Assimilation converted Judaism from a nationality or religion into a psychological quality

Evidence

Instead of being defined by nationality or religion, Jews were being transformed into a social group whose members shared certain psychological attributes and reactions, the sum total of which was supposed to constitute “Jewishness.” In other words, Judaism became a psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved personal problem for every individual Jew. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 219

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Core mechanism for the scaffolding on racialized/psychological identity — parallels how Islamophobia constructs ‘Muslimness’ as a psychological trait rather than a religion.
• SEED: Article angle: how regimes of discrimination convert group identity into interiorized psychological ‘qualities’ that then discipline individuals.

Related

• Assimilation stripped Jewish identity of political meaning and converted it into a psychological trait. (similarity 0.91)
• Social pressure converts a people into a set of shared psychological traits (similarity 0.89)
• Assimilated Jews could reconstruct Jewishness as a chosen performance rather than a fixed fate (similarity 0.85)
• Jewish identity collapsed into mere birth among assimilated elites (similarity 0.85)
• Assimilation paradoxically produced Jewish chauvinism rather than dissolving it (similarity 0.84)
• Jewishness was transposed from a nation’s religion into a national religion (similarity 0.83)
• Assimilation reduced Jewish identity to a mere fact of birth (similarity 0.82)
• Assimilation paradoxically produced Jewish chauvinism as a perverted individualistic nationalism. (similarity 0.82)
• Jewish intellectual assimilation shifted Jews from inter-European traders to national citizens seeking social admittance (similarity 0.82)
• Assimilated German Jews were trapped in a double differentiation from both worlds (similarity 0.81)
• Assimilation erases the Jewish difference Nazis then must bureaucratically reconstruct (similarity 0.80)
• Jewish identity psychology was defined by simultaneous regret and bad conscience (similarity 0.80)
• Assimilated Jews diverted antisemitic antipathy onto poorer immigrant brethren (similarity 0.80)
• Privatized Jewish identity intensified into obsessive self-preoccupation as its public significance faded. (similarity 0.79)
• Assimilation never threatened Jewish survival because society always saw them as Jews. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Assimilation converted Jewish origin from political fact into a psychological trait #corroborates (0.98) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 264