Jewish question

The Jewish question was the name given to a wide-ranging debate in European society pertaining to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews in society. The debate involved the civil, legal and national status of Jews as a minority within society, particularly in Europe.

The debate started within societies, politicians and writers in western and central Europe influenced by the 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 and Jewish Enlightenment.

The expression has been used by antisemitic movements from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the Nazi phrase "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.

History of "The Jewish Question"

The term "Jewish Question" was first used in Great Britain in around 1750. 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 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.'" The question was next discussed in France ("la question juive") after the French Revolution in 1789, before arriving in Germany via Bruno Bauer's treatise "Die Judenfrage" - The Jewish Question.

The Jewish Question

The Jewish Question is an 1843 book by German historian and theologian Bruno Bauer, written and published in German (original title Die Judenfrage).

Bauer argued that 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. He described the contemporary concept of Jewish nationalism as "chimeral" and "baseless".

In his commentary On The Jewish Question also published in 1843, Karl Marx criticizes Bauer's book as well as “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden″ (“The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free″).

See also

References

External links

Jews

The Jews (/dʒuːz/;Hebrew: יְהוּדִים ISO 259-3 Yehudim, Israeli pronunciation [jehuˈdim]), also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jewish ethnicity, nationhood and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation, while its observance varies from strict observance to complete nonobservance.

The Jews trace their ethnogenesis to the part of the Levant known as the Land of Israel. The discovery of the Merneptah Stele confirms the existence of the people of Israel in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. Since then, while maintaining rule over their homeland during certain periods—such as under the Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdom of Judah, the Hasmonean Dynasty, and the Herodian Kingdom—Jews also suffered various exiles and occupations from their homeland—from Ancient Egyptian Occupation of the Levant, to Assyrian Captivity and Exile, to Babylonian Captivity and Exile, to Greek Occupation and Exile, to the Roman Occupation and Exile. These events subjected Jews to slavery, pogroms, cultural assimilation, forced expulsions, genocide, and more, scattering Jews all around the world, in what is known today as the Jewish diaspora.

Kevin McDonald (disambiguation)

Kevin McDonald may refer to:

Kevin MacDonald may refer to:

See also

Question

A question is a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or the request made using such an expression. The information requested should be provided in the form of an answer.

Questions have developed a range of uses that go beyond the simple eliciting of information from another party. Rhetorical questions, for example, are used to make a point, and are not expected to be answered. Many languages have special grammatical forms for questions (for example, in the English sentence "Are you happy?", the inversion of the subject you and the verb are shows it to be a question rather than a statement). However questions can also be asked without using these interrogative grammatical structures – for example one may use an imperative, as in "Tell me your name".

Uses

The principal use of questions is to elicit information from the person being addressed, by indicating, more or less precisely, the information which the speaker (or writer) desires. However questions can also be used for a number of other purposes. Questions may be asked for the purpose of testing someone's knowledge, as in a quiz or examination. Raising a question may guide the questioner along an avenue of research (see Socratic method).