Jewish question
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The Jewish question, also referred to as the Jewish problem, was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century
The debate began with
The expression has been used by
History of "the Jewish question"
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Jews and Judaism |
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The term "Jewish question" was first used in Great Britain around 1750 when the expression was used during the debates related to the
The question was next discussed in France (la question juive) after the French Revolution in 1789. It was discussed in Germany in 1843 via Bruno Bauer's treatise Die Judenfrage ("The Jewish Question"). He argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only if they let go their religious consciousness, as he proposed that political emancipation required a secular state. Bauer's conclusions were disputed by Karl Marx in his essay Zur Judenfrage, in which he argued that society cannot be free from the oppression of capitalism without removing Jews from society: "As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object... The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism."
According to
From around 1860, the term was used with an increasingly antisemitic tendency: Jews were described under this term as a stumbling block to the identity and cohesion of the German nation and as enemies within the Germans' own country. Antisemites such as
and others declared it a racial problem insoluble through integration. They stressed this in order to strengthen their demands to "de-jewify" the press, education, culture, state and economy. They also proposed to condemn inter-marriage between Jews and non-Jews. They used this term to oust the Jews from their supposedly socially dominant positions.The topic was also taken up by Jews themselves. Theodor Herzl's 1896 treatise Der Judenstaat advocates Zionism as a "modern solution for the Jewish question" by creating an independent Jewish state, preferably in Ottoman-controlled Palestine.[4] The 1934 science fiction novel Zwei im andern Land by the German rabbi Martin Salomonski imagines a refuge for Jews on the moon.[5]
The most infamous use of this expression was by the
Bruno Bauer – The Jewish Question
In his book The Jewish Question (1843), Bauer argued that Jews could only achieve political emancipation if they relinquish their particular religious consciousness. He believed that political emancipation requires a secular state, and such a state did not leave any "space" for social identities such as religion. According to Bauer, such religious demands were incompatible with the idea of the "Rights of Man." True political emancipation, for Bauer, required the abolition of religion.[8]
Karl Marx – On the Jewish Question
Karl Marx replied to Bauer in his 1844 essay On the Jewish Question. Marx repudiated Bauer's view that the nature of the Jewish religion prevented assimilation by Jews. Instead, Marx attacked Bauer's very formulation of the question from "can the Jews become politically emancipated?" as fundamentally masking the nature of political emancipation itself.[9]
Marx used Bauer's essay as an occasion for his own analysis of liberal rights. Marx argued that Bauer was mistaken in his assumption that in a "secular state", religion would no longer play a prominent role in social life. As an example, he referred to the pervasiveness of religion in the United States, which, unlike Prussia, had no state religion. In Marx's analysis, the "secular state" was not opposed to religion, but rather assumed it. The removal of religious or property qualifications for citizenship did not mean the abolition of religion or property, but rather naturalized both and introduced a way of regarding individuals in abstraction from them.[10] On this note Marx moved beyond the question of religious freedom to his real concern with Bauer's analysis of "political emancipation." Marx concluded that while individuals can be 'politically' free in a secular state, they were still bound to material constraints on freedom by economic inequality, an assumption that would later form the basis of his critiques of capitalism.
After Marx
Josef Ringo proposed the establishment of a Jewish state in his 1917 The Jewish question in its historical context and proposals for its solution (Die Judenfrage in ihrem geschichtlichen Zusammenhang und Vorschläge ihrer Lösung).[citation needed]
Between 1880 and 1920, millions of Jews created their own solution for the
The Nazi "Final Solution"
In
Upon achieving power in 1933,
In the United States
A "Jewish problem" was euphemistically discussed in majority-European countries outside Europe, even as the Holocaust was in progress. American aviator and celebrity Charles A. Lindbergh used the phrase repeatedly in public speeches and writing. For example in his diary entry of September 18, 1941, published in 1970 as part of The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, he wrote[20]
[John T.] Flynn says he does not question the truth of what I said at Des Moines,[21] but feels it was inadvisable to mention the Jewish problem. It is difficult for me to understand Flynn's attitude. He feels as strongly as I do that the Jews are among the major influences pushing this country toward war. He has said so frequently and he says so now. He is perfectly willing to talk about it among a small group of people in private.
Contemporary use
A dominant
See also
- Anti-Semite and Jew
- Antisemitic canard
- Armenian question
- David Nirenberg § Anti-Judaism
- German question
- Irish question
- Martin Luther and antisemitism
- National question
- Negro Question
- Polish question
- The Race Question
- Ulrich Fleischhauer
- Useful Jew
Notes
- ^ For some extra depth, see Wannsee Conference.
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8153-0812-6. Freely available at "The following essay, by Prof. Otto Dov Kulka, is based on the introduction to Rena R. Auerbach, ed.: "The 'Jewish Question'". The Felix Posen Bibliographic Project on Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Archived from the originalon 25 November 2005.
- OCLC 1103005.
- OCLC 5326379.
- ISBN 978-0-486-25849-2. Retrieved 28 September 2010.
- ^ "Jews in Space. Six questions for Lena Kugler". 11 September 2022.
- ^ a b Stig Hornshoj-Moller (24 October 1998). "Hitler's speech to the Reichstag of January 30, 1939". The Holocaust History Project. Archived from the original on 14 March 2008. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- ISBN 978-0-8052-4051-1
- JSTOR 26214177.
- ^ Karl Marx (February 1844). "On the Jewish Question". Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- ^ Marx 1844:
[T]he political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.
- ^ Werner Sombart (1911) [translated in 2001]. The Jews and Modern Capitalism (PDF). Batoche Books. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- ^ Theodor Herzl (1896). Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (in German). M. Breitenstein's Verlags-Buchhandlung. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- ^ Dr. Achim Gercke. "Solving the Jewish Question".
- ^ David M. Crowe. The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath[permanent dead link]. Westview Press, 2008.
- ^ Adolf Hitler; Wilhelm Frick; Franz Gürtner; Rudolf Hess (15 September 1935). "Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor". Archived from the original on 19 March 2008. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- ^ Adolf Hitler; Wilhelm Frick (15 September 1935). "Reich Citizenship Law". Archived from the original on 21 March 2008. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- ^ Doris Bergen (2004–2005). "Germany and the Camp System". Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Community Television of Southern California. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- ^ Niewyk, Donald L. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II." Also see "The Holocaust," Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007: "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others, by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question."
- ^ Gord McFee (2 January 1999). "When did Hitler decide on the Final Solution?". The Holocaust History Project. Archived from the original on 2 June 2015. Retrieved 25 March 2008.
- OCLC 463699463.
- ^ "Des Moines Speech" Archived January 30, 2017, at the Wayback Machine. PBS. Retrieved: January 19, 2011.
- ^ Kestenbaum, Sam (21 December 2016). "White Nationalists Create New Shorthand for the 'Jewish Question'". The Forward. Retrieved 25 May 2017.
- ^ "JQ stands for the 'Jewish Question,' an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people have undue influence over the media, banking and politics that must somehow be addressed" (Christopher Mathias, Jenna Amatulli, Rebecca Klein, 2018, The HuffPost, 3 March 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florida-public-school-teacher-white-nationalist-podcast_us_5a99ae32e4b089ec353a1fba)
Further reading
- Arendt, Hannah. "The Jew as Pariah" in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. R.H. Feldman, ed. New York: Grove Press 1978.
- Birnbaum, Pierre and Ira Katznelson, eds. Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995.
- Case, Holly. The Age of Questions (Princeton University Press, 2018) excerpt
- Katz, Jacob. Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1973.
- Kovach, Thomas. "The Elusiveness of Tolerance: The" Jewish Question" from Lessing to the Napoleonic Wars." Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.1 (1998): 127-128.
- Roudinesco, Elisabeth (2013) Returning to the Jewish Question, London, Polity Press, p. 280
- Wolf, Lucien (1919) "Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question", Jewish Historical Society of England
- The Jewish cause: an introduction to a different Israeli history– the subject's impact during the Holocaust
- ISBN 978-0-393-34791-3.
- Smith, Steven B. Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press 1997. ISBN 0300066805