Having called Jews “a people gifted with the very strongest vitality” while heaping all sorts of insults on them, and having been given to attacking anti-Semites even more vociferously than he attacked Jews, the notoriously hard-to-pin-down philosopher did not make it easy for historians trying to make sense of his views in this area. Robert Holub, in Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem, presents a thorough evaluation of Nietzsche’s attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, based primarily on his private writings. Benjamin Silver writes in his review:

Nietzsche, Holub concludes, was not an anti-Semite in the late-19th-century sense of the term. After briefly flirting with that ideology during his years [of friendship with Richard Wagner], Nietzsche “recoil[ed] from the crude excesses” of such political anti-Semitism, finding it vulgar and, probably, unphilosophical. But Nietzsche, Holub is quick to qualify, was no friend to the Jews, ether. Even his seemingly positive remarks “often amount to a validation of existing stereotypes.” Moreover, Nietzsche held views that “we would categorize today as biased and perhaps even racist.” Contextualizing Nietzsche turns out to mean that he was not an anti-Semite then, but that he would be now. . . .

While Silver calls this persuasive, he finds lacking Holub’s analysis of the role Judaism played in Nietzsche’s mature thought:

Biblical Judaism, according to Nietzsche, slowly developed “slavish” values and, in so doing, eventually launched a Christian revolution. The significance of Nietzsche’s schema here must not be overlooked. At first blush, Nietzsche’s view would seem to put him just as much at odds with Jews as he was with Christians. For him, Christianity was the one great curse visited upon humanity, and it was visited upon humanity by the Jews. . . .

[Thus] Nietzsche’s philosophy is itself of interest, and his project of . . . tearing down the “slave morality” of Christendom is necessarily connected to Judaism. But for those concerned with that issue, Holub’s study is of little help. It’s very hard to see how Nietzsche’s refusal to remain within the Wagnerian fold, in combination with his employment of certain anti-Jewish stereotypes, helps us make sense of his philosophical-historical understanding of the Jews as “gain[ing] satisfaction from [their] enemies and conquerors only through radical revaluation of their values, . . . in an act of the most deliberate revenge.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.