The course explores Nietzsche's philosophical critique of religion in general and Judaism in particular. Nietzsche took a special interest in Judaism. In Judaism's biblical phase he detects sublime expressions of the will to power. In the clerical phase of the Second Temple era he diagnoses atrophy that gave rise to Christianity. And in the diasporic phase, he asserts, the Jews managed to reconstruct their lost power out of the very suffering they were undergoing. Nietzsche's aim, therefore, was to use contemporary Jews as levers with which to extract Europe from its degeneration.