To defeat Judaism, the Jew must first understand himself, and war against himself. So far, the Jew has reached no further than to make and enjoy jokes against his own peculiarities. Unconsciously he respects the Aryan more than himself. Only steady resolution, united to the highest self-respect, can free the Jew from Jewishness. This resolution, be it ever so strong, ever so honourable, can only be understood and carried out by the individual, not by the group. Therefore the Jewish question can only be solved individually; every single Jew must try to solve it in his proper person.
There is no other solution to the question and can be no other; Zionism will never succeed in answering it.
The Jew, indeed, who has overcome, the Jew who has become a Christian, has the fullest right to be regarded by the Aryan in his individual capacity, and no longer be condemned as belonging to a race above which his moral efforts have raised him. He may rest assured that no one will dispute his well-founded claim. The Aryan of good social standing always feels the need to respect the Jew; his Antisemitism being no joy, no amusement to him. Therefore he is displeased when Jews make revelations about Jews, and he who does so may expect as few thanks from that quarter as from over-sensitive Judaism itself. Above all, the Aryan desires that the Jew should justify Antisemitism by being baptized. But the danger of this outward acknowledgment of his inward struggles need not trouble the Jew who wishes for liberty within him. He will long to reach the holy baptism of the Spirit, of which that of the body is but the outward symbol.
To reach so important and useful a result as what Jewishness and Judaism really are, would be to solve one of the most difficult problems; Judaism is a much deeper riddle than the many Antisemites believe, and in very truth a certain darkness will always enshroud it. Even the parallel with woman will soon fail us, though now and then it may help us further.
In Christians pride and humility, in Jews haughtiness and cringing, are ever at strife; in the former self-consciousness and contrition, in the latter arrogance and bigotry. In the total lack of humility of the Jew lies his failure to grasp the idea of grace. From his slavish disposition springs his heteronomous code of ethics, the “Decalogue,” the most immoral book of laws in the universe, which enjoins on obedient followers, submission to the powerful will of an exterior influence, with the reward of earthly well-being and the conquest of the world. His relations with Jehovah, the abstract Deity, whom he slavishly fears, whose name he never dares to pronounce, characterise the Jew; he, like the woman, requires the rule of an exterior authority. According to the definition of Schopenhauer, the word ‘God’ indicates a man who made the world. This certainly is a true likeness of the God of the Jew. Of the divine in man, of “the God who in my bosom dwells,” the true Jew knows nothing; for what Christ and Plato, Eckhard and Paul, Goethe and Kant, the priests of the Vedas, Fechner, and every Aryan have meant by divine, for what the saying, “I am with you always even to the end of the world”—for the meaning of all these the Jew remains without understanding. For the God in man is the human soul, and the absolute Jew is devoid of a soul.
It is inevitable, then, that we should find no trace of belief in immortality in the Old Testament. Those who have no soul can have no craving for immortality, and so it is with the woman and the Jew; “Anima naturaliter Christiana,” said Tertullian.
The absence from the Jew of true mysticism—Chamberlain has remarked on this—has a similar origin. They have nothing but the grossest superstition and the system of divinatory magic known as the “Kabbala.” Jewish monotheism has no relation to a true belief in God; it is not a religion of reason, but a belief of old women founded on fear.
Why is it that the Jewish slave of Jehovah should become so readily a materialist or a freethinker? It is merely the alternative phase to slavery; arrogance about what is not understood is the other side of the slavish intelligence. When it is fully recognised that Judaism is to be regarded rather as an idea in which other races have a share, than as the absolute property of a particular race, then the Judaic element in modern materialistic science will be better understood. Wagner has given expression to Judaism in music; there remains to say something about Judaism in modern science.
Judaism in science, in the widest interpretation of it, is the endeavour to remove all transcendentalism. The Aryan feels that the effort to grasp everything, and to refer everything to some system of deductions, really robs things of their true meaning; for him, what cannot be discovered is what gives the world its significance. The Jew has no fear of these hidden and secret elements, for he has no consciousness of their presence. He tries to take a view of the world as flat and commonplace as possible, and to refuse to see all the secret and spiritual meanings of things. His view is non-philosophical rather than anti-philosophical.
Because fear of God in the Jew has no relation with real religion, the Jew is of all persons the least perturbed by mechanical, materialistic theories of the world; he is readily beguiled by Darwinism and the ridiculous notion that men are derived from monkeys; and now he is disposed to accept the view that the soul of man is an evolution that has taken place within the human race; formerly, he was a mad devotee of Buchner, now he is ready to follow Ostwald.
It is due to a real disposition that the Jews should be so prominent in the study of chemistry; they cling naturally to matter, and expect to find the solution of everything in its properties. And yet one who was the greatest German investigator of all times, Kepler himself, wrote the following hexameter on chemistry:
“O curas Chymicorum! O quantum in pulvere inane!”
The present turn of medical science is largely due to the influence of the Jews, who in such numbers have embraced the medical profession. From the earliest times, until the dominance of the Jews, medicine was closely allied with religion. But now they would make it a matter of drugs, a mere administration of chemicals. But it can never be that the organic will be explained by the inorganic. Fechner and Preyer were right when they said that death came from life, not life from death. We see this taking place daily in individuals (in human beings, for instance, old age prepares for death by a calcification of the tissues). And as yet no one has seen the organic arise from the inorganic. From the time of Schwammerdam to that of Pasteur it has become more and more certain that living things never arise from what is not alive. Surely this ontogenetic observation should be applied to phylogeny, and we should be equally certain that, in the past, the dead arose from the living. The chemical interpretation of organisms sets these on a level with their own dead ashes. We should return from this Judaistic science to the nobler conceptions of Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and Euler, Newton and Linnæus, Lamarck and Faraday, Sprengel and Cuvier. The freethinkers of to-day, soulless and not believing in the soul, are incapable of filling the places of these great men and of reverently realising the presence of intrinsic secrets in nature.
It is this want of depth which explains the absence of truly great Jews; like women, they are without any trace of genius. The philosopher Spinoza, about whose purely Jewish descent there can be no doubt, is incomparably the greatest Jew of the last nine hundred years, much greater than the poet Heine (who, indeed, was almost destitute of any quality of true greatness) or than that original, if shallow painter, Israels. The extraordinary fashion in which Spinoza has been over-estimated is less due to his intrinsic merit than to the fortuitous circumstance that he was the only thinker to whom Goethe gave his attention.
For Spinoza himself there was no deep problem in nature (and in this he showed his Jewish character), as, otherwise, he would not have elaborated his mathematical method, a method according to which the explanation of things was to be found in themselves. This system formed a refuge into which Spinoza could escape from himself, and it is not unnatural that it should have been attractive to Goethe, who was the most introspective of
