Here I barely touch upon the problem of the _origin_ of Christianity. The _first_ thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung--it is _not_ a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In the words of the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews."[4]--The _second_ thing to remember is this: that the psychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (which is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the _Saviour_ of mankind.-- [4] John iv, 22. The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be _at any price_: this price involved a radical _falsification_ of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer. They put themselves _against_ all those conditions under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been _permitted_ to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct opposition to _natural_ conditions--one by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a _contradiction_ of its _natural significance_. We meet with the same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the Christian church, put beside the "people of God," shows a complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the most _fateful_ people in the history of the world: their influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more than the _final consequence of Judaism_.