Labeling Jews as distinct made them conscious of minority status

Evidence

George Mosse has commented, “the separateness of Jewish schoolchildren, approved by Virchow, says something about the course of Jewish emancipation in Germany. However, rationalized, the survey must have made Jewish schoolchildren conscious of their minority status and their supposedly different origins.” Nonetheless, even though they were labeled as different, Jews came to parallel the scale of types found elsewhere in European society. They “became” German in their very bodies, but these bodies were distrusted by the culture in which they found themselves. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 779

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with how the ‘separateness’ of racial categorization operates in things like the one-drop rule in US race history and Parable of the Sower’s social fragmentation.