Peoples cut off from worldly achievement turn inward to claim a redemptive mission

Evidence

Whenever peoples have been separated from action and achievements, when these natural tics with the common world have broken or do not exist for one reason or another, they have been inclined to turn upon themselves in their naked natural givenness and to claim divinity and a mission to redeem the whole world. When this happens in Western civilization, such peoples will invariably find the age-old claim of the Jews in their way. This is what the spokesmen of pan-movements sensed, and this is why they remained so untroubled by the realistic question of whether the Jewish problem in terms of numbers and power was important enough to make hatred of Jews the mainstay of their ideology. As their own national pride was independent of all achievements, so their hatred of the Jews had emancipated itself from all specific Jewish deeds and misdeeds. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 611

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s concept: the ‘naked natural givenness’ turn — groups without shared worldly action fall back on biological/nationalistic chosenness. This is a core mechanism to carry into the Islamophobia readings about how exclusion produces identity overcompensation.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s earlier chapters on ‘the Jews as pariah/parvenu’ and prepares the later argument about racism’s ‘emancipation from specific deeds’ — links to Islamophobia readings on racialized identity independent of individual acts.