Assimilated Jews diverted antisemitic antipathy onto poorer immigrant brethren

Evidence

Using the same tactics as Gentile society had employed against them they took pains to dissociate themselves from the so-called Ostjuden. Political antisemitism, as it had manifested itself in the pogroms of Russia and Rumania, they dismissed airily as a survival from the Middle Ages, scarcely a reality of modern politics. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 332

Categorization

• SEED: The mechanism of a dominated group deflecting stigma onto its own disadvantaged members by adopting the oppressor’s categories is a powerful template for explaining respectability politics within minority communities.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-Semitic exclusion disciplined Jewish parvenus for faults natives shared — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 166; German-Jewish philanthropy to immigrant slum dwellers was laced through with patronizing contempt; Assimilated Western Jews avoided Eastern Jewish refugees