German Jewish scholars orientalized their own eastern European co-religionists to distance themselves

Evidence

Combining a sensibility born of one who hailed from the eastern reaches of Germany and had abandoned his Orthodox background, he displayed the contempt for east European Jews that was characteristic of his generation of German Jews. It was a contempt bred by familiarity and fear that German Jews would be viewed as equally incorrigible as their Polish co-religionists. … With a venom that could only be matched by anti-Semites, Graetz engaged in his own form of internal Jewish orientalism, deriding and degrading one part of his own people in order to highlight the characteristics he found favorable in another branch of Jewry. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Orientalism thesis of the book and to internalized hierarchy dynamics seen in other minority self-distancing studies.
• SEED: Angle: how a marginalized group reorients its own internal ‘other’ to win acceptance from the dominant culture — Graetz’s contempt as a refugee-from-identity gambit.
• SHARE: For someone studying Jewish historiography or internalized orientalism — Graetz calling Yiddish a ‘half-animal language’ is a striking, quotable anecdote.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 394