ABSTRACT
The globalization of Nietzsche did not pass over the culture of the Hebrew revival in central and eastern Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. David Neumark (1866–1924), whom Micah Yosef Berdichevsky (1865–1921) called the “Hebrew Kant”, in 1894 wrote the first article on Nietzsche in the Hebrew language.
In the 1920s, Neumark and Berdichevsky carried on a lively correspondence centering on a dialogue concerning art, nationalism, and history. Neumark, took his distance from the Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie, which was beginning to influence the group devoted to Nietzsche, the Jewish Tse’irim (literally: The Young Once) in revolt against the Ahad Ha-Am (1856–1927) type of “national morality”. The “new philosophy” of Nietzsche was liable to deflect them from the conservative high road of the national theology. Whereas Neumark wished to expound a systematic theological structure of Jewish monotheism characterized by internal harmony, moral order, and national unity, on the basis of which he became a reform rabbi, Berdichevsky, who was regarded as the “Hebrew Nietzsche”, was throughout his life involved with “heretical religiosity”.
