Jewish identity collapsed into mere birth among assimilated elites

Evidence

Judaism, and belonging to the Jewish people, degenerated into a simple fact of birth only among assimilated Jewry. Originally it had meant a specific religion, a specific nationality, the sharing of specific memories and specific hopes, and, even among die privileged Jews, it meant at least still sharing specific economic advantages. Secularization and assimilation of the Jewish intelligentsia had changed self-consciousness and self-interpretation in such a way that nothing was left of the old memories and hopes but the awareness of belonging to a chosen people. Disraeli, though certainly not the only “exception Jew” to believe in his own chosenness without believing in Him who chooses and rejects, was the only one who produced a full-blown race doctrine out of this empty concept of a historic mission. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding goal: assimilation emptying religious identity into bare ‘fact of birth’ is a mechanism that reappears in Islamophobia literature on how identity is flattened into race.
• DEFINE: Defines how secularization hollows out a religious-national identity into an ‘empty concept of a historic mission’ that race doctrine then fills.