Adorno’s anti-Semitism scale coded Jews as both threateningly competitive and clannishly separate.

Evidence

The investigators’ general conception of anti-Semitism was that it consists in “stereotyped negative opinions describing the Jews as threatening, immoral, and categorically different from non-Jews, and of hostile attitudes urging various forms of restriction, exclusion, and suppression as a means of solving the ‘Jewish problem’” (Adorno, et al., 1950, p. 71). They wrote fifty-two questionnaire items to tap this attitude. The authors classified their fifty-two items under five subheadings: 1) offensive items described Jews as conceited, sensual, dirty, and the like; 2) threatening items described them as ruthless, competitive, radical, and the like; 3) attitudes items recommended various discriminative actions to be taken against the Jews; 4) seclusive items credited the “clannish” Jews with a desire to keep apart from gentiles; 5) intrusive items, on the other hand, attributed to Jews a desire to move in where they are not wanted. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 446

Categorization

• SEED: The five subheadings — offensive, threatening, attitude, seclusive, intrusive — form a useful taxonomic grid for coding contemporary anti-Semitic or out-group rhetoric; each modern slur maps onto an Adorno category.