Legal definition of victims reassures bystanders they are exempt from persecution

Evidence

The impact of the antisemitic propaganda was, however, supported and considerably reinforced by the care taken to aim all anti-Jewish measures closely on the target, so that each successive act, even if ineffective in its declared purpose, deepened the gulf between the Jews and the rest, and further underlined the message; however atrocious are the things happening to the Jews, they definitely have no adverse influence on the plight of the rest of the population, and therefore are of no concern for anybody but the Jews. We know now from the thoroughly researched historical evidence how much of the energy of the top Nazi bureaucrats and the experts they hired went into designing the proper definition of the Jews – apparently a legalistic subtlety, looking ridiculously out of place against the background of brutal and unscrupulous violence. In fact, the search for a legally perfect definition was more than the last vestige of the Jurisprudenzkultur the Nazi could not quite get rid of, or a homage paid to the not-yet fully forgotten tradition of the Rechtsstaat. Precise definition of the Jew was necessary for reassuring the witnessess to the victimization that what they saw or suspected would not happen to them, and hence that their interests were not under threat. To achieve this effect, one needed such a definition as one would be able to use to decide exactly who was and who was not a Jew; to eliminate all possibility of unclear, intermediate, mixed, equivocal cases allowing for contradictory interpretation. However absurd in their substance and ostensibly functional relevance, the notorious Nuremberg Laws served this purpose splendidly. They left no no-man’s-land between the Jews and the non-Jews. It created a category of people earmarked for Sonderbehandlung and ultimately for annihilation. Yet it also created, in one fell swoop, a much wider category of safe and clean citizens of the Reich; the German of pure blood. The same purpose was served, with varying degree of success, by marking the Jewish shops (and thereby emphasizing the propriety and security of the unmarked ones), or by forcing the leftovers of German Jewry to adorn their dress with yellow badges. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 355

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia scaffold: classification/boundary-drawing of who is exempt versus who is targeted maps onto how anti-Muslim discourse constructs a ‘safe’ citizenry against a marked population. — connects to: International law defines refugees by well-founded fear of persecution — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 724
• QUESTION: How did the Nuremberg Laws’ bright-line approach differ from contemporary boundary-drawing in anti-Muslim law (e.g., who counts as Muslim for surveillance)?
• DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism by which precise legal definition functions as reassurance to the majority, not merely as administrative tool.

Broader Connections

• International law defines refugees by well-founded fear of persecution #expands (0.85) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 724