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The Jews—a people "born for slavery," as Tacitus and the
whole ancient world say of them; "the chosen people among the nations,"
as they themselves say and believe—the Jews performed the miracle
of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained
a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums. Their prophets
fused into one the expressions "rich," "godless,"
"wicked," "violent," "sensual," and for
the first time coined the word "world" as a term of reproach.
In this inversion of valuations (in which is also included the use of
the word "poor" as synonymous with "saint" and "friend")
the significance of the Jewish people is to be found; it is with them
that the slave-insurrection in morals commences.
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What Europe owes to the Jews?—Many things, good and bad, and above
all one thing of the nature both of the best and the worst: the grand
style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands, of
infinite significations, the whole Romanticism and sublimity of moral
questionableness—and consequently just the most attractive, ensnaring,
and exquisite element in those iridescences and allurements to life, in
the aftersheen of which the sky of our European culture, its evening sky,
now glows—perhaps glows out. For this, we artists among the spectators
and philosophers, are—grateful to the Jews.
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Let us come to a conclusion. The two opposing values "good
and bad," "good and evil" have fought a dreadful, thousand-year
fight in the world, and though indubitably the second value has been for
a long time in the preponderance, there are still not wanting places where
the fortune of the fight is still indecisive. It can almost be said that
in the meanwhile the fight reaches a higher and higher level, and that
in the meanwhile it has become more and more intense, and always more
and more psychological; so that nowadays there is perhaps no more decisive
mark of the higher nature, of the more psychological nature,
than to be in that sense self-contradictory, and to be actually still
a battleground for those two opposites. The symbol of this fight, written
in a writing which has remained worthy of perusal throughout the course
of history up to the present time, is called “Rome against Judaea,
Judaea against Rome.” Hitherto there has been no greater event than
that fight, the putting of that question, that
deadly antagonism. Rome found in the Jew the incarnation of the unnatural,
as though it were its diametrically opposed monstrosity, and in Rome the
Jew was held to be convicted of hatred of the whole human race:
and rightly so, in so far as it is right to link the well-being and future
of the human race to the unconditional mastery of the aristocratic values,
of the Roman values.
What, conversely, did the Jews feel against Rome? One can surmise it from
a thousand symptoms, but it is sufficient to carry one’s mind back
to the Johannian Apocalypse, that most obscene of all the written outbursts,
which has revenge on its conscience. (One should also appraise at its
full value the profound logic of the Christian instinct, when over this
very book of hate it wrote the name of the Disciple of Love, that self-same
disciple to whom it attributed that impassioned and ecstatic Gospel –
therein lurks a portion of truth, however much literary forging may have
been necessary for this purpose.) the Romans were the strong and aristocratic;
a nation stronger and more aristocratic has never existed in the world,
has never even been dreamed of; every relic of them, every inscription
enraptures, granted that one can divine what it is that writes the inscription.
The Jews, conversely, were that priestly nation of resentment par excellence,
possessed by a unique genius for popular morals: just compare with the
Jews the nations with analogous gifts, such as the Chinese of the Germans,
so as to realize afterwards what is first rate, and what is fifth rate.
Which of them has been provisionally victorious, Rome or Judaea? But there
is not a shadow of doubt; just consider to whom in Rome itself nowadays
you bow down, as though before the quintessence of all the highest values
– and not only in Rome, but almost over half the world, everywhere
where man has been tamed or is about to be tamed – to three Jews,
as we know, and one Jewess (to Jesus of Nazereth, to Peter the Fisher,
to Paul the tentmaker, and to the mother of the aforesaid Jesus, named
Mary). This is very remarkable. Rome is undoubtedly defeated.
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Source: Friedrich Nietzsche The Philosophy
of Nietzsche, The Modern Library