Europe Discovers Nietzsche 339Nietzsche then added his psychograph of the typical anti-Semite:
"Envy, ressentiment, blind fury as a leitmotif of instinct: the claim of
the 'chosen'; complete moralistic hypocrisy—they perpetually ratde off
virtuous and grand words. Here is the typical sign: they do not even
notice whom they are the spitting image of! An anti-Semite is an envi-
ous, i.e., extremely stupid Jew" (13,581).
Nietzsche was an "anti-anti-Semite" to the point of writing in one of
his last letters, which were all tinged with madness: 'T will simply have
all anti-Semites shot" (B 8,575; ca. Jan. 4,1889). Yet he also developed a
theory in On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist
according to which Judaism had played a major role in ushering in and
guiding the "slave revolt in morality" (5,268; GM First Essay § 7). In On
the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche even managed to express a grudging
admiration for the incomparably creative ressentiment that had imposed
a "revaluation of all values" on the world, first when Jewish law was
introduced and later when the Jewish apostate Paid transcended this law.
Nietzsche regarded this revaluation as an essential component of a
"secret black art of a truly grand-scale politics of revenge" (5,269; GM First
Essay § 8). A renaissance of "noble" values would now need to be
enacted against the Jewish revaluation, but the Jewish success story still
merited our respect as an example of an unconditional will to power that
understood how to win over the allegiance of the weak. The Christian
commandment to love thy neighbor impressed Nietzsche as an extraor-
dinarily clever and sublime strategy of the will to power. In his last writ-
ings, notably in Twilight of the Idols, he employed even more adamant
moral and philosophical arguments to advocate anti-Judaism, and intro-
duced an occasional hint of racial biology: "Christianity, with its roots in
Judaism and comprehensible only as a growth from this soil, represents
the countermovementto any morality of breeding, of race, of privilege: it is
the anti-Aryan religion par excellence" (6,101; 77 "Improvers of
Mankind" § 4).
Hence the anti-Semites, whom Nietzsche despised, had no trouble
using some of his ideas as ammunition, even though their image of the