To defeat Judaism, the Jew must first understand himself, and war against himself. So far, the Jew has reached no further than to make and enjoy jokes against his own peculiarities. Unconsciously he respects the Aryan more than himself. Only steady resolution, united to the highest self-respect, can free the Jew from Jewishness. This resolution, be it ever so strong, ever so honourable, can only be understood and carried out by the individual, not by the group. Therefore the Jewish question can only be solved individually; every single Jew must try to solve it in his proper person.
There is no other solution to the question and can be no other; Zionism will never succeed in answering it.
The Jew, indeed, who has overcome, the Jew who has become a Christian, has the fullest right to be regarded by the Aryan in his individual capacity, and no longer be condemned as belonging to a race above which his moral efforts have raised him. He may rest assured that no one will dispute his well-founded claim. The Aryan of good social standing always feels the need to respect the Jew; his Antisemitism being no joy, no amusement to him. Therefore he is displeased when Jews make revelations about Jews, and he who does so may expect as few thanks from that quarter as from over-sensitive Judaism itself. Above all, the Aryan desires that the Jew should justify Antisemitism by being baptized. But the danger of this outward acknowledgment of his inward struggles need not trouble the Jew who wishes for liberty within him. He will long to reach the holy baptism of the Spirit, of which that of the body is but the outward symbol.
To reach so important and useful a result as what Jewishness and Judaism really are, would be to solve one of the most difficult problems; Judaism is a much deeper riddle than the many Antisemites believe, and in very truth a certain darkness will always enshroud it. Even the parallel with woman will soon fail us, though now and then it may help us further.
In Christians pride and humility, in Jews haughtiness and cringing, are ever at strife; in the former self-consciousness and contrition, in the latter arrogance and bigotry. In the total lack of humility of the Jew lies his failure to grasp the idea of grace. From his slavish disposition springs his heteronomous code of ethics, the “Decalogue,” the most immoral book of laws in the universe, which enjoins on obedient followers, submission to the powerful will of an exterior influence, with the reward of earthly well-being and the conquest of the world. His relations with Jehovah, the abstract Deity, whom he slavishly fears, whose name he never dares to pronounce, characterise the Jew; he, like the woman, requires the rule of an exterior authority. According to the definition of Schopenhauer, the word ‘God’ indicates a man who made the world. This certainly is a true likeness of the God of the Jew. Of the divine in man, of “the God who in my bosom dwells,” the true Jew knows nothing; for what Christ and Plato, Eckhard and Paul, Goethe and Kant, the priests of the Vedas, Fechner, and every Aryan have meant by divine, for what the saying, “I am with you always even to the end of the world”—for the meaning of all these the Jew remains without understanding. For the God in man is the human soul, and the absolute Jew is devoid of a soul.
It is inevitable, then, that we should find no trace of belief in immortality in the Old Testament. Those who have no soul can have no craving for immortality, and so it is with the woman and the Jew; “Anima naturaliter Christiana,” said Tertullian.
The absence from the Jew of true mysticism—Chamberlain has remarked on this—has a similar origin. They have nothing but the grossest superstition and the system of divinatory magic known as the “Kabbala.” Jewish monotheism has no relation to a true belief in God; it is not a religion of reason, but a belief of old women founded on fear.
Why is it that the Jewish slave of Jehovah should become so readily a materialist or a freethinker? It is merely the alternative phase to slavery; arrogance about what is not understood is the other side of the slavish intelligence. When it is fully recognised that Judaism is to be regarded rather as an idea in which other races have a share, than as the absolute property of a particular race, then the Judaic element in modern materialistic science will be better understood. Wagner has given expression to Judaism in music; there remains to say something about Judaism in modern science.
Judaism in science, in the widest interpretation of it, is the endeavour to remove all transcendentalism. The Aryan feels that the effort to grasp everything, and to refer everything to some system of deductions, really robs things of their true meaning; for him, what cannot be discovered is what gives the world its significance. The Jew has no fear of these hidden and secret elements, for he has no consciousness of their presence. He tries to take a view of the world as flat and commonplace as possible, and to refuse to see all the secret and spiritual meanings of things. His view is non-philosophical rather than anti-philosophical.
Because fear of God in the Jew has no relation with real religion, the Jew is of all persons the least perturbed by mechanical, materialistic theories of the world; he is readily beguiled by Darwinism and the ridiculous notion that men are derived from monkeys; and now he is disposed to accept the view that the soul of man is an evolution that has taken place within the human race; formerly, he was a mad devotee of Buchner, now he is ready to follow Ostwald.