The Bizarre Case of Nietzsche: The Pro-Jewish Writer Who Inspired a Million Anti-Semites

Perhaps the most pro-Jewish German writer of his time, his ideas were adopted by Hitler and Nazism.
by Barry Rubin
No serious thinker has done more harm to the Jewish people than Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings were an important inspiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Yet far from being an anti-Semite, Nietzsche was one of the most pro-Jewish German writers of his time. How can this paradox be explained, and does it have any lessons for the present day?
Nietzsche was the son and grandson of Protestant ministers. He became an academic expert on ancient Greece, yet his poor health forced him to resign his professorship at a young age. He spent most of the rest of his life on a pension, traveling from spa to resort town trying to avoid the extremes of weather that gave him such physical discomfort.
A massively productive and self-consciously iconoclastic writer, Nietzsche never attained a large readership in his lifetime, though his fame did grow. His life and works are too complex to summarize here, but one constant feature of his worldview was his friendliness — even admiration — towards Jews.
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