Assimilated German Jews located authentic Judaism in its most alien, orientalized forms

Evidence

Combining a sensibility born of one who hailed from the eastern reaches of Germany and had abandoned his Orthodox background, he displayed the contempt for east European Jews that was characteristic of his generation of German Jews. It was a contempt bred by familiarity and fear that German Jews would be viewed as equally incorrigible as their Polish co-religionists. … With a venom that could only be matched by anti-Semites, Graetz engaged in his own form of internal Jewish orientalism, deriding and degrading one part of his own people in order to highlight the characteristics he found favorable in another branch of Jewry. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 394 (#expands, via linked claim)

Yet assimilation almost necessarily involves an element of hiding or even betraying one’s identity. After all, assimilation entails the abandonment of central aspects of a person’s background, such as language, name, values and manners, in favour of those of the society to which they wish to belong. Such changes would not be problematic if the consequences of such actions for one’s identity were considered a private matter, and if the notion of the authentic self was a non-issue. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authenticity of the self became an increasingly significant question in society. The great upheavals of modernity in the nineteenth century created an obsession in German conservative intellectual circles with rootedness and authenticity. Romanticists not only searched for authenticity in German history, philosophy, music and myths, they also started to extol authenticity itself. Fidelity to one’s inner nature became a moral requirement in itself. This demand then backfired on the Jews, who, for their very adjustments to society, were now easily taken to represent superficiality and inauthenticity. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1659 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Weimar antisemitism drove assimilated German Jews back to Jewish tradition in diverse forms; Jews prefigured Orientalized others as inside-yet-outside Western Christendom; German-Jewish idealization of eastern Jews reveals their own ideological plight — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 415 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• German Jewish scholars orientalized their own eastern European co-religionists to distance themselves #expands (0.92) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 394
• Romantic-era cults of authenticity branded assimilated Jews as inherently inauthentic #complicates (0.75) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1659