Assimilation paradoxically produced Jewish chauvinism rather than dissolving it

Evidence

Secularization, therefore, finally produced that paradox, so decisive for the psychology of modern Jews, by which Jewish assimilation—in its liquidation of national consciousness, its transformation of a national religion into a confessional denomination, and its meeting of the half-hearted and ambiguous demands of state and society by equally ambiguous devices and psychological tricks—engendered a very real Jewish chauvinism, if by chauvinism we understand the perverted nationalism in which (in the words of Chesterton) “the individual is himself the thing to be worshipped; the individual is his own ideal and even his own idol.” From now on, the old religious concept of chosenness was no longer the essence of Judaism; it became instead the essence of Jewishness. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 240

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely counterintuitive mechanism: the attempt at integration manufacturers an intensified, secularized self-worship — a central concept in Arendt’s account of modern Jewish psychology.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘chauvinism’ in Arendt’s specific perverted-nationalism sense — key term for the scaffolding vocabulary.
• XREF: Directly parallels the construction of racialized selfhood under colonial conditions that later Islamophobia readings rely on — assimilation’s failure breeds intensified identity.

Related

• Assimilation paradoxically produced Jewish chauvinism as a perverted individualistic nationalism. (similarity 0.96)
• Assimilation stripped Jewish identity of political meaning and converted it into a psychological trait. (similarity 0.86)
• Assimilation converted Judaism from a nationality or religion into a psychological quality (similarity 0.84)
• Jewish identity collapsed into mere birth among assimilated elites (similarity 0.82)
• Jewish intellectual assimilation shifted Jews from inter-European traders to national citizens seeking social admittance (similarity 0.82)
• Privatized Jewish identity intensified into obsessive self-preoccupation as its public significance faded. (similarity 0.82)
• Assimilated German Jews were trapped in a double differentiation from both worlds (similarity 0.81)
• Assimilated Jews could reconstruct Jewishness as a chosen performance rather than a fixed fate (similarity 0.80)
• Social pressure converts a people into a set of shared psychological traits (similarity 0.79)
• Racial self-interpretation among Jews preceded and enabled later secular antisemitism. (similarity 0.79)
• Assimilated Western European Jews were more preoccupied with Jewish birth than traditional communities were. (similarity 0.79)
• The nation-state’s protection and Jewish self-preservation interests coincided to prevent assimilation. (similarity 0.79)
• Even well-meaning emancipation advocates reduced the Jewish question to a social one (similarity 0.79)
• Antisemitism only conserved Jewish identity after emancipation and assimilation. (similarity 0.78)