CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN, ZIONISM AS COMPARED WITH OTHER NATIONALISMS OF THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Conor Cruise O'Brien. ZIONISM AS COMPARED WITH OTHER NATIONALISMS OF THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY. September, 1996.

BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC
Paper was presented at The Centenary of Political Zionism Conference, Boston, October 7-10, 1996.

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT
O'Brien examines the relationship of anti-semitism in Europe to the rise of the zionist movement to create a new Jewish state. Of interest to the PROGRAMME is the way he situates Nietzsche's ANTI-CHRISTIAN ANTISEMITISM in that story. Anti-Christian anti-semitism, says O'Brien, removed the "Christian limit" on anti-semitism, which had held in check the ultimate antagonism to Jews. O'Brien attributes the "Christian limit" to Thomas Aquinas. Nietzsche's purported message allowed the antagonism to go beyond the limit and lead to the Nazi "final solution."

QUOTABLE QUOTES
"The most radical and persuasive of the anti Christian antisemites was Friedrich Nietzsche, who was to dominate the intellectual life of Germany in the years before the First World War.

"Nietzsche's message was that the Christian ethic was poison; its emphasis on mercy reversed the true Aryan values of fierceness: 'pride, severity, strength, hatred, revenge.' And the people responsible for this transvaluation of values (Umwertung des Wertes,) the root of all evil, were the Jews....

"'The Jews,' he wrote in The AntiChrist, 'have made mankind so thoroughly false that even today the Christian can feel anti-Jewish without realizing that he is himself the ultimate Jewish consequence.'

"Amid the excited vulgar anti-semitism of the late-nineteenth century, the reminder that Christianity was a Jewish thing was the most effective argument against Christianity. And to weaken Christianity, especially by this route, was to move toward the abolition of the Christian limit." (p.7)

SIGNIFICANCE, EVALUATION, AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORK
  1. O'Brien's finding runs contrary to that of Walter Kaufmann in Viking's The Portable Nietzsche.
  2. In mail, we had an exchange with a reader on Nietzsche and German Anti-Semitism.

    10 November 1996; updated 16 November 1996
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