The Jewish Question, often abbreviated as JQ, is a popular talking point/conspiracy theory among the "dissident" right; however the usage of the term itself precedes the current wignat usage by over a hundred years. One prominent and early example is Die Judenfrage (1843) by Bruno Bauer, which Marx made a well known critique of in his "On the Jewish Question." The current day usage by wignats, however, refers to a real or perceived overrepresentation of Jews in political, economic, or industrial positions, almost entirely ignorant of the original meaning of the term.
The Historical JQ and Marx's "On the Jewish Question" (1843)[edit | edit source]
Historically speaking, the Jewish Question referred to the inability of the Jews to integrate into secularized European society, because for most of history, the Jews were actually marked by an exclusion from the main state, be it in the form of privileges, rights, duties and so forth, and many Jews had an agreement with the country that they resided in that they would live in Jewish ghettos that were to be governed by Mosaic Law. But with the French Revolution and the establishment of a Universal state, such carve-outs and prejudices became incompatible with the premise of that state: formal equality. The Jewish Question became the name of a contradiction latent in the bourgeois or universal state. To allow Jews to abide by Mosaic law would compromise the formal equality which is the basis of such a state, but to forcibly secularize them would violate freedom of religion.
In the text, Marx unequivocally blasts Bauer's demand that Jews renounce their religion, referencing contemporary societies like America where religious pluralism attended a secular state, revolutionary charters like that of 1791 which included civil rights and nowhere presupposed "the positive abolition of religion, and therefore Judaism,"[1] and even their old schoolmaster Hegel. In all cases his point is that abolition of religion qua the state means simply the end of recognition of religion by the state. No where is it required that all individuals give up their private belief. Once the state is blind to religion, this is bourgeois abolition. In this sense "the State as State annuls private property," merely by allowing men to vote irrespective of property. But of course religion remains as a private affair - as do private property and other differences. And this is the basic Marxist point.
Bauer is anxious that the Jew, granted the rights of man, "is and remains a Jew, in spite of the fact that he is a citizen and lives in general human relationships: his Jewish and limited nature always and eventually triumphs over his human and political obligations." For Marx, however, "the incompleteness, the contradiction, lies not only in [the Jew], but it also resides in the essence and the category of political emancipation." This is because political emancipation frees the bourgeois state from the material world in the same way an ostrich frees itself from a predator by sticking its head in the sand.
The political State is related to bourgeois society as spiritualistically as heaven is to earth. It occupies the same position of antagonism towards bourgeois society; it subdues the latter just as religion overcomes the limitations of the profane world, that is, by recognizing bourgeois society and allowing the latter to dominate it.
Bauer feared the double-nature of the Jew; Marx only chuckles and bids him welcome to the essential contradiction of the bourgeois state generally:
... the completion of the idealism of the State was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civic society. The throwing off of the political yoke was at the same time the throwing off of the bond which had curbed the egoistic spirit of civic society. The political emancipation was at the same time the emancipation of civic society from politics, from even the semblance of a general content.
Men are forced into a double life, the citizen an "imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty .... robbed of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality," and the private person, "regarding other men as a means, degrading himself into a means and becoming a plaything of alien powers." It is not simply the Jew, Marx writes, but modern bourgeois society in general which finds itself split between the universal state and the private caprices of civil society.
Controversy over the second section[edit | edit source]
Idiots and liars like to jibber-jabber about the second part of the work. Taking quotes without context, it is easy to paint Marx as Anti-Semitic in these passages. "What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money." But what is Marx actually getting at? It would be strange if, after carefully elaborating the material contradiction at the heart of bourgeois society, Marx suddenly turned around and made everything about religion again. Stale, pseudo-Hegelian religious criticism is precisely what Marx is breaking with during the 1840s. Put simply, Marx is making fun of Bauer. He is making fun of him for presenting the Jewish Question as though it were a matter of serious theological criticism when in fact, in practical reality, the Jewish Question is a proxy for the place of property in bourgeois society generally.
We will try to get rid of the theological conception of the question. The question of the capacity of the Jews for emancipation is from our standpoint transformed into the question, what particular social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity for emancipation of the modern Jew is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation is necessarily disclosed by the special position of Judaism in the modern subjugated world.
This paragraph immediately precedes the infamous one cited above. So when Marx writes that "Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and therefore from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our epoch," he is clearly not talking about something specific to Jews, but rather the "particular social element" (viz. private property) which undermines the Universal state generally, and of which Jews are merely a popular symbol due to their "special position," their historical association with usury. And when Marx talks about "practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world," he is again talking merely about this, the fact that "money has become a world power," something which has happened "with and without [the Jew's] cooperation." Marx references the popular association between Judaism and money-grubbing only to throw it in the face of the anti-Semite by pointing out, ironically, how even the Christians these days have become Jews.
There are really only two ways to look at this. You can be stupid and claim that Marx really thinks there is an essential connection between Jews and Capitalism, and that he literally means that "bourgeois society continually creates Jews." Or you can accept that he is joking, that such an idea is on its face absurd, and that his point is rather that what people criticize in the Jew is in fact the social disintegration, the atomization and egoism attending Capitalism as such.
The Jewish Question today[edit | edit source]
While Marx's criticism is objectively true, for a very long time suspicion of the Jews has lasted to the present day, in almost every society. When the internet first came around, questioning the Holocaust, talking about the Kabbalah, & fabricating or taking out of context Talmud quotes were fairly popular, as well as many infographics showing the large amount of Jews in Media and Banking companies. Around the 2010s, many websites like Google, Facebook and Youtube, began to crack down on this form of content, partially due to pressure from the ADL. During this time, the JQ discourse got more empowered & solidified on Alt-Media sites like Bitchute , & then like the Angel releasing the locusts from the Abyss, Elon allowed "freedom of speech" on Twitter and JQ discourse became almost the main topic of discussion for nearly three months, stopping until Palestine became the main news topic.
The Wignat understanding of the Jewish Question however is completely retarded, for starters it fails to get that the large scale presence of Jews in "Goy" Companies, simply proves that the Jews have almost completely integrated into Gentile Society. Of particular importance the Wignats like to give focus to is the ADL, however it must be understood that the ADL isn't simply some rights organization like the NAACP or even ACLU, but is actually an intelligence front on behalf of Zionism, & they also have a long history of bullying anti Zionist Jews as well. The wignats almost completely ignore that majority of American Jews are secular, & among the secular Jews they have a 72% intermarriage rate with other communities.[2] The one actual exception to the Traditional JQ not being applicable is the large visibly Orthodox Jewish community of New York & the greater Northeast Area. There is a reason why so many JQers are often from New York, & that is because they deal with the medieval age Jewish community, that does indeed throw its weight around in NY politics, and many do get involved with many anti-social enterprises such as welfare fraud, organ harvesting, & many other schemes; as well as a large social animosity in that the majority of these Jews speak Yiddish as their first language rather than English. However what many Wignats fail to realize, such as Nick Fuentes or John Zherka, is that their programme of a "Traditional Catholic America" would necessarily enable this form of Judaism, as the NY Hasidic Jews represent the Jewish people during the historical majority. Infact it was very common for Jewish Secularists & Socialists to embrace Zionism and the State of Israel to break free of what they called "Rabbanic Tyranny".
Relation to Zionism[edit | edit source]
Zionism, like Nazism, ironically emerged as an "answer" to the "Jewish Question" the idea is that if Europeans were to have a Universal State based on some national identity, then the Jews must create their own state somewhere. Many Zionists originally advocated settlement to Uganda, or Australia or even Antarctica, but they all finalized on Palestine, which actually became controversial among Religious Jews because the Torah forbids resettlement to Israel after the exile. Zionism, like nationalism, seeks to reduce Judaism into a identity of a national-state, bottling up all the 4000 year history into a passport. Many Nazis actually considered it okay to deport Jews to Israel, really showing us the real agenda of this plan.
Anti-Semitism also serves Zionism insofar as Zionist propagandists frequently point to online anti-Semitic rhetoric to justify the illegitimate State of Israel and its criminal actions.
References[edit | edit source]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/