Breeding Superman

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Breeding Superman
Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in
Edwardian and Interwar Britain
DAN STONE

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/pdf/BreedingSuper.pdf

-------------------

Oscar Levy: A Nietzschean Vision  

. . . it was the Jews who started the slave revolt in morals; a revolt with two
millennia of history behind it, which we have lost sight of today simply
because it has triumphed so completely . . . Let us face facts: the people
have triumphed - or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call
them - and if the Jews brought it about, then no nation ever had a more universal
mission on this earth.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 1887, I: vii, ix
Surely it is not every one who is chosen to combat a religion or a morality
of two thousand years' standing, first within and then without himself.
Oscar Levy, 'Editorial Note' to The Complete Works
of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. I, 1909, p. ix.

A book on Nietzsche, race and eugenics in Britain has no choice but to begin
with Oscar Levy.' The editor of the first complete English edition of
Nietzsche's Collected Works (1909-1913), he was a Jew and a German (both
withholding and juxtaposing the two will be seen to be important) who in 1894
abandoned his father's banking business in Wiesbaden for the life of the mind,
settling in London as a physician. Levy not only drove forward the reception
of Nietzsche in Britain in the face of widespread indifference (though on the
basis of the earlier efforts of others), but also wrote much and contributed
more to the intellectual development of a whole 'school' of thinkers, centred
mainly around A. R. Orage and the avant-garde weekly journal, the New Age.2
His diagnoses of civilisation, penetrating and controversial, not only landed
him in trouble with the authorities in the wake of the anti-alien backlash of the
post-First World War period, but are still worthy of consideration for their early
insights into the coming European cataclysm. Although many of his claims,
stemming as they do from his belief in the need to overthrow decadent Judeo-
Christian values and replace them with an aristocratic conception of society,
are inimical to today's mainstream beliefs, they are consistent, compelling, and
not easily dismissed. That they also led Levy into the arms of some of Britain's
most eccentric extremists, notably George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, is only one
of the conundra that I hope to address in this analysis of one of the most talented,
committed and 'untimely' of British intellectuals.

Shortly after arriving in London, where he set up a doctor's practice, Levy
had a 'moment of realization' during one of his trips to the British Museum, a
moment described in his autobiography as follows:
I have the sudden thought that Monotheism etc. may not be 'Progress' after
all, as I had been taught in school and life under the (unconscious) influence
of Hegel. My Damascus: 'But then the Jews were wrong!?' The Chosen
People not chosen for Beauty like the Greeks? Only for Morality, and what
a Morality: the curses of J.C.! I have never recovered from my 'Damascus',
and today at the age of 75, I hold it even with more fervour than 50 years
ago. 3

Once the influence of Nietzsche - who was recommended to him by an
unknown female patient - is added to this self-description, one has a complete
picture of the themes that would haunt Levy throughout his life: the role of
religious ideas in history; the relationship of Judaism, Christianity and western
civilisation; and the need for beauty and nobility in the realm of morality - all
seen through Nietzschean lenses.

The history of Nietzsche's reception in England has already been written,
so I will not reiterate it here.4 Suffice it to say that when Levy stated - as he
often did - that to interest the English in Nietzsche was an uphill struggle, he
was hardly exaggerating. Suffice it also to say that Levy eventually succeeded
because, apart from practical considerations such as finance (which was taken
care of by his father's money), he took the task on with a fervour that was
nothing short of religious. In the editor's note to the first volume of the
Collected Works, Levy wrote that 'this Cause is a somewhat holy one to the
Editor himself'; in the introduction to the same volume, he spoke of
Nietzsche's works in the same way a missionary talks of the 'Good News'; and
in his 1932 introduction to the Everyman edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Levy wrote of his earlier 'conversion' to Nietzscheanism.5 Furthermore, he
succeeded in a way that would have delighted Nietzsche himself, confirming
his claim that his notoriety would come from being misunderstood: the outbreak
of war in 19 14, and the general identification of Nietzsche with German
militarism and barbarism, despite Levy's valiant efforts to disprove the connection,
probably did more for Nietzsche's (and Levy's) reputation in England
than any essays by Havelock Ellis, lectures by Anthony Ludovici, or articles
and letters to the press by Levy himself could ever hope to achieve. Levy,
though he headed the Nietzsche movement in Britain, was atypical of it, in that
he followed Nietzsche to the letter, especially concerning the role of the Jews
in western history.

What was it then that Levy found so irresistible in Nietzsche? A good answer
may be found in Levy's first book, The Revival of Aristocracy (1 906). Although
this book postdates Levy's discovery of Nietzsche, and although he later
claimed to be somewhat embarrassed by it, the book adumbrates all the
matters that were to preoccupy Levy all his life. Like so many cultural critics
and scientists of the fin-de-siècle, Levy was drawn to the theory of degeneration,
arguing that philanthropy, extended to the benefit of 'the feeble, commonplace,
pitiable, unsound, and helpless' to the exclusion of the 'best', had
led to the point at which, by the late nineteenth century, 'only a harmless flock
of sheep was left surviving, mutually innocuous and useless'.6 Levy believed
that a way out of this dangerous situation could be found in the teachings of
Nietzsche: 'man might be regenerated; conceivably might a new shepherd be
found for this straying herd of waifs; an aristocracy might be established to
counterbalance that equalized and contemptible rudis indigestaque moles'. 7 No
doubt it was because of this note of optimism that Levy later distanced himself
from this book, but his diagnosis of society remained unchanged.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the person who took most notice of The Revival of
Aristocracy was A. R. Orage, the editor of the New Age. Orage was wide-ranging,
and published writers of all political views. He had himself advocated an aristocratic
understanding of Nietzsche's ' Ubermensch'.8 On reading Levy's book, he
contacted Levy asking for twenty-five copies to sell through the pages of the New
Age. Since this was a supposedly socialist paper, Levy's Nietzschean colleagues
Ludovici and G. T. Wrench objected, but he persuaded them otherwise, and
soon both were themselves regular contributors. Ludovici in fact made his name
as an art critic in Orage's journal, with his bi-weekly column in the years
1913-1914. Later on, Levy had this to say about the New Age:
It was, on the whole, not a Socialist but a reactionary paper (which is the
same). So reactionary, that most of its contributors were Medievalists - or
of that Christian Secularisti, such as Shaw . . . They lived in the past, to
which they were frightened back by threatening chaos. They wished to put
the clock back, as Chesterton once said, but they had not the Chesterton
courage to confess it.9

Thanks to Orage, Levy found an audience, however small, for his views. Most
importantly, he had found the most suitable outlet for airing his views on
Nietzsche, from which base he could gather around him others committed to
the Nietzsche cause.

The most important of these was Anthony Ludovici. Having been Rodin's
private secretary for a year in 1906 and having then spent a year in Germany
studying Nietzsche, to (some of) whose ideas he subsequently devoted himself,
Ludovici was an ideal candidate for involvement with the Nietzsche movement.
He quickly became Levy's protégé, 'one of the best disciples', was the
main translator for the Collected Works, and gained some literary fame as a lecturer
and publisher on Nietzsche.lo The two men were, at first, inseparable,
being nicknamed 'The Lion and the Jackal' by the other readers in the British
Library. Levy even paid for Ludovici to accompany him on a tour of Germany
('where AML enchants my sister') , Italy, Greece, Turkey and Palestine.
Ludovici returned the favour by basing Dr Melhado - one of the main protagonists
of his first novel Mansel Fellowes (1918) - on Levy." Later on, when
Ludovici became involved with the proto-fascist group the English Mistery,
wrote articles in the English Review praising the Third Reich, turned to antisemitism,
and even travelled to Nuremberg to attend a rally, the relationship
between the two men took a turn for the worse.12 But with typical tolerance of
his friends and disregard for women, Levy could never bring himself to break
completely with Ludovici, and he blamed their differences less on Ludovici's
political mistakes than on Ludovici's wife Elsie Buckley who, Levy believed,
was aggrieved that she had earlier been spurned by him. According to Levy,
after their marriage, 'Seven offensive letters followed from London, Ludo
reproaching me for "coming from a decadent stock" etc., and apparently
"leading him astray". I very much suspect, that it was all her game.'13
Levy's influence on Ludovici was enormous, and in the years of their close
collaboration they shared a common interpretation of Nietzsche. This interpretation,
popular among British Nietzscheans, saw Nietzsche as the herald of
a 'transvaluation of values', in which the effete 'slave morality' of western
civilisation would be replaced by a pagan, aristocratic, manly set of values. The
emasculated condition of society was summed up in several pithy sentences by
Levy in his introductions to the eighteenth and last volume of Nietzsche's
Collected Works and to Gobineau's The Renaissance. Today, he wrote, we are
faced with 'millions of slaves, many of whom are beyond any care and help,
many whose propagation even threatens our society with an ignoble death from
suffocation by its own refuse'. How did this come about? The answer lay in the
type of values which had been propagated for the last two thousand years: '. . .
our moral values, the values of Democracy, Socialism, Liberalism,

Christianity, lead to the survival of a type of man who has no right to survive,
or who ought only to survive on an inferior plane'.14
The important difference that developed between Ludovici and Levy was
on the response to this shared diagnosis. Where Levy stressed the role of
moral ideas, Ludovici - like other Nietzsche scholars such as Maximilian
Mügge or Paul Carus - gradually came to place more and more emphasis on
breeding and race, on 'the impossibility of securing the preservation of the
nation's identity (which includes its character, culture and institutions),
except by preserving its ethnic type'.15 Levy was by no means immune to the
latter theme. Indeed, while he excoriated Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1 899) for its vulgar, déclassé antisemitism,
which made the mish-mash of German peoples into the proud bearers of
a pure Aryan heritage, Levy celebrated Gobineau as the discoverer of the allimportance
of race. This meant, quite clearly for Levy, a 'refutation of the
democratic idea that by means of an improvement in environment a healthy
and noble person could be produced out of a rotten stock'.16 Levy often also
cited Disraeli in order to defend his claim (indeed his admiration for Disraeli
led him to translate Tancred and Contarini Fleming into German17). But Levy's
notion of 'stock' was not a racialised one, as it was for Ludovici and Mügge,
who argued for the necessity of racial homogeneity. Rather, for Levy 'stock'
meant above all 'breeding' in the sense of class position; a biological aristocracy.
18 Thus although Levy praised 'that young and promising Eugenic Party',
he also noted that 'the successful "breeding" of men can only be brought
about by religious or philosophic faith', and that therefore one needed
Nietzsche more than Galton.19 And hence he felt able to laud Gobineau in
rather expansive terms:

Gobineau's [unlike Chamberlain's] was an honest Antisemitism, it was, like
Nietzsche's, an historical Antisemitism: it had nothing whatever to do with
modern Antisemitism, that movement born from fear, envy, and impotence
... t is an upright, a genuine, a gentlemanly Antisemitism, it is the
Antisemitism of the aristocrat, who sees his very blood threatened by revolutionary
religions. Both Nietzsche's and Gobineau's Antisemitism, therefore,
included of course Christianity.20

The mention of Christianity in this context is revealing. As a Jew, Levy felt
more obliged to take the position on breeding that he did than he otherwise
might have done, although he never had any qualms about publicly advertising
his delight in 'Christian baiting'.21 His aristocratic vision led him to stress class
above race, but there is a certain tension involved in his doing so. When he discusses
that obsession of the British degeneration theorists, the disintegration of

Empire, he contradicts his invocation of Disraeli's and Gobineau's dictum that
'all is race', arguing that 'It was intermarriage with the non-race, with the
people, that led to the ruin of Rome: it was the mixture of different classes much
more than the mixtures of different races that produced that decadent and
servile chaos of the later Roman Empire'.22
The racial element that remained, however, is what lends to Levy's thesis its
frisson. For although the power of the Roman Empire had not simply undergone
racial degeneration, but had 'been 'sapped' by an uncongenial and poisonous
code of values',23 this poisonous code had been propounded by the
Jews. On the one hand, then, Levy shies away from arguments that proceed
from the belief that modern Europe can only be rescued from degeneration by
the creation of racial homogeneity through eugenic measures, arguing instead
for a kind of pre-nationalist aristocratic vision of a pan-European ruling
caste;24 on the other hand he accepts Nietzsche's claim, primarily expounded
in the Genealogy of Morals, that the people who have led Europe to the moral
abyss which has sought equality at the expense of health, vigour and achievement
are the Jews.

Like Nietzsche, Levy was consistent in this claim, seeing Christianity as the
child of Judaism, and its more successful continuer of the slave morality in
ethics. This is the reason why Levy attacked Chamberlain so fiercely, but lionized
Gobineau: since the Germans claimed to be Christians, a religion which
historically neglected the body in favour of the spirit, their claim for racial
superiority was disingenuous: 'What cannot and must not be tolerated is the
confusion of these two contradictory values - Race and Christianity.'25 While
Levy was not alone in this period in arguing for an aristocratic revivalism,26 his
arguments are more original than most because they do one thing that the
others do not: they explain European civilisation through a consistent methodological
insistence on the history of moral ideas as the driving force of history.
His argument runs something like this: modern European society is degenerating
because it is bound to an effete moral value system; these effete values
derive from Judaism, from that Judaism which developed when the 'early white
Semites mixed their blood with lower races and thus degenerated';27 this
Jewish ethic was taken a step further by Christianity, which is a 'Super-
Semitism'; Luther, the Reformation and Puritanism took Europe even further
away from its manly origins; modern revolutionary movements such as led the
French and Russian revolutions, though they believe themselves to be atheist,
are in fact continuing to further the causes of Judeo-Christianity by their insistence
on a utopian vision of equality and their contempt for the 'strong'; the
archetypal example of this barbarism masquerading as civilised values is
Germany; only an aristocratic revival - based on the attitude of the ancient
Jews - which scorns Christianity, the weak and feeble can save Europe from
terminal decline.
*
This theory may have been sweeping, but in the first half of 1914, when the
atmosphere was already darkening, it helped Levy make prescient claims about
the fate of Europe. On the subject of individual liberty, he noted that
What in reality such liberty may lead to, the history of Germany with its two
centuries of barbarism after the proclamation of liberty [by Luther] will
teach us; a barbarism, by the way, which is only half painted over, and which
no commercial success of modern Germany will ever hide from the eyes of
the more cultured observers of Europe.28

And in correspondence with George Chatterton-Hill, who wrote from Freiburg
that he had 'never known a nation so brutally chauvinistic', Levy agreed:
There is no doubt about the hopeless state of culture in modern Germany
- a state, all the more serious, as it is not felt by the Germans themselves,
who, even when questioned about it only shrug their shoulders and say 'Wir
leben eben in einer Uebergangszeit'. If further pressed, where the
'Uebergang' leads to, they are silent, or order another glass of beer, beer
being their anodyne against a bad conscience and a muddled mind.29
This attack on the Germans was of course closely bound up with his own
background. But in the event, he was proved correct, at least insofar as the outbreak
of war confirmed his pessimistic assessment of the times. On the subject
of the war, Levy was equally thoughtful. Although never having any inclination
to become a naturalised Briton since, from his Nietzschean perspective,
nationality was irrelevant, during the war he was at pains to stress how far
removed he was from the 'German temperament'. Even though he reluctantly
returned with his wife Frieda and daughter Maud to Germany, in January
19 15 , on Frieda's bidding (she could not stand the anti-German atmosphere
in England), they soon moved on again to Switzerland. Throughout the rest
of the war, Orage took the brave decision, in terms of popular opinion, to continue
publishing Levy's articles. These became increasingly devoted to defending
Nietzsche's reputation from the charge of being the muse of German
militarism. 30

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Thus Levy began to define himself using British political terminology: 'I,
as a Tory, object to Germany's democracy and her democratic materialism
and romanticism, which cultivate no virtues whatsoever and only lead to
uncleanliness in thought and action.'31 But neither this self-definition, nor
Levy's remarkable plea to the readers of the New Age on behalf of Germans
who were being interned as enemy aliens in Britain,32 prevented Levy from
continuing to appropriate Nietzsche's position of the 'good European' as the
position from which to criticise the whole European system. 'It is idle,' he
wrote, 'to think that this war will end wars: it will, on the contrary, only start
a new Napoleonic Era of Wars. The gamble for the mastership of Europe has
begun and it will not end until that mastership has been reached and Europe
has become one and united.'33 In his little book of War Aphorisms (1917) , Levy
warned: 'If we do not re-educate ourselves in the matter of Christianity, then
in a few decades the bloody religious dance of the national dervishes will begin
again.' But in a sign that he had lost some of the optimism of pre-war days, he
ended the book with the claim that 'the new, united Europe will be aristocratic
or it will not be at all'.34

This loss of optimism is confirmed in a series of articles which Levy produced
for the New Age. Under the title 'The German and the European', Levy
penned five imaginary conversations between the eponymous characters. The
European attempts to convince the German that Christianity is the ultimate
cause of the war, and that the unification of Europe under a ruling caste drawn
from all nations is necessary, while the German sees only the immediate political
causes, and retreats from the force of the European's arguments - which
he initially accepts - into appeals to Christianity and nationalism, and a vindication
of Germany's actions in the face of her isolation by the other great
powers. They part unreconciled.35

By the end of the war, Levy seemed to have lost any hope that the regeneration
of Europe might be forthcoming. In another series of articles for the
New Age, he made more dark predictions for the future. Asserting once again
that "'Down with the strong, long live the weak!'' is the secret watchword of
every Christian and every democrat', Levy went on to claim that this weakening
did not make men less ready to go to war. On the contrary: 'by weakening
men we do not turn their thoughts towards peace, we make them
quarrelsome and vindictive ... Only the strong and healthy can remain at
peace, provided they desire to do so; the weak and sickly, still more the impotent,
cannot do so in any case, whether they want to or not.'36 Hence the conclusion
in 1919, which he headed 'A Reflection for Optimists', that 'A war
arising from mystic and moral motives cannot be ended by the application of
social and economic nostrums. This does not mean that our diplomats will
not conclude a peace; it only means that the peace they make cannot possibly
be a lasting one.'37 Levy's writings after 1918, as before 1914, sought to
explain in what these 'mystic and moral motives' consisted. For Levy the

explanation was straightforward, and in this straightforwardness lies the
explanation's strength and its weakness.
*
On returning to London in April 1920 - an act which required some cunning
manoeuvring around the Home Office, and gaining an entry visa from the Foreign
Office - Levy found himself rather isolated, and the mood of the city changed.
Even many of his earlier friends spurned him, as they could obviously not be seen
to be acquainted with an 'enemy alien'. As a result, he moved to a hotel in
Margate, where he could work undisturbed. In the move, however, he 'forgot' to
mention his change of address to Bow Street police, a legal requirement for aliens.
The hotel owner thoughtfully reported his presence to Margate police for him.38
It was perhaps his lack of friends that made Levy's acquaintance with
George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers all the more explicable. But there is no need for
psychological guesswork. Both men clearly shared to a remarkable degree their
understanding of the world around them. This understanding was to drive
Pitt-Rivers into the arms of Nazism, while Levy remained committed to his
aristocratic international; but it was the same understanding nevertheless.
The two men met at the offices of the New Age, and exchanged ideas over
lunch. Not only did Pitt-Rivers believe that the chief causes of the 'contemporary
disasters' were spiritual, but more importantly he believed that 'The spirit
which led this world into disaster and will continue to do so, unless stopped in
time, is the spirit of your own race ... the Semitic spirit'.39 When Pitt-Rivers
went on to explain to Levy that 'only the Jews can deliver us from the Jews',
by which he meant that the comparative racial purity of the Jews could yet be
a source of strength in overcoming the problem which they themselves had
spawned, Levy was convinced. He had himself earlier declared, in a classic
expression of 'honest antisemitism', that

The world still needs Israel, for the world has fallen a prey to democracy
and needs the example of a people which has always acted contrary to
democracy, which has always upheld the principle of race. The world still
needs Israel, for terrible wars, of which the present one is only the beginning,
are in store for it; and the world needs a race of good Europeans who
stand above national bigotry and national hypocrisy, national mysticism and
national blackguardism.40

Undertaking the unlikely task of pre-emptively defending him from charges of
antisemitism, Levy agreed to write a preface for Pitt-Rivers's pamphlet, The
World Significance of the Russian Revolution (I 920).

This remarkable piece of writing is easy to dismiss simply as Jewish selfhatred.
Yet although Levy was certainly so deeply immersed in the current
beliefs about Jews and Judaism that he accepted too readily many of the prevailing
stereotypes,41t here was nevertheless a good reason for his approach. His
Nietzschean critique of civilisation took as its starting point an attack on a value
system supposedly introduced by the Jews, and continued by Christianity in
both its religious and post-religious (modern, revolutionary) manifestations.
Beginning with a sweeping claim that chimes in exactly with what Pitt-
Rivers had already said to him over lunch, Levy wrote:

There is scarcely an event in modern Europe that cannot be traced back to
the Jews ... all latter-day ideas and movements have originally sprung from
a Jewish source, for the simple reason, that the Semitic idea has finally conquered
and entirely subdued this only apparently irreligious universe of ours.
It has conquered it through Christianity, which of course, as Disraeli
pointed out long ago, is nothing but 'Judaism for the people'.42
He then goes on, summarising Pitt-Rivers's argument, to assert that this
history-of-ideas approach means that the author of the pamphlet can in no way
be regarded as a vulgar antisemite. Since Levy believes that a certain type of
antisemitism 'does the Jews more justice than any blind philo-semitism ... that
merely sentimental "Let-them-all-come-Liberalism", which is nothing but the
Semitic Ideology over again' (pp. viii-ix), he has no qualms about naming
himself an antisemite: 'If you are an anti-Semite, I, the Semite, am an anti-
Semite too, and a much more fervent one than even you are ... We have erred,
my friend, we have most grievously erred' (p. x).

In what, then, have the Jews erred? Levy accepts all of Pitt-Rivers's allegations:
the Jews, whether consciously or not, have been the principal agents of
economic and political misery in the world, through their dealings in international
finance and their actions in promoting democracy and revolution;
Bolshevism, as the bearer of an originally Jewish ideal of equality for the
masses, was successful because it was opposed only by democracy, itself a
product of the same forces. This argument, however, leads Levy into the
realms of conspiracy theory, where he sounds more like Nesta Webster - the
modern English originator of such theories - or Lady Birdwood - her latterday
successor43 - than Nietzsche. Seeing nothing but the play of ideas in
history, he asserts that 'There is a direct line from Savonarola to Luther, and
from Luther to Robespierre, and from Robespierre to Lenin' (p. iii). Thus
Bolshevism 'is a religion and a faith' (p. iv).

What is shocking in this piece is not merely Levy's summary of the effects
of the Jewish morality in history:

We who have posed as the saviours of the world, we, who have even boasted
of having given it 'the' Saviour, we are to-day nothing else but the world's
seducers, its destroyers, its incendiaries, its executioners ... We who have
promised to lead you to a new Heaven, we have finally succeeded in landing
you in to a new Hell. (pp. x-xi)

Levy also argues, and here his claims become more interesting, that the Jews,
under the teachings of Nietzsche, can reverse the situation begun by their
ancestors two thousand years before:

Yes, there is hope, my friend, for we are still here, our last word is not yet
spoken, our last deed is not yet done, our last revolution is not yet made.
This last Revolution, the Revolution that will crown our revolutionary work,
will be the revolution against the revolutionaries ... It will pass a judgment
upon our ancient faith, and it will lay the foundation to a new religion.
(p. xii)

The Jews, the underminers of western civilisation, are the only people able to
rescue that civilisation from further deterioration. Self-hatred is yet selfaggrandisement
.
The article caused something of a minor storm. Antisemites applauded -
the same vulgar antisemites Levy believed himself to be combating - and
Jewish groups were understandably horrified. Pitt-Rivers may have been
charming, but he was nevertheless among the small number of truly committed
extremists in Britain. Taken in by his superficial scholarship, Levy made
the mistake of believing Pitt-Rivers to be truly interested in saving civilisation
by, through criticising them, saving the Jews.44
Here Levy's exceptionalism regarding the Jews becomes clear. Many Jewish
commentators applauded Nietzsche's philosernitism, but omitted to mention
his attack on the Jewish origin of the slave morality.45 Some, such as the
German scholars Maximilian Stein, Leo Berg and Auguste Steinberg, did not
omit the awkward aspects of Nietzsche's thought, but left them 'muted or
explained away'.46 Levy, however, accepted and vociferously propounded
them all.

Hence positive reviews of Levy's preface coming from the far right, including
one from Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent,47 were decidedly not to
Levy's liking. In contrast to the Jewish thinkers, they applauded the first half
of Levy's argument, but failed to mention the second. As Levy later complained
in My Battle for Nietzsche in England (the manuscript of which he sent
to Pitt-Rivers for correction in 1926), they 'omitted to give my complaints
about English Puritanism and its connection with capitalism, democracy and
plutocracy ... [They] likewise skipped my remark about the inner and profound
similarity of the Scotch, Jewish, American and English financiers.'
And that, Levy protested, was essential to note if one was to understand 'the
comprehensive anti-Semitic tendency of my preface, that was the anti-Jewish
as well as the anti-Christian view point of my introduction'.48 Levy's views
on the Jews, though they may appear bizarre, were in fact consistent with
Nietzsche's. Yet in the history of Nietzsche-reception in Britain, few thinkers
- whether of left or right, Jewish or not - were willing to follow Nietzsche to
the letter in his harsh assessment of the Jewish origins of modern western
civilisation. As one scholar puts it, 'while many laid the axe to Jewish roots,
Nietzsche sought to cut the fruit off the tree. Nietzsche did not seek to cut
off the Jews, but rather to value their ancient roots and integrate their modern
descendants into a new society'.49 Levy likewise cut himself off from the
mainstream of early twentieth-century political thought by insisting on the
validity of the whole of Nietzsche's Zivilisationskritik. He may have shared
some ideas with the social Darwinists, some with the eugenicists, the aristocratic
revivalists, the antisemites, the Zionists and the Jewish philosophers,
but Levy's exceptionalism lies in the fact that none of them could follow him
consistently, for all of them would have found their ideas contradicted by
doing so.
The only journal accurately to report what Levy wrote was Plain English, the
vehemently antisemitic hate-sheet run by Lord Alfred Douglas, in his post-
Oscar Wilde reincarnation as Catholic antisemite. Yet even he dismissed
Levy's claims about the relationship of Christianity to Judaism as a 'trick'
because the consequence of accepting the argument would necessarily have to
be the de-Christianisation of Europe. Levy wrote to the paper, which he
praised as 'the only review which takes questions of religion seriously', setting
out in detail his position. Again stating the inextricable link between
Christianity and Judaism, Levy argued that his antisemitism
includes, and very much so ... the Christians. No Christian has a right to
be an anti-Semite, for he is himself a Semite, nay a Super-Semite. No
Christian must accuse Jews of revolutionary tendencies, for he is himself the
follower of a God with revolutionary tendencies. No Christian must
condemn Jews for their socialism and Bolshevism for these Jews are simply
good Christians, and those who accuse them are knowingly or unknowingly
repudiating their own God.
In the following issue, Douglas dismissed Levy's piece as 'mere Jewish
raving' .50

The publicity surrounding this piece provided the opportunity wanted by
the Home Office to deal with Levy who, as the major promoter of Nietzsche
(and hence of German militarism) in England, was already viewed with
some suspicion. In the wake of the passing of the 1919 Aliens Act, Levy
became a victim of official British xenophobia. He was deported in October
1921.
Levy's case became something of a cause célèbre. The press devoted considerable
attention to it, most of it admonishing the government for its determination
to 'make an example' out of Levy, citing its shameless rejection of his
contribution to British cultural life over the previous twenty years as, as one
commentator put it, 'a curious reflection on the civilisation which went to war
in the cause of "liberation"'.51M ore chilling undertones can be detected in
Hilaire Belloc's contribution. Belloc maintained that Levy's expulsion was an
outrage because of his unusual honesty: 'he had never hidden his true nationality
nor changed his name, nor used any of those subterfuges which, even
when excusable, are dangerous and contemptible in so many of his compatrio
t ~ 'A.n~d ~th e antisemitic newspaper The Hidden Hand or Jewry Über Alles
lauded Levy as 'the most courageous and honest Jew living', applauded him
for not having 'changed his name to Levin, or Lawson, or Livingstone, or
Lawrence, or Lincoln, or any other of the aliases affected by weaker brethren
of his name', and blamed the Home Secretary's decision to deport him on the
secret machinations of the Learned Elders of Zion, of whom 'Mr Shortt is
merely the tool'.53
Levy himself discussed his expulsion publicly only in 1932, in his introduction
to the Everyman edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra. He treats the subject
lightly, yet it is clear that being forced to leave England had pained him greatly.
He explains the reasons why he did not apply for naturalisation: 'I had only the
battle "Culture against Barbarism" at heart; I was not interested in the fight
"Nation against Nation", knowing very well that, whatever its results, it would
only lead to more Barbarism.'54 Despite his protests against the decision, he
was informed that only those Germans 'who were "of definite benefit to British
trade" were allowed to remain - alas! I was only the importer of a few new but
very odd and doubtful ideas!' (p. 60). Yet he ends on a note of defiance, revelling
in his literary achievements: 'Now the British Government could drive
out the body of his apostle, but never the spirit which he had brought to these
shores and far beyond these shores' (p. 61).

A year later, on the receipt of a Nansen passport for stateless people, Levy
divided his time between Wiesbaden and the south of France. In 1924 he travelled
to Italy to meet Mussolini, and he finally left Germany for good just
before Hitler took power in 1933. He left France for England in 1938, on his
daughter's persuasion, returned to France, and then, being in England when
the war broke out in 1939, he remained there until his death in 1946.