Early modern rationalists promised legal equality would dissolve Jewish distinctiveness through education.

Evidence

On the one hand, the blatant irrationality of the status of the Jews was represented as another example of the general absurdity of the feudal order and one of the superstitions that barred the advance of reason. As for the salient distinctiveness and idiosyncracy of the Jews, it was seen as being in no way different from innumerable particularisms that the ancien régime tolerated and the new order was set to explode. Like many other local eccentricities, this one was understood as mainly a cultural problem – that is, a feature which diligent educational effort was able and bound to eradicate. There was no shortage of prophecies that once the newly fashioned legal equality was extended to the Jews, their distinctiveness would fast evaporate, and the Jews – that is, Jews as so many free individuals and bearers of citizen rights – would soon dissolve in the now culturally and legally uniform society. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 141

Categorization

• XREF: This liberal-assimilationist promise parallels contemporary secularist expectations that Muslims in liberal states will assimilate and shed religious distinctiveness. — connects to: Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169; State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness

Related

• Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured (similarity 0.83)
• Assimilated Jews feared equal rights because equality erased their exceptional status. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169
• State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness #contradicts (0.78)