On the origin of scholars. – In Europe the scholar grows out of all kinds of classes and social conditions like a plant that requires no particular kind of soil: thus he belongs, essentially and involuntarily, to the bearers of the democratic idea. But this origin betrays itself. Once one has somewhat trained one’s eye to recognize in a scholarly book, in a scientific treatise, the scholar’s intellectual idiosyncrasy – every scholar has one – and catch it in the act, one will almost always behind it come face to face with the scholar’s ‘prehistory’, his family, especially its occupations and crafts. Where the feeling, ‘This is now proven; I am done with it,’ is expressed, it is usually the ancestor in the blood and instincts of the scholar who from his standpoint approves of ‘the finished job’ – the faith in a proof is only the symptom of what in a hard-working family for ages has been considered ‘good work’. An example: the sons of all types of clerks and office workers, whose main task was always to organize various different kinds of material, to compartmentalize and in general to schematize, when they become scholars, show a tendency to consider a problem practically solved when they have merely schematized it. There are philosophers who are basically just schematizers – for them, the formal aspect of their fathers’ occupation has become content. The talent for classifications, for tables of categories, reveals something: one pays the price for being the child of one’s parents. The son of a lawyer will also, as a researcher, have to be a lawyer; he primarily wants his cause to win; secondarily perhaps also for it to be right. The sons of Protestant ministers and schoolteachers one recognizes by the naive certainty with which, as scholars, they take their case already to have been proven when they have merely stated it heartily and warmly; they are thoroughly used to being believed, as that was part of their father’s craft. A Jew, on the other hand, in keeping with the characteristic occupations and the past of his people, is not at all used to being believed. Consider Jewish scholars in this light: they all have a high regard for logic, that is for compelling agreement by force of reasons; they know that with logic, they are bound to win even when faced with class and race prejudices, where people do not willingly believe them. For nothing is more democratic than logic: it knows no regard for persons and takes even the crooked nose for straight. (Incidentally, Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making its people more logical, for cleanlier intellectual habits – none more so than the Germans, as a lamentably déraisonnable8 race that even today first needs to be given a good mental drubbing. Wherever Jews have gained influence, they have taught people to make finer distinctions, draw more rigorous conclusions, and to write more clearly and cleanly; their task was always ‘to make a people “listen to raison” ’.)