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

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

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 [de] by the German rabbi Martin Salomonski [de] imagines a refuge for Jews on the moon.^[5]

The most infamous use of this expression was by the

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

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

• 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

References