Even a recognized exception like Mendelssohn drew no political conclusion from his own degradation

Evidence

The Prussia which Lessing had described as “Europe’s most enslaved country” was to Mendelssohn “a state in which one of the wisest princes who ever ruled men has made the arts and sciences flourish, has made national freedom of thought so general that its beneficent effects reach even the lowliest inhabitants of his domain.” Such humble contentment is touching and surprising if one realizes that the “wisest prince” had made it very hard for the Jewish philosopher to get permission to sojourn in Berlin and, at a time when his Munzjuden enjoyed all privileges, did not even grant him the regular status of a “protected Jew.” Mendelssohn was even aware that he, the friend of all educated Germany, would be subject to the same tax levied upon an ox led to the market if ever he decided to visit his friend Lavater in Leipzig, but no political conclusion regarding the improvement of such conditions ever occurred to him. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2036

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete case of a marginalized intellectual not translating personal exclusion into political demands — a pattern worth carrying into how the Islamophobia field theorizes elite minority accommodation.