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The Jewish question 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 group within society, particularly in Europe during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
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 legal and economic Jewish disabilities (such as and segregation), Jewish assimilation, and Haskalah.
The expression has been used by antisemitic movements from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the Holocaust (1941–45), specifically a Nazi terminology called the "Final Solution". Similarly, the expression was used by proponents for, and opponents of, the establishment of an autonomous Jewish homeland or a sovereign Jewish state, leading to the state of Israel in 1948.
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 (). 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 Jewish political emancipation was possible because a secular state presupposes and sustains the private religious life of its citizens, while still maintaining the abolition of capitalism would bring about the end of Judaism: "The existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state... However once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object."
According to Otto Dov KulkaAs 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), , . of Hebrew University, the term became widespread in the 19th century when it was used in discussions about Jewish emancipation in Germany (Judenfrage). In the 19th century hundreds of tractates, pamphlets, newspaper articles and books were written on the subject, with many offering such solutions as resettlement, deportation, or assimilation of the Jewish population. Similarly, hundreds of works were written opposing these solutions and offering instead 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 to their opponents.
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 Wilhelm Marr, Karl Eugen Dühring, Theodor Fritsch, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde and others declared it a racial problem insoluble through integration. They stressed this in order to strengthen their demands to "de-jewify" the press, education, culture, state and economy. They also proposed to condemn inter-marriage between Jews and non-Jews. They used this term to oust the Jews from their supposedly socially dominant positions.
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. The 1934 science fiction novel by the German rabbi imagines a refuge for Jews on the moon.
The most infamous use of this expression was by the in the early- and mid-twentieth century. They implemented what they called their "Final Solution to the Jewish question" through the Holocaust during World War II, when they attempted to exterminate Jews in Europe.Furet, François. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. Schocken Books (1989), p. 182;
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.Marx 1844: 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.
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.David M. Crowe. The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath. Westview Press, 2008. The next stage was the persecution of the Jews and the stripping of their citizenship through the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Starting with 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and later, during World War II, it became state-sponsored internment in Nazi concentration camps. Finally the government implemented the systematic extermination of the Jewish people (The Holocaust),Niewyk, Donald L. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 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 Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question." which took place as the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
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 Vichy France established its own Institute for studying the Jewish Questions.
In the 1920s, according to historian Leo Ribuffo, auto magnate Henry Ford sponsored a major outburst of attacks on Jews in his magazine, the Dearborn Independent, bundles of which he sent to all Ford dealerships every week. It especially promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and also published new articles that blamed Jews for America's problems. In 1927, following a lawsuit by Aaron Sapiro, Ford publicly apologized for his anti-Semitism, retracted his earlier views, and closed his magazine. Leo P. Ribuffo, "Henry Ford and 'The International Jew American Jewish History 69.4 (1980): 437-477. online
A "Jewish problem" was 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 , he wrote (1970). 9780151946259, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 9780151946259
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