Nietzsche, Judaism and Antisemitism

Online talk from Thomas Stern

Nietzsche is one of the most quoted — and most controversial — philosophers on the subject of Jews, Judaism and antisemitism. He praised the Hebrew Bible as one of the great achievements of world literature, counted both Jews and self-declared "antisemites" among his targets, and yet also wrote things about Jews that are difficult to read as anything other than antisemitic. This talk tries to untangle these threads. Drawing on Nietzsche's letters, published works, and a contemporary's report of a conversation with him, we will look at his relationship with the openly antisemitic circles around Wagner, his response to the new "scientific" biblical scholarship of his day (which upended the traditional history of ancient Israel), and his repeated, complicated remarks about Jews, Judaism and what he called the "slave revolt in morals." The aim isn't a simple verdict on Nietzsche, but a clearer view of what's really at stake, philosophically and historically, in his own late-nineteenth-century context.
Thomas Stern is Professor of Philosophy at UCL and Vice-Dean for Interdisciplinarity in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. His research focuses on nineteenth-century German philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: his book Nietzsche's Ethics  2020) gives a comprehensive account of Nietzsche's later ethical thought, and he edited The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (2019). He has also published on aesthetics and the philosophy of theatre (Philosophy and Theatre, 2013) and, more recently, on Proust.