Pariah Jews could preserve social luck by accentuating rather than hiding their difference

Evidence

His innocence made him recognize how foolish it would be to feel déclassé and how much more exciting it would be for himself and for others, how much more useful for his career, to accentuate the fact that he was a Jew “by dressing differently, combing his hair oddly, and by queer manners of expression and verbiage.” He cared for admission to high and highest society more passionately and shamelessly than any other Jewish intellectual did; but he was the only one of them who discovered the secret of how to preserve luck, that natural miracle of pariahdom, and who knew from the beginning that one never should bow down in order to “move up from high to higher.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 226

Categorization

• DEFINE: Supplies Arendt’s concept of ‘pariahdom’ as a condition carrying its own natural luck, and frames assimilation strategy as a choice between erasing or accentuating difference.
• XREF: Connects to the established pariah/parvenu distinction in Arendt’s earlier chapters and the wider assimilation discourse; grounds the mechanism for the Islamophobia field’s treatment of identity performance.