This is an obligatory task imposed by psychological observation and analysis. It is undertaken independently of past history, the details of which must be uncertain. The Jewish race offers a problem of the deepest significance for the study of all races, and in itself it is intimately bound up with many of the most troublesome problems of the day.
I must, however, make clear what I mean by Judaism; I mean neither a race nor a people nor a recognised creed. I think of it as a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion only amongst the Jews. Antisemitism itself will confirm my point of view.
The purest Aryans by descent and disposition are seldom Antisemites, although they are often unpleasantly moved by some of the peculiar Jewish traits; they cannot in the least understand the Antisemite movement, and are, in consequence of their defence of the Jews, often called Philosemites; and yet these persons writing on the subject of the hatred of Jews, have been guilty of the most profound misunderstanding of the Jewish character. The aggressive Antisemites, on the other hand, nearly always display certain Jewish characters, sometimes apparent in their faces, although they may have no real admixture of Jewish blood.[25]
[25] Zola was a typical case of a person absolutely without trace of the Jewish qualities, and, therefore, a philosemite. The greatest geniuses, on the other hand, have nearly always been antisemites (Tacitus, Pascal, Voltaire, Herder, Goethe, Kant, Jean Paul, Schopenhauer, Grillparzer, Wagner); this comes about from the fact as geniuses they have something of everything in their natures, and so can understand Judaism.
The explanation is simple. People love in others the qualities they would like to have but do not actually have in any great degree; so also we hate in others only what we do not wish to be, and what notwithstanding we are partly. We hate only qualities to which we approximate, but which we realise first in other persons.
Thus the fact is explained that the bitterest Antisemites are to be found amongst the Jews themselves. For only the quite Jewish Jews, like the completely Aryan Aryans, are not at all Antisemitically disposed; among the remainder only the commoner natures are actively Antisemitic and pass sentence on others without having once sat in judgment on themselves in these matters; and very few exercise their Antisemitism first on themselves. This one thing, however, remains none the less certain: whoever detests the Jewish disposition detests it first of all in himself; that he should persecute it in others is merely his endeavour to separate himself in this way from Jewishness; he strives to shake it off and to localise it in his fellow-creatures, and so for a moment to dream himself free of it. Hatred, like love, is a projected phenomenon; that person alone is hated who reminds one unpleasantly of oneself.
The Antisemitism of the Jews bears testimony to the fact that no one who has had experience of them considers them loveable—not even the Jew himself; the Antisemitism of the Aryans grants us an insight no less full of significance: it is that the Jew and the Jewish race must not be confounded. There are Aryans who are more Jewish than Jews, and real Jews who are more Aryan than certain Aryans. I need not enumerate those non-semites who had much Jewishness in them, the lesser (like the well-known Frederick Nicolai of the eighteenth century) nor those of moderate greatness (here Frederick Schiller can scarcely be omitted), nor will I analyse their Jewishness. Above all Richard Wagner—the bitterest Antisemite—cannot be held free from an accretion of Jewishness even in his art, however little one be misled by the feeling which sees in him the greatest artist enshrined in historical humanity; and this, though indubitably his Siegfried is the most un-Jewish type imaginable. As Wagner’s aversion to grand opera and the stage really led to the strongest attraction, an attraction of which he was himself conscious, so his music, which, in the unique simplicity of its motifs, is the most powerful in the world, cannot be declared free from obtrusiveness, loudness, and lack of distinction; from some consciousness of this Wagner tried to gain coherence by the extreme instrumentation of his works. It cannot be denied (there can be no mistake about it) that Wagner’s music produces the deepest impression not only on Jewish Antisemites, who have never completely shaken off Jewishness, but also on Indo-Germanic Antisemites. From the music of “Parsifal,” which to genuine Jews will ever remain as unapproachable as its poetry, from the Pilgrim’s march and the procession to Rome in “Tannhäuser,” and assuredly from many another part, they turn away. Doubtless, also, none but a German could make so clearly manifest the very essence of the German race as Wagner has succeeded in doing in the “Meistersingers of Nurnberg.” In Wagner one thinks constantly of that side of his character which leans towards Feuerbach, instead of towards Schopenhauer. Here no narrow psychological depreciation of this great man is intended. Judaism was to him the greatest help in reaching a clearer understanding and assertion of the extremes within him in his struggle to reach “Siegfried” and “Parsifal,” and in giving to German nature the highest means of expression which has probably ever been found in the pages of history. Yet a greater than Wagner was obliged to overcome the Jewishness within him before he found his special vocation; and it is, as previously stated, perhaps its great significance in the world’s history and the immense merit of Judaism that it and nothing else, leads the Aryan to a knowledge of himself and warns him against himself. For this the Aryan has to thank the Jew that, through him, he knows to guard against Judaism as a possibility within himself. This example will sufficiently illustrate what, in my estimation, is to be understood by Judaism.
I do not refer to a nation or to a race, to a creed or to a scripture. When I speak of the Jew I mean neither an individual nor the whole body, but mankind in general, in so far as it has a share in the platonic idea of Judaism. My purpose is to analyse this idea.
That these researches should be included in a work devoted to the characterology of the sexes may seem an undue extension of my subject. But some reflection will lead to the surprising result that Judaism is saturated with femininity, with precisely those qualities the essence of which I have shown to be in the strongest opposition to the male nature. It would not be difficult to make a case for the view that the Jew is more saturated with femininity than the Aryan, to such an extent that the most manly Jew is more feminine than the least manly Aryan.
This interpretation would be erroneous. It is most important to lay stress on the agreements and differences simply because so many points that become obvious in dissecting woman reappear in the Jew.
Let me begin with the analogies. It is notable that the Jews, even now when at least a relative security of tenure is possible, prefer moveable property, and, in spite of their acquisitiveness, have little real sense of personal property, especially in its most characteristic form, landed property. Property is indissolubly connected with the self, with individuality. It is in harmony with the foregoing that the Jew is so readily disposed to communism. Communism must be distinguished clearly from socialism, the former being based on a community of goods, an absence of individual property, the latter meaning, in the first place a co-operation of individual with individual, of worker with worker, and a recognition of human individuality in every one. Socialism is Aryan (Owen, Carlyle, Ruskin, Fichte). Communism is Jewish (Marx). Modern social democracy has moved far apart from the earlier socialism, precisely because Jews have taken so large a share in developing it. In spite of the associative element in it, the Marxian doctrine does not lead in any way towards the State as a union of all the separate individual aims, as the higher unit combining the purposes of the lower units. Such a conception is as foreign to the Jew as it is to the woman.
For these reasons Zionism must remain an impracticable ideal, notwithstanding the fashion in which it has brought together some of the noblest qualities of the Jews. Zionism is the negation of Judaism, for the conception of Judaism involves a world-wide distribution of the Jews. Citizenship is an un-Jewish thing, and there has never been and never will be a true Jewish State. The State involves the aggregation of individual aims, the formation of and obedience to self-imposed laws; and the
