American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

the ineluctable power of this Nietzschean image of Jewish nomadism cut across religious and secular divides and helps explain what Daniel Bell recognized as Nietzsche’s resonance for secular Jewish intellectuals. It is what Bell, in the shattered world of 1946 described in his moving Jewish Frontier essay, “A Parable of Alienation,” which led off with a Nietzsche epigraph: “Woe to him who has no home.” For Bell, Nietzsche helped illustrate the plight of the wandering Jew as a metaphor for the necessary alienation of the modern Jewish intellectual: “The deepest impulses urge us home. But where are we to go?” For Bell as for Rubenstein, Jews could no longer take refuge in ideology, in tradition, or even in Zionism. Nietzsche had shown them that latent in their Judaism, even after the death of God, one remains a Jew, and that radical homelessness was that givenness of being a Jew. Now, after the Holocaust, Bell affirmed, the Jew can only keep on living as he had always had to live: “in permanent tension and as a permanent critic.”106

Jews as rootless cosmopolitan