Political marginality led emancipated Jews to fetishize legal equality as permanent security

Evidence

Precisely because they had played so small a part in the political development of the lands in which they lived, they had come, during the course of the century, to make a fetish of legal equality. To them it was the unquestionable basis of eternal security. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 332

Categorization

• XREF: The fetishizing of formal legal equality over actual political standing connects to later critical-theory critiques of formal-legal citizenship as insufficient protection, building toward the Islamophobia field’s treatment of nominal inclusion.