Assimilation never threatened Jewish survival because society always saw them as Jews.

Evidence

Assimilation, whether carried to the extreme of conversion or not, never was a real menace to the survival of the Jews. Whether they were welcomed or rejected, it was because they were Jews, and they were well aware of it. The first generations of educated Jews still wanted sincerely to lose their identity as Jews, and Boerne wrote with a great deal of bitterness, “Some reproach me with being a Jew, some praise me because of it, some pardon me for it, but all think of it.” Still brought up on eighteenth-century ideas, they longed for a country without either Christians or Jews; they had devoted themselves to science and the arts, and were greatly hurt when they found out that governments which would give every privilege and honor to a Jewish banker, condemned Jewish intellectuals to starvation. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 215

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that reception is always racialized (welcome or rejection both hinge on the category) anticipates the Islamophobia field’s point that inclusion and exclusion are twin faces of racialization.
• SEED: The Boerne line — reproach, praise, pardon, but always ‘all think of it’ — is a compact essay hook on how marking operates even in acceptance.