European orientalists proposed solving the Jewish question by exporting Jews as colonial laborers

Evidence

Hess provides some concrete support for the “Jews-as-colonials” argument. The German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) was an orientalist and an anti-Jewish polemicist. Hess notes that Michaelis came up with a colonialist solution to the “problem” of the Jews as the Asiatic residents of Europe. He suggested turning Europe’s Jews into real colonials—by exporting them to “sugar islands” in the West Indies, where they would labor to benefit the German economy. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 78

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the instrumentalization of marginalized populations as colonial labor elsewhere, and to the history of Jewish emancipation debates.
• SEED: A concrete historical case for an essay on how ‘the Other’ gets reframed as a colonial resource to be extracted or relocated, rather than integrated.