Great Semites of Philosophy


Attempt by antipaganism to found and make itself possible philosophically: predilection for the ambiguous figures of the old culture, above all for Plato, that instinctive Semite and anti-Hellene—also for Stoicism, which is essentially the work of Semites (—"dignity" as strictness, law, virtue as greatness, self-responsibility, authority, as supreme sovereignty over one's own person—this is Semitic. The Stoic is an Arabian sheik wrapped in Greek togas and concepts).
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Nietzsche also theorizes (baselessly) that Plato may have been taught by Egyptian Jews. Walter Kaufmann claims Zeno of Citium (Cyprus), the founder of Stoicism, was probably a Semite. Swami Abhayananda goes so far as to claim he was a Jew from Phoenicia. Stoicism is certainly a philosophy of spiritual exile.

T.E. Lawrence comments in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (source):
I had believed Semites unable to use love as a link between themselves and God, indeed, unable to conceive such a relation except with the intellectuality of Spinoza, who loved so rationally and sexlessly, and transcendently that he did not seek, or rather had not permitted, a return. Christianity had seemed to me the first creed to proclaim love in this upper world, from which the desert and the Semite (from Moses to Zeno) had shut it out: and Christianity was a hybrid, except in its first root not essentially Semitic… [Christianity’s] birth in Galilee had saved it from being just one more of the innumerable revelations of the Semite. Galilee was Syria’s non-Semitic providence, contact with which was almost uncleanness for the perfect Jew. [Christianity swept] across the hearts of Europe in a fashion which Judaism and Islam could not achieve…

Stormfront, however, disagrees:
Liberalism is rooted in the humanist fantasies which found their way into Europe through the philosophy of Zeno and the religion of Paul. Both Stoicism and Christianity are of Semitic origin.

The writer quotes Cicero:
All the monuments of the ancients and all histories have handed down to us the tradition that the race of the Phoenicians is the most treacherous of all races. The Poeni, who are descended from them, have proved by many rebellions of the Carthaginians, and very many broken and violated treaties, that they have in no respect degenerated from them.

Surely grounds for a Lebanese-Israeli alliance?

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