Was Nietzsche an antisemite? This question has been debated ever since his writings were put into the service of Hitler's “Third Reich.” The standard account is that Nietzsche's writings were heavily edited and bowdlerized by his sister and literary executor Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who, along with her husband Bernhard, went on to establish a proto-Nazi Aryan settlement called Nueva Germania in Paraguay. This was the story told after World War II in Walter Kaufmann's path-breaking Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), which sought to restore Nietzsche to the canon of Western humanism. Kaufmann's book did more than any other to cleanse Nietzsche of the stain of antisemitism and protofascism. Nietzsche was instead seen as an apostle of existentialism and a kind of apolitical individualism. This view has had, with modification, a powerful hold on contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. Consider, for example, Alexander Nehamas's influential Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), which treats him as a philosopher of postmodern “perspectivism.” There is not even a reference to Jews, Judaism, or antisemitism in the index to Nehamas's book. We seem to have come full circle.

“I have not met a German yet who was well-disposed toward the Jews,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1966], sec. 251). One might explain this statement, as Leo Strauss once did, from the narrowness of Nietzsche's circle of acquaintances (Liberalism Ancient and Modern [New York: Basic Books, 1968], 227). Although Strauss magnanimously exempted Nietzsche himself from this judgment, certainly no one would expect to find people well disposed to Jews among the German Protestant pastors who had been Nietzsche's teachers or with colleagues like Jacob Burckhardt at Basel. Robert Holub's new book attempts to restore the question of anti-Judaism as a central preoccupation of Nietzsche's life and work.

Holub's argument rests on a distinction between antisemitism of the kind associated with nineteenth-century thinkers like Arthur de Gobineau and Wilhelm Marr, and anti-Judaism, which traffics in a wider range of prejudices and sentiments. On Holub's reading, Nietzsche was contemptuous of antisemitism, with its obsessions about Jewish hegemony and racial purity, even though his writings espouse a consistent Judeophobia. Antisemitism seemed to him just one of many contemporary fads and “isms” that included nationalism, socialism, vegetarianism, and pacifism, all of which come in for Nietzsche's ridicule. Holub defends Nietzsche against his appropriation by the National Socialists and offers a far-ranging exculpation of Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth, yet he also wants to restore the negative assessment of Nietzsche as a deeply Judeophobic philosopher. On the surface, it seems an odd distinction to insist upon.

Holub's early chapters document how Nietzsche imbibed the casual Judeophobia of his surroundings. He occasionally struggles to find evidence for Nietzsche's anti-Judaism where none exists. Prominent attention is given to the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer on the young Nietzsche, even while admitting that Schopenhauer “wrote relatively sparsely on the Jewish Question and Jewish history” (45). An entire chapter is devoted to Nietzsche's relation to the notorious antisemites Richard and Cosima Wagner, but even here Holub admits that Wagner exercised no determinate influence on Nietzsche's thought. Nietzsche's decision to dedicate his book Human, All Too Human to Voltaire—a Frenchman, an archrationalist, and universalist—was meant as a rebuke to the German nationalism of the Wagner circle.

A further case in point is Holub's treatment of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. The book sets out a contrast between Socratic rationalism and the Greek tragic view of the world. Socrates represented for Nietzsche a world-historical turning point in his attempt to replace the tragic pessimism of Homer and Sophocles with a facile optimism based on belief in the rationality and intelligibility of the cosmos. Although Holub admits that there is only one reference to anything “resembling Judaism” in Nietzsche's text, he claims the treatment of Socrates is a “coded” manner for speaking about the Jews (78). It is not altogether clear why Nietzsche would have had to engage in coded language to speak about Jews and Judaism, as antisemitism was widespread in Germany. “Nietzsche,” in Golub's turn of phrase, “was learning well how to vent his frustration at modern Jewry and its tyranny over German culture without specific reference to Jews” (84). Indeed, Nietzsche's frustration here seems to have been so deeply coded that no one has ever noticed it before.

Given Holub's thesis about the enduring legacy of Judeophobia on Nietzsche, he has difficulty making sense of the lengthy section from Daybreak titled “Of the People of Israel” that even Golub admits is “a long litany of praise” (118–19). Here Nietzsche engages in elaborate praise of the Jews for their courage and even heroism during the most frightful persecution. “Their courage beneath the cloak of miserable submission,” Nietzsche writes, “surpasses the virtues of all the saints.” In the same section Nietzsche goes on to praise Jewish marriage and family rituals and suggests that through intermingling with the upper classes the Jews may even come to dominate Europe. The tone throughout is one of respect, even awe, at the Jewish ability to transcend their circumstances. None of this is intended to exculpate Nietzsche's Judeophobia. It is only to say that one should find it where it exists and not find it where it does not exist.

The book is a useful walking tour of Nietzsche's acquaintances, friendships, correspondence, as well as published and unpublished work, as they pertain to what might be called the “Jewish Question.” The problem is that everything is given equal weight, from the most trivial to the most profound, in the author's attempt to come up with a composite portrait of Nietzsche's anti-Judaism. The best part of the book is devoted to Nietzsche's treatment of Jewish themes in The Genealogy of Morals, because this work represents his most important statement on the topic. Although Golub is convincing in his attempt to free Nietzsche from the affiliation with National Socialism, it is not clear what he believes Nietzsche's central importance is. Why should the reader care if he is a Jew-hater but not an antisemite, if that distinction even makes any real difference? For the philosophical meaning of Nietzsche's anti-Judaism, I still prefer Yirmiyahu Yovel's Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).