Firstly, what is the Jewish Question? In its simplest form, the question goes along the lines of: “What are we to do with the Jews?”
Secondly, who asks the Jewish Question? Whom does it target? Historically speaking, the “we” that requires the Jews as the object of “our” question is the modern, nominally secular, European state. Indeed, although Europe’s Jews have long been subject to various forms of state-enforced control – expulsions, ghettos, forced conversions, and so forth –, it is not until the “State” emerges in its purest form that the Jews can be the object of the Jewish question. By “purest form,” we mean the state insofar as it claims to represent a people while it administers to their needs, as opposed, for instance, to the power claimed by divine right. We call this form “pure” because in it, the State as a contradiction is most fully developed: on the one hand, the people have a State because they are sovereign, and this sovereignty forms the basis of their State; on the other, the State is a separate kind of power over-and-above them, imposing limits on the same sovereignty that founds statehood. Such a contradiction strives for purity in its components – one State, as unified as possible, coming from and at times confronting a people, as united as possible in their sovereignty. Sovereignty being officially granted via citizenship, this kind of State desires a democratic base in which everyone, regardless of religion or ethnicity, participates in its foundation. The Emancipation of Europe’s Jews, the historic event associated with the French Revolution, coincides with the emergence of the ideal of the pure state. But it is ironically only once Jews are given equal rights that their difference can be contrasted with the idea of equal citizenry. In other words, the attempt to make the Jews just like the Christian sovereign subject-citizens of the state posed for the first time the question of an alien nation-within-a-nation – because it also created the “nation” and it created the “within.”
Finally, we may return to our starting point. Why? Why a question, specifically, and not, say, a “problem,” a “situation,” a “happenstance,” a “conundrum”? A Question implies reason, but it stops short of thought. In many ways, the Jewish Question is formulated and eventually “dealt with” in an extremely reasonable manner. If the destruction of a population is sought after, then gas chambers and death squads are “reasonable,” logical “solutions.” They are also monstrous attacks on thought, which is necessarily a knife cutting into conformity, into the radical evil of fanaticism. In the Holocaust and implicitly in the formulation of the Jewish Question, “reason” attacks thought and becomes “cunning,” calculation, pure trammels on thought’s capabilities. We will have time later on to explore this “cunning” aspect of Reason, and we will see its reemergence in the Zionist State’s highly reasonable, utterly thoughtless destruction of the Palestinian people. To be clear, I am not directly comparing Nazis and the Zionist State, if only because I find such an analogy simplistic. I am rather pointing out that Zionism extends the logic of the Jewish Question outside of Europe without actually attending to what the Jews mean as a question for the modern European State. It asks What are we to do with the Jews? from the perspective of the Jews, but does not wonder what it might mean for the Jews to ask such a question of Europeans (unless indicated otherwise, when I say “Europeans,” I will be assuming “European Christians,” because I am interested here solely in how European states confront Jews as an alien object of questioning). As PLFP spokesman George Habash astutely pointed out, the Palestinian Question and the Israel-Palestine Question hinge on the Jewish Question,[1] and as such, it is clear that the Jewish Question was never satisfactorily responded to.
Why not? Why was the Question impossible to untangle with thought, instead of the cunning, pragmatic, bureaucratic manipulations it did in fact inspire? Let us return to the question’s formulation. The “we” of the question need not be announced but can in fact be assumed because the Jews are the “difference,” the thing needed to be explained, as posed by the question. The Jews – for European Christians in the process of creating their ideal State, and not for the Jews themselves – are then a question. The Jewish Question accurately understands the Jews as a question while inaccurately assuming their point of view. Jews-as-question predate the Jewish Question, Medieval Jews already asked Europe – what makes us the different or the same? Or, rather – what makes the Jews “fundamentally” different, relative to the “sameness” of the European subject-citizen? The sameness of citizens is chalked up to their sovereignty: the sameness of sovereignty is explained as the political expression of exchange-value. And the Jews, forced into usury, had a very peculiar role in expanding the reach of exchange-value in Europe. This role will explained below in greater detail.
Jewishness as a question for European powers is a social fact related to how Europeans see themselves, basically removing Jews themselves from the equation except insofar as they will receive the backlash, also from the part of Europeans, of capitalist displacements of feudal land’s primary social role as use-value. European capitalism needs the Jews, first, in its infancy, as both solvent separating property from its value and as glue tying Europe together in a singular market, then, later, as the objects of the “Jewish Question.” Had there not been any Jews, they would have surely found someone else. Eventually, they did. The shift towards the Jewish Question coincides with the opening of the anti-Black slave-trade and colonial empires. From capillary, ambulatory negativity to totalizing negativity (also called “social death”[2]), from the uprooting of the peasantry and the divorcing of labor-power from labor to the uprooting of whole peoples and their bloodlines, to the negation of labor-power itself (as the slave does not sell their labor-power).
Of course, as we indicated earlier, Europe attempted several times to control, discipline, and exterminate its Jewish communities well before the advent of anti-Black slavery. But such acts were not really “solutions” to the Jewish Question: they were the formulation of the Question itself. The Question does not preexist its own posing, but its components – the European State and the Jews as its object of questioning – were in the making before they were coupled. European states may act as though they stumbled upon Jewish communities and then had to figure out what to do with them, but this story hides the deeper truth of the Jewish Question, namely, that it had to be created in order to found the modern European State, which in turn gave sense to the notion of the Jews as an alien nation-within-a-nation, the foundational problem of Zionism. Granted, our idea of mutual dependence runs the risk of circular logic. If the European States create the Jewish Question, and the Jewish Question defines the State, then which comes first? We maintain that the Jewish Question was developed out of the “Jews-as-question,” the Jews as a conduit for the money-trading that tore apart feudal property relations. Various Crowns, now and again in tandem with the Church,[3] both encouraged and hampered the circulation of money and the forcing together of Jews and “usury,” until the modern state surpassed the need for what we have already termed “ambulatory negativity” in order to distinguish it from, and eventually link it to, the European need for anti-Black race-thinking in “totalizing negativity.”[4]
The Jews-as-question allow us to discuss the forcing of Jews into the practice of moneylending with interest, vilified as “usury” by the Church. The involvement of Jews in Medieval moneylending varies from place to place and from era to era. It is easy to overestimate the Jewish “preponderance” in moneylending, just as it is easy to overestimate Jewish presence at all throughout Europe in this time period – as we look at Christendom, we should remember that the vast majority of Jews spent the Middle Ages (until the end of the 12th century) under Muslim rule.[5] French historian Léon Poliakov also points out that Jews were far from exercising, quantitatively speaking, an enormous role in Christian Europe’s economies:
…(L)e total des impôts perçus en 1241 par le trésor imperial du Saint-Empire germanique s’élevait à 7 127 ½ marks, mais la part des Juifs dans ce chiffre n’était que de 857 marks. C’est ainsi que, conformément au Livre de taille à laquelle était astreinte la population de Paris pour 1292, sur un total de plus de 12 000 livres, la part des 125 contribuables juifs qui l’habitaient n’était que de 126 livres, tandis que celle des Lombards était de 1 511 livres.[6]
The Holy Roman Empire gathered 7,127 ½ marks in taxes for the year 1241. Of this total, only 857 marks were contributed by Jews. Similarly, the Book of Taxes of the Parisian population of 1292 reveals that the 125 Jews eligible to pay taxes only raised 126 of the 12,000-plus pounds of the sum total; in comparison, the Lombards supplied 1,511 pounds.
We say “quantitatively,” because the figures above do not actually tell us how large the population of either the Holy Roman Empire or Paris were, nor if the Jews were evenly taxed (they often were not), nor what precisely was being taxed. But we can at least see that relative to the total wealth gathered by the State, Jews represented a minority.
However, it was not quantitatively that Jews were important to Medieval Christian Europe. It was their function as a ligament in the circulation of goods and money. In places like Spain and Poland, Jewish moneylenders kept the States’ debts internal, out of the hands of the far more powerful Italian bankers.[7] Indeed, after the abrupt end to the two-century-long Jewish monopoly on moneylending in England with the Expulsion of 1290, the Crown found itself indebted to the likes of the Peruzzi. France met a similar fate.[8] Entrusting Jews with moneylending – or, more accurately, forcing it upon them – made great sense for Christian States and, in spite of their numerical weakness, Jews and more specifically Jews in money-trading were able to transform Europe via its sinews rather than directly through the bone or muscle, to extend the analogy.
That being said, such transformative power is not the effect or “fault” of the Jewish people or Judaism, it is rather a characteristic of money in the process of being money-capital. Money, before it was money-capital, and usury, before it was finance-capital, had both centripetal and centrifugal effects, both immediately impacting Jewish communities first and foremost. There was first and foremost a simple unification of forces around the Jews. Historian Salo Baron notes, “…(T)hrough their loyalty to the Crown, and their services as a ‘sponge’ sucking up the wealth of the country for the benefit of the rulers… the Jews helped unify England, France, Spain and Portugal.”[9] (Writing as he was in 1942, Baron was then able to remark upon the disaster that European nationalisms ultimately represented for the Jews.) Jews could be deployed to systematize and centralize the Crown’s wealth, as opposed to that of individual estates and warring feudal factions.
But Baron misses another, perhaps more crucial, sense in which moneylending was a unifying factor: it fostered exchange-value in place of barter’s use-value. It encouraged production to focus not on subsistence or on traditional kinds of manufacture, but on whatever was valuable to an ever-growing market. Wider markets due to circulation (made all the more possible by money) raised prices and required new ways to produce things.[10] That is to say, money allowed for a feedback-loop that could expand the reach of capital and unify various productive forces into a market.
Meanwhile, the debt that abounded in the wake of the market’s growth led to greater concentration of money-wealth in fewer hands, as well as more ruined small-owners.[11] The feudal form of property that tied people to their land was being replaced by another, more dynamic kind of wealth, one that separated the exchange- from the use-value. This alienation of use-value from exchange-value also applied (applies) to labor.
Money divorces the laborer from his labor-power, which must increasingly be confronted for its exchange-value, i.e., wages, rather than its use-value, as in guilds. We can then say that money, before it was money-capital, rehearsed capitalism before capitalism was historically prepared to institute wage-labor. The mass of laborers needed to come from somewhere. And debt uprooted them from their land more organically than the slew of Enclosure Acts that accumulated in rapid succession by the 18th century.
Many historians, including Baron,[12] point to the catastrophic and revolutionizing effects of money-becoming-capital on feudalism as a source of the Gentiles’ resentment or hatred of Jews. Indeed, the Middle Ages saw many conflicting, contradictory treatments of Jews in Christian lands. Protections offered by the Church varied greatly. In 598, Pope Gregory I could afford to view the Jews as simply another religious group who should keep to themselves; by 1199, although Pope Innocent III rails against the “perfidy” of the Jews and views them as a potential threat to Christianity’s hegemony, he (kindly?) claims they should not be utterly wiped out, but rather left alone; in 1271, Gregory X much more straightforwardly condemns persecution of the Jews and denounces blood libel.[13] Contradictory positions, marked by several back-and-forths, seem to have been the rule.[14] But the concern around the Jews prepares what will become the Jewish Question. Perhaps we can point to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 as an important moment in the Church’s thinking about Jewish people. It explicitly links Jews to moneylending, and then seeks to punish the Jews as if they were usury itself. Seeking to contain the devastating effects of debts on feudalism in general and the Crusaders in particular, the Church imposes sanctions – not on moneylending, but on the Jews:
The more the Christians are restrained from the practice of usury, the more are they oppressed in this matter by the treachery (“perfidia”) of the Jews, so that in a short time they exhaust the resources of the Christians. Wishing, therefore, in this matter to protect the Christians against cruel oppression by the Jews, we ordain in this decree that if in the future under any pretext Jews extort from Christians oppressive and immoderate interest, the partnership of the Christians shall be denied them till they have made suitable satisfaction for their excesses. The Christians also, every appeal being set aside, shall, if necessary, be compelled by ecclesiastical censure to abstain from all commercial intercourse with them. We command the princes not to be hostile to the Christians on this account, but rather to strive to hinder the Jews from practicing such excesses. Lastly, we decree that the Jews be compelled by the same punishment (avoidance of commercial intercourse) to make satisfaction for the tithes and offerings due to the churches, which the Christians were accustomed to supply from their houses and other possessions before these properties, under whatever title, fell into the hands of the Jews, that thus the churches may be safeguarded against loss.[15]
The text speaks to two anxieties: one, that the bans on usury, often targeting the Jews, would only lead to a Jewish monopoly on moneylending; two, that the Jews should exceed the Christians in wealth and power. The former is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the latter is in no way plausible. So why bother? Why attack Jewish people instead of the actual concern, moneylending? But look at what precise solutions are proposed: boycott and taxation, not religious persecution. We view this text not only as an attempt to free would-be Crusaders from debt (which is indeed at stake), but also to impose limits on the power of money to exert debt – and to take wealth out of the hands of the Church. Thus, they want to control the flow of money as an economic factor, but also as a social one. They wanted more money specifically for the Church, not merely to stamp it out as such. Hence the targeting of a people as well as a practice. But they would not succeed. The “wandering Jew” would mirror the uprootedness of European serfs and peasants as masses were detached from their land, and the land from its use-value. The Church’s hands were tied, though they held out a few more centuries before they truly understood it.
There existed another solution the problem of usury, linked to but ultimately separate from the Church, and it was absorption by the banks. After taking their élan in the 15th and 16th centuries, centralized banks in the early 17th century would do what the Church could not, because, unlike the Church, banks were uninterested in maintaining feudalism. Marx writes, “By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function is taken out of the hands of the private capitalist and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its own limits, and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindles.”[16] Thus, fledgling capital moved towards centralization, beyond the utility of a wandering people in the interstices of Europe. Banks were one method of controlling capital’s flow.
One may remark thatit is only in this era that the first ghetto was established (in 1516 in Venice, the heart of the money-trade). The ghetto was both an oppression and, paradoxically, a sign of integration: the Christian governments designated a place for Jewish communities, evidently as a method of control to taper what they saw as an important but unpredictable part of their societies. Along with mass expulsion, mass containment in the ghettos was one of the strategies to disperse the Jews-as-question, as in, as dissolving agent of capital against feudalism. We may also point out that what would later be applied generally as population control was experimented on Europe’s Jewish communities.[17]Why, specifically, these two strategies? Granted, there were also several massacres, but often in spite of protections, and they were nothing akin to the systematic, state-enforced Nazi genocide. That is, murder was not yet a full-fledged strategy, and could not be, until the Jewish Question was posed and a Jewish population as an object could be targeted. So the Medieval states formed Jewish populations, sectoring and defining Jews not primarily as a religious or economic threat, but as a people, or, eventually, as another nation.
Jewish population-hood (as opposed to peoplehood, a question for and amongst Jews) was enforced in several ways. Geographically, the ghettos closed off Jewish communities. Economic sanctions and coercions left them with few options to make a living. Soon, proto-biological explanations would tie Jews together as a predecessor to race-thinking. The first known legal mention of Jewish blood occurs in 1449, in Toledo’s proclamation of Limpieza de sangre, which views conversos with as much hatred as practicing Jews.[18]Emancipation could not yet be countenanced but forced conversion was often installed in its place, insofar as both offer the same trade-off – integration of the Jews at the price of their Jewishness. The argument of blood, however, would render conversion useless; one cannot change one’s heritage.
Emancipation, meanwhile, was only possible at a certain level of the modern state’s development, which the Jews had prepared both as agents (as the question themselves, tearing feudal property asunder) and as experiments in biopower. It is even a primary concern of the modern state, which had already shifted towards colonialism and enslaving Africans. We must linger on this double-sided point: on the one hand, the foundational nature of Emancipation to the modern state, and, on the other, the concurrent rise of anti-Black slavery and superexploitation. If we view the French Revolution and its ensuing state(s) as the ultimate experiment in modern statehood, then the importance of the Abbé Grégoire’s Motion en faveur des juifs, pronounced before the National Assembly only five months after the storming of the Bastille (23rd of December, 1789), cannot be overstated. He opens,
La dispersion des juifs, errants, malheureux, proscrits dans tout l’univers depuis dix-huit siècles, est un événement unique dans l’histoire. J’ai toujours cru qu’ils étaient hommes ; vérité triviale, mais qui n’est pas encore démontrée pour ceux qui les traitent en bêtes de somme, et qui n’en parlent que sur le ton du mépris ou de la haine. J’ai toujours pensé qu’on pourrait recréer ce peuple, l’amener à la vertu, et partant au bonheur.[19]
The dispersion of the Jews – wandering, unhappy, exiled everywhere in the universe for eighteen centuries – is a unique event in history. I always believed they were human (lit., ‘men’); a trivial truth, but one still denied by those who treat them as beasts of burden, and who only speak of them in a tone of contempt or hatred. I always thought that we could remake this people, bring them to virtue, and towards happiness.
The Abbé Grégoire implicitly poses a Jewish Question, but it would not yet make sense to phrase it as such. He must first argue for Emancipation, the final step that would allow Jews to be viewed as an alien nation-within-a-nation, since they were then gathered, defined, and granted national characteristics relative to Republican citizenry, which carries with it racial connotations. Just as the Republic had secularized Christian values, race was universalized before it could be particularized… Counterintuitively, race seems to be sublimated before it is even posed as a problem. Race is taken for granted, the subject of the Question that does not even need to be announced. We must point out the equation of humans with men, towards which the Jews must be pushed. There is a notion of Man, and Jews are widely considered outside it, but could be “remade” in its image, the contrary of “beasts of burden,” the holder of “virtue.” Those familiar with the French Revolution’s discourse will recognize “virtue” as a primary value of Revolutionary thought. It encapsulates the ideals and goals of the Republic, secularizing the Christian goodness, piety, etc. One would also recognize the “beasts of burden,” bereft of virtue – Black slaves, the antinomy of the Republican Citizen. Jews then are offered a rapprochement with the virtuous citizen named “Man,”[20] and distance from the slave.
Emancipation would arrive in 1791. The first abolition of slavery occurs in 1794, and excludes what are today known as La Réunion, Martinique, and Tobago.[21] It would eventually be reintroduced by Napoleon in 1802, and only definitively abolished in 1848. Blackness was never a question for the state. Once race-thinking had implanted itself, incorporation of Black people could only be limited. Emancipation of Black slaves was of necessity uneven. Jews, meanwhile, could now be an object of the Question, instead of its subject.
What forces the subject to announce itself, and race to be specified – racialized as race, rather than other kinds of difference? If we were to once again take the example of France, we would see the Jews’ and Black slaves’ fates intertwine at several key moments. For context, we should keep in mind that Louis XIII legalized (already practiced) slavery in the colonies in 1642, though it remained illegal on European French soil, as it had been since 1315.[22] The legalization of slavery in the colonies was specifically, explicitly geared towards the conversion of kidnapped Africans to Catholicism.[23] Race was thus implicitly expressed through religious difference (as it still is in France today, by the way); if the difference were merely religious, then no Christian would be enslaved, and moreover, the legalization would not have specifically targeted the Caribbeans while sparing Europe. Anti-Blackness was (and is) intimately tied the theft of surplus value – capitalist exploitation in general, which was not yet in full swing.[24]
But only a few decades would have to pass before an explicit pronouncement of racial difference was written into law in the form of the “Black Code,” Le Code noir. Penned in 1685 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the father of mercantilism, and upheld once again in 1724 in slightly modified form, the Code noir set up a framework for race-based slaveholding in the Caribbeans.[25] Surprisingly, perhaps, its very first article expels the Jews from the islands, using precedent from 1615 (which is itself based on precedent from 1394).[26] It is interesting to note that the very first expulsion of the Jews from France in 533 enforces conversion, on pain of the gouging out of the eyes, whereas by 1394, the self-proclaimed “definitive” expulsion of the Jews notes increased immigration and simply forces them out of the land.[27] Religion is increasingly a racial distinction, one of Being and not one of faith. The Jews are also seen as an impediment to the establishment of anti-Black slavery – just as St. Abogard feared Christians being swayed to Judaism in 826/7,[28] Colbert seemed to worry about Jews overtaking the French slave trade. Money was meant to go to the State, not to the “sponge.” Indeed, the utility of the middlemen was no longer so certain.
With the Jews out of the way, at least as slaveholders, dealt with at the very top of 60 articles of the Code noir, a racial definition of Blackness as a birth-condition of slavery could ensue. For instance, Article 13 defines slavery through the mother’s womb:
Article 13 Voulons que, si le mari esclave a épousé une femme libre, les enfants, tant mâles que filles, suivent la condition de leur mère et soient libres comme elle, nonobstant la servitude de leur père, et que, si le père est libre et la mère esclave, les enfants soient esclaves pareillement.[29]
Article 13 We want it to be so, that if a husband-slave marries a free woman, the children, be they male or girls, follow the condition of the mother and should be free like her, regardless of the father’s condition of servitude. And if the father is free and the mother a slave, the children should also be slaves.
The “will” (volonté) of the legislators determines the reproduction of slaves, encouraging the rape of enslaved women for property, of enslaved men for free children. One may then object that Blackness-as-servitude is not truly the issue at hand, if Black children could be born free, of a free mother. We would then recall the name of the legislation, its purpose, and that in any case, race in France in the 17th century is still in construction and will not quite follow the iron-clad rules of 18th– and 19th-century American anti-Black chattel slavery. We would also point to the gendering of slaves, and Black people more specifically, as inherent to the nature of race-making in this time period. Jews are treated as Jews; but Black men are “males,” Black women “girls,” and those “girls” a peculiar commodity whose condition will be passed to their children, in a distorted mirroring of Jewish halakha.
The Code noir also details the obligations of masters to their slaves, how much food one is legally required to give them, that they should be sent to the hospital if infirm, etc., etc. It speaks to the practical concerns of owning humans. But never is it a “question” of how to deal with Black populations. People are stolen, the scant “obligations” to them and various punishments available legislated, the populations replenished with rape or with marriage between slaves. There is no illusion of having come across an alien nation-within-a-nation, nor is there a “noble savage” fetishization. The construction of slavery is evident, deliberate, and requires no smokescreen. It is a total negation: it uproots millions of people, forever links the color of their skin to a condition of chattel slavery and state-sponsored terror, ensures the exploitation and oppression of generations to come, and attempts to destroy every cultural or social signifier amongst the enslaved. The societies from which the millions of people were stolen were left sapped of their population and large portions of their wealth.[30] Moneylending spread through the passageways of European trade; anti-Black slave-trading confronted a continent as a whole and proceeded to pillage it and its people. Such a major turning point in world history does not then lead to racist justifications, it necessarily builds on a preexisting racial logic. Europeans did not innocently land on African shores and happen upon history’s largest traffic in human beings. European states, sagging under the pressures of the money-driven market, needing desperately to revolutionize production, ended up intensifying the negativity spread about by money-trading. Like striking open a blood-jet or a vein of gold, they forced apart the remaining structures of their own feudal societies and marveled at the mass productive powers unleashed by burgeoning capital.
The best way for the bourgeoisie to control money-circulation was to participate in it – not hoard, but spend; not repulse, but systematize. Money could speculate, notably on slaves;[31] money could translate cotton into gold into rum into sugar; money could multiply itself as credit began to replace pure and simple usury. As a people set aside for the particular task of moneylending, the Jews had lost their utility. Though there were some Jews who participated in the slave trade, their involvement has been wildly exaggerated by antisemitic conspiracy theories.[32] They were largely muscled out of the colonial trade, as Colbert’s legislation illustrates. Their signification could now be morphed into a question of alien Being, as the State took on the role of ultimate financier.
We insist on this relationship between an ontological “alienness” and the dispossession of Jewish moneylending. We claimed earlier on that the Jewish Question is a relationship with Thought, but it behooves us to note that European powers have always treated it as a relationship with Being – of the Jewish condition of exile and alienness, “everywhere in the universe,” as a transhistorical and immutable existential fact. But Jews have a peculiar relationship with Being, if Being is defined in the universalizing terms Europeans have grown used to, because Jews are posited as alien in and of themselves. In the argument of Being is the elision of cunning, manipulation: the essence of the modern state’s management of capital, which has been projected unjustly onto the Jews.
Being is supposedly one single thing, since everything “is” in the same way. Nothing “is” more than another. But mightn’t that destroy the particularities of Being, rendering specificity a kind of degradation? And indeed, Heidegger describes Being as unified and unifying; for him, essence (Wesen) degrades (ist verwesen), declines as it were along multiplicities. As we “ascend” towards Being, we unify.[33]
However, although counterintuitive, it is certainly possible for Being to countenance difference, as Jacques Derrida shows us. In his musings on Heidegger, he questions the direction of the “flow” of degradation, using the peculiar German word “Geschlecht.” Literally, “that which is struck” (to strike is “schlagen”), Geschlecht refers to sex as an act, sex-gender, origins, heritage… Anything that strikes, stamps, leaves traces, cleaves irrevocably… He argues that the “striking” occurs not after the fact, as a degradation of essence, but in the very heart of essence itself. Dasein, in this new reading, gathers multiplicity without grinding it all to a uniform paste.[34]
But we would like to argue that just as Wesen becomes verwesen, the Geschlecht becomes verschlagen: cunning.The cunning is precisely not “struck” at the heart of Being but imposed artificially, not as an ontological but social fact. The verschlagen pretends to be Geschlecht. It insists on its naturalness, on the immutable fact of its Being. One must retroactively constitute its essence, just as the Jewish Question constructs the Jewish object of European manipulation.
Marx writes extensively, bitterly, and with acidic irony on this projection in his 1844 text, On the Jewish Question. For instance, he claims:
The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.[35]
This passage follows Marx’s argument that Jews should not have to assimilate in order to be accepted, but rather that European society itself promulgates a secularized Christianity whose sovereign subject is the Christian, bourgeois man. As such, it would be ridiculous to take him literally, since he does not actually believe that Jews are on equal footing with, let alone more powerful than, their Christian neighbors in deeply anti-Semitic Europe. It would also be to miss the point. The Christians have become “Jews”: they have fully adopted the usury they themselves forced upon the Jewish communities, who for centuries tottered between forced exile and forced containment. By becoming “Jews,” the Christian nations dispensed with the need for actual Jews. They could now view this people as an object of a question whose subject need not be announced, because it is presumed. There is no need for a Code blanc: the Code noir established it implicitly. There is no need for a Code bourgeois, the cynical deployment and serial expulsions of the Jews accomplished as much.
But how did the formulation of the no-longer-necessary Jewish moneylender lead to the Jewish Question, and the Jewish Question to the modern, secular, cunning, slave-trading State? It is worth citing Marx at length, both to understand contemporary accounts of the 19th-century state, the height of bourgeois reign, and to develop our own claims as to the nature of the state as a philosophical statement, as in as a relationship to Thought:
The members of the political state are religious owing to the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious because men treat the political life of the state, an area beyond their real individuality, as if it were their true life. They are religious insofar as religion here is the spirit of civil society, expressing the separation and remoteness of man from man. Political democracy is Christian since in it man, not merely one man but everyman, ranks as sovereign, as the highest being, but it is man in his uncivilized, unsocial form, man in his fortuitous existence, man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted by the whole organization of our society, who has lost himself, been alienated, and handed over to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements – in short, man who is not yet a real species-being. That which is a creation of fantasy, a dream, a postulate of Christianity, i.e., the sovereignty of man – but man as an alien being different from the real man – becomes, in democracy, tangible reality, present existence, and secular principle.[36]
We see an argument in which the state represents an alienation. There are individual humans, and then there is Man as a concept formed in and by civil society, which, when separated from humans, becomes the political state. In other words, the concept of the human in society stands above the humans themselves, and regulates their actions. Human sovereignty, a political expression of Christian Man, becomes more powerful than humans themselves. Humans, then, grant authority to humanity as though it were separate from them in the same way that they might profess faith in God.
It follows that in Christian States, the height of its power would be signaled precisely in the fact that it need not outwardly proclaim itself to be anything other than secular. In so doing, rather than overcome its Christianity, the state merely universalized its religious principals as “human sovereignty” – which in any case did not apply to people like Black slaves –, and concretized the theoretical, religious alienation of the human from itself. The human is presupposed, implicitly as a white Christian bourgeois man. The “neutrality” of this rather specific minority became a condition sine qua non of Thought, since it was this precise type (genre, Wynter would say) of human who was to be the thinking thing, the subject of thought.
Amongst Jews themselves, the Question was never posed, because it made no sense to ask it. Only once it had been concretized as a national question could Jews themselves proffer their own nationalism – as a continued, direct attack on Judaism. Zionism repeats the Jewish Question from the perspective of the Jews, but does not actually confront its presuppositions. If it were to do so, it would have to admit that it is not primarily a Jewish philosophy, but a European-Christian response to a European-Christian question. A properly Jewish philosophy would avail itself not to Being or to its verschlagene Reason, but to Thought.
Thought, untied to Being, would not be immutable, but rather a historical, changing theorization of a historical, changing reality. It would catch up with reality, open itself to its ebbs and flows. Although there is no reason to speak of a purely Jewish field of thought to which others would not have access, there are specific realities to the Jews as a group and amongst Jews as communities, which have nothing to do with moneylending, since money-trading was an outside exhortation. There are, of course, rules in the Talmud for honest trade, just as there would be in any legal system. But amongst Jews, usury is not a problem for thought as it was for the Christian States. We would argue that amongst the realities necessarily affecting Jews worldwide are the very recent events of the 20th century, namely, the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel. Before 1948, Jews’ connection to Palestine was much more widely understood to be metaphorical or traditional rather than literal in the sense of property. Baron speaks to this, in relation to the Medieval Christian States’ perception of the Jews as fundamentally alien in a way that would eventually become ontologically stated:
It made no difference how long the Jew lived in a particular country and whether or not he had actually settled there before the arrival of those ethnic groups who later claimed “native” rights on that soil. He was, moreover, an alien without a motherland. Much as the Christian world accepted the spiritual yearning of the Jews for the restoration to Palestine, and often itself considered such a return as a necessary prerequisite for the second coming of Christ – the equivalent of the Jewish messianic hope – Palestine obviously was not the mother country of exilic Jewry in the normal sense. It could neither threaten reciprocity nor could its legislation in any way affect the changing personal law of the individual Jew or of his western community.[37]
Western countries could not understand a people untied to a land, even as they were spurring the mass displacement of their own populations. Nor could they understand a group tied together by tradition and by a relation to thought – Torah being metonymic for both commandment and learning –, and not to a specific trade. Nor, by the way, to Being. For and amongst Jews, Being was not a problem, because Jews’ difference to other peoples is foundational for Jewish theology and, in the long run, survival. There was no threat of Jews universalizing their genre of humanity as “sovereignty” or as “Man.” Until, of course, Jews posed the Jewish Question to themselves, which they did as Zionism.
In his short 1896 book, The Jewish State, founder of political (as opposed to agricultural, say, or spiritual) Zionism, Theodor Herzl asks the Jewish Question in relation to the very real problem of European anti-Semitism. He reasons that since Jews are forced out of business, out of government, and indeed, out of society, it behooves them to ask where they could possibly go. In his chapter entitled, “The Jewish Question,” Herzl makes a shrewd comment on Emancipation but draws false conclusions from it:
In the principal countries where Anti-Semitism prevails, it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews. When civilized nations awoke to the inhumanity of discriminatory legislation and enfranchised us, our enfranchisement came too late. It was no longer possible to remove our disabilities in our old homes. For we had, curiously enough, developed while in the Ghetto into a bourgeois people, and we stepped out of it only to enter into fierce competition with the middle classes… At the same time, the equal rights of Jews before the law cannot be withdrawn where they have once been conceded. Not only because their withdrawal would be opposed to the spirit of our age, but also because it would immediately drive all Jews, rich and poor alike, into the ranks of subversive parties. Nothing effectual can really be done to our injury… The very impossibility of getting at the Jews nourishes and embitters hatred of them.[38]
Ironically, Herzl underestimates the precarity of Europe’s Jews. Though he cannot be faulted for not having predicted the Holocaust, it seems difficult to leap from the correct position that Emancipation births modern anti-Semitism, to the incorrect one that Emancipation actually liberated the Jews. In reality, it merely highlighted their inability to assimilate without renouncing Judaism. Similarly, the legal protections gained were not ironclad, and major economies were more than willing to sacrifice its Jewish participants. Indeed, Europe had absolutely no issue with rendering all Jews illegal as Jews, effectually rendering them “subversive.”
Following our argument’s logic, Jews had always been subversive, but European States had previously known how to make use of that subversion. But it would be far too simplistic to say that Nazi legislation made plain what liberal states had kept hidden, because it would be giving the Nazis too much credit. People who believe that Jews cost Germany the First World War are too deluded to provide any actual insight into the nature of Jewish existence in Europe. We must rather say that unbeknownst to themselves, despite themselves, and contrary to their own propaganda, Nazi fascism took the notion of Jewish alienness-as-such to its logical conclusion. Of course, the Nazis did not realize they were responding to the actual fact of alienation, not to the actual fact of Judaism, just as the Gentile states constructed a Jewish object to their Jewish Question and thus, to their liberal states. In the slogan Arbeit macht frei, the Nazis accidentally rehearsed the separation of property’s use-value from its exchange-value, to the “freeing” of agricultural laborers from everything that had tied them to property. The alienation that followed in the wake of Jewish trade was ascribed to the Jews themselves, a godsend to the burgeoning exploitative classes.
The Jews-as-question provided the subject for the bourgeois state, as well as the financial power. It weakened the feudal powers, it spread exchange-value across Europe, it spurred the deterritorialization of the agricultural laborer. The ambulatory negativity prepared the totalizing negativity of the Black slave, and the overwhelming backlash of the positive side of the coin: capitalist empires. It gave the modern state its every composing element, as well as a ligament to tie it together. Only after Emancipation could the Jews possess an alien Being, while attributed the State’s cunning, because only then could integration be posed as a problem – more specifically, a racial problem parallel to anti-Black slavery’s positing of an anti-Being, an utter exclusion of ontology.[39]Both “Beings” hide the State’s cunning, expressed most nakedly philosophically in the utilitarian calculus, politically in Realpolitik, scientifically in crude but productive materialism… For the Jews ourselves, however, acceptance of this cunning comes at the price of our relationship to thought, our openness to thinking. I hope that the reader may conclude for themselves the necessity not to “resolve” the Question in the Nazi-fascist sense of “solution,” but to “resolve” it in the dialectical sense that the Question can be overcome, a knot undone by Thought.
Useful Bibliography
Baron, Salo. “The Jewish Factor in Medieval Civilization,” in Proceedings of the American
Academy for Jewish Research. Vol. 12. American Academy for Jewish Research. Online. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3622094.
Chazan, Robert. The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000-1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Online.
Derrida, Jacques. De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question. Paris: Galilée. 1987. Online. “Fourth Lateran Council, 1215.” Online. Hanover College.
Grégoire, Henri. “La citoyenneté des Juifs.” December 23, 1789. Online. Assemblé Nationale.
Habash, George. “Pour une solution démocratique,” in Rien n’est plus précieux que la liberté. Trans. Ugo Boust-Khattou. Paris: PMN. 2025.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 1962, 2001.
Herzl, Theodor. The Jewish State. Trans. Sylvie d’Avigdor. New York: Dover, 1988. Online. Gutenberg.
“Le Code noir.” 1685. Online. Université Laval.
Marx, Karl. Capital, vol. 3. Trans. E. Untermann. New York: International Publishers. 1967,
1975.
–––––. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin. 1973, 1993.
–––––. “On the Jewish Question.” February 1844. Andy Blunden et al. Online. Marxists.org. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/, 18.
Poliakov, Léon. Histoire de l’antisemitisme, vol. 1. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. 1981.
[1] George Habash, “Pour une solution démocratique,” in Rien n’est plus précieux que la liberté, trans. Ugo Boust-Khattou, Paris: PMN, 2025, 26.
[2] Cf Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
[3] Or in competition with it but, from the Jewish people’s perspective of being hounded left and right, these amount to the same thing.
[4] The modern state successfully sublimated the Jews-as-question into the Jewish Question, but it is this Question which can only ever be “resolved” with the uprooting of the State itself and, simultaneously, the birth of a new relationship between Jews and thought, divorced from the constraints of the modern State’s cunning.
[5] Salo Baron, “The Jewish Factor in Medieval Civilization,” in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 12, ed. American Academy for Jewish Research, online, URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3622094, 1.
[6] Léon Poliakov, Histoire de l’antisemitisme, vol. 1, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1981, 271.
[7] In the context of Poland, Poliakov writes, ‘…Les Juifs s’assurèrent rapidement d’un rôle prépondérant dans toutes les activités liées à la circulation des marchandises et de l’argent’, Ibid, 388; Baron, 22.
[8] Ibid, 21; Poliakov, 271 for dates.
[9] Baron, 40.
[10] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1973, 1993, 509.
[11] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. E. Untermann, New York : International Publishers, 1967, 1975, 594.
[12] Baron, 40.
[13] Compare Pope Gregory X, “Papal Protection of the Jews,” 1271, online, Papal Encyclicals Online, URL: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/greg10/g10jprot.htm to Pope Innocent III, “Constitutio pro Iudeis,” 1199, online, Relmin, URL: https://telma.irht.cnrs.fr/outils/relmin/extrait103876/.
[14] Robert Chazan points out that Innocent’s text will prove to be the more lasting. Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000-1500, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, online, URL : https://www.sjimondenhollander.com/uploads/1/2/4/7/124727437/robert-chazan-the-jews-of-medieval-western-christendom-1000-1500.pdf, 51.
[15] Italics and interjections my own. From “Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” online, Hanover College, URL: https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/344latj.html. Also see Chazan, 60-63, for his interpretation of the Lateran Council’s decision. For Latin text, see Relmin, online, URL: https://telma.irht.cnrs.fr/outils/relmin/extrait30315/.
[16] Marx, Capital III, 607.
[17] Cf Michel Foucault, “Le panoptisme” in Surveiller et punir, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, online, URL: https://monoskop.org/images/2/22/Foucault_Michel_Surveiller_et_Punir_Naissance_de_la_Prison_2004.pdf, 197-229.
[18] “Sentencia-Estatuto de Toledo,” 1449, trans. K.B. Wolf, online, URL: https://www.kbwolf.sites.pomona.edu/sentencia-estatuto.pdf.
[19] Abbé Henri Grégoire, “La citoyenneté des Juifs,” December 23, 1789, online, Assemblé Nationale, URL: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/abbe_gregoire_seance23dec1789.asp#:~:text=J’ai%20toujours%20pens%C3%A9%20qu,r%C3%A9clament%20les%20droits%20de%20citoyens.
[20] Cf Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” in The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, Fall 2003, 257-337, online, Project Muse, URL: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2432989/Wynter-2003-Unsettling-the-Coloniality-of-Being.pdf.
[21] Cf “4 février 1794 : Marcel Dorigny raconte la 1ère abolition de l’esclavage,” February 4, 2021, online, Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, URL: https://memoire-esclavage.org/4-fevrier-1794-marcel-dorigny-raconte-la-1ere-abolition-de-lesclavage.
[22] Cf “Traite esclavagiste,” online, Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, https://memoire-esclavage.org/traite-esclavagiste.
[23] Cf André Larané, “Le Code noir: Louis XIV réaffirme son autorité sur les colons,” October 5, 2022, online, Herodote.net, URL: https://www.herodote.net/Louis_XIV_reaffirme_son_autorite_sur_les_colons-synthese-2108.php.
[24] It would then be reductive to claim that anti-Black racism is a subsection of economic antagonisms, and myopic to maintain that it transcends the historical framework of capital. Both positions forget that capital is a social relationship, not merely an economic or political fact.
[25] “Le Code noir,” 1685, online, Université Laval, URL: https://www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/amsudant/guyanefr1685.htm.
[26] Ibid.
[27] See both texts online at https://www.crif.org/sites/default/fichiers/images/documents/br%C3%A9viaire%20Richard%20Rossin.pdf.
[28] Abogard of Lyon, “On the Insolence of the Jews,” 826/7, trans. W.L. North, online, Fordham University, https://origin.web.fordham.edu/halsall/source/agobard-insolence.asp.
[29] “Le Code noir.”
[30] For the classic account of this underdevelopment, cf Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Black Classic Press, 2011, online, URL: https://arxiujosepserradell.cat/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/How-Europe-Underdeveloped-Africa-by-Recorded-Books-Inc.Rodney-Walter-z-lib.org_.pdf.
[31] A short article on Wall Street’s participation in the slave trade: Zoe Thomas, “The hidden links between slavery and Wall Street,” August 29, 2019, online, BBC, URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49476247.
[32] See Herbert Klein’s review of Eli Faber’s study on the matter, Herbert Klein, “Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (review)” in Journal of Social History, vol. 33, no. 3, Spring 2000, pp. 743-745, ed. George Mason University Press, online, Project Muse, URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/17716.
[33] Cf in particular Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1962, 2001, online, URL: https://altair.pw/pub/lib/Martin%20Heidegger%20-%20Being%20and%20Time%20(translated%20by%20Macquarrie%20&%20Robinson).pdf, 67-77; he speaks of verwesen in Unterwegs zur Sprache, but Derrida will cover that in the following citation. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, online, URL: https://archive.org/details/on-the-way-to-language-martin-heidegger-1982/page/n1/mode/2up.
[34] See Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question, Paris: Galilée, 1987, online, URL: https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Derrida_Jacques_De_l_esprit_Heidegger_et_la_question_1987.pdf, 140-157.
[35] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” February 1844, ed. Andy Blunden et al, online, Marxists.org, URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/, 18.
[36] Ibid, 9-10.
[37] Baron, 36-37.
[38] Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, trans. Sylvie d’Avigdor, New York: Dover, 1988, online, Gutenberg, URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25282/25282-h/25282-h.htm#II_The_Jewish_Question.
[39] Writers on this particular exclusion or tension with ontology include Calvin Warren, Frank Wilderson, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Lewis Gordon. Warren and Wilderson self-identify as Afropessimists, whereas Gordon is explicitly critical of Afropessimism but a careful reader of people like Fanon, who first points out the failure of ontology when faced with the colonial “subject.” Silva offers a detailed analysis of what she calls “ontological operators” in light of Blackness. Cf Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007; Calvin Warren, “Onticide,” in Ill Will, 2014, online, URL: https://illwill.com/print/ontocide; Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” in Social Identities, 2010, pp. 225-240, online, URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1350463032000101579; Lewis Gordon, “Critical Reflections on Afropessimism,” in The Brotherwise Dispatch, vol. 3, no. 3, 2018, online, URL: https://brotherwisedispatch.blogspot.com/2018/06/critical-reflections-on-afropessimism.html.
Hyperspekulation 
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