Assimilated Jews identified so deeply with French society that they admired its antisemitic mob

Evidence

Even a Jewish historian of the time, although he had seen with his own eyes that Jews are no longer safe when the mob rules the street, spoke with secret admiration of the “great collective movement.” This only shows how deeply most Jews were rooted in a society which was attempting to eliminate them. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 309

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox of assimilation — victims admiring the movement eliminating them — prefigures the deracination and self-abnegation Arendt traces as preconditions of totalitarian victimhood.