Eugen Dühring: Elimination of All Judaic Elements, Chapter Four, Third Point
Ausscheidung alles Judäerthums, Kapitel Vier, Dritter Punkt
Source Material: German Scan | German Corrected
Editor’s Note: This work is part of a series; refer to Table of Contents.
Third Point:
National religion in a bad and good sense. Fundamental German characteristics.
As soon as modern peoples properly understand their own racial nature, they will not be able to avoid recognizing the New Testament as a racial-Jewish tradition that does not correspond to their own better national essence. The confrontation then becomes simpler; the Old and New Testaments essentially form a single mass of conceptions that stands in racial opposition to the nobler spirit of nations.
As already discussed, the Christianity of modern peoples is, to a better extent, a national creation of these peoples; for example, Christianity on German soil, insofar as it is compatible with the German essence, is indeed a national product of the German spirit.
It is impossible for peoples, especially those with the noblest predispositions, to completely lose their national way of thinking and feeling in a foreign religious vessel.
On the contrary, they will fill the foreign forms and conceptions with their own content and thus, despite the foreign religion, involuntarily develop much of their own nature. The harm will lie only in the fact that a contradictory mixture arises, whose lack of coherence has a detrimental effect and can only be remedied by eliminating the foreign element.
Indeed, one can confidently assert of modern peoples that they visibly lack a national religion; for that name does not deserve what is today overgrown with the foreign to the point of unrecognizability. Where the research and self-reflection of a thinker must first seek out the traits of one’s own nationality and remove the foreign to make the better ancestral elements visible, much is still lacking in the independent spiritual power of nationalities.
“The Jews, who are now only a fragmented nation without a state, are nonetheless the only ones among all modern peoples to have a national religion.”
Looking at the current state of religion, the strange spectacle presents itself that the Jews, who are now only a fragmented nation without a state, are nonetheless the only ones among all modern peoples to have a national religion; for they have carried into the world and preserved with utmost tenacity, almost unchanged, the religion they once developed on Israeli soil by virtue of their racial character.
The so-called Christian peoples, i.e., the modern cultural nations, have adopted the name and form of the specific religion they revere, albeit indirectly, yet ultimately originating from Israel. However much of it may be their own creation, the prevailing Israeli Christianity is visibly a foreign and nationally incompatible imposition.
Were the national character of the Jews better than it is, they would indeed have the advantage over modern peoples of possessing their own racial religion. As it stands, however, they have only the unenviable advantage that there is no moral contradiction between their bad character and their religion.
Their religion reinforces these questionable character traits, which also explains their rigid adherence to it. They cultivate their bad and hostile inclinations toward other peoples when they practice their religion; for in it, everything they wish to permit themselves toward other nations is not only allowed but also prescribed and even sanctified.
Accordingly, it is fairly indifferent where one seeks the incompatibility of the Jewish essence with that of other peoples, whether directly in the national character or indirectly in the religion; for the latter is everywhere a documentation and simultaneously a reinforcement of the former.
It further follows from this that the modern peoples designated as Christian, by tolerating this foreign religious garb, allow something that puts them in contradiction with their own national and better human essence. It is not enough that the harshness of this contradiction has been increasingly softened for over a millennium by infusing ancestral ways of feeling into the foreign templates.
Ultimately, a complete reckoning must occur, and the better native national character must triumph over the inferior foreign one. The German way of thinking and feeling cannot coexist in the long run with the Israeli-Christian one.
The formation of ideals stemming from the Nordic and German national character not only far surpasses the New Testament tradition but comes into direct conflict with it. The Jewish racial essence is, in the nobler sense of the word, entirely incapable of ideals.
“The Jewish racial essence is, in the nobler sense of the word, entirely incapable of ideals.”
It knows only idols patterned after its character elements, and we have already shown through some examples what these are like. In contrast, the Nordic and German national spirit has no reason to fear the analysis of its components anywhere.
Rather, upon closer examination, it proves to be most inclined to represent something that transcends national boundaries. It has an international and universally human disposition because it exhibits relatively the least genuine selfishness.
In everything that a nation is for itself with its characteristics, its individual character can take manifold forms without there necessarily being anything in it that is authoritative for humanity. This is, so to speak, the domestic side of nationality, and it is only its own well-being and fate that depend on this aspect.
In this sense, the positive cultivation of national characteristics is justified, but it must not assert itself toward other nationalities as if it produced something exemplary for the rest of humanity. The latter claim is justified only insofar as it concerns the national expression of such characteristics that are good by a general standard, thus aiming at a better human type, and whose generalization therefore yields something quasi-supranational.
The Jews have pursued not a task for, but against humanity as their chosen vocation. They want, and according to their religion are supposed to, exploit and dominate all peoples. Their world-historical motto, as Tacitus already expressed in antiquity, is hostility toward the rest of the human race.
They are anti-national, but they contrast most sharply with peoples like the Germans, who have a national character predisposed to the highest degree to recognize other good national characters and are thus particularly suited for a generally human vocation.
To prevent misunderstandings, let it be said once and for all that nationality as such and without further qualification is nowhere asserted as authoritative for humanity, but only insofar as it partakes of the good. Otherwise, domestic peculiarities, however justified they may be in their own domain, would unjustly encroach where they do not belong.
Among the Jews, however, even their flaws and bad traits assert themselves as something to which the whole world must be subjected. This conceited narrow-mindedness initially suited the oriental corner-people and then extended to the monstrous selfishness and injustice that, nomadically emerging from that corner, infiltrated other peoples. It is also this that becomes increasingly incompatible with the broad-mindedness of modern peoples and finds its most decisive opposition in the humanitarian sense of the Germans.
Ancestral traits of the German essence are freedom and individualization, a sense of justice, and loyalty. One can clearly enough recognize these characteristics in every stage of Germanic history, even beneath the overgrowth of foreign creeping vines.
Witnesses to this are not only the way of thinking and the intellectual, as it has documented itself, but also the institutions and customs in which the spiritual foundation outwardly manifested itself. Pick out any human affair, and one will find that the national spirit of the Germans has proven itself in the specified sense.
This national spirit extends everywhere; it permeates all areas of life. In our context, however, it would stray too far from the topic of religion and its replacement if the traits of the national spirit were also specifically discussed in other directions. However, the intimate relationships between a people’s fundamental spiritual views and the shaping of its public life and social customs must not be entirely overlooked.
The original political institutions of the Germanic peoples are well-known to be freedom-loving, and it was only foreign elements, such as the Roman imperial tradition and, from the ecclesiastical side, canon law, that worked against the national character in the sense of unfreedom and an inquisitorial spirit.
Tacitus’s description of the relatively early conditions of the Germanic peoples is a counterpart to his occasional portrayal of the Jews. From all the political institutions of the Germans of that time, one can discern the independence that accrued to the people in their sphere and to the leaders in theirs.
Even women among the Germanic peoples held a relatively respectable position for that early stage of development. The German national character’s conception of marriage and family was always such that loyalty and trust united with freedom and justice, thus producing in law and custom something that, though it may have been crude originally and remained imperfect, can challenge the corresponding institutions of any other nation for comparison.
The Germans knew no arbitrary ruler who wielded power and enslaved at will, neither in their ancestral religion, nor in their original communities, nor in the family. Everywhere, leaders or lords were bound by the necessities of a law that truly stemmed from a genuine sense of justice and had its roots in the mindset of those bound together.
The noble free disposition bore its fruits here. It was incompatible with any servile form of life and thus, through its own development, led to no servile form of religion. The latter is a reflection of corresponding political conditions.
“As peoples conduct themselves with themselves, so they conduct themselves with their gods.”
As peoples conduct themselves with themselves, so they conduct themselves with their gods. The reality of life and the poetry of religion are woven from the same fabric. In both, the same drives and conceptions are enacted or reflected.
Oriental despotism, too, is always twofold; it prevails not only in life but also in the world of the gods. The Jews have intensified servitude in priestly rule through the idol of a theocracy to the extreme, and in this, the twofold nature of their despotic disposition is revealed within a single institution.
The church of Christianity is also fundamentally theocratic. Even the word "church," which signifies the population or community belonging to the Lord, betrays the guiding Jewish notion according to which the Lord is everything and asserts his absolute dominion in all directions of life through a priestly rule acting in his name.
No wonder, then, that the Christian religion, as a transmission of a somewhat modified Judaism onto other peoples, has become a source of all kinds of unfreedom for the latter, and that the incompatibility of this transmission, especially with the primal traits of the German nature, becomes increasingly evident over time.