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. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche says of Christianity, “Only bad purposes: poisoning, slander, denial of life, despising the body, the humiliation and self-deprecation of the human via the concept of sin,—and its methods are bad, too. —I read the lawbook of Manu with the opposite feeling, an incomparably intellectual and superior work; to mention it along with the Bible, even in one breath, would be a sin against the intellect” 56 (KGW 6/3, 235-236). Similar images of decline and decadence in the biblical tradition are visible in Jacolliot, as well: “And one might say that goodness, virtue, duty, and the ideas of the unity of God and the trinity, and the immortality of the soul, have assumed, in India, the most elevated character that could be attributed to them.”57 Ideas of anteriority are also observable in Nietzsche’s application of Jacolliot’s derivation of Semitic systems from Aryan ones. Nietzsche says, in the Nachlass, “The development of the Jewish sacerdotal state is not original: they became acquainted with that system in Babylon: the system is Aryan”58 (KGW 8/3, 178). This is a schema that is inherited by the slave class, in Nietzsche’s view, and in Jacolliot’s, as well: “The habits of slavery, of isolation, … often imposed on the Chandala … have borne among them vices against nature … all peoples called Semitic were and still are contaminated by them.59 Similarly, Jacolliot speaks 18 of “the insurgent Egyptian pariahs who call themselves the Hebrews.”60 In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche has similar images of an unnatural revolt of those in squalor: “It is the antiAryan religion par excellence: Christianity as the transvaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of the values of the Chandala, the gospel preached to the poor, the low ones, the collective uprising of all that is downtrodden, miserable, unsuccessful, unfortunate, against the “race”—the immortal revenge of the Chandala as the religion of love” 61 (KGW 6/3, 95-96). One of the major theses in the Genealogy concerns the placement of Judaism and Christianity on a continuum and the perception of Christian morality as a more damaging and egregious derivative of the values put forth in the Old Testament. Indeed, one might characterize Nietzsche’s view of New Testament morality as a kind of “Christian Semitism,” and one finds a parallel expression in Jacolliot, as well: “In copying the Hindu traditions, Christian Semitism added whatever it wanted.”
