Depoliticizing the Jewish question forced its tensions into private life

Evidence

The social destinies of average Jews were determined by their eternal lack of decision. And society certainly did not compel them to make up their minds, for it was precisely this ambiguity of situation and character that made the relationship with Jews attractive. The majority of assimilated Jews thus lived in a twilight of favor and misfortune and knew with certainty only that both success and failure were inextricably connected with the fact that they were Jews. For them the Jewish question had lost, once and for all, all political significance; but it haunted their private lives and influenced their personal decisions all the more tyrannically. The adage, “a man in the street and a Jew at home,” was bitterly realized: political problems were distorted to the point of pure perversion when Jews tried to solve them by means of inner experience and private emotions; private life was poisoned to the point of inhumanity—for example in the question of mixed marriages—when the heavy burden of unsolved problems of public significance was crammed into that private existence which is much better ruled by the unpredictable laws of passion than by considered policies. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 222

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the mechanism of how a group’s political exclusion gets privatized and psychological — connects to later Islamophobia readings on how public prejudice gets recast as private or cultural friction.
• DEFINE: Establishes the conceptual split between Jew “in the street” vs. “at home” — the imagined split identity of the assimilated minority.