<p>American law has long struggled to categorize Jews within its major frameworks—religion, race, ethnicity, and, at times, the highly protective free‑speech regime. This lecture traces how these shifting legal categories shaped Jewish equality in the United States, from early constitutional protections against religious outsider‑status, through civil‑rights approaches that alternated between treating anti‑Jewish harm as religious or as racial/ethnic, to today’s campus debates where First Amendment constraints limit how institutions may respond to antisemitic expression.</p> <p>Drawing on recent campus controversies nationwide, including incidents in which Jewish students were blocked from programs or campus spaces, the lecture asks whether American law can better address the realities of Jewish identity as an ethnoreligious tradition. Can legal doctrine evolve to protect religious and secular Jews alike—those whose Jewishness is rooted in faith, culture, ancestry, or peoplehood—across the overlapping domains of religion, race, equality, and speech?</p>

Abstract: I argue that The Golden Bowl confronts and entwines a scrutiny of empire and the Jewish question. The Golden Bowl stages a refutation of the era’s antisemitism by transposing the Jewish question from France to the imperial Anglophone world, and in doing so the novel addresses the European past, the Anglo-American future, and the attendant political formations of nation-state and empire. Prior accounts of Jewishness in James’s work have given lesser attention to his late period aesthetic. I focus on The Golden Bowl because of its deployment of the high style of James’s late period, because of its occurrence at a moment of politicized antisemitism and imperial expansion, and, finally, because the aesthetic and the political become inseparable in this novel.

With the arrival of the first news about the “final solution” of Nazi Germany, Republican exiles of Jewish origin present in Spanish-speaking America began to debate the issue and, above all, to question their role as intellectuals and to reflect on their own identity. Our purpose is to offer a new approach to the reception of the Shoah in the Republican intellectual community and, within this “group”, to the participation of exiles of Jewish descent in the debate on what actions to take to welcome European Jewish refugees and how to talk about the Holocaust. To do this, we will investigate the relationship between two exponents of literary intelligence in exile, Rosa Chacel and Máximo José Kahn, and the role that both played in the face of the Holocaust, starting from their friendship, which went back to before the war and continued in the diaspora; after presenting a brief historical-literary overview of the Spanish “Jewish question”, we will focus on the study of the correspondence between Chacel and Kahn and their literary production related to the topic.

Between 1866-1876, British diplomacy played a decisive role in the Jewish Question of the Romanian Principalities, a decade that coincided with Romania’s quest for international recognition. The study examines how British representatives in Bucharest and Iași reported incidents affecting Jewish communities and how these reports shaped the perception of Romania abroad. The research is based on the investigation of unpublished and published diplomatic documents, content analysis of reports and petitions and synthesis of intern and international reactions. Critical interpretation of both primary and secondary sources was essential for understanding the interaction between internal measures and external pressures. The results show that governmental actions were not motivated by ethnic or religious hostility. Documented abuses were not left entirely unpunished, as inquiries, dismissals, and corrective measures indicated a real concern to respond to international demands. Prince Carol I himself condemned abuses, rejecting actions that endangered community rights.

On the Jewish Question pioneered Marx's concentrated analysis of the relationship between political emancipation and human emancipation, constituting the germination of his theory of ideology. By examining the specific "Jewish Question," Marx grasped the essence of the modern state and its relationship with civil society, thereby gaining insight into the universal condition of religion in the modern world. Marx's critique of religion provided the crucial theoretical prerequisite for the founding of his theory of ideology. The ideas from the critique of religion in the text of On the Jewish Question, further developed through The German Ideology, were finally perfected into a mature theory of ideology critique in texts such as the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This theoretical path, evolving from the critique of religion to the critique of ideology, ultimately points toward the fundamental goal of achieving human emancipation.

Jewish nationalism, which emerged in parallel with the nationalist movements of 19th century Europe, developed both as a reaction to and as a product of modern political ideologies. While influenced by the European concept of the nation-state, Zionism—the dominant current within Jewish nationalism—was distinctly shaped by religious memory and historical consciousness. Central to Zionist thought was the aspiration to return to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), a notion rooted in sacred Jewish texts and collective historical identity. Theodor Herzl’s 1896 work Der Judenstaat provided a systematic political expression of this aspiration, arguing for a sovereign Jewish state in response to widespread antisemitism and marginalization in European societies. In the late 19th century, the Russian Empire was home to the world’s largest Jewish population. Legal restrictions, socioeconomic exclusion, and recurrent pogroms fostered an environment in which Zionist ideas found fertile ground. Organizations such as Hovevei Zion promoted Jewish resettlement in Palestine through agricultural colonization, and Russian Jews played a key role in the First Zionist Congress of 1897, which institutionalized the movement through the founding of the World Zionist Organization. However, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 fundamentally altered the trajectory of Jewish nationalism in the region. The Marxist-Leninist worldview classified nationalism as a bourgeois deviation incompatible with proletarian internationalism. While early Soviet tolerance briefly allowed the existence of socialist-leaning Zionist movements like Poale Zion, Zionist organizations were soon suppressed and labeled counterrevolutionary. For the Soviet regime, Zionism represented not only political dissent but also a challenge to the idea of a unified socialist identity. In response, the USSR initiated its own solution to the “Jewish question” by proposing an alternative to Zionism within its own borders. In 1928, the Soviet government designated Birobidjan—a remote area in the Far East near the Chinese border—as a Jewish settlement zone. This culminated in the 1934 establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), where Yiddish was made the official language and cultural autonomy was promised under socialist terms. Yet the project failed to gain genuine support among Soviet Jews, due to geographic isolation, harsh living conditions, and the absence of religious or historical legitimacy. International Zionist circles also condemned the project, asserting that Palestine remained the only rightful homeland for the Jewish people. This study aims to explore the ideological confrontation between Zionist aspirations and Soviet nationalities policy, particularly through the lens of the Birobidjan project. It employs a historical-analytical methodology, drawing on archival materials, primary sources, and scholarly works in both Russian and English. By examining the Soviet state’s attempt to construct a non-Zionist model of Jewish nationhood, the research contributes to broader discussions on nationalism, minority policies, and identity formation under totalitarian regimes. Ultimately, this work offers insight into how two conflicting visions—religious-historical nationalism and socialist internationalism—sought to define Jewish collective identity in the early 20th century.

: <i>Propaganda and Persecution: The French Resistance and the “Jewish Question.”</i>

This article examines the migration policy of the Polish government toward the Jewish minority during the interwar period (1918–1939). Drawing on historical sources and scholarly literature, the study explores how emigration was promoted as a central strategy for addressing what was perceived as the “Jewish question.” The analysis reveals three dominant tendencies: efforts to encourage or force Jewish emigration from Poland; attempts to identify and negotiate with foreign governments for potential resettlement destinations, including Palestine and Madagascar; and measures aimed at preventing the return of Polish Jewish citizens from abroad. Despite early attempts at cooperation and integration, the government’s approach increasingly reflected the influence of nationalist and antisemitic ideologies, particularly in the 1930s. These policies, often unrealistic and legally questionable, ultimately failed and contributed to the worsening plight of Polish Jews on the eve of World War II. The article argues that the state’s reliance on emigration as a solution, combined with administrative inefficiency and growing antisemitism, exemplifies the broader failure of minority policy in interwar Poland.

The article examines the question of the existence of antisemitism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a subject that continues to generate debate within contemporary German historiography. It also investigates the emergence of antizionism as an official state policy of the GDR toward Israel, alongside the regime’s pro-Arab orientation. This political stance stemmed from the ideological framework of the ‘struggle against imperialist evil,’ within which the GDR’s communist leadership consistently portrayed Israel as a primary representative of imperialism. It is concluded that, on the ideological level, the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) drew upon the “assimilationist” concept of the Communist International in addressing the so-called Jewish Question. According to this approach, Jews were expected to assimilate into the communist movement regardless of their sociocultural background, primarily through the renunciation of their Jewish identity. Within this framework, their role was to contribute to the struggle for a classless society in which antisemitism would, in theory, be rendered obsolete. Antisemitism, deeply rooted in German society since the 19th century, resulted in a multifaceted hostility toward Jews in the German Democratic Republic. First, it manifested in the form of institutional antisemitism within state structures; second, in the marginalization of Jewish victims of National Socialism from the public memory; third, in the support provided by state security agencies to antisemitic Palestinian terrorist groups; and fourth, in latent, everyday antisemitism among the population. Catalysts for these everyday expressions included the rise of anti-Polish and anti-Soviet sentiments, which were projected onto all refugees from the East, as well as public debates surrounding the restitution of Jewish property expropriated during the Third Reich. The transformation of Israel into a “tool of imperialism” in the ideological scheme of the SED was combined with the denial of guilt for the crimes of National Socialism, since “prescribed anti-fascism” shifted this responsibility to the Federal Republic of Germany. Thus, latent anti-Semitism developed into state anti-Zionism, which began to manifest itself in propaganda during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The article discusses the “Jewish question” in the Polish-language press in Łódź at the turn of the twentieth century (until the First World War). The follow- ing titles were analyzed: Rozwój, Goniec Łódzki, Kurier Łódzki, and Nowy Kurier Łódzki. These journals represented different ideological profiles. Especially after the Revolution of 1905, Rozwój demonstrated support of National Democracy, while Goniec and its successors—Kurier Łódzki and Nowy Kurier Łódzki—be- longed to the progressive camp. This had a direct impact on their attitudes toward Jews and the Jewish question. While Rozwój quickly became openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist, its competitors followed a path typical of the Polish intelligentsia of the time, in which different positions clashed. In the end, however, the press in Łódź did not show any greater originality of views on the issue than the Warsaw press, and the multinational character of the city, which required the cooperation of many ethnic and religious groups, did not prevent the local press discourse from promoting the idea of assimilation to antisemitic attitudes.

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine how the Catholic bishop Johannes Baptiste Fallize (1844–1933) disseminated antisemitic ideas in Norway through the Catholic journal St. Olaf, from its founding in 1889 until the outbreak of the First World War. The article situates Fallize’s antisemitism within the broader context of modern (Catholic) antisemitism in Europe following Jewish emancipation, demonstrating that he underwent a radicalization on the ‘Jewish question’ during the 1870s. This shift was influenced by his studies in Rome amid the fall of the Papal States and subsequent anticlerical policies. Prior to his arrival in Norway as apostolic prefect in 1887, and his later appointment as bishop, Fallize had been an active and polemical journalist and politician in Luxembourg, where he articulated pronounced antisemitic views in several Catholic newspapers, conflating religiously grounded animosity towards Jews with modern conspiracy theories. The virulent antisemitism of St. Olaf thus represented a perpetuation of Fallize’s antisemitic activities in Luxembourg. The article contends that Fallize acted as an ‘antisemitic multiplier’, especially in Norway, where outspoken antisemitism was, at that time, relatively uncommon.

The narrative of religious conflicts and divisions has long been present in the interpretations of events in Palestine during the 20th century, but the geopolitical component that led to them, actively recognised from the resettlement of Jews to the establishment of their state - Israel, cannot be ignored. In the analysis, the author dealt with the geopolitical aspect of the “Great Game” as a term for the mutual struggle of great powers to achieve their interests. Thru the relationships of political actors (great powers) toward the Middle East region in the 19th century and towards the Jewish question in the first half of the 20th century, the author sought to identify the influence of these relations on the emergence of the state of Israel. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland, during its involvement in these areas, transitioned from actively interfering in the sovereignty of states, thru dividing and participating in the administration of newly formed (liberated) territories, and supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine, to finally supporting the Arabs in their conflicts in the same land. The United Nations, as the successor to the League of Nations, became involved in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict from its very inception, attempting to diplomatically resolve the escalating intensity of the conflict, but proved inadequate. Through a sort of game the historical legacy of the conflict on Palestinian soil, which started in the 19th century as part of a larger conflict between emerging great powers in a broader geographical area (the Middle East and Southeast Asia), persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries. For centuries, there has been a tangle of historical battles involving land, state, nation, and religion.

Abstract In this paper we present a comparison of Immanuel Kant’s and Moses Mendelssohn’s essays on Enlightenment with respect to the Prussian late absolutistic estate-based society and the so-called “Jewish Question”. Our comparison consists of three aspects: firstly, the relation between theory and practice, secondly, the relation between state and Enlightenment and thirdly, the relation between progress and the dangers of Enlightenment. We argue against an individualising and ahistoric reading of philosophical texts and the focus on philosophers as individual geniuses. Instead, we show that the content of terms like “the public” (Kant) and “education” (Mendelssohn) only becomes comprehensible when the correlation of context and systematicity is reflected.

Abstract Finland was an autonomous part of Russia from 1809 to 1917. Jews had no civil rights in Russia, and in addition, Finland was permitted to retain old Swedish laws, which stated that Jews had no right to reside in Finland. In the late 1850s, Tsar Alexander II allowed Jewish soldiers who had served in the Imperial Russian Army to settle in their station cities. The Jewish minority in Finland originally consisted of these soldiers and their families. The debate over Jewish civil rights began in the Diet of Finland in the 1870s. This article describes the debate on the Jewish question in the Estate of Clergy from 1872 to 1897. It examines how Jews were portrayed and how the rise of modern political antisemitism affected the rhetoric, argumentation, and possibly the outcome of the discussion. Around the same time, so-called modern political antisemitism started to spread across Europe. Antisemitism has its roots deep in Christianity, and studying the Clergy opens up a possibility to examine the intersection between religious and secular modern antisemitism. Additionally, this article explores how Jews were perceived from the perspective of nationalism at a time when Finland was undergoing a nation-building process.

Literary facts include not only the literary texts of the writer but also his everyday behavior. The relationship between E.N. Chirikov and the journal Russian Wealth (Russkoe Bogatstvo), in which he began his literary career, clearly demonstrates it. During his writing apprenticeship, Chirikov respectfully asked V.G. Korolenko to share his ideas about the relationship between “theoreticality” and “originality” in literary work, and in 1894–1896 he became a regular contributor to the journal. After Chirikov switched to “Marxist” publications, critics of Russian Wealth (A.I. Potapov, N.K. Mikhailovsky, A.G. Gornfeld, A.M. Redko, and others) constantly emphasized the “theoretical nature” of his works to the detriment of their “originality.” Chirikov’s social and everyday behavior was based on vanity, which manifested itself in a conflict with Russian Wealth over his debt to the journal and in the “notorious Chirikov incident” regarding the Jewish question: the play of vanity prevented him from taking a balanced position. The desire for self-promotion was characteristic of M. Gorky’s entire circle in 1903–1909: the publication of group photographs of the members of the “Sreda” circle and caricatures of them demonstrates it. However, by participating in the socio-political actions of 1911 in connection with the 50th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom (response to the questionnaire in the Blue Journal, no. 9; speech at the banquet on February 19, 1911), Chirikov showed rather “originality,” while the assessment of this participation by the authors of Russian Wealth (V.A. Myakotin, A.V. Peshekhonov) suffered from “theoreticality,” which Chirikov very sharply criticized in his private letters. Thus, “theoreticality” and “originality” are not given, but variable qualities of a writer.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the process of organizing Jewish agricultural colonies in the Volhynia province during the 19th century and to identify its specific features. Methodology of the study is based on a systematic approach and the use of general scientific methods (analysis of archival documents, generalization of inefficiency reasons from numerous reports of local authorities, induction in comparing facts contained in the documents), as well as historical research methods: historical- typological (in the study of three types of Jewish colonies: on privately owned, landlords’ and state lands), historical-systemic (to understand the value of acquired agricultural skills for the future of Jews), historical-comparative (to compare the colonisation of the Volhynia province in the 19th century with the development of Jewish colonies in the Americas and Palestine in the early 20th century). The scientific novelty. The article specifies the features of Jewish agricultural colonisation in the Volhynia province, including its plans and actual implementation. Based on the study of the provincial authorities’ documents, the main reasons for the failure of the government’s Jewish colonisation project in the region have been summarized and identified it as one of the precursors of the Zionist movement. Conclusions. In 1835, the process of Jewish agricultural colonisation in the Volhynia province was officially initiated with the establishment of settlements by Jewish agrarians on privately own lands. In 1844, the tsarist government implemented a large-scale project to establish Jewish agricultural colonies on state-owned lands in the province. The objective of this initiative was to transition Jews from being perceived as a «parasitic community» to a productive labour force. The project envisaged the establishment of 600 Jewish agricultural households. According to the authorities, this was one of the strategies for addressing the political «Jewish question» and a means of assimilating Jews. However, a range of objective and subjective factors negatively impacted the actual implementation of the project, leading to its closure in 1859. The government dismantled most of the colonies and reclassified Jewish agrarians as townspeople. At the same time, many Jews from the Volhynia province became firmly established in agricultural activities and continued them without the state support. In the future, the experience gained in farming helped many of them emigrate to the United States, and later, with the assistance of the Jewish Colonisation Society and Volhynian agencies of «The Society for the Aid of Jewish Agrarians and Artisans in Syria and Palestine», to resettle in agricultural colonies in other countries and in the land of Eretz- Yisrael.

Abstract This article proposes that Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow be read not in terms of the entropic but the diasporic. Such a reading departs from a postmodernist reading of the novel and enable the following three claims: first, that the very form of the novel is diasporic and Jewish as is its vision of colonial modernity; second, that the violence of this modernity embodied in the Holocaust is metonymically continuous with the violence of colonialism; and third, that the novel permits a recasting of the Jewish question in terms of empire, migration, and violence as opposed to terms of nation and rights. Pynchon’s novel offers a counternarrative of Jewishness in the postwar era. In lieu of familiar narratives of assimilation, prosperity, and nationhood, Pynchon’s novel suggests Jewish belonging, or the Jewish question, remains as not just a vexing problem but a ubiquitous and universal one of the postwar order whose emergence it describes.

Abstract: Abraham Benaroya (1887–1979), one of the founders of the Socialist Workers' Federation (Ladino, La Federación Socialista Laboradera ) in Salonica, lived a long life that straddled empire and nation, socialism and the Jewish Question. Later described by the historian Paul Dumont as "the most important socialist organization in the Ottoman Empire," the Federation sought to unite the city's multiethnic population of Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, and others under the common banner of socialism. Nevertheless, most of its members were, like Benaroya, himself, Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews. This inspired Yitzhak Ben Zvi, the second president of Israel, to describe the Federation as the "only socialist organization among the Sephardim," one with significant parallels to, but also differences from, the Bund, the better-known socialist organization founded by Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe. Following the incorporation of Salonica into Greece, Benaroya played an important role in the development of socialist politics in the country before being purged by the Communist Party of Greece. He later survived incarceration in Nazi camps and eventually emigrated to the newly established state of Israel, where he came to terms with Zionism. Benaroya's complex life and politics serve as a powerful synecdoche for the broader experiences of many Sephardic Jews from the Balkans during a long century of imperial collapse, state formation, and socialist and nationalist politics.

Karl Marx’s 1843 essay On the Jewish Question has been the subject of controversy, with accusations ranging from antisemitism to an allegedly non-Marxist character of this early text. Despite his own Jewish origins, Marx’s main concern was not to analyze the Jewish religion or history. His essay was a response to Bruno Bauer’s views on Judaism, the critique of which would allow him to reflect upon the issue of political emancipation, the modern state, and civil society. While formulating the limited character of political emancipation, Marx laid grounds for the understanding that the Jewish question, or the question of the persecution and oppression of the Jews, would not end with the conquests of the French revolution. The second and most criticized part of On the Jewish Question represents a crucial moment in the development of historical materialism.

Introduction. The article is devoted to the study of Nazi social policy as a tool for eliminating class conflicts through the creation of a racially homogeneous people’s community, designed to become a pillar of the regime. The purpose of the study is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the racial aspects of Nazi social policy.Materials and Methods. The authors relied mainly on publications in periodicals of the Third Reich; issues of the Imperial Legislative Gazette; documents published abroad; works of foreign scientists which are not translated into Russian, with the exception of Evans’ monograph. The article is based on an interdisciplinary approach; theoretically, the authors are guided by the theory of totalitarianism, which retains significant potential when addressing Nazi issues. A special role in solving the problem was played by the method of system analysis, which made it possible to reveal the essential aspects and the priority role of a racially oriented social policy designed to unite the German population of the Third Reich in the ranks of the people’s community.Results. The racial aspect of Nazi social policy was its basic element. The social security system and socially oriented programs were designed exclusively for racially “full-fledged” compatriots. “The people’s community” included “the production community”, corporate organizations of the small and middle urban bourgeoisie, “the Imperial Food Estate”, and the bureaucratic corps. The exclusion of the Jewish population from the number of recipients of state social support, along with other forms of discrimination, was a prelude to “the final solution of the Jewish question”.Discussion and Conclusion. Without being implemented in practice, the thesis about the people’s community had a serious propaganda effect. In the pre-war years, the Nazis attempted to create a specific version of a totalitarian-social state in which the principle of racial discrimination acted as one of the fundamental ones. Systemic social policy based on racial theory allowed the Nazis to create an effective mechanism for preventing social conflicts and achieve consolidation around the regime of most of German society.