then and later many racists recognized that Nietzsche was not really an ally. There may have been a common perception in Germany and abroad that Nietzsche was the forerunner ofNational Socialist ideological positions, but he clearly received mixed reviews from actual Nazi philosophers, many of whom faulted him for his failure to propagate racist positions. Golomb's volume consists oftwelve essays divided into two sections. The first six contributions deal with Nietzsche's relations or views; the second half dozen examine his influence on subsequent Jewish writers and thinkers. These last six essays are quite different in style and approach, and a few do not really belong in the volume at all. Stanley Corngold's interesting observations on the absence of real paternity in Nietzsche and Kafka, and the way in which their writings fulfill the function of offspring, has almost nothing to do with Jews or Jewish culture. Similarly, Peter Heller's discussion of Freud and Nietzsche, as illuminating as it is, does not really explore the Jewish connection, ifindeed there was one at all. And Gary Shapiro's highly personal ruminations on his relationship to Nietzsche belong in his memoirs, not in a book devoted to scholarly pursuits. More to the point is Golomb's own contribution. He examines "marginal Jews," i.e., those Jews who had assimilated to the point that they had almost lost connection with their Judaism. His thesis is that Nietzsche provided for this group a sense of identity, which was often dropped when a marginal Jew then embraced an ideological alternative (e.g., Zionism, Catholicism, Socialism). As if to 138 SHOFAR Summer 1998 Vol. 16, No.4 confIrm this proposition Paul Mendes-Flohr provides a study of Martin Buber's early attraction to Nietzsche and to Zionism, demonstrating how the philosopher was instrumental in Buber's version of the Jewish renaissance. Closing out this section are William 1. McGrath's observations on Nietzsche's influence in the Pemersdorfter circle, which included such notables as Victor Adler and Gustav Mahler, and which was influential in mediating Nietzsche to a generation of Viennese students, including Freud, during the 1870s and 1880s. The fIrst section contains more controversial material since the contributors are dealing with the thorny question ofNietzsche's views on Jews and Judaism. The key word in several of the essays is "ambivalence": Nietzsche was neither a philosemite nor an antisemite; his remarks vary according to changing topics and circumstances. Thus Sander Gilman, using Nietzsche's remarks on Heinrich Heine as his focal point, contends that "the Jews can be both a positive and a negative image within Nietzsche's system" (pp. 96-97). Josef Simon, who assesses Judaism within Nietzsche's moral philosophy...