enraptured by unknown fevers and irresistibly forced out of themselves, amorous and longing for foreign races (for such as “let themselves be fructified"), and withal imperious, like everything conscious of being full of generative force, and consequently empowered “by the grace of God.”  These two kinds of geniuses seek each other like man and woman; but they also misunderstand each other—­like man and woman.

249.  Every nation has its own “Tartuffery,” and calls that its virtue.—­One does not know—­cannot know, the best that is in one.

250.  What Europe owes to the Jews?—­Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing of the nature both of the best and the worst:  the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands, of infinite significations, the whole Romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness—­and consequently just the most attractive, ensnaring, and exquisite element in those iridescences and allurements to life, in the aftersheen of which the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, now glows—­perhaps glows out.  For this, we artists among the spectators and philosophers, are—­grateful to the Jews.

251.  It must be taken into the bargain, if various clouds and disturbances—­in short, slight attacks of stupidity—­pass over the spirit of a people that suffers and wants to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition:  for instance, among present-day Germans there is alternately the anti-French folly, the anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish folly, the Christian-romantic folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic folly, the Prussian folly (just look at those poor historians, the Sybels and Treitschkes, and their closely bandaged heads), and whatever else these little obscurations of the German spirit and conscience may be called.  May it be forgiven me that I, too, when on a short daring sojourn on very infected ground, did not remain wholly exempt from the disease, but like every one else, began to entertain thoughts about matters which did not concern me—­the first symptom of political infection.  About the Jews, for instance, listen to the following:—­I have never yet met a German who was favourably inclined to the Jews; and however decided the repudiation of actual anti-Semitism may be on the part of all prudent and political men, this prudence and policy is not perhaps directed against the nature of the sentiment itself, but only against its dangerous excess, and especially against the distasteful and infamous expression of this excess of sentiment; —­on this point we must not deceive ourselves.  That Germany has amply sufficient Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood, has difficulty (and will long have difficulty) in disposing only of this quantity of “Jew”—­as the Italian, the Frenchman, and the Englishman have done by means of a stronger digestion:—­that is the unmistakable declaration and language of a general instinct, to which one must listen and according