Abstract
This chapter focuses on the second case of study: The Jewish Question. As with the previous chapter, this reconstruction also intersects conceptual history and social history. Both dimensions of the Jewish Question will be reconstructed through the analysis of the debate between Marx and Bauer in the 19th century.
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Notes
- 1.
From a Marxist perspective on history and politics, Anderson explains the significance of the national language used in newspapers as the result of a complex ‘print-capitalism’. See: Anderson 1983: mostly chapter three with the ambitious title “The Origins of National Consciousness”. See also: Hobsbawm 2005.
- 2.
Note in this context the motive of the “unknown soldier”. Despite his namelessness, this public figure constitutes a nationally known identity (Anderson 1983: 7, 9–10). The phenomenological absence of his masculine body is filled with a sacral presence in the public space. Identification and masculinity are central elements in the Western-centric genealogy of nations’ narratives. For a discussion on the gendered conceptions of the nation see: Iveković 2003.
- 3.
For a critique on the semantic reproduction of anti-Semitism in Marx see the work of Edmund Silberner: “Was Marx an Anti-Semite?” (1949), and his book Kommunisten zur Judenfrage. Zur Geschichte von Theorie und Praxis des Kommunismus (1982). See also Helmuth Hirsch’s Marx und Moses. Karl Marx zur « Judenfrage» und zu Juden (1980).
- 4.
This discriminatory law affected Marx’s father. He converted to Christianity in order to be allowed to continue practising his profession as a lawyer (Monod 2008: 166).
- 5.
For a further discussion on the Orientalization of European Jewishness see the last section in this chapter.
- 6.
Written only ten years earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) is one of the important references in Marx’s essay.
- 7.
For a definition of Koselleck’s Sattelzeit see section 6.1.
- 8.
This paradigm in the history of translation is discussed in the section on Translation studies in Chapter 2.
- 9.
This racist statement has been discussed by the Marxist thinker Gilman (1984) and the German thinker Wulf Hund (2018). Already in the title of his paper on Marx’s racism, Wulf reproduces violence. Both critiques emphasize on Marx’s Jewish identity, although he took distance from any religion. If Judaism is the problem (and Marx was ‘accused’ of being a Jew several times), then the critical voices perpetuate Bauer’s definition of ‘the’ Jew, and ignore the violence of comparison in his statement, which should rather be thought in its postcolonial context, instead of pathos. For a critical discussion of Marx’s relation to Jewishness and Blackness, see: HaCohen 2018.
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Mancheno, T. (2023). Translation and the Jewish Question. In: Ma(r)king the Difference . Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40924-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40924-1_7
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