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• 1 media/Warsaw Getto.PNG 2017-04-03T18:05:13-07:00 Jewish Question 11 On the face of it, the "Jewish Question" might seem a bland, neutral term. Yet it is just the opposite, masquerading ruthlessness and inhumanity-the age-old and altogether vicious practice of scapegoating-in a deceptive, leisurely abstraction. The phraseology is that of the oppressor, the ultimate murderer, not the victim. plain 2017-05-02T08:31:57-07:00 1984

  "For the image of the Jew to arouse any feelings, pro or con, he had to be generalized, abstracted, depersonalized. It is always possible for the  personal, individual case to contradict a general assertion by providing a living, concrete proof to the contrary. For the Jews to become the foils of a mass movement, they had to be converted into objectified symbols so as to become other than human beings.  Moreover, mass agitation demanded simplicity and consistency, and consequence did not readily countenance subtle distinctions which might have excluded some Jews from condemnation. Hitler followed the path of his Volkish predecessors when he presented the Jewish evil not in its flesh-and-blood aspects, but as an abstracted stereotype.
  The growing abstraction of the Jew reflected the growing process of his depersonalization. Once the Jew had been denied a soul and genuine emotions, once his religion had been categorized as a fossil without ethical content, he was well on the way to being dehumanized. And who could feel any sorrow for or commiserate with an entity that had lost all human dimensions? Once a population had accepted this depiction of the Jew, it was possible to regard him as a cipher, as a figure that aroused no human compassion- only the large numbers of the martyred dead would stagger the imagination" (Mosse, 1966, p. 301-302). 
  
  This and its analogues (e.g., "Race question" as a subdivision) qualify as the most odious examples in the whole list of outright racism, WASPish myopia, and marvelous insensitivity to the suffering and legitimate aspirations of minority peoples. What was (and in many places still is) the "Jewish Question"? Who posed the 'question"? And what kind of "answer" did they furnish?" In Europe, the "questioners" were (are) the Slavic or "Teutonic" majorities, not the Jews themselves. They "questioned", in essence, what to do with Jewish communities who had lived among them for centuries, but who had seldom enjoyed full political or social rights. They "answered" with relatively more or less heinous versions of the Endlosung (Final Solution): exterminate; expel; or reduce the "non-Aryans," the "rootless cosmopolitans," to a subhuman condition. On the face of it, the "Jewish Question" might seem a bland, neutral term. Yet it is just the opposite, masquerading ruthlessness and inhumanity-the age-old and altogether vicious practice of scapegoating-in a deceptive, leisurely abstraction. The phraseology is that of the oppressor, the ultimate murderer, not the victim. Strong language? the stench at Auschwitz was stronger. The "question" facing the soon-to-be-incinerated millions was not one to be calmly debated. It was fundamental: life or death. 
  
  Remedy: Reconstructions are possible for many other inappropriate terms. Not, however, for this. It richly merits deletion. 

  Sanford Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies, 1971.