Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism - Chapter 1

Discussions and remarks about Jews and Judaism can be found throughout Nietzsche’s writings, from the juvenilia and early letters until the very end of his sane existence. But his association with antiSemitism during his lifetime culminates in the latter part of the 1880s, when Theodor Fritsch, the editor of the AntiSemitic Correspondence, contacted him. Known widely in the twentieth century for his AntiSemites’ Catechism (1887), which appeared in fortynine editions by the end of the Second World War, Fritsch wrote to Nietz sche in March 1887, assuming that he harbored similar views toward the Jews, or at least that he was open to recruitment for his cause.1 We will have an opportunity to return to this episode in chapter five, but we should observe that although Fritsch erred in his assumption, from the evidence he and the German public possessed at the time, he had more than sufficient reason to consider Nietzsche a likeminded thinker. First, in 1887 Nietzsche was still associated with Richard Wagner and the large circle of Wagnerians, whose ideology contained obvious antiSemitic tendencies. Nietzsche’s last published work on Wagner, the deceptive encomium Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), may contain the seeds of Nietzsche’s later criticism of the composer, but when it was published, it was regarded as celebratory and a sign of Nietzsche’s continued allegiance to the Wagnerian cultural movement. Nietzsche’s break with Wagner occurred gradually during the 1870s, although it may have been punctuated by particular affronts, but from Nietzsche’s published writings we can detect an aggressive adversarial position only with the treatises composed in 1888, The Case of Wagner, which appeared in that year, and Nietzsche contra Wagner, which was published in 1895 after his lapse into insanity. Nietzsche’s closest friends retained their connection to Wagner; Franz Overbeck, for example, the Basler professor of New Testament Exegesis and Old Church History who had been close to Nietzsche © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.