Antisemites conflate the parvenu with the pariah in every Jew

Evidence

The Christian theory of the Jews stepped therefore beyond the generalization of the practices of exclusion; it was more than an attempt at systemization of that vague and diffuse experience of distinctiveness which emanates from, and informs, practices of caste-style separation. Rather than a reflection of grass roots, neighbourly exchanges or frictions, Christian theory of the Jews was subject to a different logic – that of the self-reproduction of the Church and its ecumenical domination. Hence the relative autonomy of the ‘Jewish question’ regarding the popular social, economic and cultural experience. Hence also the relative facility with which this question could be set apart from the context of daily life and made immune against the test of daily experience. To their Christian hosts, Jews were simultaneously concrete objects of daily intercourse and exemplars of a category defined independently of such intercourse. The latter characteristic of the Jews was neither indispensable nor inevitable from the point of view of the first. It was precisely for this reason that it could be relatively easily separated from the first and deployed as a resource in actions only loosely, if at all, related to the practices of quotidianity. In the Church theory of the Jews, antisemitism acquired a form in which it ‘can exist almost regardless of the real situation of Jews in society… Most striking of all, it can be found among people who have never set eyes on a Jew and in countries where there have been no Jews for centuries.’ — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 131 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Every Jew in every generation faced the pariah, parvenu, or traitor choice; The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 131; Anti-Semitic exclusion disciplined Jewish parvenus for faults natives shared — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 166

Related

• The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter (similarity 0.87)
• Every Jew in every generation faced the pariah, parvenu, or traitor choice (similarity 0.87)
• The average assimilated Jew occupied a middle position between parvenu and pariah (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-Semitic exclusion disciplined Jewish parvenus for faults natives shared (similarity 0.80)
• Every Jew had to choose between pariah, parvenu, or betraying conformity (similarity 0.80)
• The conceptual Jew occupied every boundary conflict of Western modernity (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 131