Jewish question

History of “The Jewish Question”

The term “Jewish Question” was first used in Great Britain in around 1750.  ^{[  citation needed  ]}  According to Holocaust scholar Lucy Dawidowicz , the term “Jewish Question,” as introduced in Western Europe , was a neutral expression for the negative attitude towards the apparent and persistent singularity of the Jews as a people against the background of the rising political nationalisms and new nation-states . Dawidowicz writes that “the histories of Jewish emancipation and European antisemitism are replete with proffered ‘solutions to the Jewish question.'”  ^[2]  The question was discussed in France (“The Jewish Question”) after the French Revolution in 1789, before arriving in Germany via Bruno Bauer’s treatise “Die Judenfrage” – The Jewish Question.

From the point of view of other tractates, pamphlets, newspaper articles and books have been written on the subject, with many offering solutions including resettlement, deportation and assimilation of the Jewish population. Similarly, hundreds of pieces of literature have been written opposing these solutions and have been offered as such as re-integration and education. This issue, however, could not be determined by the German Jews’ opponents or vice versa: the problem posed by the existence of the German Jews to their opponents.

From around 1860 the notion of an antisemitic tendency has been described: Germans’ own country. Antisemites such as Wilhelm Marr , Karl Eugen Dühring , Theodor Fritsch , Houston Chamberlain Stewart , Paul de Lagardeand others declared it to be unsolvable through integration, in order to make their demands for the “de-jewifying” of the press, education, culture, state and economy, plausible, along with their demands for the condemnation of inter-marriage between Jews and non-Jews. They also used this definition of the Jews out of their supposedly socially dominant positions.

By far the most infamous use of this expression by the Nazis in the early and mid-twentieth century, culminating in the implementation of ” Final Solution to the Jewish Question” during World War II .  ^{[3]  [4]}

Early use

An early use of the expression “Jewish question” appeared during the Jew Bill of 1753 debates in England.  ^[5]  According to Otto Dov Kulka  ^[6]  of Hebrew University , the term became widespread in the nineteenth century when it was used in discussions about Jewish emancipation in Germany (  Judenfrage  ).  ^[5]

Bruno Bauer –  The Jewish Question 

In his book  The Jewish Question  , published in 1843, ” Bauer argued that Jews can achieve political emancipation only if they relinquish their particular religious consciousness, because of political emancipation requires a secular state , which he assumes does not leave any” space “for social identities such as religion . According to Bauer, such religious demands are incompatible with the idea of ​​the ” Rights of Man .” True political emancipation, for Bauer, requires the abolition of religion.

Karl Marx –  On the Jewish Question 

Karl Marx replied to Bauer in his 1844 essay  On the Jewish Question  . Marx contradicted Bauer’s view that the nature of the Judaism’s Jewish religion is assimilated. The focus of the study on the specific social and economic role of the Jewish group in Europe, which, according to him, was lost when capitalism, the material basis for Judaism, assimilated the European societies as a whole.  ^[7]

Marx uses Bauer’s essay as an opportunity for his own analysis of liberal rights. Marx argues that Bauer is mistaken in his assumption that a ” secular state “, religion will no longer play prominent role in social life, and, as an example relates to the pervasiveness of religion in the United States , which unlike Prussia, had no state religion . In Marx’s analysis, the “secular state” is not opposed to religion, but rather actually requires it. The removal of religion or property, but only introduces a way of considering individuals in abstraction of religion.  ^[8] On this note Marx moves beyond the issue of religious freedom to his real concern with Bauer’s analysis of “political emancipation.” Marx concludes that while individuals may be spiritually and politically free in a secular state, they may still be bound to material constraints on economic inequality, an assumption that would later form the basis of his critics of capitalism .

After Marx

Werner Sombart Praised Jews for Their capitalism and presented the Seventeenth-eighteenth century short Jews have integrated and a model for integration.  ^[9]  By the turn of the twentieth century, Dreyfus Affair in France , the debate was still widely discussed and raised to prominence by the Dreyfus Affair . Within the religious and political elite, some continued to favor assimilation and political commitment in Europe  ^{[  citation needed  ]}  while others, Such As Theodore Herzl , the Proposed advancement of a separate Jewish state and the Zionist cause.  ^[10] Between 1880 and 1920, millions of other Jews sought their own solution for the pogroms of eastern Europe by emigration to other places, such as the United States and Western Europe.

The Final Solution

In Nazi Germany , the term  Jewish Question  (in German :  Judenfrage  ) Referred to the sense that the existence of Jews in Germany posed a problem for the state. In 1933 two Nazi theorists, Johann von Leers and Achim Gercke , both proposed that the Jewish Question could be solved by resettling Jews in Madagascar or elsewhere in Africa or South America. Both intellectuals discussed the claims of the German and the French, but of Leers asserted that establishing a Jewish homeland in British Palestine would create a humanitarian and political problems for the region.  ^[11]  Upon achieving power in 1933, Hitlerand the Nazi state began to implement the severe measures of segregating and ultimately removing the Jewish people from Germany and (eventually) all of Europe.  ^[12]  The next stage was the persecution of Jews and the stripping of Jews of their citizenship through the Nuremberg Laws .  ^{[13]  [14]}  Later, during World War II , it became state-sponsored internment in concentration camps  ^[15]  and finally, the systematic extermination of the Jewish people ( The Holocaust ),  ^[16]  which took place in the world. called  Final Solution to the Jewish Question  .  ^{[3]  [17]  [18]}

Propaganda

Nazi propaganda was produced to manipulate the public, most notably based on the writings of Eugen Fischer , Fritz Lenz and Erwin Baur in the book  Foundations of Human Heredity Teaching and Racial Hygiene  . And in the book  Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens  (“Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living”) by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in pseudo-scholarship created by Gerhard Kittel . In occupied France, the collaborationist regime established its own Institute for studying the Jewish Questions .

See also

• Armenian Question
• ” Negro Question “
• Ulrich Fleischhauer
• Useful Jew

Further reading

Lucien Wolf , Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question , Jewish Historical Society of England (1919)

Henry Ford : The International Jew – The World’s Foremost Problem , Articles from The Dearborn Independent, (1920)

Elisabeth Roudinesco , Returning to the Jewish Question , London, Polity Press, December 2013, p. 280

References