Jews internalized German racial questions, which then returned as demands for their removal

Evidence

Many generations of German Jews have concerned themselves with the question, when and how a Jew can overcome his Jewishness in order to become a total German. Lightening the skin and the hair, Germanizing language and belief did not free the Jews from the Jewish illness that they brought from Germany. The Jews took over these tortuous questions from the German society in order to belong to that society. They made them more sophisticated and asked them again. And they became the same questions in return. And so on. This reciprocal process continued until the question was reformulated in: “When will Germany be free of its Jews.” (89) Historically this is quite accurate, if teleological, that nineteenth-century anti-Semitism leads directly to the Shoah. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 778

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the internalization of oppressive categories in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Things Fall Apart, where the colonized adopts the colonizer’s terms of self-assessment.