Assimilating Jews learned to advance by playing the role of what they actually were

Evidence

It is amusing to note how closely the assimilation of Jews into society followed the precepts Goethe had proposed for the education of his Wilhelm Meister, a novel which was to become the great model of middle-class education. In this book the young burgher is educated by noblemen and actors, so that he may learn how to present and represent his individuality, and thereby advance from the modest status of a burgher’s son into a nobleman. For the middle classes and for the Jews, that is, for those who were actually outside of high aristocratic society, everything depended upon “personality” and the ability to express it. To know how to play the role of what one actually was, seemed the most important thing. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 202

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the mechanism of social self-advancement through performed personality — presentation and representation of individuality as the route from outsider to insider.
• XREF: This ‘personality as performed role’ mechanism prefigures Arendt’s later analysis of the parvenu and connects to the representation-of-the-Other theme in the scaffolding toolkit.
• SEED: Angle: ‘passing as a career’ — how outsider groups have historically been told that self-presentation, not structural change, is the path to acceptance.