is a blind and closed system; both compromise the phenomenal world by showing that everything is possible in it. Tragedy, on the other hand, shows what must for all eternity be impossible in the phenomenal world; and thus tragedy and comedy alike, each in their own way, are negations of the empiric.
The Jew who does not set out, like the humourist, from the transcendental, and does not move towards it, like the erotic, has no interest in depreciating what is called the actual world, and that never becomes for him the paraphernalia of a juggler or the nightmare of a mad-house. Humour, because it recognises the transcendental, if only by the mode of resolutely concealing it, is essentially tolerant; satire, on the other hand, is essentially intolerant, and is congruous with the disposition of the Jew and the woman. Jews and women are devoid of humour, but addicted to mockery. In Rome there was even a woman (Sulpicia) who wrote satires. Satire, because of its intolerance, is impossible to men in society. The humourist, who knows how to keep the trifles and littlenesses of phenomena from troubling himself or others, is a welcome guest. Humour, like love, moves away obstacles from our path; it makes possible a way of regarding the world. The Jew, therefore, is least addicted to society, and the Englishman most adapted for it.
The comparison of the Jew with the Englishman fades out much more quickly than that with the woman. Both comparisons first arose in the heat of the conflict as to the worth and the natufe of Jews. I may again refer to Wagner, who not only interested himself deeply in the problem of Judaism, but rediscovered the Jew in the Englishman, and threw the shadow of Ahasuerus over his Kundry, probably the most perfect representation of woman in art.
The fact that no woman in the world represents the idea of the wife so completely as the Jewess (and not only in the eyes of Jews) still further supports the comparison between Jews and women. In the case of the Aryans, the metaphysical qualities of the male are part of his sexual attraction
