The Jewish Question in the Spiritual World

5,631 words

Spanish translation here

In Italy, the Jewish question is not very keenly felt, unlike in other countries, in Germany in particular. There, as everyone knows, this question provokes deep tensions today not only on the plane of ideas, but also in society and politics. The most recent legislation, proposed by Göring, which bans not only marriages between Jews and non-Jews but also unmarried mixed couples, and permanently excludes Jews, or those already married to Jews, from all Nazi state organizations, are the ultimate consequence of these tensions. 

The origins of the Jewish question are very ancient, varied and at times also enigmatic. Anti-Semitism is a theme that has accompanied almost all the phases of Western history. Even with regard to Italy, an examination of the Jewish question should not be devoid of interest. The fact that in Italy the special circumstances do not obtain that elsewhere have resulted in the more direct and unreflective forms of anti-Semitism, also lets us consider the issue more calmly and with greater objectivity. Let us state right from the beginning that anti-Semitism today is characterized by the lack of a truly comprehensive view of historical and doctrinal premises, a view that could really justify anti-Semitic social and political practices and form the basis from which they could be deduced. For our part, we hold that a certain kind of anti-Semitism is not unjustified: but the weakness and confusion of most of the arguments put forward by anti-Semites, together with the violent partisanship of the latter, ends up being counter-productive, arousing the suspicion in any impartial spectator that it all is just a matter of biased and arbitrary attitudes dictated not so much by authentic principles, as by contingent practical interests. Thus, in the following notes, we will examine of the real basis that can justify an anti-Semitic attitude.

It is said that while today there is a substantial Jewish peril in the domain of finance and the economy, there is also a substantial Jewish peril in the domain of ethics, and that in the domain of spirituality, religion, and world view, everything Semitic, and above all everything Jewish, has a specific character that is repulsive to other peoples of the white race. We will therefore examine the problem holistically, and in three texts examine the Jewish question in its three aspects, one after the other, the first spiritual or religious, the second ethical and cultural, and finally the socio-economic and political aspect. Our reference points will of course be provided by the German authors most specialized in the matter and most emblematic of the anti-Semitic ”myth”: but we will try to summarize everything in the most impersonal possible way, excluding any element that is not purely doctrinal. Is there, in general, a vision of the world, of life and of the “sacred” that is specifically Semitic?

That is the fundamental issue. The term “Semitic,” as everyone knows, has a broader connotation than the word “Jewish” – and it is precisely in this broader meaning that we use it. The reason for this is that we believe that the Jewish element cannot be clearly separated from the general type of civilization that in ancient times spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean, from Asia Minor to the edges of Arabia: however great the differences may be between individual Semitic peoples. Without a comprehensive examination of the Semitic spirit, several key aspects of the Jewish spirit and its action in more recent times are bound to escape us.

Some authors, who have transcended a purely biological racism and have begun to consider race also with regard to types of civilization — e. g. Günther in his most recent publications and Clauss, have come more or less to this conclusion, speaking, in general, of what they called “the culture of the Levantine soul” (der vorderasiatischen Seele). The peoples with that soul are, more or less, the Semitic peoples.

What basis do we have for considering the spirituality and religious forms of the Semites to be inferior? Here, anti-Semites are far from clear and concordant in their statements. The fact is that in order to be able to say in what respects the Semitic spirit is negative, one would have to start by defining what one views as positive in the domain of spirit. Anti-Semites, however, are a good deal more concerned with polemical attacks than with positive assertions, and the positive term in the name of which they negate and condemn very often remains contradictory and uncertain. Thus, some refer to Catholicism (e.g. Moller van den Bruck), others to Nordic Protestantism (Chamberlain, Wolf) and yet others to a dubious paganism (Rosenberg, Reventlow) or to secular national ideals (Ludendorff).

The weakness of such positions is shown by the fact that all of these reference points consist in historical ideas that, chronologically, are later than the earliest Semitic civilizations, and are partly influenced by elements derived from the latter, instead of leading us back to a spiritual pole that is primordial and in a truly pure state. The opposition between the Semitic spirit and the Aryan spirit is, of course, the basis of any anti-Semitism.

But to provide a more serious basis for anti-Semitism, it is not enough to give the term “Aryan” a vague racist basis or a merely negative and polemical meaning, a meaning that would simply encompass everything that, in general, is not “Jewish,” One must instead be able to define ‘”Aryanness” in positive terms, as a universal idea, one that with regard to the type of divinity worshiped and the forms of worship, with regard to religious feeling and world-view, is opposed to everything that pertains to Semitic civilizations and in particular, to the Jews.

Therefore, we must return, but transcending the purely naturalistic plane, to the ideas of nineteenth century philologists and historians – especially of the school of Max Müller – concerning the fundamental unity of the civilizations, religions, symbols, and myths with Indo-European roots. We must connect these ideas with the theory that Wirth has recently – although often with severe confusions – tried to formulate with respect to a unitary, primordial, pre-Nordic civilization (we would say: Hyperborean) as the original root of the various more recent Indo-European civilizations. Finally, we must not neglect Bachofen’s brilliant intuitions regarding the antagonism between “solar” (Uranian) and “lunar” (or telluric) civilizations, between societies ruled by the virile principle and societies ruled by the female-maternal principle (gynocratic societies).

For obvious reasons, we cannot further elaborate on these matters here, but we have already undertaken a project of this kind in one of our works (Revolt Against the Modern World, Milan, 1935). We will only repeat our conclusions regarding the type of spirituality that we can call “Aryan,” “solar,” or “virile,” and which, by way of contrast, should also make it make it clear what really characterizes the Semitic spirit.

The àrya (a Sanskrit word that means the “noble,” in the sense of a race not only of the blood, but also, and essentially, of the spirit) were characterized by an affirmative attitude in the face of the divine. Their mythological symbols, drawn from the shining sky, expressed a sense of the “bodiless virility of light” and of ”solar glory,” that is, of victorious, spiritual virility: so that those races not only believed in the real existence of a super-humanity, of a race of immortal men and divine heroes, but often attributed to this race a superiority and irresistible power over the supernatural forces themselves. Correspondingly, the ideal that characterized the àrya was more regal than priestly, more the warrior ideal of transfiguring affirmation than the religious ideal of devoted abandonment, more an ideal of ethos than of pathos.

Originally, the kings of the àrya were also their priests, in the sense that the possession of that mystical force that is tied not only the “fortune” of the race, but also to the efficacy of its rites, conceived as operations acting upon real and objective supernatural forces, was preeminently attributed to the kings and to no-one else. On this basis, the idea of regnum had a sacred, and hence, potentially, a universal character. From the enigmatic Indo-Aryan conception of the Cakravarti or “universal sovereign,” via the idea of the Aryan-Iranian universal kingdom of the “faithful” and of the “God of light,” to the “solar” presuppositions of the romana aeternitas imperi, to the medieval Ghibelline idea of the Sacrum Imperium — in Aryan civilizations, or civilizations of the Aryan type, one finds the impulse to form a universal embodiment of the power from above, the power of which the àrya felt they were the pre-eminent bearers.

Secondly, in the same way that instead of the pious servility of prayer, there was ritual — again, conceived as a dry operation that subdued the divine — so also, among the àrya, the highest and most privileged places of immortality were open not to Saints, but to Heroes: the Nordic Walhalla, the Doric-Achaean Isle of the Blessed, the heaven of Indra among Indo-Aryans. The conquest of immortality or knowledge retained virile traits; while Adam, in the Semitic myth, is cursed for having tried to steal from the tree of god, in Aryan myth similar adventures are given a victorious and immortalizing outcome in the figures of heroes, such as Hercules, Jason, Mithras, Siegfried. If, higher still than the “heroic” world, the supreme Aryan ideal is the ”Olympic” realm of immutable, complete essences, detached from the lower world of becoming, in themselves luminous like the sun and sidereal natures — the Semitic gods are essentially gods that change, that are born, that live and suffer; they are the ”year-gods” which, like vegetation, are subject to the law of death and rebirth. The Aryan symbol is solar, in the sense of a purity that is power and a power that is purity, of a radiant nature that — again — is luminous in itself, in opposition to the lunar (feminine) symbol, that of a nature that only gives off light insofar as it reflects and absorbs light emanating from a center outside of it. Finally, with regard to the corresponding ethical principles, characteristically Aryan are the principles of freedom and personality on the one hand, and loyalty and honor the other.

The Aryan enjoys independence and difference, and is repelled by every kind of mixing. But that does not stop him from obeying manfully, from recognizing a leader, taking pride in serving him according to a freely established bond: a disinterested bond between warriors, on that that is irreducible to anything that can be bought and sold or turned to profit. Bhakti — is what the Aryans of India called it; Fides — is what the Romans called it; fides — is what they continued to call it in the Middle Ages; Trust, Treue — were the watchwords of the feudal regime. In Mithraic religious communities the principle of brotherhood was above all the virile community of soldiers engaged in a common undertaking (miles was the name of a degree of Mithraic initiation), and the Aryans of ancient Persia until the time of Alexander were able to consecrate not only their persons and their actions, but also their very thoughts to their leaders, who were conceived as transcendent beings. Among the Aryans in India, the hierarchy of the caste system was founded not on violence, but on spiritual loyalty — dharma and bhakti. The serious and austere demeanor, devoid of mysticism, suspicious of every abandon of the soul, that characterized the relationship between the Roman civis, the Roman pater and his divinities, has the same traits as the ancient Doric-Achaean ritual and the “regal” and dominating attitude of the Brahmin or the ”solar caste” of the first Vedic period or of the Mazdean Atharvan. Overall, what characterizes the Aryan spirit is a classicism of domination and action, a love of clarity, difference and personality, an “Olympic” ideal of divinity and heroic superhumanity, and an ethos of loyalty and honor.

With that, albeit summarily, the fundamental point of reference is given. What we must bear in mind are the basic features of an ideal antithesis, which will allow us to orient ourselves in everything that historical reality and the overall form of civilizations often manifests itself in a mixed state: because it would be absurd, in times that are not absolutely primordial, to expect to find the Aryan and Semitic elements in their pure state.

What characterizes the spirituality of Semitic civilizations in general? The destruction of the Aryan synthesis of virility and spirituality. Among the Semites we have on one hand, a crudely material and sensualistic, or coarsely and ferociously warlike (Assyria) expression of the virile principle; on the other, a de-virilised spirituality, a “lunar” and predominantly priestly relationship to the divine, the pathos of guilt and atonement, an impure and disordered romanticism, and, beside it, almost as an escape, a naturalistic and mathematically based contemplativism.

Let us examine a few points in more detail. While the Aryans (like the Egyptians, whose earliest civilization must be considered as being of “Western” origin) viewed their king as an “equal among the Gods,” even in the earliest times, the king of the Chaldeans was only considered a proxy of the gods, conceived as entities distinct from him (Maspero). There is a phenomenon even more characteristic of this Semitic deviation from the level of virile spirituality: the annual humiliation of the king of Babylon. The king, dressed as a slave or prisoner, confessed his sins, and only when, having been beaten by a priest who represented the god, tears started to well up in his eyes, was he confirmed in his office and allowed to put on his regalia.

In fact, just as the feeling of “guilt” and “sin” (almost unknown among the Aryans) is innate in Semites and is reflected in a characteristic way in the Old Testament, the pathos of the “confession of sins” and of redemption from them is characteristic of Semitic peoples in general, closely linked to the matriarchal type of civilization (Pettazzoni) and alien to Aryan societies governed by the paternal principle. We are already dealing with the “guilt complex” (in the psychoanalytic sense), which has usurped a “religious” value and distorts the calm purity and “Olympian” superiority of the Aryan aristocratic ideal. Semitico-Syrian and Assyrian civilizations are characterized by the predominance of female deities, of lunar or telluric goddesses of Life, often with the impure traits of prostitutes.

The gods, however, who accompany them as lovers, have none of the supernatural traits of the great Aryan Divinities of light and day. Usually they are subordinate beings with respect to the image of Woman or the Divine Mother. They are either “dying gods” who suffer, perish and rise again, or ferocious deities of war, hypostases of savage muscular strength or phallic virility.

In ancient Chaldea, the priestly sciences, especially astronomy, are precisely the expressions of a lunar-mathematical spirit, an abstract and fundamentally fatalistic contemplativism, divorced from any interest in the heroic and supernatural affirmation of personality. A remnant of this component of the Semitic spirit, secular and intellectualized, is active in Jews of recent times: from Maimonides and Spinoza to modern Jewish mathematicians (e.g., Einstein, or in Italy, Levi-Civita and Enriques), we find a characteristic ”passion” for abstract thought and for natural law expressed in lifeless numbers.

This, in the end, can be considered the best part of the ancient Semitic legacy. Here, of course, in order not to seem one-sided, we would have to undertake considerations of a much broader scope than this space would allow. We will only mention that the negative elements just mentioned can be found not just among the Semites, but also in other great civilizations, civilizations that were originally Indo-European. Except that in the latter, up to a certain period, these elements were secondary and subordinate to a completely different predominant type of spirituality, and almost always the result of decadence and the influence of a substrate of subjugated or infiltrating inferior races.

Between the eighth and sixth century B.C., a kind of crisis or decline occurred almost simultaneously in all of the greatest ancient civilizations, along with an insurrection of those inferior racial elements. One could say that in the East — from China to India and Iran — this crisis was overcome by a series of reactions or adequate reforms (Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster). In the West, the dam appears to have broken and the insurrection seems to have encountered no major obstacle. In Egypt, it took the form of an outbreak of the popular worship of Isis and similar divinities, with its chaotic plebeian mysticism, in opposition to the ancient virile and solar royal cult of the first dynasties. In Greece, it was the decline of Doric-Achaean civilization with its heroic and Olympian ideals, the advent of secular, anti-traditional and naturalistic thinking on the one hand, and Orphic and Orphic-Pythagorean mysticism on the other.

But the center from which the ferment of decay mainly spread seems to have been precisely the group of Semitic-Eastern Mediterranean peoples and, ultimately, the Jewish people. Concerning the civilization of the Jews, to be objective, we should distinguish between two periods, which are definitively differentiated at that historical moment of crisis to which we have referred. If there is an accusation to be made positively towards the Jews, it is that they had no real tradition of their own, and owed to other peoples, Semites or non-Semites, both the positive elements, and the other, negative elements that they were subsequently able to more particularly develop.

Thus, if we consider the oldest Jewish religion, the ancient Philistine cult of Jehova (the Philistines, however, appear to have been a non-Jewish group of conquerors) and the line of priest-kings that Solomon and David belonged to, we not infrequently find forms that possess both purity and greatness. The alleged “formalism” of the rites of that religion most likely had the same anti-sentimental, active, dominating spirit that we have indicated as a feature of primordial Aryan and Roman virile rituals. The idea itself of a “chosen people,” called to rule the world by divine mandate — apart from its naive exaggerations and the dubious right of the Jews to claim such a vocation for their own race — is, as we indicated, an idea that is found in Aryan traditions, especially among the Iranians: just as among Iranians one also finds, although with virile and not passively messianic traits, the figure of the future “universal lord” and King of kings. It was a moment of crisis, connected to the political collapse of the Jewish people, that overturned these elements of positive spirituality, which most probably derive less from the Jewish people itself than from the Amorites, a people some claim had Nordic, and not Semitic, origins.

Prophecy already represents the decay of the ancient Jewish civilization and the way to all subsequent decadence. The type of the “seer” — ròeh — was replaced by the “prophet” — Nabi — a man inspired or possessed by god, a type of man who previously had been viewed almost as sick. The spiritual center shifts to him and his apocalyptic revelations — and away from the high priest or the priest-king who ruled in the name of the “god of Hosts,” Jehova sebaoth. Here the revolt against the ancient sacred ritualism in the name of a formless, romantic and unmastered “inner” spirituality is associated with a growing servility of man with respect to god, with an ever greater pleasure taken in self-humiliation and an increasing impairment of the heroic principle, culminating in the degradation of the figure of the Messiah to that of a “redeemer,” of a predestined “victim,” against the terrorizing backdrop of the apocalypse — and, on another plane, also culminating in that style of deception, servile hypocrisy, and tenacious, devious, disintegrating infiltration, that since then has been characteristic of the Jewish instinct in general.

Rising to power through the earliest, pre-Catholic forms of Christianity, in the Roman Empire, which at the time was already animated by all sorts of spurious Asian-Semitic cults, the Jewish spirit in effect lead a vast insurrection of the East against the West, of the guarà against àrya, of the impure spirituality of the Pelasgian and pre-Hellenic South against the Uranian and Olympian spirituality of conquering, superior races: a clash of forces that repeated one that had already occurred in an earlier period, during the first colonization of the Mediterranean.

Now we have reached a point from which we can discern what, from this point of view, the arguments of anti-Semites boil down to. Let us say right away that there is hardly anyone who has shown themselves capable of viewing the question from this higher perspective. The only exception is, perhaps, Alfred Rosenberg who, however, in his most recent statements, has almost irreparably undermined his position with all sorts of confusions and especially with blatantly Enlightenment and racist-nationalist ideological admixtures. In the religious sphere, it is very naive to think that the aversion to the Jewish religion can be justified with a selection of biblical passages, which supposedly show that the Jewish god is a “false god.” a “humanized,” “fallible,” “capricious,” “cruel,” “unjust,” “dishonest” god, and so on (Fritsch has mainly been the one to specialize in such accusations) and in stigmatizing such and such a dubious example of “Old Testament” morality (Rosenberg even calls the Bible “a collection of tales for horse traders and pimps”). Certainly, in the case of one Jew — Spinoza — we can recognize a prevailing tendency towards physicality and materiality in the Jewish mythological imagination.

However, that aside, if religions were to be judged by such contingent elements, it is questionable whether the mythologies of pure Nordic-Aryan stock would themselves be exempt from the very same accusations. Since the accusers in this case happen to be German, we could examine their own mythology. What should we then make of Odin/Wotan’s dishonesty in his pact with the “giants” who rebuild Asgard — and of the “morality” of king Günther who famously uses Siegfried so as to be able to rape Brünnhilde, for example? One cannot stoop to this low level of polemical tricks. And all the negative aspects of Jewish religiosity that we must recognize on the basis of what has already been stated should not lead us to ignore the fact that the Old Testament does contain elements and symbols of metaphysical, and hence universal value, even if they were borrowed from other sources.

When Günther, Oldenberg, and Clauss say that the Semitic-oriental spirit is characterized by “the oscillation between sensuality and spirituality, the mixing of the sacred and the brothel,” the enjoyment of carnality and at the same time, the enjoyment of the mortification of carnality, the opposition between spirit and body (which is arbitrarily claimed to have been unknown among the Aryans), the pleasure of exercising power over servile communities, its creeping way of insinuating itself into the emotions of others; when Wolf says that all the diseases we now suffer from have their origins in the Semitic East, that from ”the marshy terrain of Eastern ethnic chaos were born imperialism and mammonism, the urbanization of peoples with the consequent destruction of marriage and family life, the rationalization and mechanization of religion, mummified priestly civilization, the absurd ideal of a divine State that would encompass the whole of humanity” — when anti-Semites say these things, we are served up a mixture of truths with some rather strange confusions. In order to see just how confused things sometimes get, we could take as an example the fact that for Wolf, Greeks and Romans supposedly have no other merit than to have developed “a thriving secular national civilization”: that shows how little he takes ancient Aryan spirituality as a reference point.

Wolf ends up putting Protestantism in the place of primordial Aryan spirituality, and as a result everything is inverted: he sees the triumph of the prophecy over ancient Jewish ritual spirituality as a progress rather than a degeneration, precisely because of its analogy with the Lutheran revolt against the ritualism and authority principle of the Catholic church. As for the accusations — typical of almost all anti-Semites and racists — leveled against the ideal of a universal sacred state, which they regard as Jewish and pernicious, it should be noted that although Semitic civilization sometimes espoused that ideal, it is not, however, originally Semitic, for it is found in the ascending cycle of any great traditional civilization; it is in itself so far from being Jewish, that it was the very soul of the Catholic-Germanic Middle Ages and the dreams of Frederick II and Dante.

Strange to say, according to this anti-Semitic ideology, Rome ends up becoming a synonym of Jerusalem. Rome is not viewed so much as Christianity, but instead as Judaism, and at the same time as the legacy of the pagan empire, which, however, in its universalism, was supposedly already Jewish, or nearly so (the expression “Semitic Rome,” referring to imperial Rome, dates back to de Gobineau). What, then, is supposed to be anti-Jewish? For Wolf, evidently following Chamberlain, it is evangelical, i.e., pre-Catholic Christianity, in its individualistic, formlessly fideistic and anti-dogmatic aspect, that goes right back to the impure ferment of Jewish prophecy, i.e., not only to Judaism, but to the decadent phase of Judaism; and then Luther, who in opposition to the “Romanism” of Rome — which he regarded as satanic — essentially brought back the Old Testament, so that there is no more philo-Semitic anti-Semite than he.

It is true that others, e.g. Rosenberg, for precisely this reason, reject Protestantism as well, but only to fall from the frying pan into the fire: they serve up a purely secular anti-Catholicism, a full repudiation of everything in Catholicism that is supernaturalism and ritual; basically, a rationalism — and racists regard rationalism as a Jewish creature!

Miller also denies the justification of considering Protestantism as a type of religion purified from the Semitic element, and if he directs accusations towards the Church of Rome, it is because of Jewish residues that it retains (e.g. the recognition that Israel was the chosen people, chosen for the revelation), and because of the fact that the Church has abandoned its earlier anti-Jewish rigor, and today has gradually moved towards a policy of tolerance towards Jews.

These are themes that are very widespread today in Germany. But equally widespread is the idea that Rome is the heir of a priestly Pharisaism that, like the Jewish one, aspires to world domination by every means. Even in the famous book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to which we will have to return, the ideal of a universal realm ruled by a sacred authority is presented as Jewish.

Here, once again, things are associated and mingled that, on the basis of the principles already indicated, should instead be quite distinct. While the ancient Roman universal imperial idea was unquestionably Asianized, undergoing, as a consequence, a process of decadence, this cannot be considered a valid argument against the idea in itself: nor is it a valid argument that Judaism, to some extent, has appropriated similar ideals. From an “Aryan” point of view, the value of the Catholic Church consists in the fact that it was able to “Romanize” Christianity, reviving hierarchical ideas, traditions, symbols, and institutions that derive from a broader heritage and rectifying the deleterious element constituted by the revolution of early Christianity, which was closely connected with Jewish messianism and anti-virile Syrian mysticism. Of course, those who consider Catholicism more deeply will find many non-Aryan residues. Nevertheless, in recent times, Rome has remained the only relatively positive point of reference for tendencies to universality.

In relation to this, two points are to be fixed. As we shall see more clearly in the following chapters, there is in fact, today, a universal Jewish idea that is fighting against the remnants of the ancient European traditions, but this idea should be called international rather than universal, and represents the materialistic and plutocratic inversion of the ancient sacred idea of a universal regnum. Second, the hidden source of Nordic anti-Semitism betrays itself in its anti-universalist and anti-Roman polemics, through its confusion of universalism as a supranational idea with a universalism that only signifies the “active ferment of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition” that, according to Mommsen, even in the ancient world was mainly caused by Judaism. In other words, that what anti-Semitism reveals in this respect, is a mere particularism.

Now, there is a very curious contradiction in those who on the one hand accuse the Jews of having a national god just for them, a morality and a feeling of solidarity that only applies to their own race, a principle of non-solidarity with the remainder of the human race, and so on — but then just follow the same Jewish “style” when they attack the other (alleged) aspect of the Semitic peril, which supposedly is universalism. Those who proclaim the well-known formula “gegen Rom und gegen Judentum” almost always do so in the name of the most narrow-minded, particularistic form of nationalism, conditioned by race in the purely naturalistic sense, to the point of manifesting, in their attempt to create an exclusively German national church — deutsche Volkskirche — the same spirit of schism as Gallicanism, Anglicanism, and similar heresies, which reflect, mutatis mutandis, the spirit of exclusiveness and monopoly of the divine for the benefit of a single race, that was characteristic of Israel. Thus, they naturally end up with an explicitly anti-Roman attitude, which, however, is equivalent to anti-Aryanism, mixed-up notions, devoid of strength and clarity, and cut off from freer, broader horizons. And it is noteworthy that in some cases, this anti-Roman attitude is not limited to the Catholic Church, but goes so far as to reject even the greatest Ghibelline emperors of German origin, precisely for their universalism!

These considerations, however, already bring us to another, ethical and political aspect of anti-Semitism, which will be the subject of subsequent writings. Now it is time to conclude this brief examination of the reasons for anti-Semitism on the religious and spiritual plane. Dühring once wrote that “the Jewish question would still exist even if all the Jews abandoned their religion and joined our dominant churches.” We must extend this idea and say that, in this regard, one can even set aside the reference to race in the narrow sense, and talk about Semitism as a universal, as a typical attitude with regard to the spiritual world. This attitude can be defined in the abstract and can be detected even where a civilization lacks a clear and direct ethnic connection with the Semitic races and with the Jews. Everywhere where a heroic, triumphal, virile ascendance to divine dignity is lacking, and the pathos of a servile, de-personalizing, ambiguously mystical and messianic attitude with regard to the spiritual realm — there the primordial force of Semitism, of anti-Aryanism, resurfaces.

Semitic is the feeling of “guilt” and also the themes of ”atonement” and self-humiliation. Semitic is the resentment of the “slaves of god” who cannot tolerate anyone above them and who strive to form an all-powerful collective (Nietzsche) — with all the consequences following from this anti-hierarchical idea, right down to its modern materialization in the form of Marxism and communism. Finally, Semitic is that underground spirit of dark and incessant unrest, of inner contamination and sudden revolt, so that according to the ancients, the Typhoon Set — the mythical serpent who is the enemy of the Egyptian Sun God — is the father of the Jews, and the Gnostics viewed the Jewish god as a “typhonic” creature.

Thus, today, in the spiritual realm, the Semitic ferment of decay can discerned at the heart of the ideologies that culminate in the mysticism of a servile humanity collectivized under the sign of either the “white” or “red” internationals, or in the “romanticism” of the modern soul — the reemergence of the messianic “mood” — in its spiritually destructive, frenetic activity, its formless élan vital, in its neurotic restlessness, traversed by the impurest and most sensualistic forms of the “religion of life” or pseudo-spiritualist escapism.

In order to be rigorously anti-Semitic, we must have no recourse to half-measures, to ideas that are themselves contaminated by the evil we wish to combat. We have to be radical. We must invoke values that could really be called ”Aryan,” that are not based on vague and partial concepts suffused with a kind of biological materialism: values of solar and Olympian spirituality, of a classicism of clarity and mastered strength, of a new love for difference and free personality, and, at the same time, for hierarchy and for the universality that a race capable of rising again manfully from just “living” to a “more than life” could create in opposition to a mutilated world, a world without true principles and without peace.

Thus, we find a real reference-point only in an ideal antithesis, free from ethnic prejudice. Semitism, in this way, ends up becoming synonymous with that “subterranean” element that every great civilization — even the Jewish one, in its most ancient, royal phase — subdued in the act of realizing itself as a cosmos against chaos. Even without discussing the problem of the true unitary and prehistoric origin of the “solar” spirituality that formed and animated the Indo-European civilizations — limiting ourselves only to the West, in what we have already stated about the spirit of the civilization of the eastern Mediterranean, about the crisis undergone by the people of Israel, about the connection between the active forces in this crisis with those that disfigured both Egyptian and Doric civilization, and, finally, Roman civilization — in all this we provided sufficient evidence to justify the possibility of an “anti-Semitism” free from bias and partisanship, as part of the battles that must now be fought in the name of the most luminous traditions of our past and, at the same time, for a better spiritual future.

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