Nietzsche's Jewish Problem

About this book

For more than a century, Nietzsche's views about Jews and Judaism have been subject to countless polemics. The Nazis infamously fashioned the philosopher as their anti-Semitic precursor,while in the past thirty years the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The increasingly popular view today is that Nietzsche was not only completely free of racist tendencies but also was a principled adversary of anti-Jewish thought. This book offers a reappraisal of the controversy, taking the full historical, intellectual, and biographical context into account. As the author shows, a careful consideration of all the evidence from Nietzsche's published and unpublished writings and letters reveal that he harbored anti-Jewish prejudices throughout his life. This book demonstrates how this is so despite the apparent paradox of the philosopher's well-documented opposition to the crude political anti-Semitism of the Germany of his day. As the author explains, Nietzsche's "anti-anti-Semitism" was motivated more by distaste for vulgar nationalism than by any objection to anti-Jewish prejudice.--