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Essential Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche on anti-semitism

In Genealogy of Morals:

I also do not like these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites, who today roll their eyes in a Christian-Aryan-bourgeois manner and exhaust one's patience by trying to rouse up all the horned-beast elements in the people by a brazen abuse of the cheapest of all agitator's tricks, moral attitudinizing (that no kind of swindle fails to succeed in Germany today is connected with the undeniable and palpable stagnation of the German spirit; and the cause of that I seek in a too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, together with the presuppositions of such a diet: first, national constriction and vanity; the strong but narrow principle “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” [nationalism] and then the paralysis agitans of “modern ideas” [socialism]).
In Beyond Good and Evil:

it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic ranters from the country
In GM again, on the subject of Eugen Dühring:

the foremost moral bigmouth today--unexcelled even among his own ilk, the anti-Semites
A sample quote from Eugen Dühring (more here):

it lies in the interest of a noble mankind, thus of a true humanity and culture, that this obscurantism of religion which has upto now covered and protected the worst characteristics of the Jews with its darkness be fully removed so that the Jew may be revealed to us in his natural and inalienable constitution.
But the evidence which most shows the depths of Nietzsche's anti-anti-semitism, is in these quotes from private correspondence, for which I am grateful to this biography (well worth reading in itself.)

Nietzsche was sent several unsolicited mailings of anti-semitic literature, by Theodor Fritsch a leading writer in the anti-semitic movement, eventually losing his patience, Nietzsche sent the following response to Fritsch:

Herewith I am returning to you the three issues of your correspondence sheet, thanking you for your confidence which you permitted me to cast a glance at the muddle of principles that lie at the heart of this strange movement. Yet I ask in the future not to provide me with these mailings: I fear, in the end, for my patience. Believe me: this abominable ‘wanting to have a say’ of annoying dilettantes about the value of people and races, this subjection to “authorities” who are utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind (e.g., E. Dühring, R. Wagner, Ebrard, Wahrmund, P. de Lagarde -- who among these in questions of morality and history is the most unqualified, the most unjust?), these constant, absurd falsifications and rationalizations of vague concepts “germanic,” “semitic,” “aryan,” “christian,” “German” -- all of that could in the long run cause me to lose my temper and bring me out of the ironic benevolence with which I have hitherto observed the virtuous velleities and pharisaisms of modern Germans. And finally, what do you think that I feel when the name of Zarathustra is mouthed by antisemites?
Nietzsche in a letter to his friend Overbeck on the subject of his failed attempt to remove ownership of his printed works from the publisher Schmeitzner:

my writings lie completely buried and unexhumeable in this antisemitic hole
Nietzsche on Jews
In BGE:

The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe
That the Jews, if they wanted it--or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want--could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.
In Human, all too Human:

Incidentally, the whole problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as their energy and higher intelligence, their capital of spirit and will, which accumulated from generation to generation in the long school of their suffering, must predominate to a degree that awakens envy and hatred; and so, in the literature of nearly all present-day nations (and, in fact, in proportion to their renewed nationalistic behavior), there is an increase in the literary misconduct that leads the Jews to the slaughterhouse, as scapegoats for every possible public and private misfortune.
[to Jews, humanity] owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world. Furthermore, in the darkest medieval times, when the Asiatic cloud had settled heavily over Europe, it was the Jewish freethinkers, scholars, and doctors, who, under the harshest personal pressure, held fast to the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence, and defended Europe against Asia; we owe to their efforts not least, that a more natural, rational, and in any event unmythical explanation of the world could finally triumph again, and that the ring of culture which now links us to the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity, remained unbroken. If Christianity did everything possible to orientalize the Occident, then Judaism helped substantially to occidentalize it again and again, which, in a certain sense, is to say that it made Europe's history and task into a continuation of the Greek.
... a continuation of the Greek is for Nietzsche the utmost praise possible.

In a draft to Ecce Homo:

Jews among Germans are always the higher race--more refined, spiritual, kind
Megan Mook writes:

it should be noted that Nietzsche was not, despite his post-humus association with Nazism, anti-Semitic. He became furious when the anti-Semitic press took him for a supporter of prejudice
Nietzsche on nationalism and racism:
In The Gay Science:

We are not nearly “German” enough, in the sense in which the word “German” is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too openminded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well informed, too “traveled.“
Nietzsche remarked (quoted in the preface to Thus Spake Zarathustra):

How can one praise and glorify a nation as a whole?--Even among the Greeks, it was the INDIVIDUALS that counted.
Nietzsche was an individualist. The National Socialists were -- socialists. It is clear in the above quotes that Nietzsche recognized the relation between racist nationalism and socialism, and sensed their great propensity for genocide.

More on Nietzsche's opposition to socialism.

All the above components may be found in Nietzsche's rejection of Wagner, the Christian-centricism of Wagner and Hegel compared to Nietzsche's extreme opposition to Christianity, and the fact that socialism was a Christian schism.

 
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