Nietzsche & the Jews

the long version

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has been the subject of many intellectual biographies. Regarding Nietzsche's feelings toward the Jews, they have offered the reader a choice: Nietzsche was either anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic. In this liberating study, Professor Siegfried Mandel persuasively argues that Nietzsche was truly ambivalent about Jews: he sometimes praised them to the point of exaltation and, at other times, castigated them to the extreme of denigration. Based on an extensive and intense reading of the entire Nietzsche corpus as well as secondary sources, Mandel frees this truly complex figure from "venerators and detractors" alike.