Max Weber and the Jewish question

Gary Abraham shows how Weber's sociology of Judaism and the Jews is rooted in the vexing climate of intellectual concern with the Jewish question, the problem of the social and legal conditions for emancipation of the Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Weber's sociological treatment of Jews and two other minorities--Poles and Catholics in Germany--reveals a strong fundamental bias against a pluralistic society. The author maintains that such antipluralism marks many other areas of Weber's sociology. Abraham's thesis is to show that Weber's views on Judaism and the history of the Jews grow naturally out of his total approach to history and current events, and that both his wider discourse and his particular statements on Judaica reflect an underlying social outlook or image of the ideal society that informs his scholarly work as a whole and that was readily understandable among his contemporaries. This study will encourage a reevaluation of the wide-ranging reception of Weber's work in modern thought and will make an important contribution to a general debate about the foundations of a modern pluralist society and how it is perceived by the intellectual community and the educated public.