Bourgeois boredom turned Jewishness from a tolerated difference into a vice

Evidence

The process by which bourgeois society developed out of the ruins of its revolutionary traditions and memories added the black ghost of boredom to economic saturation and general indifference to political questions. Jews became people with whom one hoped to while away some time. The less one thought of them as equals, the more attractive and entertaining they became. Bourgeois society, in its search for entertainment and its passionate interest in the individual, insofar as he differed from the norm that is man, discovered the attraction of everything that could be supposed to be mysteriously wicked or secretly vicious. And precisely this feverish preference opened the doors of society to Jews; for within the framework of this society, Jewishness, after having been distorted into a psychological quality, could easily be perverted into a vice. The Enlightenment’s genuine tolerance and curiosity for everything human was being replaced by a morbid lust for the exotic, abnormal, and different as such. Several types in society, one after the other, represented the exotic, the anomalous, the different, but none of them was in die least connected with political questions. Thus only the role of Jews in this decaying society could assume a stature that transcended the narrow limits of a society affair. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 224

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of turning a group’s identity into an exotic and then vicious entertainment parallels how the exoticized Other gets re-coded as threat — direct connection to the representation and ‘Other’-ing toolkit for Islamophobia readings.
• SEED: Angle: how the Enlightenment’s ‘curiosity for the human’ decayed into the bourgeois ‘morbid lust’ for exotic difference — a genealogy of the modern exoticism-to-phobia pivot.