Nietzsche Called Jews the Strongest Race - The Nazis Couldn’t Handle It
The philosopher called Jews a “master race,” but his Nazi heirs, terrified he was right, turned reverence into repression.
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Friedrich Nietzsche most likely never studied Kabbalah, but he did take up Greek philosophy in a way that resembles the Kabbalistic interpretation of the world.
The wild, unrestrained element, constantly reborn, and represented in Greek mythology by the drunken reveler, he attributed to the god of wine, Dionysus, as the masculine principle of creation. The passive, circular, dreamy, seemingly calmer element he assigned to the Apollonian principle, which he viewed as somewhat feminine.
The Jews, in case you wondered, symbolized for Nietzsche a union of both Apollonian and Dionysian traits. Yet, he associated them more strongly with Dionysus, the Übermensch, the one who creates his own values. Christian Europe, on the other hand, enslaved to the “slave morality” of what he saw as a feminine religion, Christianity, belonged more to Apollo, the subordinated one.
The Jews, as the authors of the Bible, appeared to him, especially the biblical figures, as giants among men, greater even than the heroes of Indian or Greek mythology. Europe’s sin, in his eyes, was its attempt to fuse the Old Testament with the New Testament, which he dismissed as possessing a Rococo flavor.
And so, although Nietzsche regarded the Jews as the strongest race on earth (alongside the Slavs), and although Judaism at its root is a patriarchal culture, we must ask: How did Nietzsche assign such a masculine image to a people so persecuted and seemingly passive in the diaspora, the “female” of Europe?
Even more: does this not help explain the fetishization of Jewish sexuality by Nietzsche’s illegitimate heirs in the Nazi movement? How they harbored a hidden fetish of confusion between the Jew as feminine in power, but in fact masculine in endurance? did this not create great confusion to them?
Indeed, this long introduction leads to a short theory:
The Nazis, who distorted and appropriated elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy, could not accept his claim that the Jews were the strongest race, let alone his identification of that racial strength with Dionysus. Subconsciously, they knew and feared he was right, and that Jewish weakness harbors internal might of ubermenschen.
This fear, and that buried recognition, was violently repressed within the pages of Der Stürmer, which portrayed the Nordic race in its delicate, feminine form, being defiled and corrupted by the Jew.
The confusion and the hate so large, that the Aryan must see himself not only contrasted to the jew between man and man, but the Aryan is willing to appear vulnerable and ultra-delicate as a female, only the show the weak disgusting and so called nonexistence Jewish masculinity. it was a way to try and unman the Jew, as the bearer and father of civilization. An attempt to show a pure passive, and untouched being by him, not only threatened, but that can exist without his contamination – this, even at a price of portraying the representation of the Aryan as a female, or a child. Which in fact comes to show what German culture always was in comparison to the Jewish one, Very young, and very impressionable.
Secularization itself exposed the Jewish body to the world, pulled it from the ghetto, from rags, from Jewish intimacy and formality, and revealed it. This was precisely the repressed element: Freud and others uncovered the Jewish body and psyche as a mirror of the wider world’s inferiority compared to the Jewish Dionysian power.
Secularization thus made the Jewish race visible, and Nietzsche’s popular interpreters within Nazism, instead of acknowledging the power of Jews and Slavs that Nietzsche himself described, dehumanized them, reducing them to organisms to be biologized and exterminated.
The reason was, of course, the attempt to suppress the fact that the Jews were the people who constituted culture, and that the Slavs, as an Eastern people, also possessed no less cultural capability, especially as assimilators and synthesizers of culture (precisely what the Germans themselves were).
In this hatred of the culture-founders and synthesizers, and of their bodies, the Germans tried to transcend Nietzsche’s categories, to reinterpret them, and to remake themselves in light of others. Not through sexual conquest, as in Islam or other cultures, but through racial hygiene and annihilation, and negative sexual representation which turned into race-ideology.
In this sense, the creation of a new world — though contradictory in that it murdered the Jewish and Slavic “master races” according to Nietzsche, nevertheless fulfilled, in part, some of his darker prophecies in his later writings, the reliability and distortions of which remain debated to this day.