The Jewish question
Jewish question was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century European society pertaining to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews
Jews in society. The debate was similar to other so-called "national questions" and dealt with the civil, legal, national and political status of Jews
Jews as a minority within society, particularly in Europe
Europe in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The debate started within societies, politicians and writers in western and central Europe
Europe influenced by the Age of Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment and the ideals of the French Revolution. The issues included the legal and economic Jewish disabilities (e.g. Jewish quotas and segregation), Jewish assimilation, Jewish emancipation
Jewish emancipation and Jewish Enlightenment. The expression has been used by antisemitic movements from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the Nazi
Nazi phrase "the Final Solution
Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Similarly, the expression was used by proponents for and opponents of the establishment of an autonomous Jewish homeland
Jewish homeland or a sovereign Jewish state. More recently, white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis have used the initialism JQ to refer to the Jewish question.[1]

Contents

1 History of "The Jewish Question" 2 Current Background of "The Jewish Question" 3 Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer – The Jewish Question 4 Karl Marx
Karl Marx – On the Jewish Question 5 After Marx 6 The Final Solution

6.1 Propaganda

7 See also 8 Further reading 9 References 10 External links

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Further information: History of the Jews
Jews in Europe The term "Jewish Question" was first used in Great Britain in around 1750 when the expression "Jewish question" appeared during the Jew Bill of 1753 debates in England.[2] According to Holocaust scholar Lucy Dawidowicz, the term "Jewish Question," as introduced in western Europe, was a neutral expression for the negative attitude toward the apparent and persistent singularity of the Jews
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 of European antisemitism are replete with proffered 'solutions to the Jewish question.'"[3] The question was next discussed in France ("la question juive") after the French Revolution
French Revolution in 1789. It has arrived in Germany in 1843 via Bruno Bauer's treatise "Die Judenfrage" – The Jewish Question. He argued that Jews
Jews can achieve political emancipation only if they let go their religious consciousness as he proposed that political emancipation required a secular state. According to Otto Dov Kulka[4] of Hebrew University, the term became widespread in the nineteenth century when it was used in discussions about Jewish emancipation
Jewish emancipation in Germany (Judenfrage).[2] In the 19th century hundreds of tractates, pamphlets, newspaper articles and books were written on the subject, with many offering solutions including resettlement, deportation and assimilation of the Jewish population. Similarly, hundreds of pieces of literature were written opposing these solutions and have offered solutions such as re-integration and education. This debate however, could not decide whether the problem of the Jewish Question had more to do with the problems posed by the German Jews' opponents or vice versa: the problem posed by the existence of the German Jews
Jews to their opponents. From around 1860 the notion took on an increasingly antisemitic tendency: Jews
Jews were described under this title as a stumbling block to the identity and cohesion of the German nation and as enemies within the Germans' own country. Antisemites such as Wilhelm Marr, Karl Eugen Dühring, Theodor Fritsch, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde and others declared it a racial problem 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 to oust the Jews
Jews out of their supposedly socially dominant positions. By far the most infamous use of this expression was by the Nazis in the early- and mid- twentieth century, culminating in the implementation of their " Final Solution
Final Solution to the Jewish question" during World War II.[5][6] Current Background of "The Jewish Question"[edit] A dominant anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is 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 propose to "address" it. They often refer to it as the JQ.[7] Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer – The Jewish Question[edit] In his book The Jewish Question, published in 1843, Bauer argued that Jews
Jews can achieve political emancipation only if they relinquish their particular religious consciousness, since 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
Karl Marx – On the Jewish Question[edit] Karl Marx
Karl Marx replied to Bauer in his 1844 essay On the Jewish Question. Marx contradicted Bauer's view that the nature of the Jewish religion prevented Judaism's assimilation. Instead he focused on the specific social and economic role of the Jewish group in Europe
Europe which, according to him, was lost when capitalism, the material basis for Judaism, assimilated the European societies as a whole.[8] Marx uses Bauer's essay as an occasion for his own analysis of liberal rights. Marx argues that Bauer is mistaken in his assumption that in a "secular state", religion will no longer play a prominent role in social life, and, as an example refers 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 religious or property qualifications for citizens does not mean the abolition of religion or property, but only introduces a way of regarding individuals in abstraction from them.[9] On this note Marx moves beyond the question of religious freedom to his real concern with Bauer's analysis of "political emancipation." Marx concludes that while individuals can be 'spiritually' and 'politically' free in a secular state, they can still be bound to material constraints on freedom by economic inequality, an assumption that would later form the basis of his critiques of capitalism. After Marx[edit] Werner Sombart
Werner Sombart praised Jews
Jews for their capitalism and presented the seventeenth–eighteenth century court Jews
Jews as integrated and a model for integration.[10] By the turn of the twentieth century, the debate was still widely discussed and raised to prominence by the Dreyfus Affair in France. Within the religious and political elite, some continued to favor assimilation and political engagement in Europe[citation needed] while others, such as Theodore Herzl, proposed the advancement of a separate Jewish state and the Zionist
Zionist cause.[11] Between 1880 and 1920, millions of other Jews
Jews sought their own solution for the pogroms of eastern Europe
Europe by emigration to other places, such as the United States
United States and western Europe. The Final Solution[edit] In Nazi
Nazi Germany, the term Jewish Question (in German: Judenfrage) referred to the sense that the existence of Jews
Jews in Germany posed a problem for the state. In 1933 two Nazi
Nazi theorists, Johann von Leers and Achim Gercke, both proposed that the Jewish Question could be solved by resettling Jews
Jews in Madagascar or elsewhere in Africa or South America. Both intellectuals discussed the pros and cons of supporting the German Zionists as well, but von Leers asserted that establishing a Jewish homeland
Jewish homeland in British Palestine would create humanitarian and political problems for the region.[12] Upon achieving power in 1933, Hitler and the Nazi
Nazi state began to implement increasingly severe measures aimed at segregating and ultimately removing the Jewish people from Germany and (eventually) all of Europe.[13] The next stage was persecution of Jews
Jews and the stripping of Jews
Jews of their citizenship through the Nuremberg Laws.[14][15] Later, during World War II, it became state-sponsored internment in concentration camps[16] and finally, the systematic extermination of the Jewish people (The Holocaust),[17] which took place as the so-called Final Solution
Final Solution to the Jewish Question.[5][18][19] Propaganda[edit] Nazi
Nazi propaganda was produced to manipulate the public, most notably based on writings from people such as 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
Alfred Hoche or in pseudo scholarship created by Gerhard Kittel. In occupied France, the collaborationist regime established its own Institute for studying the Jewish Questions. See also[edit]

Armenian Question "Negro Question" Ulrich Fleischhauer Useful Jew

Further reading[edit] Lucien Wolf, Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question, Jewish Historical Society of England (1919) Henry Ford: The International Jew
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[edit]

^ Kestenbaum, Sam. "White Nationalists Create New Shorthand for the 'Jewish Question'". The Forward. Retrieved 25 May 2017.  ^ a b "Essay based on the introduction to The 'Jewish Question' in German Speaking Countries, 1848–1914, A Bibliography, in The Felix Posen Bibliographic Project on Antisemitism
Antisemitism (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1994); retrieved 25 March 2008". Archived from the original on 25 November 2005.  ^ Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York, 1975), pp. xxi-xxiii. ^ As of 2008 Otto Dov Kulka's works are out of print, but the following may be useful and is available on microfilm: Reminiscences of Otto Dov Kulka (Glen Rock, New Jersey: Microfilming Corp. of America, 1975), ISBN 0-88455-598-4 and 9780884555988, OCLC 5326379. ^ a b Stig Hornshoj-Moller (1998-10-24). "Hitler's speech to the Reichstag of January 30, 1939". The Holocaust
The Holocaust History Project. Archived from the original on March 14, 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-25.  ^ Furet, François. Unanswered Questions: Nazi
Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. Schocken Books (1989), p. 182; ISBN 0-8052-4051-9 ^ "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 03/03/2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florida-public-school-teacher-white-nationalist-podcast_us_5a99ae32e4b089ec353a1fba) ^ Karl Marx
Karl Marx (February 1844). [http:// .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/index.htm "On the Jewish Question"] Check url= value (help). Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Retrieved 2008-03-25.  line feed character in url= at position 8 (help) ^ 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
Werner Sombart (1911) [translated in 2001]. The Jews
Jews and Modern Capitalism
Capitalism (PDF). Batoche Books. Retrieved 2008-03-25.  ^ Theodor Herzl
Theodor Herzl (1896). Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (in German). M. Breitenstein's Verlags-Buchhandlung. Retrieved 2008-03-25.  ^ Dr. Achim Gercke. "Solving the Jewish Question".  ^ David M. Crowe. The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath. Westview Press, 2008. ^ Adolf Hitler; Wilhelm Frick; Franz Gürtner; Rudolf Hess (1935-09-15). "Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor". Archived from the original on 2008-03-19. Retrieved 2008-03-25.  ^ Adolf Hitler; Wilhelm Frick
Wilhelm Frick (1935-09-15). "Reich Citizenship Law". Archived from the original on 2008-03-21. Retrieved 2008-03-25.  ^ Doris Bergen (2004–2005). "Germany and the Camp System". Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi
Nazi State. Community Television of Southern California. Retrieved 2008-03-25.  ^ Niewyk, Donald L. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: " The Holocaust
The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews
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
Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question." ^ Gord McFee (1999-01-02). "When did Hitler decide on the Final Solution?". The Holocaust
The Holocaust History Project. Archived from the original on 2015-06-02. Retrieved 2008-03-25.  ^ For some extra depth, the interested reader might read Wannsee Conference as well.

External links[edit]

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