Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German EditionWeininger, Otto
Philosophy
Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition
Weininger, Otto
Character; Sex; Sex (Psychology); Sexual ethics
To reach so important and useful a result as what Jewishness and Judaism
really are, would be to solve one of the most difficult problems;
Judaism is a much deeper riddle than the many Antisemites believe, and
in very truth a certain darkness will always enshroud it. Even the
parallel with woman will soon fail us, though now and then it may help
us further.
In Christians pride and humility, in Jews haughtiness and cringing, are
ever at strife; in the former self-consciousness and contrition, in the
latter arrogance and bigotry. In the total lack of humility of the Jew
lies his failure to grasp the idea of grace. From his slavish
disposition springs his heteronomous code of ethics, the “Decalogue,”
the most immoral book of laws in the universe, which enjoins on obedient
followers, submission to the powerful will of an exterior influence,
with the reward of earthly well-being and the conquest of the world. His
relations with Jehovah, the abstract Deity, whom he slavishly fears,
whose name he never dares to pronounce, characterise the Jew; he, like
the woman, requires the rule of an exterior authority. According to the
definition of Schopenhauer, the word ‘God’ indicates a man who made the
world. This certainly is a true likeness of the God of the Jew. Of the
divine in man, of “the God who in my bosom dwells,” the true Jew knows
nothing; for what Christ and Plato, Eckhard and Paul, Goethe and Kant,
the priests of the Vedas, Fechner, and every Aryan have meant by divine,
for what the saying, “I am with you always even to the end of the
world”--for the meaning of all these the Jew remains without
understanding. For the God in man is the human soul, and the absolute
Jew is devoid of a soul.
It is inevitable, then, that we should find no trace of belief in
immortality in the Old Testament. Those who have no soul can have no
craving for immortality, and so it is with the woman and the Jew; “Anima
naturaliter Christiana,” said Tertullian.
The absence from the Jew of true mysticism--Chamberlain has remarked on
this--has a similar origin. They have nothing but the grossest
superstition and the system of divinatory magic known as the “Kabbala.”
Jewish monotheism has no relation to a true belief in God; it is not a
religion of reason, but a belief of old women founded on fear.
Why is it that the Jewish slave of Jehovah should become so readily a
materialist or a freethinker? It is merely the alternative phase to
slavery; arrogance about what is not understood is the other side of the
slavish intelligence. When it is fully recognised that Judaism is to be
regarded rather as an idea in which other races have a share, than as
the absolute property of a particular race, then the Judaic element in
modern materialistic science will be better understood. Wagner has given
expression to Judaism in music; there remains to say something about
Judaism in modern science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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