For reasons that I'm not at all clear but which these posts may help to clarify, I've thought for years that the so-called 'Jewish question' has been the key question of our modern age. Not a Jewish problem, but a Jewish question. Not a question of Jews, still less a problem of Jews, but a Jewish question. From those opening sentences it is evident that words matter, that this meaning is demanded and not that other meaning. We have to be careful when reading for what may at first sight appear as a synonym turns out after a moment's reflection to be a metonym or have quite other meaning. It was of that non-Jewish Jew, Karl Marx, that his use of words was likened to that of bats : one can see in them at this moment a bird, at that moment a mouse, and in another moment both birds and mice. One area in which the Jewish question is central and in which words require particular care in choice and reading is that of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and anti-Zionism. To compound the difficulty of these Jewish questions and to demand a re-doubled care with words, one can add the problem of anti-semitism. This post is briefly by way of introducing an occasional blog on zionism, anti-zionism and anti-semitism. I'm concerned with the manner in which these different ideological expressions have emerged and evolved over the long twentieth century. In particular the manner in which either one of those expressions has come to shape the contours of the political landscape is my fascination (and my repeated distress). But I began this post with puzzling over the Jewish question and I had in mind a particular field of meaning for that phrase 'Jewish question' and which requires at least a moment's explanation though it will require many posts to elaborate even adequately. In this blog I also propose to reproduce excerpts of influential or important texts and other material, and I should do this immediately to explain my idea of the Jewish question. You'll find this by implication if not explicitly expressed by the great historian Isaac Deutscher in an essay called 'Who is a Jew ?' in a collection of mainly autobiographical essays recently re-published by Verso under the title The non-Jewish Jew. At one point (p.51) he wrote, Many will find the conclusion unsatisfactory that the Jewish question is non-reducible but I think that this is exactly what Deutscher is arguing (amongst other things). And this irreducibility remains the irremediable weakness of nationalist, racist, religious and ethnicist descriptions of Jews. Yet the experience and expression of those so-described as Jewish i.e, those who feel the pulse of Jewish history, is essential. This essential anti-essentialism is not so much a paradox as a dialectic which allows us to make clear sense of the phrase the non-Jewish Jew. The Jewish question is nothing less than the question of what it is to be a human being in general, which is always a dialectical praxis; of how, with a notion of transcending the particular of one's inheritance, one responds to history; of a movement from having been to an unending becoming in the face of extermination, repression, suppression, distortion and continuous struggle. I'm conscious of the high level abstraction of what I've just written. I think that higher level abstraction is sometimes an affliction of familiarity with one's object of enquiry. The remedy ? Go straight to a brilliant reflective, critical and familiar writer : Isaac Deutscher.
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