Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1: Complete Works, Volume SixNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1: Complete Works, Volume Six
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Human beings
and volitional capital, accumulated from generation to generation in
tedious schools of suffering, must necessarily attain to universal
supremacy here to an extent provocative of envy and hatred; so that
the literary misconduct is becoming prevalent in almost all modern
nations --and all the more so as they again set up to be national--of
sacrificing the Jews as the scape-goats of all possible public
and private abuses. So soon as it is no longer a question of the
preservation or establishment of nations, but of the production and
training of a European mixed-race of the greatest possible strength,
the Jew is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other
national remnant. Every nation, every individual, has unpleasant and
even dangerous qualities,--it is cruel to require that the Jew should
be an exception. Those qualities may even be dangerous and frightful
in a special degree in his case; and perhaps the young Stock-Exchange
Jew is in general the most repulsive invention of the human species.
Nevertheless, in a general summing up, I should like to know how much
must be excused in a nation which, not without blame on the part of
all of us, has had the most mournful history of all nations, and to
which we owe the most loving of men (Christ), the most upright of sages
(Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral law in the
world? Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when Asiatic
clouds had gathered darkly over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers,
scholars, and physicians who upheld the banner of enlightenment and of
intellectual independence under the severest personal sufferings, and
defended Europe against Asia; we owe it not least to their efforts that
a more natural, more reasonable, at all events un-mythical, explanation
of the world was finally able to get the upper hand once more, and
that the link of culture which now unites us with the enlightenment
of Greco-Roman antiquity has remained unbroken. If Christianity has
done everything to orientalise the Occident, Judaism has assisted
essentially in occidentalising it anew; which, in a certain sense, is
equivalent to making Europe's mission and history a _continuation of
that of Greece_.
476.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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