European thinkers valued Jews as a unifying inter-national link

Evidence

The grandeur of this consistently European existence should not be forgotten because of the many undoubtedly less attractive aspects of Jewish history during the last centuries. The few European authors who have been aware of this aspect of the “Jewish question” had no special sympathies for the Jews, but an unbiased estimate of the whole European situation. Among them was Diderot, the only eighteenth-century French philosopher who was not hostile to the Jews and who recognized in them a useful link between Europeans of different nationalities; Wilhelm von Humboldt who, witnessing their emancipation through the French Revolution, remarked that the Jews would lose their universality when they were changed into Frenchmen; and finally Friedrich Nietzsche, who out of disgust with Bismarck’s German Reich coined the word “good European,” which made possible his correct estimate of the significant role of the Jews in European history, and saved him from falling into the pitfalls of cheap philosemitism or patronizing “progressive” attitudes. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Humboldt’s remark that Jews lose their universality when changed into Frenchmen parallels the tension between universalist and particularist citizenship debates — relevant to later readings on how the nation-state demands assimilation. — connects to: Jews uniquely contrasted civilization both downward to nature and upward to spirit. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1431