Wagner detailed the implications of Feuerbach’s remark in his observation below that, given all that Christianity owes to its Jewish roots, it was through this influence that the Jews could one day dominate the world, fulfilling their god’s promise of world-rule:
“The tribal God of a petty nation had promised his people eventual rulership of the whole world and all that lives and moves therein, if only they adhered to laws whose strictest following would keep them barred against all other nations of the earth. (…) But the Jews, so it seems, could fling away all share in this world-rulership of their Jehova, for they had won a share in a development of the Christian religion well fitted to deliver it itself into their hands in time, with all its increment of culture, sovereignty and civilisation.” [1031W-{6-8/80} Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 232-233]
We are reminded, of course, of the Rhinedaughters’ promise to Alberich that if he renounced love he could forge a Ring from the Rhinegold and with it rule the world, and reminded again that his Ring (#19) gives birth to the gods’ heavenly abode Valhalla (#20a). But Wagner goes further and traces not only the Christian religion, Western man’s concept of Godhead, back to Judaism, but also the world-economy (offering us a conventional interpretation of Alberich’s amassing his huge hoard of treasure) and the State:
“ … the astounding success of our resident Jews in the gaining and amassing of huge stores of money has always filled our Military State authorities with nothing but respect and joyful admiration: so that the present campaign against the Jews seems to point to a wish to draw the attention of those authorities to the question, Where do the Jews get it from? The bottom of the whole dispute, as it appears to us, is Property, Ownership … .
If the application of ‘Know Thyself’ to our Church’s religious descent would turn out poorly for our case against the Jews, the result will be no less unfavourable if we investigate the nature of the only thing our State systems understand by possession, before endeavouring to secure it from the Jews’ encroachments.” [1065W-{1-2/81} Know Thyself – 2nd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 267]
What is at stake here is not, however, the presumed influence of any given human stock, Jewish or otherwise, upon modern society, but Wagner’s profounder suspicion that all human society is ultimately predicated upon egoism. Wagner is confessing in his commentary above that if his fellow Europeans truly knew themselves, they would acknowledge the egoism at the root of their own nature before seeking to blame their problems on the Jews, a point Wagner sadly often forgot himself, as instanced in various racist tracts he wrote at different periods of his life. However, this more universal Feuerbachian point, that egoism is the root of all, he takes great pains to dramatize in The Rhinegold, which is an allegory for the origins of all human society, not for some particular phase of subsequent human history, or a narrative about a particular society.
There is another extraordinarily intriguing aspect of this transition from R.1 to R.2, a plausible explanation of the opening moments of R.2 where we find the gods sleeping as the dawn lights up their newly built fortress Valhalla, recently completed by the Giants while the gods slept. The fact that the gods were sleeping while the Giants built Valhalla is not whimsical or arbitrary. Wagner is dead serious. The point he is making is the following. Feuerbach taught him that we, ourselves, are the involuntary creators of our gods, that men must have collectively, involuntarily dreamed the
