(Part 1 of a series on "The Jewish Question")
Across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the phrase "the Jewish Question" — die Judenfrage in German, la question juive in French, the Jewish problem in English — saturated European discourse.
But what, exactly, was the Jewish Question?
Strangely, there is no single answer.
The phrase was ubiquitous. There were multiple books titled The Jewish Question or The Jewish Problem. There were countless newspaper articles, pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, and learned essays addressing it. One scholar catalogued 1,230 sources (books, pamphlets, articles, speeches, meetings) on the topic in a single decade from 1875-1884.
But looking at these sources does not help define the question. They presume the reader already knows.
It appeared in Hegelian philosophy and in evangelical missionary tracts. It was the title of Bruno Bauer's 1843 treatise and Karl Marx's 1844 reply. It was used by French revolutionaries debating emancipation and by German racial theorists demanding separation. It appeared in respectable London newspapers as routine political vocabulary, requiring no definition because every reader was assumed to know what it meant. By 1939, when the Nazi government published Germany and the Jewish Problem, the phrase had been a fixture of European discourse for nearly two centuries, deployed across every political ideology, in every Western language, by every kind of publication.
The one thing nearly everyone using the phrase seemed to agree on was that the Jewish Question was not antisemitism. On the contrary. It was meant to be the alternative to antisemitism. It was the considered intellectual response to a real problem, the kind of thing serious people engaged with in contrast to the rabble who merely hated Jews.
For example, on November 7, 1881, the Pall Mall Gazette of London printed a brief telegram from Berlin under the headline "Prince Bismarck and the Jewish Question." The Tageblatt, organ of the German anti-Jewish Conservatives, was replying to remarks Bismarck had reportedly made condemning anti-Jewish agitation. The Conservatives wanted to clarify their position. "We have always condemned the brutalities of Jew-baiting," they wrote, "but these must not be confounded with the Jewish question, which is well founded. The Jewish question exists in spite of the supposed opinion of Prince Bismarck, and if the Prince adheres to the statement attributed to him, the Jewish question will exist even against him."
The German Conservatives — the leading anti-Jewish party of their moment — were drawing a line between two things they regarded as entirely distinct. On one side was Jew-baiting: vulgar, brutal, the kind of thing respectable people condemned. On the other side was the Jewish Question: serious, well-founded, a matter that any thinking person was obliged to engage with. The Conservatives located their moral position in being against the first while being committed to the second. They were not antisemites, by their lights. They were responsible men, addressing a real problem, in contrast to the ignorant bigots who physically attacked Jews.
For the educated nineteenth-century European, pogroms were awful and blood libels were medieval superstition. But the Jewish Question — that was something else. That was a matter of serious analysis.
So what was the analysis? What did the Question actually claim?
The texts will not tell you directly. They presume the reader already knows. The only way to recover what the Question meant is to work backward from the solutions its serious analysts proposed. If we can identify the solutions, we can reconstruct the questions they were meant to answer. The result is illuminating, and not in the way the analysts intended.
Four solutions, four problems
Consider four representative texts.
In 1883, Arnold Frank, a licentiate of the Irish Presbyterian Church, published
The Jewish Problem and Its Solution through the Bible and Colportage Society of Belfast. Frank was an evangelical Protestant of unimpeachable respectability. The solution he proposed was conversion, pursued through evangelism. The Christian world, he wrote, had a duty to win the Jew for Christ — "if it were for nothing else than self defence," because Jewish religious influence undermined Christian belief. Working backward from this solution, the question Frank was answering becomes clear:
Jews refuse the true faith and undermine those who hold it. What should we do? For Frank, the Jewish Problem was a religious problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was their continued existence as Jews, which conversion would remedy.
A century earlier, in December 1789, the French revolutionary Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre rose in the National Assembly to defend Jewish emancipation. He was a liberal and a constitutional monarchist, on the progressive side of the debate, advocating equal rights for Protestants and Jews against those who wanted to maintain the centuries-old exclusions. The solution he proposed has echoed through every subsequent discussion of Jewish citizenship: "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and accord everything to Jews as individuals." Working backward, the question becomes: Jews constitute a corporate body within the state — with their own laws, their own institutions, their own communal courts — incompatible with the unified citizenship the Republic requires. What should we do? For Clermont-Tonnerre, the Jewish Question was a political-organizational problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was Jewish communal existence, which dissolution of Jewish institutions would remedy.
In 1844, Karl Marx published Zur Judenfrage — "On the Jewish Question" — replying to Bruno Bauer. Marx reframed the entire debate. The solution he proposed was structural: the abolition of the social conditions that produced both Judaism and capitalism. The closing line of the essay is unambiguous: "the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism." Working backward, the question becomes: Jewish economic activity — usury, commerce, what Marx called "huckstering" — is capitalism in concentrated form. What should we do? For Marx, the Jewish Question was an economic problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was the persistence of the social form Judaism allegedly expressed, which revolutionary transformation would remedy - and leave the world with no Judaism.
In 1879, Wilhelm Marr published Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum — "The Victory of Jewry over Germandom" — and helped popularize a new word for an old position. Marr coined "antisemitism" specifically to give Jew-hatred a scientific veneer, distinguishing his position from what he portrayed as backward religious prejudice. The solution he proposed was racial separation, which his successors would push toward catastrophic conclusion. Working backward, the question becomes: Jews are a biologically distinct people whose hereditary characteristics make them permanently incompatible with German national life. What should we do? For Marr, the Jewish Question was a racial problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was their biological inheritance, which no conversion or civic emancipation could touch.
These are not four facets of one problem. They are four different problems with four different referents and four different proposed remedies. Frank's religious problem cannot be solved by economic transformation. Marr's racial problem cannot be solved by conversion. Clermont-Tonnerre's organizational problem cannot be solved by changes in the social conditions of production. Marx's economic problem cannot be solved by the dissolution of communal courts. The four frameworks did not merely disagree about details. They disagreed about what kind of thing the Jewish Question even was.
And yet all four called what they were addressing "the Jewish Question." All four believed they were treating the same subject. Across a century of discourse, no one seems to have been particularly bothered by the fact that the people writing about "the Jewish Question" did not agree, even at the most basic level, on what the Question actually was. Yet everyone agreed that there was a question.
What the shared phrase actually meant
Each framework began from the conviction that Jewish existence was the kind of presence that required management. Frank knew Jews were a religious problem because his theology said so. Clermont-Tonnerre knew Jews were a political problem because his Republicanism said so. Marx knew Jews were an economic problem because his materialism said so. Marr knew Jews were a racial problem because his pseudo-science said so. Each was correct given his framework. But the framework did not generate the conclusion that Jews required treatment. The conclusion preceded the framework. The framework provided respectable contemporary vocabulary in which the prior conclusion could be articulated.
This becomes visible when you examine what happened as proposed solutions failed. Spain attempted the religious solution in the fifteenth century, demanding conversion or expulsion. The conversos who chose conversion were persecuted as crypto-Jews for generations afterward. If the problem had really been religious, conversion would have ended it. It did not.
France attempted the political solution in 1791, granting full civic emancipation conditional on the dissolution of Jewish corporate identity. But Napoleon convened a Grand Sanhedrin to determine if Jews can really live in France as normal citizens. A century later, the Dreyfus Affair revealed that emancipated French Jews remained suspect as Jews. If the problem had really been organizational, civic equality would have ended it. It did not.
The Soviet Union attempted the economic solution after 1917, abolishing the bourgeois conditions Marx had identified. Soviet antisemitism flourished anyway, eventually producing its own state-sponsored persecutions. If the problem had really been economic, abolishing capitalism would have ended it. It did not.
Germany attempted the racial solution under the Nazis, and the catastrophe needs no description.
Each "solution" failed in the same way. A specific proposed answer was implemented, the proposed answer did not resolve the discomfort with Jewish presence, and a new framework was selected to articulate why Jewish presence remained problematic. Religious gave way to political gave way to economic gave way to racial. Each successor framework presented itself as the deeper analysis that the previous framework had missed. None of them ever considered the possibility that the Question itself was not what it claimed to be.
Real political questions, when their proposed solutions fail, generate refinement of analysis. The Eastern Question was reformulated repeatedly across the nineteenth century as Ottoman conditions changed, but each reformulation was a closer approach to the actual referent — the Ottoman Empire's relationship with European powers. The Irish Question evolved from Catholic Emancipation through Home Rule through partition, but the evolution tracked actual changes in the Anglo-Irish relationship. When the referent was finally addressed, the Question dissolved.
The Jewish Question never got refined. It got replaced. Each new framework was not a closer approach to a real referent but a fresh respectable vocabulary deployed when the previous one had become embarrassing. The pattern is the diagnostic of cognitive architecture rather than honest inquiry. A question whose stated referent keeps changing is a question whose actual referent is something else.
The actual referent — the one all four frameworks shared, beneath their respective vocabularies — was the assumption that Jewish existence as Jewish existence was the kind of presence European societies could not simply accommodate. The Question was always what should we do about our Jews?, with the answer "something" already settled, and the rationale to be supplied by whichever framework the era found most respectable.
The respectable form
This brings us back to the German Conservatives of 1881 and to the most important feature of the Jewish Question as a discursive form. Each of the four frameworks I have described did not merely articulate the assumption that Jewish presence required resolution. Each one presented itself, in its own moment, as the moderate and enlightened position — explicitly defined against a cruder antisemitism it considered beneath itself.
Arnold Frank was not a medieval Christian persecutor. He was a Belfast Presbyterian writing in the post-Enlightenment evangelical tradition. He did not endorse pogroms or forced conversion at sword-point. He represented the Protestant reform of Christian-Jewish relations: love them, pray for them, send missionaries, persuade them. By the standards of the world he had inherited, Frank was a moral progressive. He understood himself as advancing beyond the ugliness of medieval Christendom toward a more humane Christian witness to the Jewish people. And the position he took was that Jewish existence as Jewish existence should end, gently, through evangelism rather than coercion.
Clermont-Tonnerre was not a defender of the ancien régime's Jewish disabilities. He was a leading voice for Jewish emancipation in a National Assembly debate where some delegates wanted to maintain the centuries-old exclusions. His famous formulation — everything to Jews as individuals, nothing to Jews as a nation — was understood at the time as a defense of Jewish rights against those who wanted to keep Jews as a permanently inferior caste. He was on the liberal side of the argument. And his liberalism took the form of demanding that Jewish corporate existence be dissolved as the price of admission to French citizenship.
Marx was not a populist scapegoater of Jewish bankers. He was, in his own self-understanding, the deeper analyst, locating Jewish economic behavior within the structural critique of capitalism, distinguishing his position from the vulgar Jew-hatred of the conservative populists. He was a radical, and he understood his radicalism as the alternative to the cruder forms of antisemitism that produced pogroms and individual scapegoating. And his alternative was that Jewish existence as expressed in social form be abolished along with the conditions producing it.
Marr is the hardest of the four to call respectable, but in his own moment, he positioned himself as scientific and modern against what he portrayed as backward religious bigotry. He coined the word "antisemitism" precisely to give the position a scientific register, distinguishing it from the superstitious Christian Jew-hatred of the past. His self-understanding was that he was offering a sober racial analysis — modern, biological, Darwinian — in contrast to medieval prejudice. And his sober racial analysis demanded racial separation that culminated, two generations later, in industrialized murder.
Each framework, then, performed the same operation. It identified a cruder, more vulgar form of antisemitism prevalent in its environment. It defined itself explicitly against that cruder form. It articulated the same prior assumption — that Jewish existence required resolution — in the respectable contemporary vocabulary of its moment. And it understood itself, by its own lights, to be antisemitism's opposite: the moral progress over what came before.
This is what the German Conservatives were doing in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1881. They were not confused or hypocritical. They had located the moral high ground in being against the brutalities while embracing the well-founded Question. That is a stable, coherent, durable cultural-political achievement: the construction of an acceptable antisemitism, articulated in whatever vocabulary the era considers serious, sincerely understood by its adherents to be the antithesis of the vulgar form they reject.
The achievement is what made the framing so durable. Each generation could point to a worse version — one that they did not endorse — and locate themselves on the right side of history relative to it. The Reform Christian was not a Crusader. The French Republican was not an absolutist excluder. The Marxist was not a Pale of Settlement antisemite. The racial scientist was not a credulous superstitious peasant. Each could, with full sincerity, distinguish his position from antisemitism as he understood antisemitism — while occupying a position that carried forward the same load-bearing assumption that animated every cruder form.
The structural reading
When you place the four frameworks beside one another, the diagnostic is unavoidable. Frank wanted Jewish religious existence to end. Clermont-Tonnerre wanted Jewish communal existence to end. Marx wanted Jewish economic existence to end. Marr wanted Jewish biological existence to end. Each framework specified a different mode of Jewish existence as the relevant one and demanded its termination. None of them were content with Jewish existence continuing as itself.
The society's treatment of Jews was never considered the problem. The Jews themselves were the problem. And soon enough, even the respected academics admitted this. In 1879, Heinrich von Treitschke — professor at the University of Berlin, the most prominent German historian of his generation — said it without ornament in the pages of the Preußische Jahrbücher: 'Die Juden sind unser Unglück.' The Jews are our misfortune. This phrase was first published in the most prestigious journal of German political thought as an enlightened viewpoint.
The Nazis recognized it for what it was.
The Jewish Question was the socially acceptable form of antisemitism. It was sophisticated: serious analysis, considered solutions, learned treatises, careful debate. It carefully distinguished itself from the earlier, crude manifestations of antisemitism. And the world, by and large — including most but not all European Jews themselves — accepted this framing.
Almost no one considered that there was an alternative way of looking at Jews in Europe, of dissolving the Jewish question altogether. Yet there was an another way that emerged — in the New World. And only when compared against Europe can the genius of the American system be recognized, which is the topic of the next essay.
Tragically, the progressive Europeans did not recognize that the liberal, serious, progressive Jewish Question itself, that they debated endlessly as the enlightened alternative to pogroms and blood libels, is what would directly lead to genocide.
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