Jews are hated for displaying mimetic impulses civilization has repressed

Evidence

In the bourgeois mode of production, the indelible mimetic heritage of all practical experience is consigned to oblivion. The pitiless prohibition of regression becomes mere fate; the denial is now so complete that it is no longer conscious. Those blinded by civilization experience their own tabooed mimetic features only in certain gestures and behavior patterns which they encounter in others and which strike them as isolated remnants, as embarrassing rudimentary elements that survive in the rationalized environment. What seems repellently alien is in fact all too familiar: the infectious gestures of direct contacts suppressed by civilization, for instance, touch, soothing, snuggling up, coaxing. We are put off by the old-fashioned nature of these impulses. They seem to translate long verified human relations back into individual power relations: in trying to influence the purchaser by flattery, the debtor by threats and the creditor by entreaty. Every non-manipulated expression seems to be the grimace which the manipulated expression always was—in the movies, in lynch law, or in speeches by Hitler. However, undisciplined mimicry is the brand of the old form of domination, engraved in the living substance of the dominated and passed down by a process of unconscious imitation in infancy from generation to generation, from the down-at-heel Jew to the rich banker. This mimicry arouses anger because, in the face of the new conditions of production, it displays the old fear which, in order to survive those conditions, must be forgotten. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Burns’s account: the culture industry represses mimesis to pacify audiences, and anti-Semitism redirects the resulting anger. This is the founding version of that causal chain. — connects to: Anti-Semites secretly imitate the Jews they claim to despise — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 143; Jews are hated because they embody a happiness the oppressed must deny themselves. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 128; Hatred of Jews became detached from any specific Jewish deeds (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that anti-Semitic rage targets not genuine difference but tabooed similarity — what repels is all too familiar — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting reversal of how hatred of the Other is usually explained.
• DEFINE: Explains the term ‘mimesis’ as it operates in Adorno: pre-rational embodied imitation and the gestures of direct contact that civilization forbids and then projects onto Jews.

Broader Connections

• Anti-Semitism projects the subject’s own repressed impulses onto the victim #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 147
• Jews are hated because they embody a happiness the oppressed must deny themselves. #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 128
• Hatred of Jews became detached from any specific Jewish deeds #expands (0.75)
• Jews became a symbolic target for everything the mob hated #expands (0.75)