Jewish Question

“ To-day he makes himself ridiculous who denies the existence of the Jewish nation.
" One glance at this great hall, filled with delegates from all parts of the world, is sufficient, were there nothing else, to prove it. This fact means, not alone much for us, it also means some- thing for others. It not only opens up to every country a prospect of the settlement of the Jewish Question in a manner worthy of mankind, but it also contains at the same time the elements of a great perspective for the Orient. ”

“ It is only in the North American Free States—at least in part of them—that the Jewish question loses its theological significance and becomes a really secular question. Only where the political State exists in its completeness can the relation of the Jew, of the religious man generally, to the political State, and therefore the relation of religion to the State, be studied in its special features and its purity. ”

“ I ask the cultivated men whom I am addressing to set many preconceived ideas entirely aside. I shall even go so far as to ask those Jews who have most earnestly tried to solve the Jewish Question, to look upon their previous attempts as mistaken and futile. ”

“ The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country, and will remain so, even in those highly civilized—for instance, France—until the Jewish question finds a solution on a political basis. ”

“ I refer exclusively to the doubters among the Jews themselves, for if Jews were themselves convinced of the justification of the Jewish separateness, the rest of the world would be convinced. Now, the Jews who ask this question are those who are not so completely given over to Judaism, that they are blind to the claims of other religions. To them the question is one not of absolute, but of comparative truth. Judaism may still be a power, but it may not be a desirable power. ”

“ It is well that the public should understand that the present study of the Jewish Question in the United States is not based upon religious differences. The religious element does not enter except when it is injected by the Jews themselves. ”

“ Must the Son of God come down from heaven to die on the cross in order to save you, and can the Jew be saved by morality? Must you have a Saviour to comfort you in your sorrow and in the hour of death, and can the Jew do without Him?
Out of Christ, it is not a question what a man has ”

“ As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism, the huckster, and the conditions which produce him, the Jew will become impossible, because his consciousness will no longer have a corresponding object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, viz.: practical needs, will have been humanized, because the conflict of the individual sensual existence with the generic existence of the individual will have been abolished. ”

“ Some of my reviewers have also expressed regret that the subject of the "Modern Jew," which is so interesting in itself, should not have been treated independently of the Scriptures. But "I believe, and therefore have I spoken." The Jew still remains the most irrefutable witness to the historical character and supernatural element of the Scripture narrative, and it is only in the light of the revealed plan, that we can see light, on the very comprehensive and perplexing "Jewish Question," which, apart from Scripture, will for ever remain an enigma beyond solution. ”

“ We must continue, as before, to point out, firmly and persistently, that there is only one path to a brighter future for Russia, the same path along which the entire civilized world has traveled, and that along this road there is only one solution of the Jewish question—a solution demanded by the most elementary principles of civilized government—and that is to grant them, as individuals, full civic rights, and as a people, the right to free racial and cultural self-development. ”

“ Mask yourself a thousand times over, change your name, religion and character, travel throughout the world incognito, so that people may not recognize the Jew in you; yet every insult to the Jewish name will strike you, even more than the pious man who is permeated with the spirit of Jewish solidarity and who fights for the honor of the Jewish name. ”

“ Let us consider the real worldly Jews, not the Sabbath Jews, as Bauer does, but the every-day Jews.
We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will look for the secret of religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical needs, egoism.
What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money.
Very well. Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and therefore from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our epoch.
An organization of society, which would abolish the fundamental conditions of huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would render the Jew impossible. ”

“ We therefore perceive in Judaism a general pervading anti-social element, which has been carried to its highest point by the historical development, in which Jews in this bad relation have zealously co-operated, a point at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. ”

“ Yet we meet the Jew everywhere in the upper circles, literally everywhere there is power. He has the brains, the initiative, the penetrative vision which almost automatically project him to the top, and as a consequence he is more marked than any other race. ”

“ If a Jew will not seal his mind against the statements made in these articles, he will find in his own knowledge sufficient corroboration of their principal features, and he will be in a better position to assist in the solution of the Jewish Question. ”

“ The Christian State can only behave towards the Jew in the manner of a Christian State, that is in a privileged manner, by granting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but causing him to feel the pressure of the other separated spheres, and all the more onerously inasmuch as the Jew is in religious antagonism to the dominant religion. ”

“ The Jew, for instance, must cease to be a Jew if he will not allow himself to be hindered by his law from fulfilling his duties towards the State and his fellow-citizens, going, for example, to the Chamber of Deputies on the Sabbath and taking part in the public sittings. ”

“ Judaism has persisted alongside of Christianity not only as religious criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the religious parentage of Christianity, but equally because Judaism has maintained itself, and even received its supreme development, in Christian society. The Jew who exists as a peculiar member of bourgeois society, is only the particular expression of the Judaism of bourgeois society. ”

“ I believe that I understand Anti-Semitism, which is really a highly complex movement. I consider it from a Jewish standpoint, yet without fear or hatred. I believe that I can see what elements there are in it of vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defence. I think the Jewish [76] question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. ”

“ So that, the contention of certain modernists notwithstanding, the world will go on thinking of the Jew as a member of a race, a race whose persistence has defeated the utmost efforts made for its extermination, a race that has preserved itself in virility and power by the observance of those natural laws the violation of which has mongrelized so many nations, a race which has come up out of the past with the two great moral values which may be reckoned on monotheism and monogamy, a race which today is before us as the visible sign of an antiquity to which all our spiritual wealth harks back. ”

“ It was the openly expressed policy of the reactionaries who ruled Russia to solve the Jewish question by ridding the country of its Jews. “One-third will accept the Greek Church; one-third will emigrate to America; and one-third will die of starvation in Russia”—so ran the cynical saying. Some did abjure their faith, tens of thousands did starve in Russia and hundreds of thousands did emigrate to America. ”

“ This is most of all unfortunate for the persons who harbor these emotions. It is unfortunate in that it unfits the mind to consider intelligently the facts which constitute the Jewish Question, and also unfits it to deal with them in a fair and constructive way. ”

“ And finally, when, after the long struggle between the pagan world of sensuality and barbarous force, on the one hand, and the spiritual, mystic, Jewish view on the other, the sun of modern humanitarian civilization shed its feeble rays upon a better and more perfect world, it was a Jew who was able to signal to the world that the final stage of the process of human development has begun. ”

“ Then, also, will we draw our inspiration from the deep well of Judaism; then will our sages and wise men regain the authority which they forfeited from the moment when, prompted by other motives than patriotism, they estranged themselves from Judaism and attempted to reform the Jewish law. We will then again become participators in the holy spirit, namely, the Jewish genius, which alone has the right to develop and form the Jewish law according to the needs of the people. ”

“ The Jews have enough common sense, in spite of misunderstood enlightenment and orthodoxy, not to be misled by religious haziness and fanaticism which have no basis in the present life. But it is just this sober sense of reality that our race possesses in a high degree, which will finally win over those of our brethren, whether progressive or orthodox, who still possess a Jewish heart, to the national cause which has its roots deep in the practical soil of reality. ”

“ We came to the conclusion that ... the Polish-Jewish question is really a Russian-Polish-Jewish question, and touches us as much as the Poles. They have not room enough to live, and more and more Jews are coming there. Even democratic organizations are compelled to take cognizance of this. One peasant organization expresses through its organ the idea that it is true that the Jews are a burden to Poland, but it warns the peasants against anti-Semitism nevertheless. ”

“ Good, you say, and the Jew says so too, the Jew also is not to be emancipated as Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he has such an excellent, general, human principle of morality; the Jew will rather retire behind the citizen and be a citizen, although he is a Jew and wants to remain one: that is, he 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. ”

“ The Jew need no longer look askance at the name of his race on the lips of the non-Jew. It only means that suppression and deceit are past, that is all; the Jew is a Jew, is recognized as a Jew, is spoken of as a Jew ”

“ Even to-day, the great majority of Occidental Jews pay homage to their ancient religion. Neither emancipation nor Christian proselytism, with its bait of material advantages, has succeeded in estranging the majority of Jews from their traditions. On the contrary, there have appeared of late, even among those who were formerly estranged from Judaism, men who display strong sympathies for the ancient Jewish mode of life. ”

“ The use of the word Humanity in connection with the word Jew usually throws a side-meaning which may not be intended. In this connection it is usually understood that the humanity ought to be shown toward the Jew. ”

“ Jewish rationalists, who have as little reason to remain within the fold of Judaism as have Christian rationalists for clinging to Christianity are, like their Christian friends, very energetic in discovering new grounds for the existence of a religion which, according to them, has no longer any reason to exist. According to them, the dispersion of the Jews was merely a preliminary step to their entering upon their great mission. What great things are the Jews in exile to accomplish in their opinion? ”

“ If you want Jewish orthodoxy, the bracing morality of the Old Testament, you will find it, not among the successful Jews, who have Unitarianized their religion to the same extent that the Unitarians have Judaized their Christianity, but among the poor in the side streets who still sacrifice the Saturday business for their Sabbath keeping. ”

“ This other-worldliness, in the course of historical development, in the measure that the nations approached the Jewish historical religion, assumed more and more of a secular character. And the more Jewish, the more humane the pagan world became, the more could Jews participate in the culture of this world and contribute to its progress. ”

“ It is not a very pleasant sight—this crowd of emaciated, white-faced men and women, and big-eyed children. “The most damnable thing about it all is the dozen Jews who flit like magpies through the crowd. They are young, soft, well-groomed and prosperous. ”

“ the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has again become a Jew. ”

“ Every Jew has these qualities even if not in the supreme sense, just as every Englishman has Shakespeare’s tongue but not in Shakespeare’s degree. And thus it is impracticable, if not impossible, to consider the international Jew without laying the foundations broadly upon Jewish character and psychology. ”

“ In the next place, tolerant Judaism is to teach intolerant Christianity the principles of humanitarianism. Furthermore, it is the function of exilic Judaism to take care that morality and life, which in the Christian world are severed from each other, should become one. And lastly, the Jews must also act as industrial and commercial promoters-be the leaven of such activities among the civilized nations in whose midst they live. I have even heard it remarked quite seriously, that the Indo-Germanic race must improve its quality by mingling with the Jewish race! ”