Jewish social acceptance depended on being perceived as a race of traitors.

Evidence

The main point about the role of Jews in this fin-de-siecle society is that it was the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair which opened society’s doors to Jews, and that it was the end of the Affair, or rather the discovery of Dreyfus’ innocence, that put an end to their social glory. In other words, no matter what the Jews thought of themselves or of Dreyfus, they could play the role society had assigned them only as long as this same society was convinced that they belonged to a race of traitors. When the traitor was discovered to be the rather stupid victim of an ordinary frame-up, and the innocence of the Jews was established, social interest in Jews subsided as quickly as did political antisemitism. Jews were again looked upon as ordinary mortals and fell into the insignificance from which the supposed crime of one of their own had raised them temporarily. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 270

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates Arendt’s core mechanism: the ‘crime’ of Judaism versus the social role Jews were permitted to play — acceptance was conditioned on the antisemitic premise.
• XREF: Directly anticipates the Jewish ‘crime’ to ‘vice’ transformation in para 272, and connects to the Islamophobia field’s treatment of essentialized, inescapable identity markers. — connects to: No degree of conformity made Jews’ social membership secure in Weimar Germany — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 14