Assimilated Jews could reconstruct Jewishness as a chosen performance rather than a fixed fate

Evidence

Disraeli came from an entirely assimilated family; his father, an enlightened gentleman, baptized the son because he wanted him to have the opportunities of ordinary mortals. He had few connections with Jewish society and knew nothing of Jewish religion or customs. Jewishness, from the beginning, was a fact of origin which he was at liberty to embellish, unhindered by actual knowledge. The result was that somehow he looked at this fact much in the same way as a Gentile would have looked at it. He realized much more clearly than other Jews that being a Jew could be as much an opportunity as a handicap. … He knew instinctively that everything depended upon the “division between him and mere mortals,” upon an accentuation of his lucky “strangeness.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 228

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates how Jewishness-as-origin, detached from religion and community, becomes a malleable social attribute — a key mechanism in how ‘the Jew’ is socially constructed.
• XREF: Directly parallels Edward Said’s Orientalism account of how the Western gaze constructs and Orientalizes identity — a foundational text for the Islamophobia toolkit this reader is assembling. — connects to: Assimilation erases the Jewish difference Nazis then must bureaucratically reconstruct — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 164