A nationless people undermines the native-foreigner binary nationhood sustains
Evidence
Hardly any dimension of the endemic Jewish incongruence, however, has influenced the shape of modern antisemitism more strongly and in more durable fashion than the fact that the Jews were, to quote Arendt again, a ‘non-national element in a world of growing or existing nations’. By the very fact of their territorial dispersion and ubiquity, the Jews were an inter-national nation, a non-national nation. Everywhere, they served as a constant reminder of the relativity and limits of individual self-identity and communal interest, which the criterion of nationhood was meant to determine with absolute and final authority. Inside every nation, they were the ‘enemy inside’. The boundaries of the nation were too narrow to define them; the horizons of national tradition were too short to see through their identity. The Jews were not just unlike any other nation; they were also unlike any other foreigners. In short, they undermined the very difference between hosts and guests, the native and the foreign. And as nationhood became the paramount basis of group self-constitution, they came to undermine the most basic of differences: the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Jews were flexible and adaptable; an empty vehicle, ready to be filled with whatever despicable load ‘them’ were charged of carrying. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 158
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘empty vehicle ready to be filled with whatever load them carry’ directly prefigures the construction-of-the-Other and imagined-community of the nation modules; also connects to Weber’s stateless pariah people concept and to how Muslims get cast as the new ‘enemy inside’ in European populism. — connects to: Loss of human rights reduces persons to insignificant bare uniqueness
- SEED: The mechanism ‘flexibility and adaptability make a group a projective screen’ could anchor an essay on how unassimilable minorities get essentialized as both too adaptable and too rigid.