Having called Jews “a people gifted with the very strongest vitality” while heaping all sorts of insults on them, and having been given to attacking anti-Semites even more vociferously than he attacked Jews, the notoriously hard-to-pin-down philosopher did not make it easy for historians trying to make sense of his views in this area. Robert Holub, in Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem, presents a thorough evaluation of Nietzsche’s attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, based primarily on his private writings. Benjamin Silver writes in his review:
Nietzsche, Holub concludes, was not an anti-Semite in the late-19th-century sense of the term. After briefly flirting with that ideology during his years [of friendship with Richard Wagner], Nietzsche “recoil[ed] from the crude excesses” of such political anti-Semitism, finding it vulgar and, probably, unphilosophical. But Nietzsche, Holub is quick to qualify, was no friend to the Jews, ether. Even his seemingly positive remarks “often amount to a validation of existing stereotypes.” Moreover, Nietzsche held views that “we would categorize today as biased and perhaps even racist.” Contextualizing Nietzsche turns out to mean that he was not an anti-Semite then, but that he would be now. . . .
While Silver calls this persuasive, he finds lacking Holub’s analysis of the role Judaism played in Nietzsche’s mature thought:
Biblical Judaism, according to Nietzsche, slowly developed “slavish” values and, in so doing, eventually launched a Christian revolution. The significance of Nietzsche’s schema here must not be overlooked. At first blush, Nietzsche’s view would seem to put him just as much at odds with Jews as he was with Christians. For him, Christianity was the one great curse visited upon humanity, and it was visited upon humanity by the Jews. . . .
[Thus] Nietzsche’s philosophy is itself of interest, and his project of . . . tearing down the “slave morality” of Christendom is necessarily connected to Judaism. But for those concerned with that issue, Holub’s study is of little help. It’s very hard to see how Nietzsche’s refusal to remain within the Wagnerian fold, in combination with his employment of certain anti-Jewish stereotypes, helps us make sense of his philosophical-historical understanding of the Jews as “gain[ing] satisfaction from [their] enemies and conquerors only through radical revaluation of their values, . . . in an act of the most deliberate revenge.”
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2397/twilight-of-the-anti-semites/