mankind.--

[4] John iv, 22.

The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for
when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they
chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be _at any price_: this
price involved a radical _falsification_ of all nature, of all
naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of
the outer. They put themselves _against_ all those conditions under
which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been
_permitted_ to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood
in direct opposition to _natural_ conditions--one by one they distorted
religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology until each
became a _contradiction_ of its _natural significance_. We meet with the
same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only
as a copy: the Christian church, put beside the "people of God," shows a
complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the
Jews are the most _fateful_ people in the history of the world: their
influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that
today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it
is no more than the _final consequence of Judaism_.

In my "Genealogy of Morals" I give the first psychological explanation
of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a _noble_
morality and a _ressentiment_ morality, the second of which is a mere
product of the denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system
belongs to the second division, and in every detail. In order to be able
to say Nay to everything representing an _ascending_ evolution of
life--that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval--the
instincts of _ressentiment_, here become downright genius, had to invent
an _other_ world in which the _acceptance of life_ appeared as the most
evil and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a
people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when
they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose
voluntarily, and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side
of all those instincts which make for _decadence_--_not_ as if mastered
by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which "the world" could
be _defied_. The Jews are the very opposite of _decadents_: they have
simply been forced into _appearing_ in that gu