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Part I attempts to account for the rise of Zionism in British Jewry at a particular historical juncture. The ascendancy of Zionism in British Jewry from the mid-1930s is explained as the result of a combination of structural, long-term developments and temporary, but no less decisive factors. Using categories borrowed and adapted from modernist theories of nationalism these are grouped in three categories: first, the disintegration of traditional religious and social frames of reference; second, antagonistic ‘Others’, against which British Jews identified themselves collectively; and third the attractions which the Zionist project held out to British Jews.the enemy without Anti-Semitism refugees League of Nations the shoah Second World War anti-Semitism by default the enemy within liberal assimilationists Communists the Orthodox the Jewish question the Zionist programme memory and oblivion territory language and culture

This chapter turns to what historians have recently called ‘dissimilation’, the affirmation of Jewishness in response to an unwelcoming society. It inquires into new ways of being Jewish and reinventing Jewish identity: the rediscovery and revaluation of the traditional Jewish communities of eastern Europe; the notion that the Jew was really an Oriental and hence endowed quite differently from the Europeans among whom he was stranded; and finally the Zionist movement, typified by Theodor Herzl, which sought to solve the Jewish question by transporting the Jews to a new, or old, home in the East.

At the start of the Occupation, both French and German agencies accepted the fundamental legitimacy of the so‐called Jewish Question (Judenfrage) and adopted anti‐Semitic policies of defamation, discrimination, and despoliation with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Perceiving Jews as a security threat, the military administration evicted Jews from a security zone along the Channel coast and played a major role in the ‘Aryanization’ of the French economy, but the MBF condemned ‘Aryanization’ on legal grounds and did not believe that Jews stood behind all resistance activity. The Vichy regime defamed and discriminated against Jews on its own accord, created the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs to despoil Jews, and ordered French police to incarcerate specific categories of Jews, but Pierre Laval objected to the arrest of assimilated French Jews because the roundups undermined support for his government. The SS and German embassy in Paris both championed the entire defamation, discrimination, despoliation, and deportation process, but they lacked the manpower and a legal mandate to act on their own before the summer of 1942. As the fortunes of war turned against the Reich, Hitler championed increasingly ruthless anti‐Semitic measures that culminated in the Final Solution.

This chapter introduces terminology and methods that will be used throughout this study. It offers working definitions of Judentum, antisemitism, Jewish-identified individuals, fetish, modernity, and the morphemic/orthographic/semantic/phonemic field. It also describes a physiognomic epidemiological method, a technique for mapping the emergence and distribution of as well as the interrelationships among particular Jewish-associated morphemes and images in German-language verbal and visual texts. The chapter depicts a European modernity characterized by the emergence of medical/biological and national/evolutionary/colonial narratives and accompanying authorizing discourses by which truth was identified and rendered visible on the body—specifically, the body of “the Jew” and the techniques practiced upon it (e.g., circumcision). It situates the socio-politico Jewish Question in Germanophone lands within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society.

This chapter traces the genesis of the quotas and examines the way they fostered the emergence of separate Jewish student organizations as the “Jewish Question” insinuated itself into the academy. It deals with a collective portrait of Russian-Jewish students in the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution, based on a series of contemporary surveys conducted at institutions of higher education in Kiev, Odessa, and Moscow.

The ‘Jewish Question’, the problem concerning the position of Jews in Germany and Austria, was widely discussed from the 1770s onwards. Emancipation culminated in 1871 with the bestowal of equal rights on all Jewish citizens of the newly formed German Empire. Along with progress towards emancipation, the Jewish presence in German and Austrian culture became increasingly conspicuous, reaching a peak of brilliance and diversity in the Weimar Republic, before being annihilated or sent into exile by the National Socialist regime. The focus of this book is on the Jewish presence in German literature. It aims to render the ‘Jewish question’ more intelligible by looking at its literary expressions. While the main focus is on the period 1880–1930, it also goes back to the eighteenth century to show how the project of Jewish emancipation was closely tied to an Enlightenment philosemitism which was problematic from the outset.

This chapter describes how the ‘Jewish question’ and its ‘solution’ were defined in Catholic publications. The call to strengthen Christian values in the modern age and the call to convert the Jews were the most common solutions offered in English Catholic newspapers. The Tablet, the Catholic Times and the Catholic Herald did not change their view that the Jews brought their fate upon themselves, despite anger at the brutality of the pogrom. The Gelben Hefte did not share the self-restraint that the papers of political Catholicism tried to practise. National Socialism could tap into a stream of antisemitic stereotypes that were popular and common since the First World War. Most literature on Catholic antisemitism asserts that racial antisemitism was firmly rejected by Catholics. Generally, this discussion shows the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices and times and occasions when the intensity of antisemitic articles was specifically high.

This chapter demonstrates how the role of Judentum in Karl Marx's work cannot be limited to its few explicit discussions such as in “On the Jewish Question.” Though Marx did not self-identify as a Jew, he was regularly confronted by others who, often venomously, identified him as a Jew. By charting Marx's rhetoric, his use of such Jewish-associated morphemes as “Lump-” (rag, rogue) and “Verkehr-” (intercourse, inverted [verkehrt-]), this chapter analyzes how they may have provided the means by which he not only rendered the theories of his rivals (esp. Max Stirner) ludicrous, but, more significantly, also worked out his understanding of capitalism. In addition to analyses of The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (on the Lumpenproletariat), Capital, and other writings, the chapter situates Marx within a society of endemic anti-Jewish polemic in which Jews were perceived as extensively involved in crime, finance, and various rag trades.

This chapter analyzes Max Nordau's best-selling works of 1880s liberal cultural criticism, Conventional Lies of Our Civilization and Paradoxes. Written a decade before his public self-identification with and affirmation of Judentum when he embraced Theodor Herzl's Zionism, these works demonstrate an obsessive avoidance of the Jewish Question, discussion of which pervaded Germanophone Europe. The chapter argues that Nordau's diagnoses of European modernity were constructed about this (all but total) absence of the Jewish people, especially their contemporary situation and future prospects; that is, he betrays his effort to foreclose his readers' possible identification of him as a Jew by employing puns, wordplays, displacements, conspicuous omissions and inclusions that are replete with references to problematic Jewish attempts at assimilation into European culture and language as well as to antisemitic depictions of the body of “the Jew,” especially as circumcised and diseased (e.g., associated with leprosy).

This chapter addresses the famous joke on “the elephant and the Jewish question,” whose prominence is attested by its many iterations not only in collections of Jewish jokes but also in works of philosophy and theory. Drawing together two seemingly unrelated terms such as Jews and elephants and pointing at their close proximity, jokes do not merely comment on the preposterous character of the “rumor about the Jews” that there is an inherent relationship between Jews and nonhuman animals. The joke also points to what escapes theory and calls out its limitations, for theory takes the Jew as well as the animal as categories, singular as they might be, that can be comprehended only vis-à-vis universals. The chapter then looks at how Jewish authors have called into question the human-nonhuman animal divide in their struggle to think through European modernity.

This chapter examines the argument about force, which views universal war and genocide, the Final Solution, as representative of the fullest realization of the age of questions. It begins with a discussion of rhetoric surrounding a “solution” to the Polish question, and how the ideal of emancipation brought with it the longing for an emancipator, an advocate and liberator. It then considers how questions were bundled to suggest or combine solutions, how equilibrium emerged as the prerequisite for a solution to the Eastern question, and how the Jewish question was formulated in the age of questions. It also explores a number of attributes of the age of questions that figured into the trajectory from a Jewish question to the Final Solution before concluding with an analysis of the chain of questions that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis opened during the years and months preceding the Great War.

Chapter 3 analyzes American Jewish activism to help their persecuted brethren during the 1840 Damascus Affair where accusations of a blood libel against Syrian subjects led to an international call for intervention. The chapter also focuses on how the Damascus Affair helped prompt the rise of American Jewish organizations dedicated in part to helping their oppressed brethren abroad, including the Board of Delegates of American Israelites. The chapter than analyzes American cooperation with British and French Jewish organizations, including the British Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, to intervene during the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859 and the Safi Affair in 1863. This chapter analyzes how Jewish Americans attempted to reframe discussions of American identity by emphasizing the United States as a model for religious toleration and secularism, while at the same time distancing themselves from identification with racist depictions of “Oriental” Muslims.

This essay explores the divergent though intertwined presentations of Jewish identity in the post World War Two philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. There is a temporal, geographical and cultural gulf that separates these two thinkers but these distances can be bridged at the site of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 text Reflections on the Jewish Question insofar as Levinas and Derrida’s responses to Sartre create a textual intersection between Levinas’s “Being-Jewish” (1947), and Derrida’s “Abraham the Other” (2000).  The relation and connection between Levinas and Derrida becomes more clear when one considers the way that Derrida’s essay is implicitly and more importantly a confrontation with the philosophy of Levinas.  What’s more the texts by Levinas and Derrida are each predicated on responses to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in relation to his involvement with the National Socialist party. Despite the separation between the texts, both these thinkers chose to replace, evade, or preempt this “Jewish Question” by instead posing the question of “being-Jewish” in response to the Holocaust, the Nazi Final Solution. This essay explores the ramifications of this connection in relation to Levinas’s ethical philosophy of the other in his “Talmudic writings” and Derrida’s category of the “Marrano."

Chapter 4 begins in 1878 with American intercessions on behalf of Moroccan Jews during two international conferences, the Madrid Conference of 1880 and the Algeciras Conference of 1906. At the Madrid Conference, these discussions centered on maintaining the protégé system, which many believed was essential in protecting Moroccan Jews from oppression. At the Algeciras Conference, American elites explicitly endorsed the extension of French empire to Morocco. These actions were driven by American Jewish organizations such as the Board of Delegates of American Israelites and later, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, with the aid of prominent Jewish leaders such as Jacob Schiff. But such activism was facilitated by diplomatic and political elites, including Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and Felix Mathews, who had their own personal and diplomatic interests for participating in these conferences.

This chapter describes the new politics that emerged in fin-de-siècle Europe, which challenged liberal democracy and bourgeois society. Zionists and Autonomists espoused the idea that Jews were a nation entitled to its own national life either as a majority in Palestine or a national minority in Europe. Both developed the concept of “assimilation” to denigrate emancipation's pernicious effects. In eastern Europe, all the Jews' political parties—emancipationists, Zionists, Autonomists, Bundist Socialists—embraced a version of national minority rights. Meanwhile, the Bund represented a Jewish socialism that dreamed of a classless society to solve the Jewish Question. Orthodox Jews mobilized to press their own causes and to counter the multiple threats of the organized secular political parties. Ultimately, the developments of the fin de siècle were to shape Jewish life in the first four decades of the twentieth century.