While a self-confessed lover of Richard Wagner’s operas, Eric Nelson stresses the need to come to grips with his anti-Semitism. Nelson takes as his point of departure the late philosopher Roger Scruton’s posthumously published study of the composer:
Scruton recognizes that “in his mature operas” Wagner meant to reject the bourgeois, liberal “world of deals and transactions”—a world characterized, as Wagner saw it, by the perverse “‘commodification’ of human relations,” rather than the longed-for “dissolving of the self in the experience of community.” This is indeed a central ideological preoccupation of The Ring of the Niebelung. Scruton misses only the crucial fact that, for Wagner, this pathological world of bargains was essentially “Jewish.” Wagner’s anti-Semitism was therefore inextricably bound up with his critique of bourgeois liberalism. And since this distinctive style of Jew-hatred has recently returned to prominence on the political left, getting to grips with its character is, alas, no longer an imperative for deranged Wagnerians alone.
Nelson goes on to argue, through careful reading, that this brand of anti-Semitism is manifest in the plot of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Through this analysis, Nelson suggests similarities between Wagner’s view of the Jews and that of his former friend, Karl Marx:
Marx argued . . . that Judaism and liberalism were in fact a perfect match. Liberalism, on his account, is simply an expression of Judaism. . . . The pathological focus of liberal citizens on their private, isolated needs estranges them from their fellows, whom they encounter as mere “means” to the advancement of their own interests. The result is the distinctive commodification of human life that Marx associates with the bourgeois, liberal order.
Judaism, for Marx, takes the “bargain” as its paradigmatic form of encounter between agents, both divine and human. . . . “The bill of exchange,” as Marx puts it, “is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.” The liberal contractarian tradition is, in turn, merely the application of this Jewish “bargain” mentality to the relationship between citizens; each approaches the other as an “egoist” trying to extract the best possible terms from his fellows.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/eric-nelson/wagner-anti-semitism-the-ring/