Well, let’s start with “The Will to Power.”
“People of the lowest origin, partly mob, outcasts not only from good society, but also from respectable society; grown away from the atmosphere of culture, and free from discipline; ignorant, without even a suspicion of the fact that conscience can also rule in spiritual matters; in a word – the Jews: an instinctively crafty people, able to create an advantage, a means of seduction out of every conceivable hypothesis of superstition, even out of ignorance itself.”
Pg. 163
EphelDuath,
But to be fair, Nietzsche hates the ‘Jews’ for their doctrine, not their skin or race itself. He even has a sort of grudging respect for them because they managed to pull off the craziest task: the revaluation of value, the slave revolt in morality.
Nietzsche is many things, but a simple ‘anti-Semite’ he is not.
This is of course bound up with a crude idea of types and the role of genealogy in passing on characteristics, but all things considered Nietzsche is quite free of what might simply be called ‘anti-Semitism.’
Take a gander at this rather thought-provoking passage from Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ.
The first proposition towards its solution is: Christianity can be understood only be referring to the soil out of which it grew-- it is not a counter-movement against the Jewish instinct, it is actually its logical consequence, one further conclusion of its fear-inspiring logic. In the Redeemer’s formula: ‘Salvation is of the Jews.’-- The second proposition is: the psychological type of the Galiliean is still recognizable-- but only in a completely degenerate form…
The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price: the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer. They defined themselves counter to all those conditions under which a nation was previously able to live, was permitted to live; they made of themselves an antithesis to natural conditions-- they inverted religion, religious worship, morality, history, psychology one after the other in an irreparable way into the contradiction of their natural values. We encounter the same phenomenon again and in unutterably vaster proportions, although only as a copy-- the Christian Church, in contrast to the ‘nation of saints’, renounces all claim to originality. For precisely this reason the Jews are the most fateful nation in world history; their after-effect has falsified mankind to such an extent that today the Christian is able to feel anti-Jewish without realizing he is the ultimate consequence of the Jews.
From the Anti-Christ, section 24. Translation R.J. Hollingdale.
Note that Nietzsche is disdaining the cultured Christian anti-Semitism at the end. He alone, of many of his contemporaries, could see clearly enough that Jesus Himself needed to be understood in a Jewish context, which his contemporaries were unable to do because of their anti-Semitism. Indeed, one of the most important movements in biblical scholarship has been the move to recognize Jesus as a Jewish man, in a Jewish context, which has led to rich advances in the study of the Scriptures. Nietzsche, ironically, can see this. Partly because he is willing to impute what might normally be seen as an insult to Christianity (its Jewishness), but also partly because he does not have some crude anti-Semitism as a doctrine, like many of his contemporaries do.
When you understand what Nietzsche is saying about the slave revolt in morality, it makes his comments about Jews pretty understandable.
Personally, I would make a weaker claim. What’s dangerous about Nietzschean philosophy is that it seems to allow almost any action to be justified.
-Rob