It is Nietzsche’s chief thesis that most of the so-called Christian morality of today is an inheritance from the Jews, and that it is quite as much out of harmony with the needs of our race and time as the Mosaic law which prohibits the eating of oysters, clams, swine, hares, swans, terrapin and snails, but allows the eating of locusts, beetles and grasshoppers (Leviticus, XI, 4-30). Christianity, true enough, did not take over the Mosaic code en bloc. It rejected all these dietary laws, and it also rejected all the laws regarding sacrifices and most of those dealing with family relations. But it absorbed unchanged the ethical theory that had grown up among the Jews during the period of their decline — the theory, to wit, of humility, of forbearance, of non-resistance. This theory, as Nietzsche shows, was the fruit of that decline. The Jews of David’s day were not gentle. On the contrary, they were pugnacious and strong, and the bold assertiveness that seemed their best protection against the relatively weak peoples surrounding them was visualized in a mighty and thunderous Jehovah, a god of wrath and destruction, a divine Kaiser. But as their strength decreased and their enemies grew in power they were gradually forced into a more conciliatory policy. What they couldn’t get by force they had to get by a show of complaisance and gentleness — and the result was the renunciatory morality of the century or two preceding the birth of Christ, the turn-the-other-cheek morality which Christ erected into a definite system, the “slave-morality” against which Nietzsche whooped and railed nearly two thousand years afterward.
H.L. Mencken, “Transvaluation of Morals”, The Smart Set, 1915-03.
