Philosophic good will demanded Jews become exceptions to their own people

Evidence

One can hardly overestimate the disastrous effect of this exaggerated good will on the newly Westernized, educated Jews and the impact it had on their social and psychological position. Not only were they faced with the demoralizing demand that they be exceptions to their own people, recognize “the sharp difference between them and the others,” and ask that such “separation …be also legalized” by the governments; they were expected even to become exceptional specimens of humanity. And since this, and not Heine’s conversion, constituted the true “ticket of admission” into cultured European society, what else could these and future generations of Jews do but try desperately not to disappoint anybody? — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 198

Categorization

• XREF: Central mechanism of assimilation-by-exception — the demand to disavow group membership to earn individual acceptance — maps directly onto later readings on how minority individuals are tokenized in dominant societies.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘courted exception’ as a structural trap — how being welcomed as an exception binds a person more tightly than outright exclusion does, since belonging is contingent on perpetual performance.