Jewish question
The Jewish question, also referred to as the Jewish problem, was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century Europe that pertained to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews. The debate, which was similar to other "national questions", dealt with the civil, legal, national, and political status of Jews as a minority within society, particularly in Europe during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
"The Jewish question" redirects here. For the 1843 book, see The Jewish Question.
The debate began with Jewish emancipation in western and central European societies during the Age of Enlightenment and after the French Revolution. The debate's issues included the legal and economic Jewish disabilities (such as Jewish quotas and segregation), Jewish assimilation, and Jewish Enlightenment.
The expression has been used by antisemitic movements from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the Nazi phrase of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Similarly, the expression was used by proponents for and opponents of the establishment of an autonomous Jewish homeland or a sovereign Jewish state.
Bruno Bauer – The Jewish Question[edit]
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[edit]
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.
The Nazi "Final Solution"[edit]
In Nazi Germany, the term Jewish Question (in German: Judenfrage) referred to the belief 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 the idea that the Jewish Question could be solved by resettling Jews in Madagascar, or somewhere else in Africa or South America. They also discussed the pros and cons of supporting the German Zionists. Von Leers asserted that establishing a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine would create humanitarian and political problems for the region.[13]
Upon achieving power in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state began to implement increasingly severe legislation that was aimed at segregating and ultimately removing Jews from Germany and (eventually) all of Europe.[14] The next stage was the persecution of the Jews and the stripping of their citizenship through the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.[15][16] Starting with 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and later, during World War II, it became state-sponsored internment in concentration camps.[17] Finally the government implemented the systematic extermination of the Jewish people (The Holocaust),[18] which took place as the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question.[6][19][a]
Nazi propaganda was produced in order to manipulate the public, the most notable examples of which were based on the writings of people such as Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz and Erwin Baur in Foundations of Human Heredity Teaching and Racial Hygiene. The work Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living) by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche and the pseudo-scholarship that was promoted by Gerhard Kittel also played a role. In occupied France, the collaborationist regime established its own Institute for studying the Jewish Questions.
Contemporary use[edit]
A dominant anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is the belief that Jewish people have undue influence over the media, banking, and politics. Based on this conspiracy theory, certain groups and activists discuss the "Jewish Question" and offer different proposals to address it. In the early 21st century, white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis have used the initialism JQ in order to refer to the Jewish question.[22][23]