Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured

Evidence

An important thing happened to the Jews on the road to modernity. They had embarked on that road while set securely aside, segregated and enclosed behind stony or imaginary walls of the Judengasse. Their estrangement was a fact of life, like air or mortality. It did not call for mobilization of popular feelings, sophisticated arguments or alertness of self-appointed vigilantes; diffuse and often uncodified, yet on the whole well-co-ordinated habits, sufficed to reproduce the mutual repellence which guarded the permanence of separation. All this changed with the advent of modernity, with its dismantling of legislated differences, its slogans of legal equality and the strangest of its novelties; citizenship. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the core conceptual shift: pre-modern segregation was natural/uncodified, modern separation must be actively built.
• XREF: This is the classic gamekeeper-to-gardener distinction that structures Bauman’s whole modernity argument; connects forward to Foucault’s discipline and the engineered ‘Other.’ — connects to: Prussian kings preserved Jewish separateness by blocking assimilation and religious reform; Jewish survival depended on voluntary self-separation, not on Gentile persecution. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 18; Jewish emancipation simultaneously meant equality and the extension of group privileges — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 87 (+8 more)

Related

• Pre-modern caste structure made Jewish separation a normal rather than exceptional status (similarity 0.85)
• Early modern rationalists promised legal equality would dissolve Jewish distinctiveness through education. (similarity 0.83)
• Jews faced the twin contradictions of equality-as-privilege and non-national existence in nation-states. (similarity 0.82)
• Modern boundaries must be rebuilt on foundations immune to education and self-transformation (similarity 0.81)
• Jewish emancipation simultaneously meant equality and the extension of group privileges (similarity 0.80)
• Before modernity, segregated class perspectives kept hostile stereotypes of Jews from merging. (similarity 0.79)
• The conceptual Jew occupied every boundary conflict of Western modernity (similarity 0.79)
• Prussian kings preserved Jewish separateness by blocking assimilation and religious reform (similarity 0.79)
• Jewish emancipation removed visible markers of difference and so made Jews newly threatening (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Modern Jewish nationalism emerged from Enlightenment contradictions. #expands (0.75) — David Ohana, David Maisel , The Origins of Israeli…, 39